Lunchtime Talks are a series of informal presentations at Watershed's Pervasive Media Studio. They normally take place at 13:00 on a Friday, are free and are open to everybody who is interested in what they do. Come along, bring a sandwich, and get to know more about the Studio community, current and up-coming projects, or residents' work.

Artist and Assistant Professor of Expanded Media at Connecticut College, Nadav Assor is in Bristol speaking at the brilliant i-Docs symposium, run by our colleagues at UWE Bristol's DCRC, and we are delighted that he has agreed to join us in the Studio to share some of his ideas and current questions at this week's lunchtime talk.

Nadav tells us:

Many of us feel today as if our body and presence are being stretched thin beyond our knowledge and control, increasingly fragmented and distributed among different electronic, social, local and remote situations. We leave myriad “ghosts” of ourselves, through our physical migrations, our digital choices, recorded for posterity in “the cloud”, and through the private and public and motions of our body - the gestures we make on our smartphones, or our image captured and processed by the computer vision and sensor systems that are becoming a ubiquitous feature of everyday life, from cars to smart buildings to security and military surveillance. In my experimental documentary work, I create systems and situations that aim to provide new perspectives and prompt critical reflection on this process through images and experiences anchored in the human body.

In this talk, I will focus on my Mixed-Reality installation Titchener’s Cage, featured in the concurrent iDocs 2018 showcase, as well as recent related projects, that all ultimately deal with questions of embodied human connection - within and despite the increasingly convoluted mechanisms we use to mediate the world and each other. The works range across mediums and formats: from a participatory MR project, to a live public intervention in a contested political space featuring a conversation between “telepresent oracles” and passerby, to a panoramic video-map performed by a unit of 9 synchronized camerapesrons, to a feature documentary following a group of immigrants distributed across a nation, attempting to provide a polyphonic image of their experiences using body cameras and 3D scanners.

The Pervasive Media Studio is located within the Watershed building. Let us know if you'd like a tour and we'll be happy to show you around. Send an email to studio@watershed.co.uk

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