SP21 Mentorship Study Plan with Jen Hall
The goals for this semester’s mentorship rest in uniting theory with practice. To achieve this, I will continue working with the body and breath (specifically my body and my breath). The breath is both a conscious and unconscious activity of the body and serves as a substrata connecting the machines of body and mind. Through study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and other readings, writing activities and interpretation of ideas, I aim to develop more awareness and ownership around the intersectionality of body, breath, phenomenology, technology and language. Where is my personal-universal space? and what is its language?
My practice this semester will focus on realizing a body/a group/a set/a collection of videos exploring breath – what it is, what it can be and as a possible path towards collapsing the distinction between object and subject. I will also produce a video that reflects on my research into phenomenology of perception through use of my body.
Above is the study plan submitted in January. There was a focus on embodied philosophy this semester and I have produced a body of video works. Due to the circumstances of the space I had available to me this semester to work in, I did not focus specifically on breath in my work as I had intended. That work is still in the wings. Aside from that shift from breath to body, everything else is true and was accomplished.
Breath
I did spend a lot of time thinking about breath through the individual and combined lenses of theory, mind and body. In preparation for work yet to come, I did delve deeply into a daily breathing practice. This has strengthened and opened my capacity to direct breath. I also visualized breath in various ways, (for example, this). I also began making inflatable sculptures. I should say, I have researched and made many tests of varying degrees of success and am presently making more significant sculptures now which I intend to show in June.
Reading/Research
I read Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as several essays and texts by philosophers and authors such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Martin Heidegger, J. Pallasmaa, David Harvey, Susan Sontag, Aline Newton, Mark Johnson & George Lakoff, and more. I attended numerous artist lectures and online events ranging in theme from art to philosophy to technology. I have made copious and organized notes for personal use and feel that I am responding to and processing these ideas in my art. There is now more relationality between theory and process in my art. I did not create an official annotated bibliography as I did last semester. I will add a reading list here by mid-May.
Presently in my art, I am working at the complex intersection where the variable human relationship between the infosphere and biosphere meets a space of embodied philosophy with regards to contemporary themes and concerns.
I also worked with embodied performance, documented here: