Embodied Spaces ↔︎ Digital Formats

A joint practical seminar

Marie-Claude Poulin and Flora Watzal are continuing their collaboration through a shared teaching format for the 2025 winter term. Together with the students we will develop performative sketches and concepts and explore the intersections between body, space and technology in the context of site-specific art.

Echoing these entanglements, Matviyenko writes: “A cybernetic prosthesis [...] merges with the organic tissue of the body and the nervous system by means of feedback; the information flow trespassing the boundaries of organic and non-organic matter” (2015).

This seminar fosters performative and media-based exploration through embodied research, based on the idea that any experimentation involving human-machine relations, whether low-tech or high-tech, sheds light on the socio-technological transformations currently underway, including those related to AI. It aims to sharpen, through practice, a critical awareness of the artistic issues at play by examining their aesthetic and political implications through lived experience.

The starting point of the seminar are small performative interventions – captured by different types of cameras – and embedded in the premises of the Paulusplatz 5 building. It examines how technological dispositives transform the experience of the site and reconfigure it through interaction. These experiments will be subsequently used for critical analysis and artistic processes.

How is space (re)created through the camera lens? Which kinds of witness-personas arise? What if the camera follows body movement? What if the body is directed by the camera? Which kinds of performative fragments emerge? Does the process evoke mental labyrinths? Media antechambers? What scenarios unfold?

In this co-teaching context, Marie Claude Poulin will focus on the reflection and experimental investigation of the interaction of bodies with physical and digital spaces. The work with video – and the specific dispositive of the camera – will be guided by Flora Watzal.

The courses "Embodied spaces" and "Digital Formats 1" will be held together.
Please register for both courses and make sure that you have time on all dates!

For inscribing to Flora Watzal joint course, go to:
BASE course page – Digital Formats I
https://base.uni-ak.ac.at/courses/2025W/S03435/

- Attendance and diligent participation in minimum 80% of the meetings (60% )
- Completion of practical and reflective exercises at home and presentation of the assignments to the group (40%).

- Practical and project-oriented course

- Number of participants limited

- Open to all university students

Please bring:

- Your computer

- Comfortable clothes for movement