About
Somatic Archiving is an artistic research program into archiving and sharing bodily states. It combines choreographic, technological and philosophical experimentation to tackle the question of how to archive and disseminate subtle bodily states that are often lost or depleted in conventional archival forms. Our artistic contribution to the technologically dominated field of AR/MR (Augmented and Mixed Reality) is Choreographic Mixed Reality.
The work began in 2011 when Susan Kozel and Jeannette Ginslov decided to experiment with using Augmented and Mixed Reality platforms and techniques to contribute hidden affective choreographies in urban locations. More than ten years later the research has produced artistic installations, apps, and academic publications developed by a core of four artists (Susan Kozel, Jeannette Ginslov, Keith Lim and Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir) with many other artists, dancers and researchers contributing their skills or their archival traces.
Nonverbal, kinaesthetic, affective and affecting, these archives are performed and circulated by means of our particular approach to combining networked digital technologies, with digital and analogue materials. These archives, once re-choreographed, become re-enactments of the original material.
Somatic Archiving is less about representing and conveying the truth of an original or historical bodily experience, than it is about releasing the emotional force or kinaesthetic intensity of archival material to produce somatic transference. We shift the power relation from the contemporary subject viewing the archival bodies as objects from the past, to a potential relationship of resonance and empathy. The mobile technologies in the installations are not used to record or even to preserve, they are for transformation and transmission. Our bodies are archives, and our bodies respond to archives – we are living archives, not just of our own memories but by means of receiving and holding the memories of others.
This website is itself a living archive. It provides documentation of the work and links to related publications. The work has been shown formally inside and outside, in gallery spaces and in reclaimed urban buildings. It has travelled to private and personal spaces we don’t not know by means of the free app and the images that circulate both online and in analogue forms (as post cards, in box archives). This website opens access to 2 of the projects: all you have to do is download the apps specified and use them with the images provided. Or feel free to contact us if you would like to see the full installation set up either by us or as a DIY project yourself.
Somatic Archiving was established as part of the Living Archives Research Project [insert link] at Malmö University in Sweden (2012-2017). It is currently supported by the Data Society Research Program at Malmö University.