Cartographic Bodies

2015

Cartographic Bodies explores the idea of the body both as a cartographic territory and tool. Two of the experiments included in this project attempt to map the body: a photographic series that captures some of the traces of our bodies in our environment and a sound piece that looks for traces of our bodies in our conversations. Three other exercises use the body as an instrument to map the world around us: a sample of body-centric expressions that people use in their everyday lives to relate to other people, themselves, and their environment; a map that presents New York City as a human body, and a small book that speculates about what our body parts would remember if they could.

The result is a multimedia installation that invites its viewers to reflect on the role of the body as an interface between self and world.

Bodies as Media Working Group

2016

Contemporary society seems to be on a resolute quest to erase the human body: significant developments in virtual reality, social spaces that rely solely on digital interface, automation and drones, self-driving cars, the quantified self... represent efforts to make our world a bodiless one. And so many of our learning environments are taking these dangerous cues - teaching only to the mind and instrumentalizing the body to exhaustion.

This dream of disembodiment can and must surprise us, especially considering that throughout time people have used their bodies as means to multiple ends: they have been perceived as vessels to contain our souls, proxies that spirits and deities can use to communicate with terrestrial beings, canvases where society imprints its norms, models to understand and shape whole cities, sites and tools of the deepest learning. In this sense, the human body can be understood as the ultimate medium.

During the Fall of 2016, I co-facilitated The Bodies as Media working group, which met regularly over the course of three months to explore the many ways in which the human body mediates experience and knowledge. In our time working together, we explored ancestry and memory, ecology, emotionality and creativity, death, etc., etc., etc., through the (human) body. This working group was created in the context of the School of Apocalypse (SoA), a NYC-based initiative that examines connections between creative practice and survival and seeks to develop new modes of inquiry and apply broader levels of experience to intellectual investigation. The culmination of our joint investigation is a tool (a deck of cards and a set of wristbands) with instructions on how to perform a learning ritual that aims to “turn on” people’s body awareness and prepare their bodies to learn, work, and trust others in any given learning community.

Collaborators: Eugenia Manwelyan, Danessa Santana, Sarah Beck, Robert Beck.

Controlled Accidents - On Roland Barthes' Wrinting Instruments and Practices

Developed in collaboration with Isabella Brandalise
Showcased in barthesmonamour.com

We really must last a bit longer than our voices; we must, through the comedy of writing, inscribe ourselves somewhere.
Roland Barthes in From Speech to Writing

With his centennial as an excuse, we decided to honor Roland Barthes and his fixation with his writing instruments and processes. Two months of research led us to many fascinating details about Barthes’ writing and reading habits. An interview with him titled An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments* became our main source of information, but also extract interesting details from several of his books’ prefaces as well as his autobiography.

The objects fabricated for Controlled Accidents are reproductions of some of Roland Barthes’ writing instruments, re-created out of our interpretation and revisitation of these sources.

*"An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments" was initially published by Le Monde in 1963 and it can be found in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, published in English by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 1985.

BEYOND GREEN - COMMUNITY BUILDER KIT

2015

beyond green is a project that started under the umbrella of the Civic Innovation course at The New School. It is the result of a year-long collaboration between myself, Isabella Brandalise, and Emily Jarvis–the three of us graduate students at The New School–, and the Catalyst Program–an initiative from Partnership for Parks that helps create self-determined park communities through long-term engagement during which people are connected to park spaces, skill-building programs, community groups and organizations, and other key resources.

The Community Builder Kit (CBK), the tangible outcome of this collaboration, is a customizable booklet that invites people to reflect on and identify community groups and public spaces in their neighborhood, as well as the relationship between both. All the sections of the CBK are free and available for download, and each community is encouraged to use it as they see fit.

Check out the project’s website

Timeline of Guatemalan Arts and Socio-Political History (1955-2015)

2015

Guatemala Después is a collaborative project developed by The New School and the Guatemalan arts organization Ciudad de la Imaginación. The initiative explores the ways in which social and political realities in contemporary Guatemala have affected–and keep affecting–its artistic and cultural production.

In order to provide a general framework for the artworks that were being showcased, we developed a multi-layered timeline showing the interactions between sociopolitical events and artistic interventions in Guatemala over the last 60 years.  I was the coordinator and designer of this project.

When exhibited in NYC, the visualization gave the visitors a basic context to approach the artworks and to understand the relevance of the exhibition in both a national and a global scale. But in Guatemala, the timeline served as a discussion-starter, inviting people to reflect on the information they were reading and to participate in the conversation by either inserting bites of their personal stories, suggesting additions or revisions to the already existing layers, or imagining the future of their country. Ranging from the trivial to heartfelt, the participatory installations in Xela and Guatemala City gathered the most diverse contributions, evidencing the blurred boundaries between the notions of history, collective memory, and personal memories as well as problematizing around them.

AMERICA FOR COMRADES AND LOVERS

2015

First Prize. Vera List Writing Awards 2014 - 2015

americaforcomradesandlovers.py is a Python script, inspired by For Comrades and Lovers, Glenn Ligon’s installation at The New School University Center. When run, the program identifies all the nouns and adjectives in The Project Gutenberg EBook of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and randomly pairs them with the phrase “America is”. Below each sentence, an automated sentiment analysis module is implemented to measure the level of polarity and subjectivity of the statement, as an invitation for the viewer to compare the computer’s reaction with her or his own.

As great part of Ligon’s explorations, America for Comrades and Lovers is a text-based piece that reframes well known literary work in order to trigger specific questions and to provoke critical reflection around issues usually related to race, gender, or social (in)justice.

As Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, this exercise seeks to speak about America in a very experimental, provocative, and sometimes polarizing way. The apparently absolute character of the “America is…” statement, followed by a sentiment analysis that at times seems accurate and at times feels nonsensical, will hopefully ignite emotional reactions that will lead to meaningful discussions and reflections among the audience.

Despite of being inspired by their work, America for Comrades and Loversis faithful neither to Ligon nor to Whitman. On the contrary, it takes some licenses to generate a reflection on the essence of America today. This reflection does not aim to be a conclusive analysis of For Comrades and Lovers; it is instead an exploration of the key concepts of Whitman’s famous text and Ligon’s pursuits present in the piece, as well as an invitation to question our own ideas about America.

Download americaforcomradesandlovers.py.

How to run the program on your computer (you need to have Python previously installed):

1)   Save americaforcomradesandlovers.py and log.txt on your desktop

2)   Open americaforcomradesandlovers.py and change the directory in the last line for yours (ie: '/Users/nelesirodriguez/Desktop/log.txt')

3)   Open your computer Terminal (Type “Terminal” on the spotlight and open the application)

4)   Type on the Terminal window “cd desktop” and hit enter

5)   Type on the Terminal window “python americaforcomradesandlovers.py” and hit enter again

6)   Wait a few seconds, and the program will start running on the Terminal window

Note:

The program can be downloaded through the following link: http://continuum.io/downloads