​Bandwi/d/th: The Togethering Lab's Online Relational Festival
March 19-23, 2018

The Togethering Lab goes cyber for our week-long, international festival of online relational experiments! Join us for a series of workshops which explore ways of being together through digital communication technologies. How might dispersed networks perform intimacy? How does the digital carry our bodies? How far can we imaginatively extend these platforms? What new modes of togetherness can be created there? How is our experience of materiality - the screen, our lover, the subway platform - altered, mediated, (un)done?  Each workshop is, at its heart, an experiment - beginning with a question in mind (or series of questions), which is then investigated using a toolkit of diverse relational practices (philosophical, theoretical, therapeutic, textual, artistic, embodied, meditative). Participants will have the opportunity to fill in lab sheets after each experiment to further pry open  investigations and document our findings.

Registration is required for all events     | ​​   Please read descriptions below prior to registration

ONGOING

​R&J: Real Intimacy for a Fiction Based Game

JESSICA CREANE
R&J is a two player, multi-day game that explores self-expression and intimacy in the digital world. The game is played exclusively via e-mail and text message from Monday, March 19 - Friday, March 23. Each day of game play mirrors the events of one day of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, which unfolds over the course of five days.  From Day 1 (the masked ball) to Day 5 (the epilogue), players will engage in meaningful, story-based conversations, negotiations, games, and activities, all in true masked ball/cryptocurrency style: never knowing their partner’s true name or location.

You’ve read the text, you’ve seen the performance, now play it for yourself.
Max Capacity: none
​Requirements: text, email
Jessica is an immersive theater artist and game designer based in Philadelphia, PA. She creates digital and analog games based on philosophical thought experiments (some of them edible) and durational theater and game experiences for people who don’t yet know each other. Jessica is a graduate of The Pig Iron School with an MFA in Devised Theater and has recently performed as an artist-in-residence in The Great Smoky Mountains and Petrified Forest National Parks where she created personalized, adventure narratives for park visitors. She is an avid reader, hiker, new years resolutionist, and has written seven novels that she will never show anyone. She will, however, make you a personalized blank book to fill yourself since she’s super into experimental bookbinding. More can be found at www.jessicacreane.com

MONDAY MARCH 19th

6-8pm EST

​Opening:
​Being-with in the Bandwidth

HANNAH KAYA
​AARON FINBLOOM
A bandwidth is a threshold, an indication of when communication transmission has reached capacity. It is a rate of frequency, of density. Increasingly, digital communication technologies are mediating the ways we are together. It’s worth asking, what are the qualities of communication that these new technologies facilitate? What new ways of being together do they open up? What do they obscure? What do they do to our bodies? To our focus? To the speed or depth of communication? This opening workshop will guide participants through a structured conversation which will touch on a multiplicity of themes and points of interest explored throughout the conference. We will utilize a diversity of communication technologies, through a variety of ever-changing modalities in an effort to get at the heart of what is happening.​
Max Capacity: none
​Requirements: various online platforms to be determined
Hannah is a thinker, artist, and organizer based in Montreal. Her work offers ludic, participatory, and performative methods of enacting radical imagination and intervention. She is the co-founder of Fishbowl Collective - a glitter-punk, feminist physical theatre company promoting insurrectional and intimate dialogue. She co-runs the Togethering Lab, a participatory & interdisciplinary experiment that plays with ways of being together. Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, performance artist, musician and co-founder of SMT. Much of Finbloom's creative practice functions as an attempt to expand the scope of philosophy’s pedagogy via structured conversations, dialogical games, improvisational scores, contemplative audio guides and performative lectures. He has led numerous workshops and performances at places including: matralab, Senselab, The Centre for Expanded Poetics, The Topological Media Lab, and EMERGE Residency Program, He holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Art from SUNY Stony Brook and is currently working towards a PhD in the Humanities at Concordia University. ​

TUESDAY MARCH 20th

5-5:45pm EST

​A stroll through fluorescent woods 

HENRIETTE VON MUENCHHAUSEN
​
​A stroll through fluorescent woods (workshop on Instagram, 45 min., max. 10 participants) The idea of strolling through the woods can have many different connotations; often they are grounded in the myths and stories of the area of the world we grew up in. In contrast, moving through Instagram is a streamlined activity, reigned by secret algorhythms. What if strangers meet on Instagram and trigger each other to share their memories? Will they feel connected, no matter with which myths and stories they grew up? Does this ""microweb“ make Instagram a more intimate place and can it initiate real contact? Let's find it out and stroll through fluorescent woods together. In this workshop you are invited to submit images in a private Instagram group and share your memories triggered by the pictures provided by the other participants.
Max Capacity: 10
​Requirements: instagram
Henriette von Muenchhausen (born in Munich, DE) creates volatile communities of objects which are out to seduce the viewer. Her works – mainly sculptures, drawings and short videos – are often fed by memories and tend to be of ambivalent nature. They possess the power of transformation and speak of joy as well as of darker elements of life. Von Muenchhausen graduated in Fine Arts at the KABK (Royal Academy of Art The Hague) in 2017. She works and lives in The Hague, NL.

7:30-8:15pm EST

​Collective improv in telepresence

ANNE GOLDENBERG (GOLDJIAN)
This workshop would like to brain and body storm about the technical and embodiment aspects of a telepresence set up for networked performance of improvised dance and music with video projection.  It is the continuation of a set up and performance test realized in November 2017, which brought together participants from Austria, Canada, Mexico, UK, US untitled Earthian Encounters. The relational experience was thrilling. This set up could be used for further explorations, and we want to open it's design to collective exploration. During this particular workshop, some human could participate remotely, some could be part of the test locally. We will dance and play music together and remotely, and then question the technicality of the set up.

The workshop will involve: a presentation of the project, gratefulness and acknowledgement, a short talking circle, a quick technical preparation of the experimental performance, the experimental performance (collective improvisation in telepresence), a talking circle to share about what was experienced, possible technical improvements, understandings of artistic statement, a closing circle 
Max Capacity: 10
Requirements:  device able to access https://appear.in/eertet

Participants can choose to contribute to the experience with: playing instrument / singing with the performance, improvise with spoken word, doing a video recording of the session (on their laptop), setting up a performance space (if they have access to a video projector and a bit of space to dance in front of it)
Goldjian est un.e artiste, chercheureuse et hacktiviste féministe et transdisciplinaire, qui aime rendre visible, lisible et malléable les processus de co-construction de connaissance. Son travail introduit des pratiques relationnelles entre humain.e.s et technologies et crée des espaces intimistes d’émancipation collective, d’apprentissage mutuel et de ralentissement processuel.  Goldjian is a feminist transdisciplinary researcher hacktivist and artist who likes to make visible, readable and malleable the processes of co-construction of knowledge. They introduces relational practices toward humans and technologies in digital arts and hacker culture and creates intimate spaces toward collective emancipation, mutual learning and process deepening.

8:30-9:30pm EST

Get on the
​Same Page

JORDAN CAMPBELL
Get On the Same Page is an experiment in sharing a creative process through technology. Participants in different physical locations will work in pairs to attempt to create identical art pieces. Each pair will use only one method of virtual communication to collaborate; text messaging, facebook chat, video chat or phone call. After ten minutes of creating, we will compare the results. What is the most effective virtual platform to share a creative process and get on the same page?
Max Capacity: 14
Requirements: Participants must have access to: a single piece of 8.5x11 white paper, a black marker, a pair of scissors,
a private space to be creative.  They'll also need to be able to take a picture of their finished product and email it to me.

Participants must have access to ONE of the following methods of communication: Whats App Messenger, Facebook Messenger (facebook chat), Phone Calling (for a ten minute call, potentially long distance - we could also use Whats App for this), Video Chat (access to webcam and internet).
Jordan Campbell is a queer performance artist and creator. He is part of the POP ART performance collective xLq which blends fashion, dance, community ritual and performance into new audience experiences for the 21st century brain. His solo work is a blend of drag, visual art and contemporary performance. Jordan also works creatively with children and adults of varying abilities at Purple Carrots Drama Studio. 

9:30-10:30pm EST

Linguistic Despecho

LINA MORENO
​I would like to invite people to write about the possibilities –perceptual, experiential, relational– that have opened/closed for us when living immersed in a language that is not our mother tongue. We'll do a video screen-recording of a google document where we write simultaneously about our experiences, responding to each other, and going back and forth between English and other languages. (This experiment was originally created for Something Other's issue on Migration with Diana Menestrey, Alejandra Martinez, Laura Acosta, Andrés Abril, Esthel Vogrig and myself writing. Link here)
Max Capacity: 6
Requirements: To live or have lived immersed in a second language.  To have  a computer and internet connection
(We'll be writing in English but people could talk about their experience with any other language)
Lina Moreno is a Latin American artist, educator, and visual researcher based in Montreal. She is interested in experimental pedagogies, drawing and writing. She wonders about learning spaces where we can formulate and share questions about how we relate to/with images, ideas and each other. She's also the Director of Research and Development at Mikw Chiyâm, an arts organization that promotes student engagement through artist residencies in high schools in First Nation communities in Northern Quebec.  

WEDNESDAY MARCH 21st

7:15-8pm EST

How Can We See a Network?  How Do Networks See?

CURRAN MCCONNELL
How does the global shipping system appear to the ocean? How does a population appear to the CCTV cameras which encircle its public spaces? Networked communications technology contributes to our mass surveillance. Does it also provide us a new opportunity to document macro-scale objects and networks?  This would give us a new kind of understanding that we could only achieve with other people. These entities lying at the limit of individual perception have traditionally provoked only the feeling of their enormous grandeur and insignificance of human beings. We will see whether collective, networked imagining of these entities can bring us to communal, cumulative understanding--beyond, but not superseding, "man's encounter with the sublime in nature" as the Romanticists conceived it.  In three phases, participants will document massive or distributed objects with cameraphones. In the first phase, participants will be given the names of a few massively distributed entities to document (e.g., the hydrosphere). In the second phase, participants will collaboratively and spontaneously investigate a networked entity. They will submit photos one at a time, building a "big picture" piece by piece without verbal coordination. Finally there will be an experiment in the "free construal" of an entity--participants will submit a single photograph completely independently and we will figure out what it was that we were looking at afterwards!
Each ensemble of photographs will be made available for contemplation.
Max Capacity:  40
Requirements: Facebook Messenger. If you don't use that service you can still participate in phases 1 and 3 over say, email. Just let me know beforehand!
Don't risk your safety to take a photograph. If there's a recognizable person in your photo you need to get their permission before submitting it!  We'll be conducting the collaborative second phase over 
Curran McConnell was born in Toronto 1997. Suffered through mandatory education. Now studying math and philosophy in Halifax, NS. I like to play music.

8-10pm EST

​The Dinner Project – an Experiment in Intimacy Across Public/Private/Virtual Space 

ELIOT & SOPHIE
The Dinner Project is a pedagogical practice of weekly dinner parties. For the Togethering Lab, inspired by the Institute fur Alles Moglich, the Dinner Project adapts an ambitious global initiative which seeks to investigate intimacy across virtual spaces, and aims to connect people eating dinner internationally. Remote workshop participants are invited to have dinner, solo or as an excuse to get others together, and adapt our public/private/virtual intimacy score according to their own interests and desires. The Dinner Project will host a dinner in Toronto, and perform the score live among attendees. Remote participants are invited to a video conference connecting the dinner parties, which will include a structure for engaging with each other across space and time. All participants are also encouraged to use #dinner or #thedinnerproject on Instagram to document their participation. During the Toronto Dinner Project dinner party, participants are invited to engage with cameras set up in 'more private' spaces in the house --potentially bathroom, bedroom, etc. – which will be connected to a live video chat in the main dinner party space. In engaging with this virtual space within a shared physical and live social environment, we wonder about the following questions: Does live video offer the potential to be in two places at the same time (like to be in the bathroom without missing the conversation)? How does it shift our experience of space/place, or various kinds of space within a home/event? What might this kind of potential alternation or conversation between private and public offer to the growth of intimacy in the group?"
Max Capacity: locally, 15 people; remote/online participants, no cap.

Requirements:  remote participants will need their own computer, internet and GoogleHangouts access 
eliot feenstra is an interdisciplinary scholar-artist-farmer interested in performance, dialogue, and place-based thinking. he grew up sitting down with his family to eat dinner most nights; it was usually prepared by his mother and generally included a vegetable and meat. meal rules included: no singing, no leaving without asking to be excused, no saying that things are gross while someone else is eating it.  Sophie Traub is a performing artist and arts organizer for The School of Making Thinking, currently working on her masters in Performance Studies at York University. Her performance work and research focuses on group processes as they relate to cultural production, the pedagogy of conflict, and improvisation and embodiment. Sophie relishes the emergent intimacy and fluid social unfoldings within a group over dinner. She also is a fan of Eliot. 

~~BREAKING NEWS~~
SPECIAL VIRTUAL CONCERT TONIGHT
on Facebook Live 10-11pm EST.
​Audwords – featuring Jenna Lynn on viola, violin, vocals and percussion & Aaron Finbloom on accordion, guitar. Jenna in Youngstown, Ohio & Aaron in Montreal, Quebec will virtually improvise a 1-hour set. To listen-in "partially" find either of their live feeds on Facebook; or to listen-in "fully" open Facebook on two devices to hear both at the same time.

THURSDAY MARCH 22nd

12-1pm EST

Tour Agency

TAL ALPERSTEIN
JULIA TURBAHN
Tour Agency is asking whether there can be alternative ways of discovering a foreign place by introducing the "Tour Agency": offering online guided tour via instant messaging. We are offering intimate guided tours through your smartphone without leaving your room. On one end there will be a tour guide actually present in a place, holding his smartphone. On another end there will be you, the tourist waiting wherever you want, experiencing the tour via instant messages only. The tour is created as an interaction between the guide and the tourist to create together their own tour narrative. The instant messaging tours asks if words are a possible medium to replace the corporeal experience of being in a place. Tour Agency is a second collaboration between Julia Keren Turbahn and Tal Alperstein. In this work we are dealing with the different ways a memory is framed in the realm of tourism.
Max Capacity: 6
​Requirements: The participants need to install whatsapp on their phone. They need to sign up with their phone # and country code. We need to know in advance their numbers to set up the tour groups.
Tal Alperstein (Tel-Aviv, Israel 1985) received her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, and her MA from the film and television school, Tel-Aviv University. Alperstein works mainly in performance art. In recent years many of her works were solo actions. Lately, Alperstein Started to create also Video Performances, using the video as a site for the live action, considering the difference in time-set.  Julia Turbahn (Ramat Gan, Israel 1990) was raised in Leverkusen, Germany and is now based in Berlin. She studied Media and Cultural Studies in Düsseldorf and at the University of New South Whales in Sydney as a DAAD scholar for Dance Studies. She finished her BA with a thesis on the anthropocentric view on the difference between human and animals, looking at how in artistic research especially dance another form of knowledge in relation to this topic can be produced. Currently she is studying ‘Dance, Context, Choreography’ at the Inter- University-Center for dance, the HZT Berlin and works as a dancer and performer in interdisciplinary projects. In her work she has a strong interest in the interconnection of theory and practice as well as the choreographic quality of everyday movement and interdisciplinary and collaborative work.

5-6pm EST

Interactivity

NISSE GREENBERG
"What is a conversation?" I asked the person in my head. They responded, but did they? Because of course they were in my head. Is that really a response? Is this? As computers attempt to facilitate and replace our social relations, one of the biggest obstacles has been created AI that can converse in a way that feels human. What makes conversation feel human? Is a conversation inherently human? Can artificial intelligence ever have a conversation? What would that look like? These questions were swirling around in Stewart Brand and Andy Lippman's head and in their conversations when they had a metalogue ("a dialogue that is it's own example.") about conversation in the early '80s. It is that exact metalogue that we will be reproducing word for word. We will be taking on the roles of SB and AL and reenacting their metalogue about what makes a conversation a conversation. As many participants as we feel is possible will take on a role reading the parts of either Brand or Lippman. The rest of us will listen
Max Capacity:  none 
Requirements: You need google video and the ability to read a pdf
Nisse Greenberg is an educator and storyteller and explorer of technological phenomena. His latest research has been into what different algorithms want and how we can determine that. He teaches storytelling for The Moth and Story Collider, as well as coaching a robotics team for a local high school. He also will always be a high school math teacher in his heart because that is where his brain lies. You should check out his playground at nissegreenberg.com

6:30-7:15pm EST

Back to Back Drawing

CHRIS MOFFETT
ARE (aestheticrelationalexercises.com) consisting of Chris Moffett, Helen Miller & Joshua Hart
Typically a laggy and imperfect approximation of “presence” between talking heads, video conferencing software affords relatively untapped potentials for heightened collective sensory attunement. This experiment involves a collective drawing practice of 4-8 experimenters, each drawing based on watching only the body movements of the next experimenter in the chain. By attending to subtle whole body gestures typically bracketed out of our digital experience, the experimenters will see how closely they can attune themselves as an embodied collective in the digital space.
Max Capacity: 6
Requirements:  Participants need a webcam, reliable/fast internet connection, a black sharpie, and a couple sheets of white 8.5x11 paper. No drawing experience needed. The experiment will be recorded.
Chis Moffett is a philosopher of education, movement educator and artist, exploring the sensory (dis)organizations of these areas through our embodied forms. He is a founding member of the artist collective ARE, creating "happenings" at museums and other settings, that engage with the potent intersection of movement and classic artistic practices.

7:30-9pm EST

Collaborative Rejection Letters

SUSO PHIZER
The workshop offers an collective approach to reimagining past experiences with rejecting. The workshop reacts to a collective dream that all people should be accepted by each other, and that to reject is to violate this inclusive world. Under the influence of this fantasy, I see a tendency to avoid clarity and transparency around misaligned desires. I propose that rejecting, along with accepting rejection, are essential for the possibility of consent: if we cannot say no, the yesses lose their meaning. In this spirit, participants are invited to revisit a memory of wanting to split off from someone: be it a life-changing event like a messy divorce or a relatively minor incident with an irritating coworker. During the first part of the workshop, we will write rejection letters as an effort to re-process and practice rejections. In the second part of the workshop, we will edit one another’s letters and draft imagined responses from the perspective of the rejected parties. We will explore a variety of tools, among them: radical honesty, cruelty, gracefulness, deception, blame-giving, blame-taking, and ambiguity.

The process will be completely anonymous.
Max Capacity: 15
Requirements: access to computer with internet, ability to use google drive and google docs
Suso Phizer is an artist currently living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

9:30-11pm EST

InterTwined: Co-Gaming, Co-Authoring, and Co-Playing a Choose Your Own Adventure Game 

JESSICA CREANE
1) Co-create a choose-your-own-adventure story in this Exquisite Corpse style writing game. Players will have access to a small portion of the story at a time, challenging them to write a radical “yes, and” to their collaborators narrative proposals. As the story evolves, players will be working on different branches of the same story without knowing which branch they are working on, resulting in a wholly original interactive story.

After the story has been drafted players will play through the game online and then join a chatroom to discuss edits to the narrative, after which the story will be published and fully playable on the platform Twinery (https://twinery.org/). 
Max Capacity: 8
Requirements: email
Jessica is an immersive theater artist and game designer based in Philadelphia, PA. She creates digital and analog games based on philosophical thought experiments (some of them edible) and durational theater and game experiences for people who don’t yet know each other. Jessica is a graduate of The Pig Iron School with an MFA in Devised Theater and has recently performed as an artist-in-residence in The Great Smoky Mountains and Petrified Forest National Parks where she created personalized, adventure narratives for park visitors. She is an avid reader, hiker, new years resolutionist, and has written seven novels that she will never show anyone. She will, however, make you a personalized blank book to fill yourself since she’s super into experimental bookbinding. More can be found at www.jessicacreane.com

FRIDAY MARCH 23rd

12-1pm EST

​Echo Chambers –US/Iran

ELIOT FEENSTRA
ELAHE ROSTAMI 
Are you seeing what I'm seeing? What potential intimacy comes from inhabiting digital space together? This project aims to create awareness around how "echo chambers" and social media algorithms influence our understandings of the world and ourselves as "citizens" of digital landscapes. We're inviting artists who identify as being based in or from the US or Iran to inhabit each others' "echo chambers." Participants based in the US will be paired with participants based in Iran via Skype and share screens, give each other tours of their digital landscapes--potentially including Instagram, Facebook, etc.--and discuss why they're following what they follow, what annoys them, what they enjoy and why, what inspires them in their own art practice, creative influences, etc.  Disclaimer: We acknowledge that identities are intersectional and do not intend these categories of US and Iranian to be limiting or exclusive to people who have left or moved, dual citizens, Iranians in the US or vice versa, non-citizens, people using proxy servers, others who feel a strong draw to participate who are not "of" Iran or the US.  We're interested in opening this conversation between people who've been living in particularly strong opposing poles of a political media war for years. If you are interested and your story disrupts the borders of this project, great.
Max Capacity: 40
​Requirements: Skype and a device that can do screen-sharing in Skype (could be phone or comp)
Elahe is a freelance designer and photographer who is especially interested in play and installation. She loves to collect stones and she carries stones from Iran, Malaysia, Germany, and Canada in her pouch. She has a love/hate relationship with social media--she uses it mostly to follow news and she recently unfollowed a bunch of people but also it's the only way she can stay connected with friends and family on different continents. (instagram: @ela_her).  Eliot is a theatre-maker, scholar, and farmer. Drawing on training in clown, theatre, and contemporary dance, his work explores how we relate to the places we live, collective memory and dialogue as performance practices, wonder, and strategies for reducing remoteness. He's a US-Canadian dual citizen and is currently studying performance and place at York University. He almost only 'friends' people he's met in person and just started using Instagram last week--so far, he's posted drawings and one photo of bread he baked. He sometimes uses Facebook to repost news he thinks is important, tries to use it to increase access to opportunities, and occasionally to reach out for support but goes through long periods of not posting anything. (instagram: @eliotlefiend)