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BOOK NOW: Art/Work Association members, join us on Tuesday 12th November, 7 - 8pm for ‘Separated by Millenia: in conversation with Helen Starr’, led by artist Sarah al-Sarraj.

In the foreword to the Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle at Night, author Stephen Graham Jones poses a thought-provoking question: “So you took all that land you could see. But what about all this other territory you don’t even know about?” This inquiry speaks to the broader issues of settler land dispossession and the erasure of diverse knowledge systems. In response, many Global Majority communities actively preserve alternative cartographies and cosmologies through spiritual and storytelling practices.

In this context, Starr and al-Sarraj will delve into Starr’s work at the intersection of world-building, storytelling, and immersive technologies. They will explore how Global Majority artists are reclaiming narratives and creating alternate realms that challenge oppressive systems. Additionally, the conversation will highlight Starr’s commitment to building a network of Global Majority, queer, and trans intersectional feminist creators, along with her innovative strategies for promoting equity for marginalised artists in the evolving landscape of digital storytelling.

This event is free to attend and will be held on Zoom. To register, follow the link in our bio.

Art/Work Association is a peer forum of early-career artists and creative workers. If you would like to become an A/WA member, please follow the link in bio.

@themechatroniclibrary
@ssaarraahj

Image: ‘Trophic Cascade (detail)’, 2024, Sarah Al-Sarraj. Courtesy the artist.

After oodles and oodles of work, I am so proud to announce the latest issue of Animation Practice, Process and Production on the theme of Decolonising Animation is now out through Intellect. Big shout out to my co-editors Helen Starr, Pedro Serrazina, Natalie Woolf and Tereza Stehlikova. Thanks to all our amazing contributors Diwas Bisht @diwasbishtPaula Callus @callusinsta Mark Chavez @drmindset Ina Conradi @inaconradi Tara Douglas Nairy Eivazy @nairyeivazy Liliana Conlisk Gallegos @drmachete Maybelle Peters @maybellepeters.art Susan Sloan @susansloan_uk Helen Starr, Yijing Wang. This edition of the journal is based on the symposium Ecstatic Truth VII: Decolonising Animation, which was held at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham in 2023. Thanks to all my colleagues who supported the event @willbishopstephens @jane_cheadle @londonanimationclub and also to the executive editors of the AP3 journal @harris6480 @sammooreanimate . Cover art courtesy of Liliana Conlisk Gallegos.

@intellectbooks #ap3 #decolonize #decolonization #decolonizeyourmind #animationresearch #animationstudies #ecstatictruth @unicreativearts

About the Pope being the Lord of all the universe in place of God, and that he had given the lands of the Indies to the King of Castile, the Pope much have been drunk when he did it, for he gave what was not his…. The king who asked for and received this gift must have been some madman for he asked to have given to him that which belonged to others.

The Cenu Indian’s repy to the Spaniard “local culture conception of the legitimacy of the Papal Bull of 1492 as one which gave the New World to Spain Greenblatt 1974 pg 27

Except from: THE POPE MUST HAVE BEEN DRUNK THE KING OF CASTILE A MADMAN:CULTURE AS ACTUALITY, AND THE CARIBBEAN RETHINKING MODERNITY Sylvia Wynter 1995

The wounds of Black Arrival were so deep that baleen whales, the singing titans of the seas, were forced to change their migratory path. When Christopher Columbus sailed past the Chaguramas peninsula into the warm, healing waters of Trinidad’s giant harbour, it was so full of these gentle cetaceans, he named it The Gulf of the Whale. By the late 18th century cartographic sources repeatedly refer to it as Golfo Triste, The Gulf of Sorrow and today it's name is settled on the Gulf of Paria, from the word pariah, outcast. There are wounds in the sea. In Danielle’s Braithwaite Shirley’s tender work, history becomes an ocean wild with loss, remembrance and longing.

Except from Bush Tea (2022) by Helen Starr
Edited by Amrita Dhallu and Priya Jay
Designed by Rose Nordin
Published by STUART
Supported by iniva and Arts Council England

The physicality of information , like the gender neutral Brahman of Hindu metaphysics, refers to the single binding unity behind diversity in all that exists in the universe. In other words the how and the what of what makes us a particular type of human - a particular type of living being.
Wynter highlights the dynamic interaction between our genetic and nongenetic codes—what she describes, respectively, as our first set of instructions and our second set of instructions -in order to think through how our subjective sense of self and our subjective sense of we is intimately connected to the interrelational activities between or across the physiological and the storytelling - symbolic

Wed, 19 Jul | ARCHIVO WEBINAR SERIES 2023
To dance in the dark
HELEN STARR
—
Session moderated by Astrid Korporaal

On Making Art in the 4th Dimension

Virtual Beings —automated, three-dimensional agents—can serve as realistic embodiments for social interactions with human users.

Current literature suggests that a user’s responses toward a Virtual Being depends on the extent to which the interaction elicits a sense of co-presence, or the subjective “sense of being together.”

What does primitive thought mean? Is it indigenous thinking?

I, for one am tired of being thought of as primitive. What do you think @kinnarisaraiya?🙄

In 2013, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney published their now classic collection of essays in the open source Book: The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney 2013

When we say that gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role; we're acting in some way... To say that gender is performative is a little different, because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman... We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that's simply true about us, a fact about us. Actually, it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.

— Judith Butler, Your Behavior Creates Your Gender (2011)

Black Knowledges/Black Struggles 2015
Copyright Date: 2015
Published by: Liverpool University Press

The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition1 Sylvia Wynter

We can think of virtual reality as an artificial, digital world. When we digitise ourselves as avatars, when our ephemeral minds inhabit our ephemeral bodies, our real bodies react as if we are physically present. When we are scared in an artificial world, adrenaline (fear) rises in our real bodies, when we feel adoration in an artificial world, our body produces oxytocin (love). The veil, this skin, between what is real and what is virtual is thus compromised and we, in a transitory state of flux exist simultaneously in a dreamt up world and the natural world.
Sync(Emerge(Consciousness))
Helen Starr
November 2018
ISBN 978-0-9954611-6-1

What is reality?