Workshop with CDMC Research Fellow Marina Wainer

Monday 20 May 2019, 9.30am-3pm.

This workshop was organised for PhD students of the Centre for Digital Media Cultures and the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics, and given by Visiting Research Fellow Marina Wainer, who was co-hosted by both Centres. This was a unique opportunity to attend a masterclass-type workshop with an internationally renowned researcher, artist and curator. The workshop was tailored to theory and practice-based PhD students and included an element of creative methods. These were some of the questions explored:

• How to imagine the relationships between humans, the living and non-living in 2051?
• What are digital, environmental and social elements of these relationships?
• How to raise the question of the subjectification of natural elements in Western culture?
• By using collage as a way to prototype intentions and thoughts, the workshop propose to imagine speculative fictions around these issues. http://marinaestelawainer.com/

Marina Wainer is a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist. After studying dance, video art and new media, she has concentrated her work on new approaches to digital creation.Four years ago, Marina started developing a photographic work produced in the digital space (with smartphones/social networks, especially Instagram), which focuses on new forms of representing the real.Marina devotes part of her work in design event, at the crossroads of the artistic and editorial direction (*di*/zaïn / Le Monde Festival / Forum Design de Paris) and leads a teaching activity (she is currently teaching at Sciences Po Paris — Master’s degree in Digital Innovation and Transformation and Ina SUP — Master’s degree in Audiovisual Heritage).

The starting point of this work was to question the transformation of the system of production and distribution of images (in particular urban or natural landscapes) due to mobile photographic uses: creation of visual communities, conversational image, celebration of sharing. Part of this work has been integrated in recent installations and was also carried out in workshops with art students and the general public.

For the last fifteen years, MW has been creating interactive installations anchored in space, where the engagement of the body is essential, placing the public at the heart of the artwork. The idea is to create a dialogue between the body and an environment, in which the public alters the space by adding its own stories and emotions, with a sensitive approach of technology. The interaction proposed in her work, which requires public participation, has sometimes been transformed into collaboration, involving the public from the beginning of the work.