Art Metropole

07 Apr. 2018

Feeled Recordings

An Embodied Exploration of Archival Ephemera

Time

2 - 5 PM

Join us on Saturday, April 7 to launch Emma Sharpe’s publication Feeled Recordings!

Alongside the new publication, the event will feature archival material from the Feeled Recordings workshop on display, as well as an informal Q&A about the project between Emma Sharpe and Art Met director Danielle St-Amour.

Publication information:

The Feeled Recordings publication is a result of a workshop held at Art Metropole on December 18, 2017, where participants recorded their embodied experiences interacting with archival ephemera from Art Metropole’s institutional archive. The book contains results from the last stage of the workshop: unstructured, free-form responses, each capturing elements from the participants’ subjective, one-to-one experience interacting with the material. Rife with smudges, scribbles, and the idiosyncrasies of handwritten language, these felt recordings create a responsive layer of ephemera to accompany the archival material, forging tactile connections between disparate moments in time.

Details:
Unbound with elastic belly-wrap
2-colour risograph with thermograph cover
28 pages
Edition of 50
Cover printed by Colour Code, interior pages printed by Vide Press
Price: $20

Project Description:

Emerging as a reaction to an increasingly ephemeral digital environment, the Feeled Recordings project explores our bodies’ changing relationship to the media that surround us. As hyper-fast invisible networks and flat screens continue to replace the textured, varied, and slow processes inherent to tangible media like print and books, this project asks: what changes in our sensory and emotional experiences with media as they evolve from tactile to digital? The Feeled Recordings project focuses on the physical archive as a site to explore just what gets lost in the shift towards digitization.

Beginning with a workshop, printed ephemera from Art Metropole’s institutional archive was introduced to a contemporary setting, making it available for individuals to touch, feel, interact with, and respond to. Participants recorded reactions to their selected material, limiting their perceptual observations to their somatic and affective experiences. Results from the workshop were integrated into the archive’s digital storage system as searchable keywords, and published in a small-run booklet, extending the workshop’s output through both digital and physical channels.

By experiencing, augmenting, and publishing the archive in these ways, the Feeled Recordings project aims to prompt reflection on our changing sensory relationships with the media we interact with. It focuses on the archive as a site to disrupt linear approaches to time, muddle the boundaries between physical and digital, and incorporate a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and feelings into the often singular narrative of an archive’s record. The project considers the book form and its materials as objects within themselves, brimming with textural information and sensory triggers independent from the content they communicate. In its broadest sense, Feeled Recordings is an exploration of the widespread effects of media on the human sensorium, privileging affect, subjectivity, and feeling as sites worthy of investigation.

Emma Sharpe is an MA candidate in Ryerson and York University’s Communication and Culture program. She completed her interdisciplinary Fine Arts Bachelors degree in 2011 at NSCAD University and participated in an exchange with The Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. She received a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship to pursue her Masters thesis project entitled, Feeled Recordings: An Embodied Exploration of Archival Ephemera based on her work in the archives of the artist-run centre Art Metropole. Both her work and research aim to bridge the gap between creative practice and scholarship, and focus on themes of tactility, printed matter, and mediation in the visual arts.

Images

2: Grayson James.
3: Grayson James.
4: Grayson James.
5: Grayson James.

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