Saturday 28 July, 2.00–4.30pm

Rachael Rosen is in residence at Wysing in 2018, working with a small team of coders and performers to develop a performance and playable archive for pOrtals; an ongoing collaborative world building and storytelling exercise.

As part of her residency at Wysing Arts Centre, Rachael is looking for 12 participants to take part in a mapping workshop. The workshop will share a number of listening, mapping and game techniques that have been used within her practice, especially in the case of her longstanding project, [pOrtals].

Starting from a memory map of the Wysing grounds created by Rachael and her guest collaborators, participants will work together and in smaller groups to playfully negotiate and translate descriptive sensory data in order to build on, explore and share new imaginings of the area. Participants will be asked to take on different roles similar to those found in role-playing games such as Games master), Player, Map maker, before discussing their findings with the larger group.

To give some additional context to the process Rachael will also encourage use of the workshop as an open forum, which may ask participants to consider questions such as, 'preconditioned approaches to gaming environments', 'subjective interpretations of text-based worlds', and 'transitions and the act of merging realities'.

At the end of the workshop, all participants will receive a digital hand-out including links to materials discussed, as well as an invitation to take part in a one-hour 1-2-1 session in the pOrtals world hosted by the artist.

The workshop does not require any previous experience or knowledge of these subjects, but an interest in collaborative storytelling and an inquisitive approach to exploring environments is a plus. To register your interest in participating in this workshops, please create an account, or sign in, here to complete a very short questionnaire. Capacity is limited so pre-registration is required.

Biographies 

Rachael Rosen Ltd Ed. is a transmedia artist from the UK who makes use of sound environments and possible play spaces to explore the fissure between author/ reader and online/offline environments. Rosen is known for her atmospheric live sound collage, as well as her ongoing project pOrtals, a world-building and storytelling exercise, which began in 2014 and has included collaborative output with Quantum Natives and Werkflow. She has recently been an artist in residence at Rupert, Vilnius LT (2017); performed commissioned work at Issue Project Room, New York (2017), New Forms Festival, Vancouver (2016), and the ICA, London (2015); and presented work created during residency at The Banff Centre as part of group show, Vaporents at VOIDOID Archive, Glasgow (2016).  

Henry Rodrick, a Swedish computer programmer and DJ. He studied Computer Science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and electroacoustic music at EMS (the centre for Swedish electroacoustic music and sound-art). Before relocating to London, he spent several years connecting the dots between electronic dance music and experimental sounds on the Stockholm club scene. He has previously released music on labels such as Studio Barnhus, done a live mix live for Rinse FM, and is currently developing software systems for unconventional DJing and sound art, such as http://sourceofsomecertainty.com, a collaboration with Corinna Triantafyllidis, which was performed New River Studios. 

Eimi Okuno is a Software Engineer from Tokyo. She completed her Fine Art studies at Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art, before turning to Computer Science at University College London and accepting a position at the BBC. Having taken an untraditional pathway that joins robotics, multimedia arts and installation, she explores relationships between form and expectation. She has had work presented at The Meenan Sisters gallery in London (2011), and was shortlisted for Neil Gaiman's Calendar of Tales project. Since then she has been participating in hackathons across the UK and the US, bridging journalism with engineering.