Conspirators Synthesizing | Hosted by virtual care lab

We're excited to continue researching Spatial & Access Intimacy together as part of our open microresidency project with The Bentway and From Later. In these next gatherings, we will be sorting through our gathered reflections so far, and synthesizing our findings for our collective Terms of Service.

Gatherings:
Research Residency: Money Talk | Monday May 11, 2021 -- 11 am PST, 2pm EST, 4pm GMT, 8pm CET
The Bentway x From Later has provided vcl with funds for the production for our collective Terms of Service. Naturally, we are interested in opening this moment to reflect and experiment in transparent monetary redistribution. As facilitators practicing mutual governance, we welcome everyone in the virtual care lab ecosystem to gather in the decision-making of how we should distribute these funds.

Research Residency: Term of Service: 'Study' with Ben | Tuesday May 11, 2021 -- 7pm PST, 10pm EST
For our ongoing research residency into spatial and access intimacy, virtual care lab is creating a Collective Terms of Service. One playful provocation: what are the literal “terms” that serve us in cultivating collectivity, kinship and care?

Our co-conspirator Ben Nicholson offers the term “STUDY”: that thing we ostensibly do to learn. Ben will facilitate a conversation and group reflection exercise around the word “study” as described by Fred Moten in The Undercommons. Study is “what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.”

What does “study” mean to you? What could “study” mean to us? In this gathering, we’ll discuss, share, write, and elaborate this term of service - on our terms ,- and imagine how it might allow us to “do” and “be” with each other, to nurture affinities across our different modes of learning and knowing.

Benjamin Ross Nicholson (he/him) is a writer, musician, and performer currently pursuing a PhD in USC's Media Arts + Practice program. His practice and research interests include: the corporation as a prevailing model for neoliberal subject formation, necrontology (the ontology of dying), and performance as prefigurative praxis.
Research Residency: The (collective) Terms of 'A Collective Terms of Service' with Moe | Wednesday May 12, 2021 -- 7 pm PST, 10 pm EST
In this gathering, we will finalizing our hack of legal verbiage to serve community health.

Meghan Moe Beitiks (she/they) is an artist and Lecturer at the University of Florida who works with associations and dis associations of culture/nature/structure. Fan of water. www.meghanmoebeitiks.com
Research Residency: Qigong Somatic Wayfinding with Camellia | Thursday May 13, 2021 -- 2pm PST, 5pm EST, 9pm GMT, 11pm CET
For our ongoing research residency into spatial and access intimacy, one aspect of our exploration is how to build respect for each others’ diverse embodied experiences in online contexts. What practices can we imagine to affirm our physical sensations and connections in digital spheres?

Our co-conspirator Camellia Dao-Ling offers a Qigong gathering to explore these ideas. This practice, which emphasizes embodied encounters and sensory attunement, becomes a radical tool for sensory affirmation in digital/hybrid spaces.

Through this gathering, we will use our bodies to explore, learn and reflect on digital/hybrid spatial and access intimacy. How can attuning to our embodied constellations – from our bodies’ key acupoints, to the webs of our ancestors, communities, and digital networks – help us foster kinship and care in online contexts?

*If the lower tier suggested donation is not accessible, please reach out so we can find alternative economies of care.

李道玲 Camelia Dao-Ling (they/she) is passionately engaged in an artistic practice of ancestral healing as community care. They share the Daoist medicines of their lineage to seed futures of Black liberation + indigenous sovereignty.
Research Residency: Conspirator Synthesizing | Saturday May 15, 2021 -- 10am PST, 1pm EST, 5pm GMT, 7pm CET
Regroup to stitch together our last ideas, musings, mediations and offerings for our collective Terms of Service. The project does not end here, however, this time will be reserved for forming the iteration that will be presented for The Bentway's Field Guide.

Please sign up for any session that works best for your time zone and availability. Let us know ahead of time if you have any accessibility needs or preferences, and we will try to accommodate.

If you cannot make it to any of the sessions no worries. The goal is not for everyone to have to attend every meet-up. We will be sharing prompts, discussion notes, and living community agreements for open continued engagement via Discord, email, mail, or other ways.

At any time, you can refer to the #research-residency channel or reach out to Alice Yuan Zhang, Sara Suárez, or Lea Rose Sebastianis on Discord, or just email us at virtualcarelab@gmail.com.

About the project:

virtual care lab is undertaking a research-based micro-residency with The Bentway Conservancy, in partnership with the foresight studio From Later, to collect grassroots needs and perspectives around care, and techniques of access and intimacy in hybrid digital/physical spaces. We are developing strategies and prompts that explore alternative sensing and access, hybrid placemaking, and collective action. Through intimate gatherings and discussions, we are gathering techniques, tools, considerations, and a collective “terms of service” to be published with the broader public.

We welcome diverse, curious, thoughtful humans to join this initiative. You could be a healer, sex worker, writer, doula, gardener, researcher, community organizer, artist, technologist, disabled, neurodiverse, miscategorized or overly tracked by algorithms, frustrated by today’s internet — please help shape our shared process.

This entire process is open to public participation, and we plan for it to be imaginative, messy, thoughtful, brave, collective, and fun. In true virtual care lab ethos, you define your level of commitment and how you want to contribute. If you face financial, technical, time zone, physical, or other realities that make it hard to participate, let us know and we will work with you to enable access.

See our research webpage for more information about this project.

virtual care lab is a series of experiments in remote connection, in partnership with NAVEL. Reach out at virtualcarelab@gmail.com, or @virtualcarelab on IG or Twitter.