SLOMOCO

Overview

SloMoCo was a durational event-experiment sponsored by the MOCO (Movement and Computing) steering committee and community which ran from March to December 2021. SloMoCo is refiguring the conference form via global collaborations in collective knowledge-production, cybernetically informed learning-making structurations, and telematically mediated field practice. SloMoCo temporally (explodes, augments, prolates) the event conference as a site of knowledge production.

SloMoCo hosted a total of over fifty groups and individuals of artists and 134 researchers. In the Spring, we were joined by twenty-five projects, nineteen in the Summer, and twelve in the Fall.

About This Site

This site was created after SloMoCo's conclusion to combine two web presences:

  1. A public facing website hosted on MOCO's servers
  2. A Manifold instance where presenters could create their own project pages.

This website is a final archived combination of the two.

About Slomoco

Phases, Participation, and Event Types

SloMoCo ran three phases: Spring, Summer, and Fall which mapped onto the seasons of the year 2021 respectively. Each phase contained a discrete call for proposals that populated the various streams (microresidency, presentations / practice works, and provocations) with people, events, and themes. Some microresidencies extended their work into a second phase.

We hosted public events at three to four-week intervals to develop an iterative reportage. The events have taken place on zoom to accommodate a community scattered around the planet. They are comprised of ready-to-go submitted works, microresidency proposals for extended research and work development, or seminars conceived by committee members and community.

The SloMoCommittee, a small group of volunteers that shrank and expanded over the nine months, chose participants from submissions based on two criteria: 1) their proposals’s relevance to the movement and computing space and 2) their willingness and enthusiasm to engage the eccentricities of the SloMoCo project. Interestingly, informal surveys completed with project applications suggested that only about 1/third of applicants had been involved with the MOCO community before. There was no fee for participation and no business model.

Microresidencies

About two-thirds of submissions were microresidency proposals, indicating applicants desire for embedded artistic community. Microresidents met for an hour every week with a cohort of 3-5 other microresident projects. Each cohort collaborates with a counselor, a SloMoCommittee member who facilitated discussions and intermediates between the microresidents and the SloMoCommittee (communicating needs, wants, issues, etc.). Microresidents were under no obligation to show completed work but did present their proposal at a public event. They were encouraged to use the cohort time for user testing, work-in-progress showings, critique, or discussion. In the Spring, the microresidency culminated in a group exhibition at a public art show in Phoenix. In the Summer, microresidents showcased their work in a 90-min critique session. By Fall, microresidency cohorts had developed a dynamic autonomy and organized their own showing inside a virtual environment created by a microresidency project.

Provocations Track

SloMoCo also hosted a track of vibrant provocations run by Jessica Rajko, Teoma Naccarato, and John MacCallum that spanned all three phases. This provocations track built on the history of auxiliary events at MOCO that provoke or intervene in generatively fricative ways. At MOCO 2017 at Goldsmiths, London featured an unconference-like event called UNCOMO (uncomputatable movement) organized by Adam Russell and Joel Fletcher. UNCOMO inspired subsequent events called Provocations at MOCO 2018 and 2019. Naccarato and MacCallum organized the event in 2018 and were joined by Rajko in 2019. In these provocations events, provocations organizers posed provocative question so to solicit counter-provocations (“What escapes computation in interactive media art?” and “What aspects of your practice are invisible to your collaborators?”). The provocations organizers published the responses they received on a dedicated website (https://www.provocations.online/). At the conference event, select provocateurs were put in conversation with each other in single session.

SloMoCo provided continuity to the Provocations project, which developed its own track spanning all three phases. In each, they revisit, remediate, resituate the 2018 and 2019 Provocations in a video series showcasing conversations between previous years’ provocations submitters alongside new entrants. In the Fall, a new provocation was proposed that riffed through the two phases of SloMoCo provocations. Through the pairings of video conversations (available on this website) and prompts to SloMoCo SloMoCo participants on the Discord server, organizers display an advanced and idiosyncratic mode of facilitating.

Special Events

Although all phases featured microresidencies and practice work presentations, Spring, Summer, and Fall made distinct offerings in response to participant’s needs and other opportunities. In the Spring, nine microresidents participated in co-creating a multichannel projection mapped installation at a car park on a university campus in Arizona. In the Summer we planned three seminars to accompany each public event. The seminars included invited guests, readings and a thematic or problematic which grounded both discussion and the presentations of practice work and microresidency presenters. In the Fall, we repeated these seminars as three Art lounges (a panel, a set of performance, a collection of workshops) at an interdisciplinary conference.

SloMoCommittee

  • Garrett Laroy Johnson, SloMoCo chair
  • Shomit Barua, Social Media and Practice Works
  • Renee Carmichael, Manifold and Events
  • Madoka Clark, Web design
  • Will Hallett, Graphic Design
  • Lisa Jamhoury, Production and Micro-residencies
  • Ri Lindegren, Practice Works and Micro-residencies
  • Hannah Tardie, SloMoCo archivist
  • Megan Young, Research and Production

MOCO Steering Committee

  • Frédéric Bevilacqua, IRCAM
  • Sarah Fdili Alaoui, LRI-Université Paris-Sud 11
  • Thecla Schiphorst, Simon Fraser University
  • Cumhur Erkut, Aalborg University Copenhagen,
  • Sofia Dahl, Aalborg University Copenhagen,
  • Grisha Coleman, Arizona State University
  • Gualtiero Volpe, University of Genova
  • Marco Gillies, Goldsmiths, University of London
  • Sotiris Manitsaris, MINES ParisTech