Elasticity is the capacity to stretch and return to a new initial state. It entails resistance and elastic resilience to produce movements like oscillation and vibration. It allows a material to deform when a force is exerted on it and, when the force is withdrawn, the elastic body returns to an origin, one that is never the same.
After stretching, compressing, bending, and returning, there is constant change in each elastic scene, in each elastic material, there is loss, wear, but also something is gained in the process of learning how to be elastic.
Elastic Media have the ability to adapt and react with flexibility to the forces of rigid infrastructures or norms, in society or in digital systems for instance. This implies media in constant reconfiguration that responds to internal and external forces, while containing an almost obsessive intention to come back to an impossible past, to a retro-future.
Together, we will analyze examples of elastic behaviors in the confrontations of communities: For instance, migrants have to adapt their culture in a foreign land. And colonized communities have to behave in response to external forces that arrive in their territories to extract "natural resources"—such as gold, copper, coltan and lithium—through extractivist systems. We will examine the elastic limits in these situations, using these cases as fundamental references for critically creating our works.
In this class, we will explore with elastic materials and develop elastic artefacts, instruments, algorithms and devices to perform with them. As well, we will program systems of code that will allow elastic behaviour inside the rigidities of the current digital world.
We will read the theories of Suely Rolnik, Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Yásnaya Aguilar, Eduard Glissant, Arturo Escobar, and Catherine Malabou to examine moments of elasticity in their texts. These readings will help us develop our own embodied theory of elasticity and connect it to the elastic artifacts/instruments we create.
Any question, please send me email to: ilopezdemesamoyano@hfk-bremen.de
