Im going to a Feldenkrais workshop on Sunday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method This is a form of body therapy used to help improve problems with physical movement and patterns of negative thinking. It was first brought my attention when I came across the work of George Khut and his project Thinking Through the Body http://thinkingthroughthebody.net/about/ where it has been used as a method of augmenting the interface between body and technology and opening up the role of the body in new media arts practice.
The workshop is happening next Sunday and I am hoping it will sort me out after the two days that I have just spent bed ridden with a miserable hang over. Its approaching my 27th Birthday and I am wondering if I am beginning to feel my age….eight glasses of wine was clearly too many!
It will be nice to get to grips with something practical, to think more about how physical and creative forms might come together, but using my body rather than my head! I’m all too aware of my tendency to live in my head and to withdraw from physical experience, something that I think is happening more in society in general. Artists like George feel really important in the way that they combine technology and body therapy as an anecdote to the desensitisation I think we all feel to some extent through spending endless hours sitting at computers, driving in cars and watching TV. It feels to me that integrating the body and the senses to our relationship with technology is absolutely vital, drawing emphasis away from what technology can do and toward how it can make us feel.
