Welcome and introductions

After we’d set the scene we want to do something to get moving and come into the same (zoom) room.

Victoria:

I have some resistance towards virtuality to getting in touch. In most cases, I find that the screens become a wall and the interactions just get relegated to an individual square, of separated faces on the screen.

Because of this, for this encounter we required a bit more, because sharing concerns and experiences are more complex than just reading a paper. Finding the space for safe unjudged experimentation is difficult when we don’t know if we share or not the inner conflicts of the other. So, to initiate our first encounter, our first way of getting in touch and starting interactions in the virtual space, we required of the audience's hands and a gallery view of the zoom room.

We stretched our fingers and expanded them, to warm them up in preparation to write. We took our time to pause, to see and feel our hands. To really see them and really feel them. We acknowledged that use our hands every day to touch, to interact, to express something and write.

While we were in different physical places, I asked to pay attention to light, to hands... and the interaction of the light passing through the fingers, paying attention to the micro and macro variations of our quiet or in-movement hands. After a bit, and without realising, those unsynchronized movements were the beginning of something emerging on the screen, under the grid of the gallery view, the multiple hands started to move across the screen. The hands, before separated by the physical space, started to touch and interact with the other hands on the sides, above and below. I took the time to remind us: we are here because of our hands.

The movement of the hands started to synchronize-open hands-creating a choreography.-Closed hands- to explore ways of connecting tactly otherwise -Open hands-virtually otherwise. -Closed- while we moved our hands.-Open- in this virtual space -Closed- we were touching others hands. -Open- we were contouring the digital space towards new sense-making, -Close-while we are looking for meaning and the limits of possibilities. -Open- we were looking for meaning in the enclosures and opening of our practices.
The rhythm that slowed us down also turned us to each other, bringing the attention to an embodied and relational meaning making. We encountered each other in this dance, in this interaction as first encountering. In turning towards each other and reaching the unknowing, we found the agentive possibilities formed with and in the making, in our contact and touch. We invited the unknown to be known otherwise and welcomed generative encounters.