 
Introduction to Protactile Theory with John Lee Clark
John Lee Clark
“Introduction to Protactile Theory” is a legendary seminar that facilitator John Lee Clark has designed to bring diverse communities into conversation with the Protactile movement.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
 
“Introduction to Protactile Theory” is a legendary seminar that facilitator John Lee Clark has designed to bring diverse communities into conversation with the Protactile movement.
 
A celebration of our overabundant social entanglement and complicity, that remind us of how we can see ourselves, stripped of powers’ attempts to grasp us.
 
Transfeminist and revolutionary poetry, voice and timbral abstraction: a sounding and spatialising of reparative sonic and somatic practices that can speak back to violent histories of expropriation and ecocide.
 
The production of moving image (film) by the mechanically, unfalteringly repetitive manipulation of mass-produced materials (film), in order to explore three different allegorical representations (films) of repetitive human actions and labour under capital.
 
Summing up of the investigations with a reflection on what has been done that week and what could be done the next.
 
A festival hewn from passions for experimental music, film and visual art and for a passion in figuring out how they can relate to, cross-fertilise and inspire and each other.
 
Improvising violinist Angharad Davies performing with pianists Tisha Mukarji and Andrea Neumann.
 
A Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by improviser yodeller, composer Phil Minton.
 
Like walking through the abstracted amalgamation of 30 or so storms, trays of water shaken by thunder, light bouncing off pools.
 
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
 
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
 
How does this practice, that simultaneously resists and honours the distinctions between these genres, materials and senses, determine the inhabitation of another: a convergence of aesthetic and social experimentation?