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.
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
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?
A programme looking at landscape, filmic or architectural spaces and at how the fixed stare of a camera frame only captures so much reality; here we focus on how filmmakers structure our relationship with that reality and at how they relate it to or interpret it through sound.
A conversation between Philip and Moten: how do we read NourbeSe’s anti-narrative poetic lament in Glasgow today, given the city’s role in the history of slavery?
A multi-media harp and spoken word tribute to the incalculable, the in-deducible, the suspicious static noise that accompanies the voice of truth, and the attempted aberrations in the domain of emergence.
A film performance about Guy then, and Guy now, as a metaphor for the passing of time, which of course all film is inherently about.
Guitar solo where inscrutable, minute electric sounds are excavated by palms that smother and strangle, that wring sound from the fretboard, from behind the bridge.
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.
What would a world and an ethics look like free from the destructive consequences of the Western mind?
Has neoliberal capitalism locked down social experience? Are our seemingly subjective desires, our identities, pre-packaged by dominating social structures?
In 2008 we toured our Kill Your Timid Notion festival of experimental sound and image to London, Bristol and Glasgow, bringing audiences a taste of the previous 5 festival editions.