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 collaboration bringing together artists with a shared gravitational heft to their work; an intense and concentrated accumulation of detail and power.
What is the radical concept at the core of ‘rhythm’, expanded from simply musical or mathematical notions to encompass personal, social, collective rhythms?
A socio-poetic reading on wayward communities – The wayward create upheavals, incite tumult. They come and go as they please; they are fugitive; they are in open rebellion against society.
An extravagant debauch of huge pianos, plush toys, cognac and ritual.
The struggle for sex workers’ rights and how we can understand it in the continuum of care work and other forms of invisibilised and precarious work.
A sound of buzzing and flickering metallic drones, glottal stops and guttural growls, and also an explosiveness and purity of sound that reminds you as much of Bill Dixon as anyone else.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing by the Stones of Stenness, instead of the Ring of Brodgar, because of bad weather.
A bodiless treatise on narration, bored speakers, audience misbehaviour and police megaphones, but: is anybody listening?
60 minutes of hard ass minimal film, projected onto a weather balloon and accompanied by the inspired poetic rant of a visionary Frenchman.
What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene going on in Harlem had travelled downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?
A system in which film is projected onto copper strips, captured again and then re-projected as video, somehow transforming the original imagery into molasses-slow, molten and incredibly tactile flickers of colour and light.