The Feeling Digital Workshop [2021]

As part of the Feeling Digital initiative, I participated in the experiment "Sensation and virtuality: atmosphere and situated body". Here is a glimpse of my results:

Public space as an intimate performative scene: The atmosphere of a market in Guatemala City.

"As an immersive embodied experience, a visit to the market contrasts with the virtual interactions normalized during the Covid-19 pandemic. As an experiment to feel digital, I took the challenge of documenting and translating the atmosphere of a physical experience into a virtual format. I regularly visit a market located in the historic center of Guatemala City, since my childhood. My great-grandmother used to be a merchant, and so, over generations, my family is used to visit this market. In principle, I have an economic relation with the place, but over the years, we have gotten to know better the merchants whom we meet every week. Different from technologized modern super markets, the traditional market allows for a personal relationship with the sellers, and I decided to run my experiment there."

"About “Feeling Digital” Workshop During the outbreak of COVID-19, everyday life has been modified in accordance with the protocols that every country has implemented. These modifications have posed ongoing challenges for fieldworkers, artists, and practice-based ethnographic researchers, while they have simultaneously produced opportunities for these researchers to reimagine fieldwork, ethnography, art, and research practices. These modifications were also embedded into different ways of relating to the mediated presence of self and other, the shifted meanings of territory and space, and the altered feelings of body and home. We refined these critical questions into a core question: What does “feeling digital” mean? To answer this question, we designed four sets of “experiments” to perform “body-theaters” in groups, each aimed at addressing one particular facet of “feeling digital”. We recruited 23 participants from different disciplines, professions and institutions around the world to form five focus groups, each practicing, reflecting and discussing one of the four sets of experiments." (Rao and Benavides, 2021).