BODIES AS DATA SENSING – BADS

Politics of the body and the environment in urban space.

“Bodies as data sensing (“BADS”) addresses the politics of urban space from the shared physiology of its living organisms. The workshop focuses on understanding the city as a distributed medium of cognition where perceptual errors – let’s call them that – such as synaesthesia become a vehicle for research.

Synaesthesia, prototype of cosmic and communal sensibility, has been very present in the relationship between architecture and politics being the paradigm of a collective sense, of a psychedelic climax capable of transforming everything. In “BADS” we will use various somatic experiences combined with theory and case studies to set in motion an urban synaesthesia that will facilitate a design in which the unconnected organisms of our cities take up and raise their voices. The more-than-human world as a political agent in urban design.

By setting in motion a kind of urban synaesthesia, where one thing can be confused with another, revealing political situations and urban imaginaries, the delimitations, identities and classifications that we usually take for granted are questioned.

By setting aside logocentrism, we participate in a common experience, in an ecstasy brought about by the environment of distributed cognition of which our somatic markers are a part. The city thus becomes imbricated in our bodies, fostering unusual links and relationships of association. Rescuing the cosmic consciousness that synaesthesia has always had and its political dimension, from Fourier to Bragdon, from Aleksandra Kasuba to the wayward Yale students who in the 1960s built Prickly Mountain.

The workshop takes place in the urban space of the city of Donostia and in the ARGI pavilion of the MUGAK Biennial.