Attune to your animal body. Explore technology as an extension of yourself. Meld the creature and machine in you. Taught by Olivia & Kyle of Chimeras Collective.
🗓 6 sessions, 2 hours, June 2 - July 27
🕰️ DAY TBD: Either Mondays 6:30-8:30pm, Tuesdays 6:30-8:30pm, or Sundays 1:00-3:00. Please select your preferred meeting day in the application.
🗺 Location: The wilds of Prospect Park (likely Nellie’s Lawn)
💰 Pay what you can: Base: $400. Supporter: $600. Scholarship: $100-200.
Tuition pays for Kyle and Olivia’s time creating a syllabus we think you’ll love, class planning, admin/coordination, snacks, and keeping this practice not just sustainable but expanding!
🐌 Max 15 participants
Metal and bone. Deep in the earth, one is formed, another is found. In modern times, bodies of metal and bone have become organisms desiring, computing, and surviving. Phones, like us, come from the earth (rare metals), are fed by the earth (fossil fuels). Not only do they come from earth, but they are alive, animate, seemingly agential, and even magical.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke
We believe that technology has desires. It has an appetite. In what ways has the iPhone domesticated the human body to stay alive? Doesn’t it feed off of your attention? Your desperate addiction? Feed me, charge me, need me. This is a kind of symbiotic relationship: two organisms tethered to one another for survival.
“Sometimes, adopting a new technology becomes basically obligatory. Technology creates a need for itself; it makes itself valuable.” The Consilience Project, Technology is Not Values Neutral
Behavioral manipulation, planned obsolescence, proprietary data, and now AI slop have come to dominate how we suffer as technology — how we’ve unknowingly become tethered to it, disfigured by it (physically, mentally, spiritually), and forgotten we were human before it.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We’re not advocating for a Luddite world where we return to bare feet and you can only see “the cloud” by looking up. We advocate for a more conscious and consensual living in the world as technology, where its capacity to delight, to inspire, to calm, and to deepen our relationships is at the forefront, instead. A different way of being in relation to our devices and our networks is possible.