Les Maintenants – Web of Care
Beginn des PhD-Programms / Start of the PhD-Program:SS 2021
Betreuung / Supervision: Karin Harrasser
“It looks a bit like a wolf. But the wolf can hear human heartbeats. It has X-ray eyes to see if everything inside the body is OK. Its tail is extendable to get things from the closets in the other rooms.” The wolf doctor was invented by Danny Bisson, founding member of a (fictional) tech company called Les Maintenants. While the caring but scary wolf is part of a collectively written science-fiction (in my film Aurore), the rise of technological innovations for use in the care sector is increasingly becoming a reality in the light of the care crisis. How do these “caring technologies” reshape relations in more than human worlds (Bellacasa)?
Les Maintenants means, literally translated, the hands that hold, but also, a constantly repeated now. Les Maintenants questions chrononormativity (Freeman) through an exploration of different rhythms and movements across time zones. Through a long-term collaboration with three protagonists, I would like to create a feature length essay film that uses digital tools developed for eldercare and re-appropriates them as filmic devices. We would speculate on relations between human and non-human actors, search for alternative ways of seeing, of togetherness, and, ultimately, of filmmaking.
Two figures will be guiding formal and narrative motives in this research: the web and the chain. While care has long been conceptualized as a complex interdependent web of activities (Fisher/Tronto), through the emergence of digital technologies to be used in the care sector, this web has become a techno-affective milieu (Angerer), shaped increasingly by the driving force of the bio-technological industry. In light of these developments, media can no longer be considered merely from an anthropomorphic perspective, but rather on the contrary, they contribute significantly to a novel organization and self-description of human society that includes the emergence of non-human actors. As a result of an increasing commercialization of the care sector, we see new partnerships between private and academic research groups emerge. In the field of Digital Social Innovation, however, there are also practices developing that are rooted in activist healthcare struggles (Graziano). Through an exploration that departs from technological objects in order to question the ideologies, assumptions and interests that inform their design, I would like to render visible the complex relations between different actors that currently shape this field.
Which forms of knowledge do these caring technologies prioritize? While most developments of digital care are dominated by the regime of the visible, there is a need to re-institute the importance of touch in epistemology to highlight the geographical, physical, relational situatedness of knowledge. This project thus explores touching visions (Bellacasa) through collaborative sensory ethnography, a methodology that combines approaches of sensory ethnography (Castaing-Taylor) and collaborative filmmaking.
Kurz-Biographie / Short Bio:MARLIES PÖSCHL (b. 1982) is an artist, filmmaker, curator and educator. She is currently based in Vienna (AT) and works internationally. Pöschl taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna as well as the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Salzburg. Shifting between artistic, curatorial and educational approaches, Pöschl is interested in art as a form of knowledge production. She understands filmmaking as social practice and often collaborates with actors from outside the art world in search for polyphonic narrations and open-ended dramaturgies.
Email-Adresse / Email-Address:
kontakt@marliespoeschl.net
Website:www.marliespoeschl.net