About

Body Weather is a new film by Stine Marie Jacobsen, commissioned by Radar as part of its Risk Related project. It draws on workshops which Jacobsen hosted in collaboration with the neuroscientist Aleks Berditchevskaia, in which participants were invited to describe both perceptual imaginaries and visceral reactions in response to an uncertain threat. Drawing on these ‘naive’ descriptions, the film develops a prototype visceral visual and verbal language to convey the perceptual experience of risk. Privileging situated, embodied understanding, the work questions the ‘objectivity’ of risk assessment, and asks questions about how we interpret science in relation to everyday experience.

This event will feature extracts from the film, and bring Jacobsen and Berditchevskaia into dialogue with Davide Fillingeri, Associate Professor in Skin Health at the University of Southampton. Their conversation will trace connections between the film and Fillingeri’s research into how humans sense temperature and wetness on their skin, and how these signals contribute to regulating body temperature. It will also explore the speculative design on the film’s production, and interrogate the potentials of collaborations between artists and scientists.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Stine Marie Jacobsen is a conceptual artist working to decode violence and law through participatory means. She creates open-structured sociocultural projects with clearly defined themes, conducting performative experiments and creating platforms for critical thinking. Jacobsen has conceptualised a number of long term participatory and educational projects such as Direct Approach, where people retell a violent film scene memory and choose to play either victim, perpetrator or bystander in a reenactment and Law Shifters, where the artist in collaboration with lawyers, invites people to rejudge court cases and write their own law proposals. She has had solo shows at Nuuk Art Museum, Nuuk, Nikolaj Art Center, Copenhagen; Flat Time House, London; Galerie Wedding, Berlin; Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; and Galway Arts Centre. In 2016, she was awarded a Peace Fellowship from the Rotary Foundation and won the Berlin Art Prize.

Aleks Berditchevskaia is the Principal Researcher at Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, where she leads the project delivery and research on AI-enabled collective intelligence. She is the lead author of ‘The Future of Minds & Machines’ a report about combining human and machine intelligence to address societal challenges. She also co-authored the ‘Playbook for Collective Intelligence Design’, a toolkit to help organisations and innovators tap into collective intelligence.

A neuroscientist by background, Aleks has held a number of roles that explored the societal impact of emerging technologies and how to tap into new sources of ideas and insight through participatory methods. Aleks is passionate about the intersection between the arts and sciences. She has co-curated community-facing Art & Science programmes and previously collaborated with the artist Jacobsen on the educational project Pidgin Tongue for the inaugural Riga Biennial.

Davide Fillingeri is Associate Professor in Skin Health, in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Southampton and, until recently, was Vice-Chancellor’s Lecturer in the Environmental Ergonomics Research Centre School of Creative Arts at Loughborough University, where he lead the THERMOSENSELAB. His research explores how our brain senses the external world through our skin, how this influences our body temperature regulation and thermal behaviour, and how this integrated system fails when neurodegeneration takes place. After completing a BSc and MSc in exercise physiology at the University of Palermo, he obtained a PhD in Environmental Physiology and Sensory Neuroscience at Loughborough. He then undertook post-doctoral research at the University of Sydney and at the University of California at Berkeley.

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