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Non-Fiction Publications
Telling your story through art at VEMU: Reflections on creative expressions of Estonian-Canadian identity and community
by Camille Intson
"In the early weeks of 2023, I was approached by Piret Noorhani about hosting a workshop for VEMU, intended to engage the Estonian-Canadian community in a series of exercises around “Turning Your Story Into Art”. Though I was enthusiastic at this prospect, I had my hesitations: Was I Estonian “enough” to host a workshop like this? How could I, as an early career artist and researcher, leverage my experience towards community building in a community that I often find myself on the margins of?"
"As a child, my Estonian grandmother showed me that stories are often our greatest teachers. Preserving cultural heritage isn’t just about historical fact, documentation, or record; it’s also about the feelings, sensations, and experiences that can only be passed down through more creative forms of expression."
Eesti Elu, Nr. 19 2023
Zach Blas | Profile
by Camille Intson
"In foregrounding speculative fiction and design in his art practice, Blas ponders what it means to think beyond and outside contemporary systems or surveillance and control. By conceptualising maker technologies as mechanisms that might be leveraged against capitalism and state oppression, Blas leaves viewers to consider how resistance might be leveraged beyond the gallery or the museum, moving from aesthetic to community-engaged modes of intervention."
ART Monthly, No. 459, September 2022
Making the Most of the 'Crisortunity': Multidisciplinary Provocations on Techno-fixes and Precarity
by Haley Bryant, Nelanthi Hewa, Camille Intson, Arun Jacob
"What then, might a robust crisis response that goes beyond a software patch look like? Each of these case studies show that bounded crisortunities are the fruiting bodies of the fungal network that is the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the deeper structural and material crises brought about by neoliberal policies. Though each author proposes a method to mitigate some of the challenges or harms in their particular case, a more sustainable and care-full approach to the pandemic crisis must take the form of a broader, structural critique."
IDEAH, Vol. 3, Iss. 2 (DHSI Conference & Colloquium)
Findings in the future of live performance
by Camille Intson
"Although the talks are more grounded in the practice-based explorations of consortium participants than in critical or scholarly debates around ‘liveness’, the panels suggest an erosion of boundaries between what an audience perceives to be live as opposed to pre-recorded or computerized. In digital space, these bounds are unfixed; action flows from human to technology to computer in an assemblage of hybrid objects, characters, and plot lines. Throughout these talks, the subject of audience agency is continually emphasized, theorizing mixed reality performance as a collaborative medium which de-centres the individual performer (or designer) as the locus of control. These panels also query how traditional institutions of theatrical training can or should adjust as these interdisciplinary, intermedial forms of expression become more commonplace. Furthermore, as these experiences demand more of audience members, questions of consent and expectation in theatrical spaces become paramount."
IJPADM, Vol. 18, Iss. 3
Intimate Audio-Materialities: Reinventing Audio Drama for Community-Engaged Crisis Response in Ghost River Theatre's Sensory Box
by Camille Intson
"How, then, do we rediscover our bodies in the spectatorial process? I propose that this may be achieved through a redesigned connection to the corporeal, to an awareness of the material conditions of the self-as-spectator. As pandemic audiences, we seek a hybrid performance design that bridges information and embodiment, the virtual and the corporeal, and passive and active modes of viewing and experiencing. I argue that digital togetherness is bred in the between-space of these things."
Canadian Theatre Review, Vol. 188, Fall 2021
Intimacy betweenspace/s: Towards a Transmedial Practice of Digital Intimacy
by Camille Intson
"As a performance practitioner-researcher working collaboratively with digital technologies, I find the notion of a digital intimacy, or of a digitally intimate encounter, contradictory yet stimulative. Whereas prevailing ideas of intimacy privilege physical touch, gesture, and co-presence, a digital intimacy hinges on the axes of simultaneous presence and absence, virtuality and corporeality, embodiment and disembodiment. These contradictions may at first seem like barriers to the effect of intimacy; however, I argue that, in the deconstruction of their opposition, there exists a fluid and generative space of enquiry through which intimacy is not only possible, but inevitable."
Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings, Vol. 6, Iss. 2
Blindness | Performance Review
by Camille Intson
"After five months of stringent social distancing restrictions and entertainment venue closures, this pandemic-time experience brought London’s theatre- going audience together in a rare moment of communality. Stephens’ intermedial Blindness facilitated an experience of togetherness in times where physical proximity was impossible, setting a compelling precedent for forthcoming iterations of pandemic theatre. Throughout the pandemic, the tension between individual and collective action has been commodified in governmental propaganda, such as the UK’s ‘Together Apart’ slogan; in Blindness, we find a reprise of this psychology which posits the ‘quarantined’ individual in relation to their com- munity and society. The production’s absorbing design, which includes 360 degree audio recording technology, the use of individual headphones, and synchronized lighting cues, creates an experience that is at once communal and individual."
IJPADM, Vol. 18, Iss. 1
The Play in the System | Book Review
by Camille Intson
"Materialized at the intersections of performance studies, feminist studies, digital media studies, and critical theory, Anna Watkins Fisher’s debut monograph The Play in the System is a pivotal and provocative interdisciplinary meditation on 21st-century artistic resistance and institutional cooption of creative and political praxis. Fisher considers the politics and aesthetics of artistic creation when dissidence and disruption are seen as commodifiable, responding to trends in the neoliberal economy toward a rise in automated technologies and the resultant insidious power that operates not by constraining its subjects but by inciting and allowing them to participate in the system. These powers, both sociocultural and institutional, present themselves as open and flexible, with the aim of not incapacitating or debilitating their subjects, but optimizing them.
TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 65, Iss. 4
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