Uncertainy Seminars: Senses of Security: a larp workshop by Susan Ploetz

As part of Uncertainty Seminars: Other Than Art's Sake this workshop led by Susan Ploetz deals with senses of security and law making, through speculative social prototyping. Larp stands for live action role-playing, a game where participants explore in a playful way certain scenarios, while interacting with each other in character. There are many different styles of larping. Artist Susan Ploetz is a progressive larp designer and somatic practitioner. She focuses on multisensory imagination, which is not strictly language based but follows the knowledge of the body.

This workshop, which keeps the context of The Hague as International City of Peace and Justice in mind, is open to everyone (students, artists, researchers, citizens, law makers, activists, NGOs et cetera) who is interested in exploring somatic senses of security, and wants to experiment how interpersonal and bodily senses of safety could be scaled up to methods of law making.

How can a sense of personal safety translate to a public sense of security? What would a sense of security based in a co-operative, co-creational model/system function like/feel like (instead of one based in an adversarial/protective mode), and what would be the laws that helped encourage this sense of security? If we explore the laws and functions of the body and the material world, or of ecologies, in an explorative, playful way, could we scale that up to laws that govern the public body? What if other members of society (artists, children, mothers, refugees) made laws besides politicians and judges, how would that change laws and how they function? Through role play and real-time speculative social prototyping, we will explore these questions and the alternative realities they might produce.

Susan Ploetz
Susan Ploetz (US/DE) conducts artistic research through embodied simulations and co-creative world building using techniques from progressive larping and somatic practices. Her work is multidisciplinary and deals with bodymind-technology interactions, imagination as interface, perceptual expansions, procedural expression, and emancipatory emotional dissonance. She has presented work, spoke or taught at Martin Gropius Bau/Berliner Festspiele, Universität der Künste Berlin, Dutch Art Institute, dOCUMENTA (13), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Performa amongst other venues.
https://susanploetz.com