LUCY A. SAMES
PhD Candidate / Associate Lecturer, Goldsmiths, University of London
Wet Rest: Speculative Ontologies of Floatation
Lucy A. Sames is a curator and researcher living and working in London. She is an Associate Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and holds a PhD studentship at Northumbria University Newcastle (2016-19) where her research project SYBRNTCKMYSTX utilises mystical diagramming as a technology for analysing the intersection of cybernetics and altered states of consciousness as manifest in contemporary art practice and curating. This stems from 5 years of related exhibition making: Janusware (Res. London 2017), CHEMHEX EXTRACT (PVA Aberdeen 2016), Exta (Res. London 2015), Tomb Shrine (Enclave London 2014) and Sci-Fi Paganism (Enclave London 2013).
Lucy is Co-Director and Curator at Res. (www.beingres.org) a mutable project based in a gallery and workspace in Deptford, South London, where their recent co-curated cross-platform programme Alembic (Res. London 2016-18) considered the legacies of cyberfeminism through processes of alchemical transmutation, and included archival work, international artist commissions, performance, an online commission, book and conference.
She is part of the Social Morphology Research Unit at University College London, where her interdisciplinary collaborative work concerns the cumulative constitution of personhood through ‘altered states of consciousness’, and utilises practices of both anthropological and artistic research.
Wet Rest: Speculative Ontologies of Floatation
Floatation is a form of restricted environmental stimulation therapy (REST): one floats alone in the dark, in highly salinated water that provides buoyancy to the body and limbs; the water and air are both warmed to body temperature and ear plugs exclude sound. Developed during the 1950s by neuroscientist John C Lilly, floatation is today utilised largely for physical therapy, to increase productivity, for accelerated learning and behaviour modification (phobia and aversion therapies).
Appropriating this technology, Wet Rest is a monthly practice-based research and reading group that employs the unique multidimensional affective experience of sensory deprivation floatation tanks as embodied methodology for artistic research into the conditions of posthumanism and altered states of consciousness. Founded and convened by Lucy A. Sames, Wet Rest has been meeting since October 2017 and each month its members participate in both a floatation and an accompanying reading group. Through the redeployment of this therapeutic technology for the harnessing of its corollary effects – kinaesthetic disorientation, somatic misperception and spatio-temporal distortion – Wet Rest aims to open up a radical, productive space in which speculative ontologies can emerge.
Through a presentation of this project, my paper will examine the productive spaces associated with these transpersonal and transtemporal modes of being, and consider the utilisation of floatation and sensory deprivation (or more accurately: sensory attenuation) for such esoteric purposes: magic practice, lucid dreaming, sigilisation and out of body experience, in the context of contemporary art practice and curating.