Pushing the boundaries of digital video production, the course was one of two offered through RISD’s Movement Lab this Wintersession.
RISD Movement Lab Symposium Presents Mind-Bending Visions of Motion, Perception, and Time
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A pink searchlight revolves around the darkened room where former Movement Lab fellow Patrick Buhr is presenting a technological piece called Radical Fantasies. His face appears on the screen behind the table where he sits, his hand moving in a circle and controlling the speed of the prerecorded audio that muses about straight lines and circles.
It is Day 3 of RISD’s inaugural Movement Lab Symposium, a multifaceted event highlighting interdisciplinary research conducted at RISD from 2023–26 by seven visiting research fellows: Buhr, Melisa Achoko Allela, Azadeh Ahmadi, Maxime Cavajani, Kameron Neal, L.A. Samuelson, and Hunter Whitaker-Morrow. The idea for a symposium in this form came from late Film/Animation/Video (FAV) Department Head Sheri Wills, and the Movement Lab itself—a space for investigations of the social, cultural, ecological, and expressive properties of movement—started as an idea proposed by current Department Head Amy Kravitz, who was studying the movement of caterpillar legs at the time.
“The Movement Lab Symposium’s structure reflects the adventurous errantry of the seven fellows and their practices,” notes Associate Professor Africanus Okokon 13 FAV, who organized the event along with Samuelson. “Rather than remaining fixed in a single locale, the symposium moves between spaces on campus and beyond, challenging and expanding how we think about movement in relation to time-based media, as well as culture, spaces, and bodies.”
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The symposium began in the Glass department’s hot shop, where Cavajani collaborated with faculty and students on a project investigating the medium of glass, its fluid movement when molten, and its omnipresence in the world. The fellows gathered the next day for a panel discussion led by Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Assistant Curator Tessa Haas, who posed questions about each artist’s exploration of movement and uncovered the relationships between their practices.
“Many of your fellowship projects seem to approach movement as a form of translation related to capturing and transmitting knowledge,” she noted. In response, Whitaker-Morrow said he thought about fugitivity and the escape of the subject when creating his piece Untitled (Realtime System), a single-channel, audiovisual installation that generates an infinitely shifting digital cinematic assemblage. Neal considers form in a similar way with his Red Study (for What Year Is It?), a video installation that explores how people talk about time and societal progress on the Internet.
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Achoka Allela explained that motion capture is integral to her Songa Mocap Library, a project that seeks to address the scarcity of culturally specific motion capture/3D asset libraries. She went to the sources for capturing African movement forms and gestures in order to create an authentic collection that reflects, among other things, embodied oral storytelling practices.
Samuelson, a dancer who tells stories with their body, presented a live performance called Vertical Time Horizontal Traffic after Buhr’s, in the same darkened space. A beam of white light orbited the room as Samuelson swooped, dove, and rolled in and out of the moving light, speaking directly to the audience about our shared connection to movement and time. “We’re losing our ability to tolerate uncertainty just when we need it the most,” they said.
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The live performances were followed by screenings of two experimental film-based projects: Ahmadi’s Rehearsing a Breath and Cavajani’s Forrest for the Trees. The former begins as a mostly linear narrative about a family with a dark secret before morphing into a more experimental piece focused on gestures, bodies, and the air we share. The latter was inspired by late fisherman-painter Forrest Bess (1911–77), whose life revolved around a search for meaning.
The culminating element of the symposium is an exhibition at the Jamestown Arts Center called Imprint and Playback on view through November 7. The show concentrates on how beings, materials, ideas, and memories travel and focuses on the role of bodies, human and otherwise. The artists in the show, Samuelson notes, “are particularly interested in the gap between sensory perception and recognition as fertile ground for artmaking, and the works they have created slip across this gap—changing form and embracing instability as a way of focusing and transmuting the viewer’s attention.”
RISD’s Movement Lab Symposium was funded by the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation, the Robert L. Turner Theatrical Performance and Design Fund, and an anonymous donor.
Simone Solondz / performance photos by Kaylee Pugliese
October 22, 2026
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