During Cheerful Weaves, I would like to reflect together on the co-dependency we hold with the many mediated channels bridging our connections and communities. Technologies in fact refer to the ways human, nonhuman bodies, and lives are entangled.

Following a materialistic perspective on this co-dependency allows us to acknowledge how technology and the body are interdependent and inextricable; the former always being "embodied", while the latter always "technologically invested" (Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway). Queer theories and transgender studies contextualised this relation also through the term "somatechnics", considering the body and corporality as bound up with technologies, techniques, and technics: these being not something we add or apply to the already constituted body (as object), nor being tools that the embodied self employs to its own ends. Rather, technés are "the dynamic means in and through which corporealities are crafted; that is, continuously engendered about others and to a world" (Sullivan). The human emerges thus from a relationship with technology, in a process of fulfilment of a lacking essence: humans are "neotenic" beings, essentially incomplete; formed or educated only through technical prostheses (Bernard Stiegler). If we reckon technologies as both products of human creativity and forces shaping human existence, we can turn to them considering them as determinative but not deterministic for human experience. This relation between corporality and technicality is marked by principles of "intimacy and intrusion" (Rosi Braidotti), the role of the "technical" being a caring feature for the human: as a very "end", rather than just a supplement.

In granting possibilities to relate, technology becomes "mode of existence", indispensable for everything that matters, and so fundamentally political. How to think mediated connections out of the neoliberal digitized economy, that do not appropriate and commodify the generative potentials woven between human and nonhuman bodies?

To access a group exchange in a performative dynamic, I wish to explore ourselves and our close relationship to technologies through the usage of long-based communication devices in situ, more particularly through walkie-talkies. I would like to experiment with forms of non-linear dialogues, interacting ecologically through the spaces of Libken, while in motion and at distance from one another. Recent times amplified our dependence on technologies, helping us to keep in "touch" while being physically distanced. This showed nevertheless, how an overreliance on virtual communications has direct effects on our attention, our mental health, and the very capacity to be communicative. When interfacing our daily lives with technology in order to connect and be connected, how do we like our virtuality and how do we account for the growing consumption of signs? When bodies don't interact in proximity, and the contact is mediated, how to be careful and "response-able" in the way we expose ourselves through technology? How do we nurture our virtual communications when physically disjoined, and what kind of desires are projected in overcoming distance through the interface? I would like to tackle these topics through the orchestration of a small selection of readings, from authors who researched the interrelation of care and technology. It can be interesting to try to stimulate an exchange on these texts being disseminated in space and through mediated feedbacks.