Dr Nicolas Salazar Sutil

Nicolas Salazar Sutil (Academic Fellow, University of Leeds) is a movement researcher, trained in the Laban-Malgrem system of movement psychology (a movement based system for actors, therapists and educationists). As a creative researcher, I work with artistic associates often under the name of Con8, an artistic collaborative focusing on natural (i.e. uncoded and non-technique based) movement as creative medium. I am the author of the books Motion and Representation (MIT Press 2015) and Digital Movement (co-edited, Palgrave 2015). I am currently writing my third book entitled Softer media: mediation for a paleo world (2016).

My research tends to gravitate to the topic of movement, broadly conceived, but more narrowly addressed from the perspective of creativity research, performance and media studies. Questions focus on relationships between lived-in movement and its representation or technological mediation, as well as ontological preoccupations: what is, or how do we understand the being of movement, or being as movement? Clearly, there are Deleuzian and process-philosophical inflections. My work is also concerned by the issue of nonhuman performance, and recognition of creative agency in more-than-human actors. Thus, I am currently conducting practice based explorations of movement of motor vehicles (smart cars) and car simulators, as dancers. In parallel, I am exploring prehistoric decorated caves as elemental media, and agents of nonhuman communication, particularly in regards to questions of mobile cultural imaginaries. Other areas of interest include: social choreography (mobility), animal movement, expanded notions of movement (computational and mathematical), and epistemologies of motion.