Sensory Online School

The Sensory Online School (or SOS) is a direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I wanted to design an experimental workshop series to test whether it’s possible to create a social, creative and safe space in the online sphere. Unable to use our usual creative spaces or see friends and family without restricted with physical touch, is there a way we can explore our senses in a digital environment? The workshop sessions invited 8 people, my closest friends being UAL final year students and recent graduates, to come along and become more aware of our senses and create work without institutional pressure. We used Microsoft Teams video chat software to meet up in the morning and catch up, followed by a presentation where I outlined some key texts, poetry or imagery to initiate creative thought and then focus on the sense of the day. I set an exercise, be it drawing, writing or thinking, to then go away and create something, coming back to a chat afterwards to see what we had come up with. This format allowed for people to explore their immediate surroundings in their own time, with no external pressure or influence, creating an exciting variation of work. The Sensory Online School culminated in a collection of digital data, drawings and conversations. I decided to design a book, printed at home, curating these together as a souvenir and document of the experience. Full book can be read online here: https://issuu.com/lilyaforbes/docs/final_20book