Touch

A participatory scanning workshop exploring touch, memory and the ways everyday objects can become digital records.

Touch. Led by Shohrab Jahan

Led by Bangladeshi artist Shohrab Jahan, this hands-on workshop invites participants to experiment with an ordinary flatbed scanner as a tool for creative image-making.

Participants will work with familiar objects, fragments of a space and materials found around them, placing them directly onto an A4 scanner to create digital images. Rather than simply recording an object, the workshop asks how scanning might capture something of our intentions, memories and relationships with the things we touch.

Working together, participants will observe the different objects and approaches chosen by others and explore the unexpected ways a scanner receives, interprets and transforms what is placed upon it.

The workshop is not about producing a technically perfect image. Instead, it is an invitation to slow down, handle objects differently and experiment with texture, composition, light, proximity and the relationship between physical objects and their digital traces.

Images created during the workshop may be exhibited as part of the wider project and will be shared with the group. The workshop process, including discussion and scanning, will also be documented using a handheld video camera to create a short process film. Participants will be appropriately credited, and permission will be sought for the use of their work and participation in the film.

No previous artistic or technical experience is required.

What participants need: Nothing is required. All equipment will be provided. Participants can bring a USB stick if they would like to take their scanned image away with them; images will also be shared digitally after the workshop.

About Shohrab Jahan: https://www.shohrabjahan.com.bd/ Shohrab Jahan is an interdisciplinary visual artist, educator and curator based in Chattogram, Bangladesh. Working across moving image, installation, sculpture and artists’ books, his practice explores memory, landscape, everyday objects and the ways personal and collective experiences can be recorded and reinterpreted. Shohrab is also a founding member of JOG Art Space in Chattogram.

This workshop forms part of an international exchange supported by the British Council through the Connections Through Culture programme.

Image Credit: Shohrab Jahan