for an accessible “plain language” version of all this information, please Click this Blue Button below:

please note - this page is split into two sections:

1. A ‘Warm Data’ Lab for the Sydney Community Services and wider community 

2. Sydney Community Service’s / Dean Walsh’s - Creative Dance & Movement Program, 2020 - the blue button at the bottom of this page takes you to that information.

1. WARM DATA LAB - 13th February, 2020

Venue: Critical Path / Drill Hall, Building b, 1c New Beach Rd,Rushcutters Bay, NSW 2027

Dean and Sydney Community Services will be kicking off Term 1 of our disability access and inclusion dance and movement program with a ‘Warm Data Lab’ facilitated by Dean, with assistance from fellow qualified Warm Data Hosts, Julie Regalado, Christie Wilson and Sienna Aguilar.

Further info on-hosts:

Christie
Julie
Sienna

If booking on the actual day of event - Please RSVP directly to:

dean@dean-walsh.com

earlier bookings go to:

Sydney Community Services - Gaynor Stark or Amanda Zhong
(email) - Reception@sydneycs.org
(ph) - 9427 6425

Who is this Warm Data Lab for?

Everybody, everymind. We're wanting to attract as many diverse people / groups of people and agencies, to come along from across:
- disability communities / groups and agencies in the arts
- disability arts access advocates / indie artists / funding bodies / venues
- culturally diverse arts orgs, including refugee settlement services and network groups reaching out to culturally diverse artists
- mental health agencies and members
- local and state government members / workers
- indigenous community members and groups
- lower socio-economic communities people
- youth groups
- environmental organisations

The question for this “Warm Data lab” is:

What is belonging in a complex, rapidly changing world?

10 contexts, that we will speak to the question through, will be chosen from the list below and announced on the day. As people living with intellectual disability will be present, each context will be briefly explained in "plain language terms", so as to ensure as much inclusion throughout the lab.

1. Education
2. Family
3. Art
4. Food
5. Technology
6. Mental Health
7. Culture
8. Innovation
9. Ecology
10. Economics
11. Gender
12. Science
13. Justice
14. Identity
15. Competition
16. History
17. Wellbeing
18. Politics

This lab will comprise of 4 main components - prior to light refreshments:

• Access – 30 minutes shared discussion around Warm Data theories and access needs, to assure the lab is accessible for all throughout it’s 3 hours. This is also the chance to ask your hosts any questions.

• Transcontextual - the “Warm Data Lab” – 80 to 90mins

• “Intersteeping” - remaining in the room, just being present & together, revealing thoughts on two question, only if we choose to - 20 mins

• “Symmathesy” - learning together: discussion, revealings and harvest “the togathering” - 30mins

• Interdependency - milling, social, networking, light refreshments - getting to know more about what we might want to share for the future
  

what is Warm Data?

from the International Bateson Institute website:

“Our work is to look in other ways so that we might find other species of information and new patterns of connection not visible though current methodologies. We call this information “Warm Data”.

Warm Data is information about the interrelationships that integrate elements of a complex system. It has found the qualitative dynamics and offers another dimension of understanding to what is learned through qualitative data (cold data). Warm Data will provide leverage in our analysis of other streams of information. The implications for the uses of WD are staggering, and may offer a whole new dimension to the tools of information science we have to work with at present.”

Why is Warm Data important?

“In order to interfere with any complex system without disrupting the circuitry of the interdependencies that give it its integrity we must look at the spread of relationships that make the system robust. Using only analysis of statistical data will offer conclusions that can point to actions that are out of sync with the complexity of the situation. Information without interrelationality is likely to lead us toward actions that are misinformed, thereby creating further destructive patterns.”

Who coined “Warm Data”?

I was honored to be included to participate in the week-long live-in residential in Nora Bateson’s ‘Working in the Liminal Zone‘ in September 2019. This was an intensive, full immersion-type learning on all things ‘Warm Data’. It was also a certification in Warm Data Lab Hosting. The week was beautifully led by award-winning filmmaker, writer, educator, systems thinker, Nora Bateson, who coined the terms “Warm Data” after attending a major international conference nearly ten years ago where many were talking of '“Big Data” (our social and private info on the web) and “Cold Data” (statistical, mechanistic information). Nora explains this in the 4 min video below.

The following videos may help give you more understanding of what Warm Data and the labs are about and can offer. They are also both closed captioned.

The International Bateson Institute containing most of what you need to know on the subject: https://batesoninstitute.org

Why hold this event? What is it all about?

It also seems more like a focus on disability arts access and inclusion, so why such a crossover of sectors?

“The opposite of complexity is not simplicity, it is reductionism. To address complex systems we need to meet them with complexity, not remove, reduce and study aspects of them out of context." Nora Bateson

We're living in times of compounding, deeply-felt uncertainty and confusion. This state affects all walks of life in myriad ways - and for too many, it has been already for far too long. But now we have reached a global critical mass where billions of people are starting to awaken to the deep disharmonies across all aspects of life and living.

This concern and awakening is happening across generations. A lot of focus is placed on comprehending the vast complexities and confusions through intellect alone. However, we don’t make sense of the world(s) around us, and our lives within them, via only being mindful. We are constantly engaging with many sense-making processes, even without knowing it. We share these primordial functions with every other living being and organic system on our planet and throughout the biosphere - the zone where all living things exist.

Currently, we're learning so much about, well, so much, and at great rapidity, through a very tired, human-made, Western dominated, lens. Our minds are overloaded, our hearts heavy. Our daily lives cannot stop long enough for us to more adequately process this complexity. For some, including children, processing in conventional methods and time frames can be far more difficult than it is for most - and for all manner of reasons that may not be understood or have ever been given the chance to be so.

The barrage of information, and the emotions that accompany it, can push us up against and beyond our own natures. We're becoming increasingly aware of how our modern lives, and lifestyles, have been pressing upon and into the natural world(s) - directly and through the effects of anthropogenic (meaning, human caused), Climate Change.

The long-held human-made systems we've been engaged within most of our lives are stuck. Climate Change is merely a symptom of this “stuckness”. The myriad causes and possible solutions are also all very complex. No one person or group of people have the definitive answers. If there are ways to comprehend complexity and begin to embrace and move within it and change destructive systems along the way, these are the kinds of places - the living, natural realm, systems - we need to start learning more from. Those within us and all around us.

One space to discover new ways of sense-making and a more accessible and inclusive, shared comprehension of complexity, is a Warm Data Lab. 

"Sense-making has nothing to do with complex systems models on a whiteboard, or statistics in a spreadsheet, which reduce complex living systems to numbers and graphs. This is known as “cold data”. But the question is: 'Where are the human beings in all of this? Where are our lives and lived experiences? Where are we together?'

We are found in the “Warm Data” – our stories, ideas, experiences and our interdependency.” N.Bateson

For many of us it can seem all too scary to enter fully and willingly into an unknown (and unknowable) complexity beneath, around, within and beyond the current disruption of our long-worn systems. Working and living in detailed, even unfathomable, adaptations (the liminal zone), is where the possibility opens, for all of us, of finding one another, and ourselves, in ways we may have never known or understood before. Being within the liminal (the 'in-betweens') within complexity, does not cause our "stuckness", reductionism does.

A Warm Data Lab is a temporary release valve (and salve) from the compressions of reductionist thinking and doing. These labs are simple in design, yet complex in experience. They can stay with us for many days, offering us new ways of seeing, thinking and feeling about the age we're living in and the living systems beyond our own. They are also fun, captivating, surprising, intense, challenging, exciting and, above all, they are not about looking for definitive outcomes.

“The shape of the response must meet, not match, the shape of the trouble.” N.Bateson

----II----

So we warmly invite you to share, listen-in and feel into what Nora calls, “the symmathesy” - deep transcontextual learning together. And to do so in close proximity with others, in the same space, time and place, embracing the complex living systems we are all interdependent within.

Please note: For those people who live with disability and ailments that mean being physically present is not possible, please contact Dean. We are setting up various means to enable your presence. For those with sensory overloading access needs, we have a separate area upstairs with weights, weighted blankets and headphones should you need time out.

In this upcoming lab we’ll engage in discussions and/or just listen into the layers of lived experiences and diverse contexts each of us bring to this three-hour togetherness - shared around a common question, addressed / focused through 10 contexts.

There is no preparation required - just bring yourself, though you may want to bring a pen and a notebook.

The physical format involves us all constantly changing in a free-form, flowing process that “stretches the edges” of what we thought we knew and how we process the big questions - the complexity - through diverse sense-making processes.

As we move through smaller groups, in our own pace and ways, we're all in the work together. No one person is actually leading or steering the lab. It is designed to hold itself. We all hold the space within and immediately post lab, (the "interstepping" of knowledge and new ideas), before a session that gives us the opportunity to reveal thoughts, patterns and changes we’ve noticed, and in any way we wish to disclose - i.e some may choose to draw, others dance or tell it in story form.

Having your presence and inclusion on this day would be extremely valuable and important for access and inclusion in the arts but also elsewhere.

2. The 2020 Creative Dance / Movement and Performance Program

Presented by Sydney Community Services and Dean Walsh

Click this Blue button below for more information on this program & Dean’s approach to accessible and inclusive teaching, risk assessment and class/group guidelines.