AFK Party

Sholeh Asgary + Heather Kapplow

AFK Party, occurring live at the ARoS Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, is inspired by a collaboration via Zoom through 2020-21 where we developed a series of audience-participatory explorations that used text prompts and immersion in sense and process within the context of Zoom (the corporate technology that has been colonizing our homes, schools, places of worship and other gatherings since Covid began) to disambiguate image from experience, and open up more space for the unresolved. AFK Party is part of our ongoing efforts, through play, to remind ourselves and each other that interfaces are not neutral, and that we don’t have to accept how they frame us.

At AFK Party, we will facilitate a variety of conversations/activities in a physical format that resembles Zoom to help people adjust to the idea of meeting in person again after so much virtual meeting in the past year or two. IRL Zooming!! At ARoS, we will discuss our projects during Covid lockdown and also have a workshop where people can make wearable analog Zoom backgrounds to use in our IRL Zoom windows.

Live drawing by Britt Marie. Group photo by Carlos David TC.