GATHERINGS

virtual care lab gatherings are community-led, public activities that can take the form of a workshop, focused discussion, collective performance, or other format. They are held in an interactive online setting and encourage active group participation.

Lab Hour is our main gathering practice, held weekly in our Discord channel. You can find other upcoming gatherings on our community calendar, and you’re welcome to join in any of them! ︎ You can also lead your own gathering – propose new ideas here.

Lab Hour

Sundays @ 2 PM PDT | virtual care lab community
Lab Hour is a weekly time for collective imagining. Each Sunday, our 'Lab Hour' Discord channel is open for folks to meet each other, ask questions, exchange perspectives, and discuss ideas in real time. Have a specific topic on your mind? Email us at virtualcarelab [at] gmail.com.

︎ Join on Discord

PAST GATHERINGS

Field Trips

Saturdays @ 12 PM PDT, 2020-2021 | Hosted by Kenny Zhao
We’re all spending more time online than ever. But what does effective, healthy, and regenerative gathering actually look and feel like? The [FIELD TRIPS] group explores this question through weekly visits to virtual communities across the internet. ︎ More Info

Growing Teeth: Research Group

Fall/Winter 2021 | Hosted by Nina Sarnelle and Sara Drake
The US society does not provide adequate support for the elderly. How might we collectivize around meaningful mutual aid? How might we form a community for our future(s) with aging in mind, based on shared values and critical, creative engagement? Together, we will gather resources and host conversations around alternative ways of planning for old age with a focus on cooperative structures. ︎ More Info

Homeroom

Fall/Winter 2021 | Hosted by Sophie Reiff
Homeroom is a virtual space for people who do community organizing work, or who are interested in community organizing work, to gather and discuss how their organizing work intersects with notions of personal and collective ethics, somatics, and longform histories of movement building. ︎ More Info

HUEM_N Listening Party with Def Sound | virtual listening party hosted by hip-hop artist Def Sound, presenting his newest album HUEM_N, which was developed with community input. We share our reflections and experiences as we travel through these sensational textures and rhythms together.

Inward Organizing by Sophie Reiff | Critical meditations on ancestry, somatic listening exercises, and foundational tenets of community organizing work to hone and clarify each of our personal code of ethics, so that we can sustainably and safely engage in organizing groups and actions.

Meet José Miguel Galán Najarro, a rapper, poet, friend and collaborator of virtual care lab! He is also an immigrant who has been incarcerated for 17 of the 19 years that he’s lived in the United States. This launch is the first of monthly gatherings through which we will listen and reflect together on Jose Miguel’s work and write responses directly on the site.

Herbal Allies by Paradise Plant Medicine | Explore what's hiding in the back of your kitchen cabinets and drawers. Take our health into our own hands – for ourselves, collectively, and for our own respective communities, as we learn about safe ways to access herbal medicine from home.

A Center In A Table by Amanda Maciel Antunes | An across-time-zones feast of meals and memories! A Center In A Table is an ongoing performance-video series bringing together a group of people you may or may not know in the sharing of our collective memories and our relationships with food and one another.

Kenny's Room, a listening party by Kenny Zhao and friends | Kenny’s Room is a mixtape of our reflections regarding COVID quarantine, climate collapse, and slowing down in urgent times. Combining samples, beats, and diary entries, we stretched our limbs and connected in a new context, forming this project as a much-needed container for our early experiments in ongoingness.

Vulnerability Companion System by PHILTH HAUS | A recurring grief performance and collective practice guided. We offer this space to sit with your unique experiences and emotions, as we open ourselves to experience our emotions in full. Together, we empower the tear amidst our seismic grief.

Community Social by virtual care lab | Mingle with your fellow internet ducks! 💬❤️💬❤️💬

Urban Care Lab by Roundhouse Platform (Brendan Sullivan Shea and Noémie Despland-Lichtert) | Explore the city from indoors with soundscapes, digital maps, archives and illustration tools. This session contemplates our city as a system, body, and organism, and the ways it is perceived, represented, recorded, and imagined.

Dear Friend by virtual care lab | An unguided, independent session during which you can share thoughts or ask for advice from others. Write to old friends and make some new ones!

Synchronise by Stephanie Whitelaw | A guided sound walk and online gathering, connecting us to place through synchronised walking and guided creative response to local landscape. Exploring ideas of pilgrimage through interactive, sense-based activity, we will engage with inner and outer themes of nature.

Re-member [[Home]] by Anise S. Hines & Marguerite Hemmings | Explore how movement and storytelling can help us re-member what holds us down in times of transition. We learn and share movement practices to return to when we're apart, and end with a collective discussion to imagine, understand and redefine what is valuable for each of us, finding the way Home into our bodies.

Resoundingly You by Hop Nguyen | In this sonic journey, we use breathwork, vocal toning exercises, and sonic awareness exercises to explore listening, presence, and embodiment. Working from a collectively created intention, we generate a soundscape together with our own voices, instruments, and environments.

Letters Together by sukhpreet purewal | In this collective letter-writing practice, we learn to focus and express our thoughts to the people we care about through letters, as we navigate these times of stress and separation. Writer and artist sukhpreet will offer guiding prompts and themes to inspire our writing, after opening with a guided meditation.

Inside Encounters by Lucy Kerr | Your house is a vessel for memories; the space you inhabit contains each of your days. In this gathering we will explore how our bodies relate to domestic space and to each other, through somatic exercises, recollections, and guided movement improvisations. We will find new ways for our bodies to relate to the shapes, structures and objects of our homes, and make use of text, language, and writing as well.

And Not: Authentic Movement by m kennedy volcofsky | Authentic Movement is a mode of free association of the entire organism. Witnessed by the group – with your own eyes closed – you follow impulses to move (or not), to sound (or not), to speak (or not).

Social Dreaming Matrix by Leslie Goldenberg | In this shared, collective world, we tell dreams, we listen, we discover what connects them, and we let our imagination run free. We offer our dreams as shared images for a collective reverie, available to associative transformation and re-telling by the group. We also make a collective dream poem!

Poetry Soup by Angelina Sorokin | Start with a poem. Collect visual representations and objects to represent what it means to you. Taken together, our individual collections of artifacts become one unique library. We read the poem together and share our poetic ‘soups’, finding new interpretations and ways to understand it together.

more past gatherings here....