No Ego

How can we free ourselves from unconscious constraints and invent new ones that transform limitations into possibilities?

“No Ego” is a one day workshop from Are.na and artist Sara Magenheimer that explores how artists have employed strategies to dig below the ego and enliven their work with chance and recombination of all kinds. 

From David Bowie’s verbasizer to William S. Burrough’s cut-ups to Stan Brackhage’s collage films, John Cage’s prepared piano, and Sheila Heti’s alphabetical prose experiments, we’ll look toward examples of the use of chance, humor, happenstance, and structural experimentation across history. 

After an in-depth lecture, lively discussion, personal reflection, and dialogue, the 4-hour workshop will conclude with activities drawn from strategies designed to loosen an artists’ grip on the creative process and see what else can be expressed when the self gets out of the way. 

Participants will leave with a wide variety of resources, prompts and ideas to incorporate into their own process. 

To drill one hole after another into language until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today's writer. — Samuel Beckett

This workshop is led by artist, writer, and educator Sara Magenheimer in collaboration with Are.na. It’s for anyone working in any medium, and there’s no experience necessary to participate.

Learn more about the workshop and Sara’s work in this interview on Are.na Editorial.

About Sara

Sara Magenheimer is an artist preoccupied with language whose work spans moving image, writing, performance, collage, sound and sculpture. She is based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include a survey show at Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY; The New Museum, NY; Timeshare, LA; The University Art Museum in Albany, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, NY. Her videos have been widely screened including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Oberhausen Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The New York Film Festival, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, EMPAC at RPI, Now Instant Image Hall, The LA Festival of Movies, Sydney International Film Festival, Flaherty Seminar, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was the recipient of a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, 2015 Artadia Award, the Prix De Varti at the 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2020 and awarded a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva in 2021. Magenheimer authored Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2019 Wendy’s Subway published Beige Pursuit, Magenheimer’s first book of writing.