[dance-tech] Re: movement & environment
- From: "Johannes Birringer" <Johannes.Birringer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <dance-tech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:36:43 +0100
hi all,
yes indeed, a wonderful conversation about movement and "taking instructions"
from the environment and re-organizing/self-reorganizing though sensual
perceptions.
It would be interesting to review this interview in light also of what Jaime
wrote
>>>>
This complex feedback, reflexivity, interrelation of forces is what I call a
metaformative process. It dosen't exclude performativity, it rather includes
it, but it exceeds it as well. It is a process in which the very structures
thorugh which we "articulate" and "understand" emerge together with the
realities we attempt to apprehend: it is the movement of thought itself, the
self, that emerges in the process.
Now we can understand this in the context of such theories of mirror
neurons, enactive cognition and proprioception, perhaps, since everytime I
see a movement of yours, I mirror it and embody it, and then it has become
something else, If I attempt to reproduce it I cannot but generate
something different, in the specificity of this body, your gesture is
transduced to my field of forces, my register of associations, my open
coordinates of interaction. The mirrorings that constitute embodiment have
always fragmentary and deforming effects in the forces that are reflected.
>>
On the issue of the generative, and the evolving, i want to mention the
premiere of ENTITY by Random Dance Co, at Sadlers' Wells last weekend (in
London), and before the Friday show Wayne McGregor and Scott deLahunta invited
interested folks to a research meeting with the team that has worked on ENTITY.
I think it would interest all of you, to draw a bit on their dicussion of the
post-choreographic and choreographic, and I'm not sure whether Scott wouldn't
want to do that himself at some point, right now I should perhaps give you the
link to the website brief on the seminar:
www.sadlerswells.com/show/Random/extras/entity-seminar#title
"The specific aims of the ENTITY research project are: to develop adaptive
software agents that can generate unique solutions to choreographic problems;
and to continue to work towards establishing principles of choreographic and
physical thinking (distributed and embodied). The seminar comprises a series of
short presentations from members of the research team including Phil Barnard
(MRC Cognition and Brain Studies Unit, Cambridge), Scott deLahunta (R-Research
Coordinator), Nick Rothwell (independent composer and software programmer) and
Anil Seth (Informatics, University of Sussex). These will focus on background
and current developments of the project and be followed by a short discussion."
What I found fascinating was the discussion on the vision not only of these
metaformative processes that Jaime addresses, but also their autonomous
software partners (adaptive agents that learn and evolve) -- and one should not
forget the environment and what Lisa Nelson refers to in her interview (the
sensed world and the sensing of the world, the information the environment
sends to us at all times to affect us) The discussion last weekend seemed to
pair evolutionary biology (selection) with creativity (physical creativity),
and then we heard about , AI (the modeling), emergence and complexity /systems
theory in rather interesting, sometimes also frustrating ways (many the visual
examples were drawn from robotics and auto-locomotion, interestingly).
the adaptive agents or the evolved articulations of the digital (in the wired
/projected environment) is a level of the (post)choreographic that we have not
fully addressed either, as presumably, at least in regard to dance, the aura of
the choregrapher (experienced at Sadlers Wells for sure, last week) is still
alive and well and the notion of the choreographic refers to problems that
humans solve? I think the cybernetic and AI discussion, however, also points
to other co-evolutions and wild arrays of real and virtual formations,
mutations, and gestations.
"Environmental Sensualities undergird all discussions of wired sustainability"
someone wrote today on the Empyre discussion list.
Jaime, do you see dance as primarily a form of "non-verbal communication" ?
but surely in interactive and emergent virtual scenarios how do you separate
the dancer from the dance, and what is the "choreographic" in the extended
sense of sensorial flows and projected flows we sought to imagine?
is the "choreographic" not the kind of "object" you deconstructed, Jaime? (the
"work" is that very process which is also your "self" and becoming, there is no
exteriority to the process or to the work, but an interdependence of forces in
the relation of which both the self and the work emerge, but never sedimenting
into something complete and fixed), a non object, a non structure, an
already-reproducible mutation.
Finally, a comment on earlier references to Artaud and the "body without
organs."
I like what Zizek wrote about the melancholia of the choreographers. We are
not too sure about the virtualization of reality, and Zizek says it's
?crucial to maintain open the radical ambiguity of how cyberspace will affect
our lives: this does not depend on technology as such but on the mode of its
social inscription. Immersion into cyberspace can intensify our bodily
experience (new sensuality, new body with more organs, new sexes ?), but it
also opens up the possibility for the one who manipulates the machinery which
runs the cyberspace literally to steal our own (virtual) body, depriving us of
the control over it, so that one no longer relates to one?s body as to ?one?s
own.? What one encounters here is the constitutive ambiguity of the notion of
mediatization.? The theft of the body may present a very likely trauma to
contemporary dance.
regards
Johannes Birringer
>>>>>>>
Thanks for this video. we need more of these - with artists talking so
eloquently of their work and process. i really enjoyed the added dance
workshop footage this time. it fleshed out the ideas put forward and made
our discussions online more concrete than abstract - straight from the
horses mouth, so to speak...a perceptible change of my organisation in
connection with this technological gaze was most enlightening.
best
jeannette
----- Original Message -----
From: Marlon Barrios-Solano
To: jaimedelval@xxxxxxxxxxx ; dance-tech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2008 6:06 PM
Subject: [dance-tech] interview with Lisa Nelson at dance-tech.net
hello list,
An interview with dance improvisation artist, lecturer and researcher on
improvisation and perception (Tunning Scores) as one of the "Embodied
Techne Series". She takes us across her experiences with dance, movement
studies, psychology of perception and her experience with video. Her
perspective might add to current and recent discussions on real-time
composition and embodiment.
In dance-tech.net
http://www.dance-tech.net/video/video/show?id=1462368%3AVideo%3A15448
In blip.TV
http://dancetechnet.blip.tv/#824922
Thank you and comments welcome,
enjoy,
Marlon
PS: editing courtesy of Ashley A. Friend
(please let me know if you want to collaborate with dance-tech.net podcasts.
I have very cool raw material...)
Marlon Barrios Solano
unstablelandscape
http://www.unstablelandscape.net
social media projects
design/development/teaching/consulting
New York City
dance-tech.net
http://www.dance-tech.net
A dance and technology social network that aggregates and facilitates the
flow of information and the distributed intelligence among movement, new
media artist and theorists working in the confluence of embodied performance
practices and new media.
Dance New Amsterdam
http://www.dnadance.org/
New Media Specialist
cell phone in USA:614-4462175
Skype name: unstablelandscape
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