[dance-tech] Dancing the Virtual

DANCING THE VIRTUAL

"what begins as a movement ends as a movement of thought"

Part 1 of Technologies of Lived Abstraction a 4-part event

sponsored by The Sense Lab (Erin Manning, Concordia University ) and the 
Workshop in Radical Empiricism (Brian Massumi, Université de Montréal)



May 10-13, 2005

at the Society for Arts and Technology, Montréal



Call for Participation



We would like to challenge the dichotomy between creation and 
thought/research by establishing a working environment in which the emphasis 
will be placed on the ways in which research-creation reinvents 
collaboration and on the new modes of thought and action this makes 
possible. To think research-creation necessitates a rethinking of the body 
(and the mind/body split). We suggest that thought is of the body. To 
elaborate this hypothesis, we will take the sensing body in movement as our 
point of departure. The sensing body in movement can be understood as a 
processual entity that transforms and is transformed by the relational 
sensing matrices it instantiates through its movements.



Movement is the key word: research-creation is about the movement of 
thought. To create movements of thought is to actualize thought as a 
technique. What is at stake is the exploration of the ways in which we 
ascertain the social potential and political implications of technology 
(where the body itself can be seen as an originary technology and the senses 
as its prostheses). The premise of the present proposal is that exploration 
of this potential is inherently a philosophical undertaking of the most 
pragmatic kind: it changes our notions about what philosophical thought can 
be by bringing it into direct involvement with other sectors of activity. 
Mutual involvement, or relation, is the connecting thread.



To engage actively in research-creation is not only to create movements of 
thought, it is also to instantiate new platforms of experimentation. This 
project proposes to create such a platform of experimentation - where the 
body is actively produced through technologically mediated environment - in 
order to foster the future potential of research-creation. What we propose 
is to ask how movements of thought can engender creative tools that further 
the production of culture. New forms of collaboration are here not simply 
locales for experimentation: they are matrices of cultural becoming. 
Experimentation will function as much at this collective level as at the 
conceptual level, and on both levels technically. The aim of the event is 
produce a platform for speculative pragmatism where what begins technically 
as a movement is immediately a movement of thought.



Invited Participants: Andrew Murphie, University of New South Wales, 
Australia

http://media.arts.unsw.edu.au/andrewmurphie/mysite/#Pubs

         Stamatia Portanova, University of East London, UK

Keynote Post-Event Speaker: José Gil, New University of Lisbon, Portugal



TO APPLY AS A PARTICIPANT

Send us a (max. 1 page) response to our call outlining how you can envisage 
contributing by February 1 2006. Participation is restricted to a total of 
30 people (including students, researchers, artists, dancers, writers, 
programmers, etc). A reading package will be sent to all participants in 
advance and a round-table seminar will be at the core of the event. 
Participants will be asked to work toward the creation of a technical object 
that emerges from research-creation. The parameters of that object will not 
be pre-defined. The created technical object (which can be a movement of 
thought) will question the relation between the virtual and the actual, the 
abstract and the concrete. Key words are: the senses, bodies, thought, 
technology, creation. Jose Gil will participate in a round table at the 
closure of the event. A public lecture by Jose Gil will take on May 16. Send 
proposals to emanning@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx .


www.thesenselab.com

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