[dance-tech] ETP_European TelePlateaus - OPEN CALL - Madrid Workshops

REVERSO__________________________________

_____ARTES______TECNOLOGÍA_____PENSAMIENTO CRÍTICO_____ACCIÓN POLÍTICA
__género y sexualidad__transculturalidad__ecología y urbanismo__conflictos 
post-globales___
____________________________________________________________
Asociación Transdisciplinar REVERSO - Presidente/Director: Jaime del Val
Tel:  687 558 436 _-_ email: jaimedelval@xxxxxxxxxxx      -     www.reverso.org 



OPEN CALL - INSCRIPTION DEADLINE  21 JUNE in: http://medialab-prado.es/  - 
http://www.reverso.org/ETP.htm


Madrid Workshop - 26-28th June 2009

 



ETP 

European TelePlateaus - Transnational Sites for encounter and Coproduction

 

Tele-Plateaus is an international initiative planned to run through 2010 with 
an aim to create publicly accessible networked audiovisual sites. The main 
objective is to make possible and support real-time sensory-physical 
interactions of people over long distances. Therefore, we work to establish a 
permanent network allowing for direct audiovisual real-time interactions 
between similarly configured public sites and performance stages across Europe. 
Tele-Plateaus will be composed, controlled and structured by movements of 
people from different cities. Within these networked stages and sites people 
from Dresden, Madrid, Norrköping, and Prague (among the first connected cities) 
can dance and play together. They can simultaneously create pictures, sounds, 
and light effects by means of their own movements without operating any 
additional interfaces. The shared virtual hyper-site is based on the generation 
of data that is available for processing to all computers within a common 
network. Movement parameters (speed, spatial position, etc.) are captured and 
digitalised by camera-based motion system and exchanged between computers at 
distant locations with a technically similar configuration. At concrete sites 
the numerically coded movement parameters are creatively transformed into 
audiovisual outputs and processes. Tele-Plateaus will ultimately provide 
accessible environments for live telematic artistic performances and other 
collaborative activities. 

 

The project is co-financed by Culture 2007 Programme of the European Union for 
the period 2008-2010. Project is led by TMA | Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau 
(http://www.t-m-a.de/) in co-operation with the Hellerau - European Center for 
the Arts, and is jointly produced with CIANT Prague (CZ, http://www.ciant.cz/), 
REVERSO Madrid (ES, http://www.reverso.org/), and bitnet Norrköping (SE, 
http://bnp.se/). 

 


Project Partners:

TMA - Hellerau- DE - http://www.t-m-a.de/ 

CIANT - Prague - CZ - http://www.ciant.cz/ 

REVERSO - Madrid - ES - http://www.reverso.org/ 

BitNet - Norrköping - SE - http://bnp.s 



Media Partner:

Dance-tech.net - www.dance-tech.net

 



Madrid Workshop - 26-28th June 2009



Organised by REVERSO - www.reverso.org 

 

EMBODIED PRESENCE IN THE HIPERREAL CITY - CHALLENGING SURVEILLANCE: FOR AN 
EMBODIED PARTICIPATION IN THE EU

 

The proposed Madrid Events 2009 of the ETP project will elaborate on several 
interrelated concepts:

 

  a.. Embodiment and Presence: In information Society communication 
technologies operate on the problematic assumption of disembodied subjects that 
communicate universal signifiers-meanings through patterns of information 
without presence. Indeed the Posthuman is to be understood as the present 
condition in which computation has substituted individualism as the ground of 
being, in which we are so far enmeshed in the circuits of information that we 
cannot meaningfully think of ourselves as separate from them (Katherine Hayles, 
2000). 
    a.. Interfaces, as a mediation between the faciality of an abstract subject 
and the machine operate through discretisation of movement: in the mouse and 
the keyboard, in the screen, in the software, in the ergonomics, in the 
algorithms. This global distribution of discreet choreographies for the sake of 
control we will call the PANCHOREOGRAPHIC. This happens within a set of reduced 
causal relations for which the interface is instrumental: click and one thing 
happens. Following philosopher of science William James we propose that such 
discreet choreographies contribute to the formation of affects and desires of 
bodies in consumer culture since affects can be understood as effects of bodily 
states and activities. 
    b.. In interpersonal communication or in practices such as dance we may 
argue however that movement is never reducible to a set of predefined 
signifier-meaning relations, therefore not reducible to patterns of 
information: the presence of the body could indeed be said to be the open field 
of emergent qualities that exceed reductionism to information patterns and 
signifier-meaning relations. 
    c.. Information Society's attempt to produce a disembodied subject, is 
actually producing conflicting kinds of bodies, in which affects and 
relationalities are standardised, and irreducible presences of bodies are 
assimilated in global economic markets. 
    d.. How can we produce notions of communication, presence and interaction 
that, instead of attempting to erase the bodies' specificity strenghthens it? 
Systems of relations that do not rely on frameworks of signification, but 
rather explore whatever in the bodies is exceeding signification at all times. 
    e.. Bodies, understood as fields of relational forces that operate at 
multiple levels, are affective and intensive, rather than material and 
extensive. How can we produce conditions in which the radical openness of the 
way in which affects are embodied, is acknowledged and supported? 
    f.. The project ETP provides a series of opportunities for such an   
experimentation: 
      a.. through stressing the non-representational character of the visual 
and sound environments that avoids the aesthetics of simulation and objectivity 
of the information era. 
      b.. through proposing amorphous and nearly abstract accounts of presence 
that defy the boundaries of cultural intelligibility of bodies, presences that 
are in the frontier of the intelligible, posthuman of metahuman presences in 
which the important thing is not to recognise standard features of a human 
agent, but to dance around diffuse qualities of an agency that could be human 
but doesn't need not be so: an agency with no defined gender or sex, no defined 
class, race or species, no defined age or capacity or form, and yet potentially 
crossing multiple sexes, species and forms of the bodies. 
      c.. through exploring accounts of presence that don't rely on the 
standardised recognition of culturally intelligible forms, but rather proposes 
a dissolution of these and experiments presence as a more open field of 
encounter with the unkown. 
      d.. through proposing metasignfying contexts of relation, that do not 
rely upon strategies of goal oriented interpretation, but rather open the field 
to processes of embodiment of affects.
 

  a.. The city, the local: The city as lived body of relations can be analysed 
at various levels: 
    a.. The lived city: what sensations, what kinds of relational intensity is 
the city constituted of through the interactions of the bodies that inhabit it: 
what are the experiential modes that constitute that metabody of relations: 
what is our experience of the city: can we translate it to parameters of 
choreographed movement (the speeds, directionalities, specific movements 
performed in the city), of sound and light and space perception, of proxemics 
and chronemics? 
    b.. The intensive city - METABODY: To understand the city, space and 
architecture as a living body of relations, as intensity rather than a fixed 
extensive space. 
    c.. The hiperreal city: the city of information and simulation, of 
publicity and ubiquitous screens, the city as machine for the affective 
production of bodies and for their assimilation in economic regimes of 
consumption, the city as semiotic landscape, the city as disciplinary grid, as 
biopolitical meta-mechanism of control and production: which are its surfaces 
of operation, through ubiquitous publicity and commercial music, and through 
the movements and choreographies that these distribute, through architecture 
and urban planning, through transport and communication technologies that make 
of public space a dissapearing reality, masked and inaccessible behind the 
façade of hiperreal Virtual Reality of the media? 
    d.. The reverse of the city: every time we contribute to the economic 
regime in the city we are complicit with old and new forms of global violence 
that the system both hides and promotes: wars in Congo, exploitation in the Far 
East, climate change... unprecedented global violence in the global era that 
the system of consumption and its metabody, the city, effectively hides, 
through its surfaces of affective production. How can we make that violence 
visible?
 

  a.. The EU and the illusions of public Participation: In a hipermodern world 
of media politics, what kinds of fake participation are citizens normally 
embedded in? In a European Union in which economic interests rate far above 
social and environmental criteria, citizens are often connected to telematic 
platforms of communication that give a certain feeling of participation. We 
argue however that such participation is a fake one, that generally serves the 
purposes of the large companies that design and choreograph WEB 2.0. We need an 
understanding of these platforms that deals with the ways in which at the same 
time as they seem to empower citizens, they take away possibilities for action, 
through producing the illusion of a free world and masking violence at global 
scale behind the culture of leisure and entertainment.
 

  a.. Surveillance and control: We are increasingly surrounded by surveillance 
systems that look down on us from satellites and street corners, from the 
ceiling of the workplace, the tube or even in the house. The system employed in 
ETP, an infrared camera placed on the ceiling, is a paradigm of surveillance 
technologies, however through connecting it to a specific software for analysis 
and its mapping to the software processing image and sound, instead of 
subjecting bodies to goal oriented systems of analysis and surveillance, 
movement becomes an uncontrollable mapping strategy within metasignifying 
systems of relation, thus defying principles of interpretation on which 
surveillance rely.
 

Therefore the project attempts to:

    a.. Promote embodied metasignifying, non representational modes of 
telematic relationality understood not as the exploration of an extensive 
physical space but as the constitution of an intensive space of movement, 
spatialised sound and amorphous moving images. 
    b.. Critically deal with aspects of the local (the city) exposing both its 
problematic production as hiperreal space of economic power systems and our 
embodied sensory experience in it, promoting a understanding of the city as 
relational intensive body, rather than extensive space. 
    c.. Critically deal with the notion of public participation and its 
possible redefinition as specific, non-standard bodies of relational becoming. 
    d.. Critically deal with and subvert the technologies of global 
surveillance.

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