passing this on to all, with the author' s permission
Von: Yvon.Bonenfant
Gesendet: Do 10/30/2008 10:38
This text (Nathaniel Stern's review, see at bottom) is of great
interest to me. The ocularist bias in the
understanding of embodiment has been a perpetual source of frustration
for me in terms of my own creative process and its interface with
academic discourse. Working with texture, fabric, and extended vocal
sound for the last years, the senses involved with the act of
embodiment
have largely been hearing and the haptic. Besides the Marks' (2002)
work
on haptic video and the recent Senses in Performance (2007)
Banes/Lepecki collection (in particular the articles on by Fisher and
Welton), as well as Pallasma's (2005) ideas about haptic architecture,
and some works in French addressing the haptic in contemporary visual
art, I find that real, felt, experiential frameworks for the
sensation-embodiment interface are fundamentally lacking in academic
discourse, particularly when the senses other than vision are
engaged. I
know there have been endless critiques - particularly in French
scholarship - of the domination of thought by the eye, but these
critiques are made in the language of the eye.
However there is a wide body of work about the felt notions of
embodiment that come from various
strands of the psychological, ranging from body psychotherapy to
humanist psychological theories and increasingly neuropsychology.
These
are often linked to the sensation-emotion-action-reaction
continuum. It
is difficult to dialogue about these in the world of performance
theory
because a/few people know about them and b/the philosophies of
embodied
experience are often much better at describing and analysing
embodiment
from an ocularist perspective rather than engaging sensation actively
and c/there is a Foucauldian and Deleuzian derived suspicion of all
that
is psychological. Somehow we need to find ways to 'talk' about art
through the generation and reception of haptic sensation and not just
through ocularist-analytic languages, and not just through observation
(for phenomenology is a form of observation! = ocularist) and to find
radical new languages for articulating the experience of embodiment
rather than 'cold' analysis of it. I am working on this in my own way,
bit by bit, with an experimental tactile publication this December and
through other experiments, but this is a lonely field and we all have
very far to go, whether our work engages with technology or not.
I hope readers of this message understand that I am grateful for
the wide
body of work that has attempted to theorise beyond the mind-body
divide.
However I want to strive for work that talks in the lanugage of touch
and hearing. I want the very fingertips and nerve endings to do the
'talking', the skin surfaces to do the listening, and still understand
this as a form of rigour.
If a group of any kind were set up to address these issues, I'd be
most
interested. I don't have time to spearhead right now, though.
Yvon.Bonenfant
*****************+******
hello Katy,hello all:
oh, thanks for your extensive response, this is very good, what you
say,
and i want to reflect on it,...
i was wondering whether everyone in the performance / dance
community had already adopted the term embodiment and how they use
it, as I cme across it first in the context of "embodied artificial
intelligence" and engineering/computer science problem solving
regarding design principles ofr intelligent systems (and a few
years back, those systems involved developing useful algorithms and
robots). I also think you are making assumptions about
"participating" in such an installation or set of rules/algorithms,
and thus about the intelligence of the system, yes?
Johannes
Touchkate wrote
Sent: Sat 10/25/2008 7:13 PM
Dear Johannes, thanks for bringing this back...
I am not sure that I agree with you here... when you say...
"Embodiment, here applied to the interactional setting of the show,
is a
category of phemenological assumption now used so frequently and
relentlessly
that one must tell oneself that one ought to know what it is, and i
am not
always sure. "
I think it is more than just the interactional setting that is
determining
the meaning of embodiment.
It is the fact that the audience become the subject of the
installation,
their movement ( a kinesthetic experience involving action and
reaction to their
own image) is the subject matter of the projected shaddows in one
example
given. (Then they become the spectacle for the next person and so
object but
have created and left the legacy of their own embodied experience).
The term embodiment is used loosely these days (in my experience)
to express
anything that involves a physical aspect of an experience that is
expressed
through or in the body, i.e, or a sensory response expressed in a
movement.
The sensory motor aspect of the nervous system requires that a
sensory input
from any of the senses including touch generates a motor response.
Awareness
that this is happening is the embodiment aspect, the realisation
for the mind
in the moment that one is moving in response rather than thinking it.
In my view a verbal response is as valid as a motor response and so
as an
embodied response, just as walking away and not participating could
be, however
it is still a response but not termed embodied because it is not the
"corporeality" of the moment here, they are wanting a fuller
engaged body based
response... reflexive not predetermined or conceived?
Fifield is provoking thinking around the limited range of response
that we
have in contemporary society being based more on high brain rather
than "of the
body" type;
"He says that contemporary society comprehends bodies, and by
extension the
world, almost exclusively through linguistic and visual
apprehension. They are
defined by their images, their symbols, what they look like and
how we write
and talk about them."
In the installations the space between viewer and the experience
is mediated
by the embodiment moment, the viewer is no longer standing back
observing
but actively participating and expressing in the space, it becomes
a lived
experience. (social?)
Again this is an assumption that the more general responses (higher
brain
ones) are not also embodied, that the viewing experience, the
presence of
spectator is not also in some way an embodied experience as the
affects are still
happening but not manifesting in movement that then becomes
subject matter?
The provocation here is experiential, moving away from the
dependence of
technology (the mouse and keyboard).
Maxine Sheets Johnstone is great on all this... the corporeality, the
tactile kinesthetic aspect of being. This work is of the same
philosophical stand
point. Massumi and Johnstone seem to sing from the same song sheet.
Have just spent 2 luscious days with Doug Rosenberg working with
these very
questions. When the body the object of the experience is it
disembodied,
(e.g. 2 dimensional representation)? Can the subject matter of
the virtual
world be experienced in an embodied way? How is it different when
the real
person is performing within this environment?
simply and by way of clarification; when I place myself in the
installation
I am the subject, the mover, making gestural signs or expressions
of being.
I then becomes the object when projected onto a wall or screen,
into a
virtual space, through direct feed from the camera.. I am
embodied as long as I am
dancing in front of them, but disembodied when seen on the
screen? How so
if I am selecting and creating the image, the moving body is
mine? My
experience is embodied, my relationship to the projected me is
also embodied,
experiential, live, resonant, not spoken, written, analysed,
linear, edited... etc.
I (and so the content) become objectified and disembodied if the
people
experiencing it cannot relate or respond to it in other than
"linguistic or
visual apprehension"? I don't go along with that totally, as even
the visual
perception is supported and informed by our past experience and
sensory
affinities, associations that inform our response as much as the
experience does... so
I may be moved by the quality, the sound waves, the colour, the
scale and so
affected in my gut as well as in my visual cortex... so hmmmmm is
that not
also embodied response? Here not so, the debate is around a
fuller integrated
body based experience?
The whole experience can become participatory if others take my
place in
front of the camera and become the mover and image, seen by others,
the viewers,
does this then become social? I guess so as then we are
collectively
contributing to the experienced event over time. The essential
aspect is about
the lived experience, that involves more than the interpretative,
language
based response, and technology.
I don't know if this elucidates...
Katy
In a message dated 24/10/2008 19:45:07 GMT Daylight Time,
Johannes.Birringer@xxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
hello all:
not sure whether this review (below) was forwarded by Simon for us to
discuss, but i now have had time to read it, and am very grateful
to find out about
this exhibition and the way (the writer says) it introduces or stages
participatory experiences of embodiment, action/reaction
patterns, sensorial
experience of ourselves/the space or environment, etc .
Embodiment, here applied to the interactional setting of the show,
is a
category of phemenological assumption now used so frequently and
relentlessly
that one must tell oneself that one ought to know what it is, and
i am not
always sure. Same goes for affect(s).
i wonder whether others felt like commenting on what is written
here, and
how you read it or sense it ?
regards
Johannes Birringer
Dap Lab
************************
Action, Reaction, and Phenomenon
By Nathaniel Stern on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 11:55
am.
In his book, Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi calls for
"movement,
sensation, and qualities of experience" to be put back into our
understandings
of embodiment. He says that contemporary society comprehends
bodies, and by
extension the world, almost exclusively through linguistic and visual
apprehension. They are defined by their images, their symbols,
what they look like
and how we write and talk about them. Massumi wants to instead
"engage with
continuity," to encourage a processual and active approach to
embodied
experience. In essence, Massumi proposes that our theories "feel"
again. "Act/React,"
curator George Fifield's "dream exhibition" that opened at the
Milwaukee Art
Museum on October 4th, picks up on these phenomenologist
principles. He and
his selected artists invite viewer-participants to physically
explore their
embodied and continuous relationships to each other, the screen,
space,
biology, art history and perhaps more.
Fifield is quick to point out that all the works on show are
unhindered by
traditional interface objects such as the mouse and keyboard. Most
of them
instead employ computer vision technologies, more commonly known
as interactive
video. Here, the combined use of digital video cameras and custom
computer
software allows each artwork to "see," and respond to, bodies,
colors and/or
motion in the space of the museum. The few works not using cameras
in this
fashion employ similar technologies towards the same end. While
this homogeneity
means that the works might at first seem too similar in their
interactions,
their one-to-one responsiveness, and their lack of other new media-
specific
explorations -- such as networked art or dynamic appropriation and
re-mixing
systems -- it also accomplishes something most museum-based "state
of the
digital art" shows don't. It uses just one avenue of interest by
contemporary
media artists in order to dig much deeper into what their practice
means, and why
it's important. "Act/React" encourages an extremely varied and
nuanced
investigation of our embodied experiences in our own surroundings.
As the curator
himself notes in the Museum's press release, "If in the last
century the
crisis of representation was resolved by new ways of seeing, then
in the
twenty-first century the challenge is for artists to suggest new
ways of
experiencing...This is contemporary art about contemporary
existence." This exhibition,
in other words, implores us to look at action and reaction, at our
embodied
relationships, as critical experience. It is a contemporary
investigation of
phenomenology.
Near the entrance of the show, Scott Snibbe's Boundary Functions
(1998)
begins by literalizing the fine line between publicly constructed
and personally
constituted space, between "you (plural)" and "me." As his
audience members
cross the threshold onto the interactive platform, the work draws
and projects
a real-time Voronoi diagram around them. No matter how many people
are
present (and moving) in the installation, each gets a continual
partitioning of
exactly the same size: lines that separate them. Snibbe says his
initial
inspiration for the work came out of a desire to reveal how we
relate to one
another, how we define ourselves and the physical space of our
bodies through, and
with, those around us. When he turned it on, however, his
revelation wound up
changing that relationship itself: we immediately want to use our
bodies to
trap or destroy or trick the piece and what it re-presents. It was
after
seeing his own creation in action that Snibbe began referring to
himself as a
"social artist" -- given that he doesn't just reveal, but actually
affects,
social behavior.
Further into the exhibition space, this is followed by Snibbe's Deep
Walls(2003), where viewers' shadows are recorded and played back
in a grid of
sixteen cinematic squares. Participants dance and shake and
explore with their
shadows between the projection and screen, and every active
performance snippet
is stored as a silhouetted animation in one of its comic book-like
boxes. Each
video sequence replaces one that was there before. Here, we are
creating
embodied and dynamic signs within a greater, collaborative
structure; we
continuously find and make our own language and meaning with and
through our bodies.
We tell and re-tell and co-tell embodied stories, through movement.
Echo Evolution (1999) is the next work on show, produced by Liz
Phillips, an
artist effectively working with interactivity for 40 some-odd
years. It asks
for viewers to navigate through a large dark room, and responds with
real-time noise and neon lights. Where you move, how quickly you do
so, and where
others are in relation to you and the space, all direct the
piece's output.
Although potentially the richest piece in its complexity, the non-
transparency
of the interaction and its rules unfortunately made this work the
weakest on
the exhibition. Most viewers were trying to understand how it
worked, rather
than exploring their bodies in relation to that interaction. I've
seen far
better installations by Phillips, and think this one was an
ineffectual choice
in the context of the greater show.
Brian Knep's premiering Healing Pool (2008) continues his
explorations of
biologically inspired generative algorithms. This room-sized petri
dish
features a floor that is covered in projected "cells" that active
participants walk
through/over, leaving tears and empty space in their wake. The
installation
then "heals" itself by growing new cells as seams and scars, never
again to
repeat any of its previous patterns. Knep's work pushes at the
conceptual
boundaries of how we understand growth, healing, organic structures
and temporal
inter-activity. It's a work that is mostly playful on its surface,
and
extremely subtle in its visual difference over time. So subtle, in
fact, that it's
very easy to miss its doubled gesture towards emergence theory:
both how
simple systems can create complexity, and how our embodied
interactions, which
seemingly change little, have lasting and forever-changing effects.
Simon Fildes
