hello all: sustained debates and critical dialogue (especially when they make hard reading, as Marlon correctly observes, or end in possible stalemate, as Simon analyses) in our forum here are very welcome. Clarifying one's terms or use of language to address dance (and dance technologies) within the current contexts might not be a bad idea, opening up new awareness of our evolved or borrowed methods seems sweet. I wanted to tell you the story about Lucy [Australopithecus afarensis], but will do so later. We lost a second-start up of a brilliant thread (2.10.2006, curators ), and i want to re-enter it here: [1] >>There is significant confusion in dance & perf-tech writing between improvised and computational modes of composition: [ ;;; ] [2] >> If we focus on crafting the 'dance' within dance & perf-tech is that developing dance-tech or expanding post-modern/contemporary dance? >> Between the beginning and end of the long posting by the curators@transubstantiate, there were many very good, excellent propositions and points to discuss. I am not sure how many here would step forward to explain how their experimentations have developed their craft (dance, choreography, composition, improvisation skills, dance knowledge, design knowledge, computation skills etc), but I would be interested in hearing about new techniques and the new content/form emerging from them. << Media specific analysis in dance & perf-tech requires an examination of the dance, technologies and dance-technologies in their own right. Dance is a media, and the content in most dance & perf-tech works performs poorly under a media specific analysis. >> Precisely. If one were to look at mixed digital/performance practices or the crossings that we see (from stage to telematic spaces, installations, screen-based, or other interactive scenarios, creative software, scientific research, visualizations, etc), then maybe the questions ought address the digital content as such (dance and dance technologies in their own right) , if i understand the curators correctly. Let us hear how expanded and advanced our digital content is. I did wonder whether in fact we can speak of a "media-specific" dancetechnologies. (it seems to be they are the opposite of medium-specific but inherently messy and hybrid). In recent workshops i tried to talk about the end of medium-specificity (Rosalind Krauss), maybe I was wrong. I think it's perhaps not too late to return to choreography, but I'd like to discuss it. And what you mean by choreography. (I know I spoke of postchoreography when I addressed "real-time" sensor performance as being incapable of adhering to structure and pattern, and that may also have been wrong, perhaps a particular sensor-performance technique has emerged amongst those practitioners who have explored applied bodysensors and moving with them in depth). <<At the time of writing we are unaware of a dance-tech work in which movement and software/system creation (live coding/hacking) occur at the same time. Yet a fully integrated dance & perf-tech improvisation work should and would require this. We do not consider real-time manipulation of variables (e.g. unstable landscapes, marlon barrios-solano) to fall under this category.>> brilliant point. (Yet), i think it is happening, i saw it this summer in the Walhalla rehearsals, and i see it in other collaborative design projects, but software writing and filming and choreographing cannot not just happen at the same time, there are durational issues (development), and especially also for the dancers writing / composing / editing with the interface as they are being designed (i want to include also the designers of the garments and the environments in which the responsive emergences happen). >>>> Although improvisation is based on a conceptual precept, it is not conceptual dance 'per se' as one may disregard the performative concept at any time. Where as in Improvisation the content (movement) is an engaged, reflexive, adaptive process, for conceptual dance it is perfunctory. When we look to the software/hardware the development process is conceptual and clearly systematic. The tools are developed with a purpose/goal that is followed until completion, the aesthetics of coding are rarely taken into account. Both software and hardware are employed for a specific purpose rather than their application/context emerging through each performance. >>> yes. this is very interesting as we rarely have discussed contemporary conceptual dance here, and what state movement manifests in it. (I never saw Dunn' s work) so back to your beginning categorization: >> # improvised ~ emergent, adaptive. # computational ~ procedural, algorithmic, generative. # conceptual ~ constructional, linear, perfunctory. >> Would it be possible to look at your suggestion, namely that "Improvisation is the primary mode of human 'choreography' within the performance technologies setting" and ask whether the conceptual could be understood differently? that it could involve # 1 (improvisation/emergence), that the "input" (for the transformative possibilities of the technological/human interface system) can be a form of expressive dancetheatre or other forms of practice (spiritual, durational, biofeedback, musical, sonic, vocal, cellular, ) and (game, a-life) behavior which hover in-between choreographies/improvsiations? How do aesthetics of codings and aesthetic of composition meet? I think we see a lot of this in experimental new music. In want to thank this particular posting for the contribution it is making to our thinking and especially the clarifications of our language. It is not often that I've heard our physical work in these experiments (whether we come from dance or theatre or music or circus etc) refered to as "performative input". It does sound as if this term instrumentalizes dance or enactment, but your analysis is correct: "Fixed choreography is often avoided as the input requirements of the technologies and transformative possibilities are poorly understood". But it is also avoided ot modified (on the fly, as we say in laptop performance) when the transformative possibilities are precisely aesthetically developed and understood as they were intended to express the compositional concept. By the way, I have seen 'command override" used by a dancer, indeed. More of this please. regards Johannes Birringer DAP Lab West London http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap