Dear all,
thanks Johannes and others for mentioning my recent activities. I just
rejoined the list (I had changed email address over the last years so have
missed the recent posts).
The resonances between Stelarc's alternate anatomies and my proposal
of *postanatomicall
bodies* is one worth debating, since it implies a shift to perception and
its ontological dimension, i.e., rather than operating on the body as given
by certain perceptual regimes and build upon the anatomies that are defined
within that perceptual grid, what happens if we tranform the perceptual
grid itself, mobilising perception in such ways that no anatomy can be
fully fixed or traced --- considering anatomy as (bio-)political technology
that renders bodies measurable and traceable...
So yes, my particular interest is not so much in alternate forms (which I
nevertheless find very interesting and have the greatest admiration for
Stelarc's work), but on mobilising bodies that defy capture in anatomies,
forms or patterns *of any kind *(form being the effect of a particular and
dominat perceptual condition based on highly rigid visual alignments and
perceptual hierarchies).
This is also largely proposed in the Metabody project, where "metabody" as
concept points precisely to a body of movements, emergent relations of
forces, always expanded and always in becoming, where becoming doesn't
point to actualisation (undoing aristotelian accounts of form is perhaps
even more urgent than undoing platonic accouts of forms in current
capitalism of dynamic capture of emergent forms, therefore my turn to
Anaximander...)
Metaformance as the ongoing transformation of perception implies an
experience of the body that challenges spectacular divides. How to involve
audiences in ways in which they stop being an audience and bodies
experience themselves the process is thus a major issues with multiple
responses, all of which imply disaligning subtly from the multilayered
perceptual alingnments we have embodied over millenia, from euclidean
geometry to perceptival vision, and its recent turn in ubiquitous
interfaces.
Empires, after all, are perceptual constructs.
best
2015-04-30 22:12 GMT+02:00 Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
dear all
a good reply from Jeroen Fabius reached us, mentioning the writings and
critique by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink on Bishop's and Rancière's theories,
and as I glance at the text - "Nomadic Theatre. Staging Movement and
Mobility in Contemporary Performance" - I see a segment that is titled
"fractured reciprocity" and that gives me pause to think, about what we
might have always assumed the relations to be - in dance or theatre - to
our audience, namely some form of face-to-face, involving exchanges of
energies, an ecology of vibrations and resonance and yet also a paradoxical
symmetry/asymmetry, movement for a perceiving audience who can reciprocate
(and mirror the movement in empathy) or refuse, become entranced, activated
to live in the poetics of the flow of movement. Take up the bodies.
The movement is also sound, and light, and so much more, the tactile
kinetics and the absorptions and refractions and so on.
we lean into it, as I recall Jeannette again and again (her close up
metaphor, we bend forward if we do not have opera glasses). (that's from
the other side of the stage. onstage, do we lean into our audience, do we
see them, or are the lights in our eyes, and there's dark off there.
Choreographic objects, when we all climb into them have different lighting.
but i've also stumbled there.
What if the close up becomes something blurry and unreadable (Jaime del
Val)?
We have not much talked about affect here, disturbed affect, angry
affect, and audience behavior, how come? and what is broken in the old
observational perspective (overlooking, from static or fixed perspective,
if ever it existed, to the multiperspectival, the moving eyes never
standing still, the camera eyes and the sound object perceptions that can
listen deep or reduced or otherwise without seeing/knowing the instrument),
what becomes fractured?
Nibbelink on the first page recalls the collective Rimini Protokoll
presenting "Call Cutta", a mobile phone theatre play. <<In this ambulatory
performance, a single spectator navigates
the streets of Berlin's Kreuzberg district, guided by a call-centre
employee in Calcutta, India, who provides directions over the phone. The
mobile phone connects the two places
of performance, and interactively engages a single performer and a single
spectator in a conversation about the local particularities at both ends of
the line. Call Cutta is presented
as theatre, it surely can be considered as such - as both the performer
and the spectator are joined in a situation that is distinctively staged -
yet it radically plays with the conventions of theatre.
In Call Cutta, spectators have become mobile; they have left the
traditional seat in the (darkened) auditorium and instead are engaged in an
ambulatory performance.>> .....
[Zunge zeigen, the late Günter Grass once drew.]
and here perhaps a good moment to insert latest writing ("The Layering of
Empires") from Jaime del Val on a performance he did in New York,
ambulatory on the streets......
http://metabody.eu/the-layering-of-empires/
and an amazing trajectory is visualized in this brief blog essay as well,
you will enjoy the images from Loie Fuller to Stelarc.
what is perhaps worth debating, as I asked previously, is whether we can
imagine a posthuman dance of the kind Jaime posits, the "posthuman
aboriginal, postqueer technoshaman, extraterrestrial metabody, lightfooted
and imperceptible," with "indeterminate becomings in the movements". Well,
I guess Jaime just did it.
as I read Jaime's questions of the post-anatomical, Stelarc shows up this
afternoon in London and hands me the new brochure they printed of his AAL:
"Alternate Anatomies Lab" (www.alternate-anatomies.org). We laugh a lot
and talk even more, and I pose questions about the after-anatomies, and he
patiently speaks of 3d printers and ambidextrous arms and alternate
operational systems and multiple agencies.
Now I find myself glancing at my poor arm, the pre-ambidextrous one.
regards
Johannes Birringer
________________________________________
Jeroen Fabius [schreibt]
Monday, April 27,
Dear Johannes
Thank you for mobilising this debate. I am thinking a lot of Brian
Massumi's Thinking-feeling text he wrote already a long while ago,
suggesting to start thinking differently about perception first, and then
to think interactivity through better.
A beautiful and thorough development and critique of Bishop and Ranciere
can be found here: http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/310682 the
dissertation by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink. I find it a wonderful delicate
filtering and balancing of a lot of the arguments that have been presented
in recent years in relation to immersion, participation etc
Kind wishes
Jeroen
_______________________________
Van: "Alexandre Achour" <a.achour@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
I will take some time to think and look into the materials that you
generously shared with us.
I will answer shortly
Best
Alexandre
Le 23 avr. 2015 à 19:26, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> a écrit :
carry on, hoping others will still join.
hello all
thanks for your reply, Alexandre, and as long as no one objects, we can
choreography is now firmly on the table, I agree. And "participation" is
The notion of expanded choreography (procedural design), and social
perhaps also ripe for re-thinking. I would love to dwell, on a practical
level, on "procedures" as design (having just worked all day with my young
digital performance students on preparing their final shows tomorrow), but
also look beyond, yes, the "strictly artistic and aesthetic realm of
dance/performance" although many here on our list perhaps still work in
that older terrain.
auto-poietic systems, or artistic realms and then again other realms where
On a reflective level, expanding thinking about rule-based systems, or
we might work organizationally, disseminatively, allow me to mention
briefly four "readings" I undertook when working on our "metakimosphere"
installation (http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/metakimosphere.html).
maybe these angles open up other avenues.
member of the Metabody project ensemble, published some notes in February
1. asymmetry (mentioned before here). Marije Baalman at STEIM, a
on "making participation in
interactive environments relevant"https://github.com/sensestage/interaction_writings/blob/master/relevant_participation.md
invitations to others to follow / consider following procedures.
they are interesting for many of us who work with installations and
Dreher, "Performance Art nach 1945: Aktionstheater und Intermedia" (2001),
2. Now, historically, I was interested in finding a book by Thomas
which quite acurately notices how observation (static audience observer
position) in the history of art reception was long undermined and changed
(he looks at action art, happenings, and multiperspectivalism and
beginnings of intermedia, way back in the 1950s).
going further into what you imply, I looked at an article by Jaime del Val
3. Historically now, thinking of expanded choreography, Alexandre,
(whom Tommy mentioned last week), where in 2009 he speaks of a "pan"
(panchoreographic) or what perhaps was meant by "social choreography", yet
most interestingly proposes a kind of undoing of the camera, framing,
focus, and anatomy itself: "Undoing Anatomy:
Resisting Global Choreographies in the Capitalism of Affects" (GRAMMA,17, 265-77). I cite his abstract:
pieces, video, cinema and publicity there are certain anatomic
Underlying the imaginaries staged and projected in texts, theater
constructions of
the senses that are the conditions of possibility for those imaginaries.Such sensory anatomies underlie implicit power mechanisms in late capitalist
societies, which operate at the level of the production of affect anddesire of consumers as well as of the concealment of global violence
through which the economic system operates. I will propose a frameworkof analysis of such power operations through the analysis of movement,
and more precisely of what I will call the panchoreographic: a set oftechnological devices of global distribution that disseminate discrete,
standard choreographies in bodies, thus contributing to the productionand dissemination of standard affects. Finally, I will show some examples
of the work developed by REVERSO in recent years that aims at theradical redefinition of the sensory anatomies that underlie media culture
and information society, aiming at the production of a post-anatomicalrelational body.
that are rather wonderful and odd as he of course also tries to disrupt
In his work he explores micromovement and microsex/skin palpitations
"affective" registers and procedures, and
the discussion of undoing camera and the surveilled/gendered/disciplinedand procedured body decidedly moves into the political, into issues of
violence, control, power.
(illegible) bodies.....!
4. post-intimate relations, Jaime asks for, and post-anatomical
Easier said than done, but the experiments with such disalignments areon-going in the Metabody project, and I am sure Yacov and Henry also tried
it in their work with virtual avatars. In a brief note I received from
Yoko Ishiguro today, responding to my telling her of our discussion on
participation here, she says:
contemporary performances nowadays as Claire Bishop and many others claim.
Audience participation is a fashionable but thoroughly big issue for
I myself make one-on-one performances and always have to think about it -my
aim is not to make 'one-on-one performances' but to think about the
distance and the relationship between an audience member and a performer
with means of performance so one-on-one style is just a result.
Talking about audience participation and photos, I have my one-on-onerepertoire that audience member can see my dance performance only through
their photo shootings.
http://ishiguroyoko.info/iroiro/Flashes.htmlalignment, breaking the camera; what do you think?
.
much to ponder once we start to unpack notions of intimacy, affect and
paragraphs from Bojana, and Ana's book help me to think of choreography as
respectfully,
Johannes Birringer
________________________________________
[Alexandre Achour schreibt]
.Hello Johannes,
I understand your last comment, I'm not a theoretician myself, but these
a wider term that doesn't necessarily limits itself to the design of
movement, they think of choreography as a design of procedures, and in this
way procedures << define actions and attitudes in general, which allows us
to treat them as a logic, a thinking model, an ideological apparatus. >> And
as Bojana says, << Unpacking the aforementioned registers of procedurality
may help us understand what choreography means when it is used outside the
strictly artistic and aesthetic realm of dance/performance. >> this is how
I understand this term of << expanded >> choreography, and that's why I
thought to bring this in our conversation..
will try..
Let me know what you think,
I had difficulties to answer to all the posts, when I have more time, I
Best wishes to all,
Alexandre Achour
