hello all Jeannette's last reply left me with little imagination to respond, perhaps hmmm, because i felt the wording had become too encumbered with the cited theories (Kroker, Deleuze,Benjamin, Simmel, etc) but maybe there is also an exhaustion effect now, after the longer debate we've had. to go back to an original motivation for asking questions about how one choreographs for/in a real-time fluid interactive environment , and whether performance in mixed/hybrid environments -- where humans learn to perform with or adapt to systems performances that are alive, semi-autonomous and semi-unpredictable-- constitutes a different dimension of the "choreographic": my initial quest was simply generated by observation and practice in rehearsal with dancers/performers wearing sensors and interacting with avatars or "scenes" (image movements, animations, graphics, 3D worlds and environments) in a flow that was also open to "interruptions" of the contexture by webcasts and web streams coming in from "outside" so to speak. I asked whether such work (mostly gestural and of course involving whole body movement and expressions inter-acting with screening projections) needs specific performer training and then specific practice-experience in real-time enactment playing these instruments (virtual instruments), the sensors that generate data and transmit them to software / computational environments where the data are analysed and then manipulated for immediate outputs. It would be nice to hear more from sensor programmers and designers on this matter also. The adaptation in real time to a constantly (potentially) real-time organising system, in my suggestion back in 2006, required a improvisational spontaneity, dexterity and virtuosity specifically geared to the sensorial interface (which in 2007 was transposed in our work into the designer garments) and at the same time to a dramaturgical sensibility of cohesively "express" or enact with the system or adapt/co-evolve with the system. This system, in my thinking, was no longer the choreographic one, and one that relied on repeatability and sustainability (and a particular precision and timing often required when dance is choreographed to music and in spatial patterns and sequences, lines, duets, trios, etc), but simply provoked a different sensibility which, i wondered, had larger implications (touching on many of the issues raised since, including Jeannette and Nathanial's marvellous writings on the "en-fleshed machine" and her experience of performing multiple selves or a kind of multiplicitous synaesthetic becoming). The implications go back, on the basis of my question, to 1) practice and performer technique, namely how dancers or actors or singers work with "control systems" and real time compositional frameworks which, in the case of articulations with wearables/sensors, can be highly unreliable and complex (one tuned system working today might be out of tune tomorrow, changing data flow and data values and how these affect the environment we, peformers and audiences, perceive) and yet primarily sensorial/sensual and thus affective on levels not necessarly "trainable" for calculated expression/effect. (PS. Heide Lazarus in Dresden is doing very interesting work on historical analysis of Mary Wigman's technologies [Wigman often being understood as working from the emotional-emphatic and mystical core rather than a clear conceptual dance technology ]...... the terms "technology" and "technique" having a complicated affair here in regard to training / apparatus, and to dance philosophies) and also on current interactive dramaturgical systems for performer-audience interfaces which, again, seem not quite coverable by the notion of the choreographic) and 2) to perception systems, and thus also to the incorporation of machine vision or AI into our post-choreographic processes , working with human enactment (i very much hesitate to think of us clearly only as puppets or cyborgs, however much I love Kleist, and find Artaud's notion of the body without organs misleading) and explorations of fluid real- time systems that include autonomous agents and creatures and sounds and projections and objects performing with the interactors. regards Johannes Birringer http://dancetech.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=1462368%3ATopic%3A15914 (this link shows the dance tech net reposting of the debate and its threads) <<,< Hi all and J'aime Your post seems like a call for strategies of survival of being cyborgs and zombies. It reflects "the confession of all the humanoids, of beings half flesh/half metal, who, speaking from within the closed, liquid textuality of technology, ruminate longingly, and romantically, on a past in their telematic future." Arthur Kroker Deleuze and Guattari: Two Meditations - The Posessed Individual. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. > WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN CYBORGS AND ZOMBIES: >we have never been fully in control of > ourselves...What we need to pay much attention to are the implicit > mechanisms of control, > the technologies that are defined with the purpose of making us into > zombies at the service of > market driven forces whilst we believe in free will and autonomous agency. >The posthuman-postself-postchoreographic, is perhaps an attempt to do away > with the fiction of the subject as an entity in selfcontrol, it is an > attempt to make explicit all the implicit structures and technologies of > power that make us into zombies before we have the possibility to realise > it... in order to open up the possibilities to redefine "ourselves" as > bodies beyond the naturalised assumption of subjectivity and aware of the > fact that we are never under definitive control of anything whatsoever in > "ourselves". Or perhaps we should adopt the practice of Psychogeography ie. to explore their environment without preconceptions, to understand our location, and therefore our existence. Walter Benjamin adopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. (Sourced from Wikipedia). He was a self confessed flâneur and as such participated in the derive. Benjamin thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace.The flâneur's tendency then is toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation. So if we see the site of postchoreograpy as a new landscape within which to perform we need to observe and participate at the same time whilst not feeling being "leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism." (Georg Simmel "The Metropolis and Mental Life") Or perhaps we should "recognize as well the deep affinity between feminism and the rhizomatic perspective of Deleuze and Guattari. For what has feminist theory always been about if not a refusal of the grand metaphysics of Being, of the unitary male subject, of the phallocentric order of the Subject, Species, and Membership; in favor a world of "multiplicities," of a dancing materiality of lines of flight and departure; of a world reenchanted by the language of desire? Not the old boring world of phallocentric oppositions, but liquid doublings where the body finally speaks, where alchemy is the rule, and where the terrestrial kingdom of grounded consciousness - the vegetative spatiality of the rhizomatic network - finally usurps abstract univocal perspective." Kroker best jeannnette