Janet O’Shea and Erin Manning
I have been working on a lecture event for Janet O’Shea and Erin Manning. I hope some of you in the area can join us!
Archive for Uncategorized
Signing out.
Ken Goldberg is now wrapping up before we go and eat!
Great day of musings, theories, studies, ideas for the future, reports on designs etc. etc. etc.
TONIGHT: 7:30-9:00 pm: UC Regents’ Lecture by Jimmy Wales (in 105 Stanley)
shoulders to ears
It’s officially that time of the semester, that time when my shoulders live shrugged half way up to my ears due to the tension that I hold in my neck and upper back. It’s that time when my hips are still from sitting to much and my back is tight with immobility. It’s that time of the semester where I attribute everything to “that time of the semester” as if the whole world functions on an academic calendar. It’s that time of the semester when my nose hits the spine of the book and my fingers rehearse choreographies with the keyboard. Somehow, this time of the semester is that time when I stop seeing dance, or even dancing in order to think really hard about dance. Now, this sounds quite counter intuitive. In fact, it is. But, nonetheless, it seems that this is the life of a dance scholar. I hypocritically stop moving to think about how mind and body, practice and theory are not dichotomous.
Choreographing and Setting
So much to consider right now. I’ve been rehearsing and programming like crazy as I prepare for my show at the milkbar THIS Friday August 14. I’ve been spending the last several weeks dancing with Nina Haft at Shawl Anderson Dance Center, beginning a Feldenkrais workshop with Mary Armentrout at Shawl and entering a fieldwork with several other bay area artists. As I condition myself I’ve been gearing up to condition my own thoughts and thinking on dance within the academy and my choreographic practice. I had a lovely conversation with Petra Kuppers about her forthcoming manuscript last week. While writing rhizomatically on process, movement, poetry, documentation, practice, theory, experience, embodied memory and more through history, theory, practice, experience, theorizing history, historicizing practice, questioning history and the archive and more… Petra has created a manuscript of folds. As Tim Murray’s new book, The Digital Baroque looks toward the Deleuzian fold and Petra’s book seems to move toward exemplifying it I wonder how my practice, theory and experience are folds in themselves as they fold together. The Feldenkrais and work with Nina have pushed me to realize that within my own process I experience each installation of my work through micro-movements and attentions.
This is how I’ve been approaching my choreography and how I’ve been literally folding my tech into my practice. My movements are inspired directly from experiences dancing with sensors. I wear sensors on my wrists. What happens when I move? The three axis accelerometers that I’m working with respond with sound output…sound interactions that I have programmed. This time programming is my immobile creative process. Sitting at a computer much like I’m doing now I connect object to object with things called “patchcords” in Max. I make things talk and I map virtual movement through a program of physical movement and sound. Different sounds and interactions push my momentum in different directions. Programming I feel sometimes like I’m connecting random points to other random points…on the contrary, these points are not random, but represent specific functions that when connected correctly in the appropriate map produce a specific product. This map makes something happen. Perhaps this process pushes me to choreograph in a similar way as I experience the programmed product through my own movement. Lately I’ve been feeling like my movement process produces a boring product. What does it mean? Is there an overarching theme? How are my dancers relating to each other? How am I relating to my dancers? My movement is random. My movement is spastic or frantic. What I am trying to convey through this display of somatic intention? As I move myself it feels as though I represent a technical process…a technical process grounded in a theoretical exploration that is inspired by artists including Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and most lately Anthea Kraut and Petra’s work. Also, as I read of Erin Manning’s philosophical explorations through technology and movement I implicitly move and respond to her ideas. My movements, therefor are not random. They are not spastic or frantic. Rather, each movement serves a particular function. This function when connected appropriately in the choreographic map produces a product based on my technical and theoretical process. My product is process and represents or repeats process.
Recently I received some feedback. My intention in my look may not be clear. How am I as the performer relating to the movements? It looks as though my body is moving me while myself is waiting to see what my body does next. Often this is my relationship to technology and to theory. I am programming and learning to program. I am reading and theorizing the theory that I read and I am writing my own theory. As I do both of these things I am often swimming in the darkness waiting for my next inspiration to pop. This is a guided swimming. My objects are pushing my swim in a very particular direction with a specific function. I am trusting them and experiencing them until I am inspired by my experience and produce the next step, which will also undoubtedly serve a very specific function. My artistic process too is representative of this experience as it performs the very process.
Perhaps my movement is boring. Is it artistically “responcible” to make my audience watch my process? Why is this interesting? Where is the humor? Where is the entertainment? Is there humor or entertainment in my own map of folds over folds in folds and as folds?
for merce…
mapping sounds to shape…
…independently of my choreographic process and movement production of course.
Also, conditioning sensor data adds latency to a system thereby introducing interesting notions of trace and ephemerality. What does it mean that the system works less efficiently while tapping into my theoretical inquiry more accurately?
Probability
I want to improvise movement while wearing sensors… from here track sensor data and produce visual output that displays the probability of different types of movement within my improvisational tendencies based on sensor readings of my performance. Perhaps this could work from live video tracking as well.
LilyPad
Sitting in the eTextiles workshop and thinking of a new project…
I wonder if I couldn’t sew conductive thread through my skin in addition to using internal heat sensors and other semi-internal sensors to send motion information to my Max patches. Following this I could create some type of difference patch between this data and live video feed motion capture data. Using the information from this difference patch I could think about the difference between our movements and those that are caught in video feeds in today’s mediatized society. How is the motion capture information based directly on my body different from that captured by the camera? Using the difference in gravitational center or something of the sort I could produce sound output…or better yet some type of physical feedback to the dancer or audience.
Thinking about Stelarc’s “Fractal Flesh” when thinking of the physical sensor based tracking and feedback.
Programming and Setting
I am currently in the midst of a week-long intensive Max workshop during the day and a week of intensive rehearsals for my upcoming show at night. The physical contrast between these two intensives is strikingly different and seems to feed my choreographic impulse. Sitting in a chair and staring at a computer screen all day I feel myself cramp up physically as my brain works on overdrive…or freeze frame. After sitting for too long I stop thinking clearly about patch cords and objects and I have an out of body experience. The programming process slows down and I simply stare at my screen for long periods of time without making any progress, or understanding anything. It is as though my brain is taking freeze frame shots of the screen and I am unable to make the program move. My physical immobility translates onto the computer program and all parts are stuck. Interestingly enough, I have random impulses to move when I enter this state and am pushed to do so, even if only mentally. The overwhelming nature of the programming encourages physical movement, but only after stopping it. In the evening I indulge these impulses and the material flows. Unfortunately, there is no opposite effect. Moving does not encourage sitting in front of a computer screen. I wonder if my creative exercises of last night will inspire technical impulse today? Somehow I am beginning to doubt it.
Choreographically thinking on….Kinks. Contort. Bend. Still. Slow. Fast. Uncontrolled. Push. Hold back. Push forward.
Choreographically indulging in….taking old material that was never TRULY worked through or finished and pushing it, connecting it and changing it.
Working with a new dancer…perhaps one of the more exciting joys in the process…and becoming more and more thrilled by the possibilities that this provides.
Stelarc’s thoughts.
Today, Stelarc posted some comments to the -empyre- list that speak directly to what I’m currently thinking about. I would like to repost them here. For an archive of the conversation to which Stelarc is responding, visit subtle.net/empyre.
Hi Norah (Stomatia, Ashley, Christina, Alan, Sally Jane, Erin,
Johannes, Tim and Renato)-
Just to say that this posting will not be in sync with the most recent
exchanges. I am staying in a hotel with very expensive internet access
which I can’t afford. And during the day I’m busy programming. Anyway,
this was done last night and being sent morning, Sydney time!
I’m delighted to read the articulate and astute observations made by
all of the participants about critical motion practice which have
accumulated but remained unanswered in my In-box.
As a counterpoint to the ideas that have unfolded in these exchanges,
perhaps the most appropriate contribution I can make is to suggest
something other- the experience of the body as inadequate,
involuntary and augmented. A body immersed in uncertainty, anxiety and
ambivalence. A body that is absent from itself, empty in itself and
exhausted by itself. This has generated ambivalence, uncertainty and
anxiety. The body might be enabled and accelerated, but this only
exposes and amplifies its obsolescence.
In an age of excess, the body needs to cope with mixed realities,
telematic embrace and its chimeric other. It is an age of circulating
flesh, fractal flesh and phantom flesh. It is also a time of
multiplying and outmoded metaphysical assumptions still affirming the
biological status-quo of the body or perpetuating disconcerting
desires of out-of-body experiences. We still speak as if these bodies
possess inner selves. As if speech is an outering from something inner.
Performances such as Fractal Flesh and Ping Body explored remote
actuation of the body wired to a computer sequenced muscle stimulation
system. In Fractal Flesh people in other places prompt the body to
move. In Ping Body mapping the reverberating ping signal, measured in
milliseconds is mapped to the body’s musculature. The body moves as a
crude barometer of internet activity. The body is seen as a split
body. Voltage-in, to jerk the left arm and leg up and down and voltage-
out, to actuate a mechanical third hand. The body moves, but not
through space. Its task envelope is defined by its limb motion but the
internet constructs it as an alternate and extended operational system.
Movatar was an inverse motion-capture system where an avatar, imbued
with genetic algorithms, whose behavior varies during the performance,
actuated the two arms using a pneumatically powered upper body
exoskeleton. The body becomes a prosthesis enabling the motion of an
avatar in the real world. The body becomes both a possessed and
performing body, simultaneously actuated and improvising. The body not
as a single agency, but also a host for an artificial entity.
The performances were done in a posture of indifference. Indifference
as opposed to expectation. Actions without anticipation. Moments
without memory. Indifference to allow an unfolding of the performance
in its own time, with its own rhythm. Ashley’s space for the in-
between not only connects but opens up. It’s also a pause that allows
for reflexion, infection and interpretation. Perhaps this is a fatal
moment and a moment of collapse. Its what happens when there is a
slippage between the intention and the action. A singularity in
programming a robot occurs at a moment when, because of multiple
possibilities, the robot can’t choose which one to execute. What
happens when a dancer stops but then can’t start?
Best wishes-
Stelarc
Thoughts on mishap
Although perhaps against blogging etiquette, I will re-post portions of my conversation on -empyre- to my blog this month. I hope that this entices some of you to join as the discussion is already proving to be incredibly interesting. Here are some thoughts of mine on digital mishap and physical stillness. See my last post for a link to sign-up to join in the discusion.
Hello all,
Ricardo, I am incredibly interested in the ideal of an “aesthetics of
failure” and agree that this pertains specifically to Lepecki’s
situation of dance and politics. I am hesitant, though, to associate
stillness as failure for the same reasons that Stamatia is resistant
to associate technical cut with mishap. If we associate stillness with
failure we equate stillness with a body that does not move. If I stand
still my body is still moving, both on the inside and on the outside.
Micro-movements become more apparent as my body awareness begins to
increase. I was in an Alexander technique workshop this past weekend
and we were discussing this very concept. So, I feel that in the way
dance often employs stillness the still does not result in the
non-moving. What is particularly interesting here is that I have
become more aware of this fact through my work with sensors. I have to
calibrate the sensors and their thresholds in order to act
appropriately with my movements because they perceive my
micro-movements much more accurately or specifically than my audience
would. The slightest twitch of a finger and subsequent shift of
tendons and veins in my wrist could send a sensor like an
accelerometer located on top of those tendons and veins into a great
deal of reception. Lepecki discusses the “betrayal of the bind between
dance and movement” as one that dance watchers including critics
perceive. Perhaps we can use a sensor to illustrate the moving affect
in stillness. I think, though, that this also disrupts the political
intention behind adding perceived body stillness to the dance
performance. It is here that we can locate your failure of politics
and an aesthetics of failure. By employing technologies in
choreography I think that we truly can move between failures of
politics as affect and clean techno gestures as effect within an
“aesthetics of failure.” I agree with Stamatia entirely that the
technical cut is an affect, but am still interested in how we work
with engineers who could consider our affect a purely technical
mishap. The clean techno gesture is effective, but in its gaps the
artist finds her affect. The artist can also find affect in
intentional cut, though, that I would associate with a cinematic cut.
I often program a cut into my technology to initiate an affective
presence. In this sense the affect does not rest on mishap at all and
we again move between affect and effect, gap and seamlessness,
movement and stillness. I am very interested in the in between here.
As we move we supposed move through or between points of perceived
stillness. When I dance with sensors and projections I am moving in
the in-between sensor, computer, projection and audience. In Dance
Forms we move between the different grids and boxes that Stamatia
brings up. The in-between provides affect for both physical and
digital affect. A perceived gap in technology, or a perceived
stillness in the body when it isn’t really still after all.
I am curious where this in-between fits theoretically, especially in
terms of D&G’s ideas of the machinic and body without organs.
Ashley
