Archive for Theory
April 26, 2010 at 10:41 am · Filed under Events, Theory, Thoughts
Here is a letter from Avi Santo, coordinating editor of In Media Res. Check out the dance and technology theme week that I will be participating in as a curator this week.
Hi all,
Welcome to a special theme week devoted to Dance and Technology.
Please feel free to respond to the contributors’ comments.
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr
This week’s In Media Res line-up:
Monday, April 26, 2010 – Stamatia Portanova (Birkbeck University of London) presents: “Movement-Objects”
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 – Ashley Ferro-Murray (University of California, Berkeley) presents: “Moving Digitally: between sensors and tone”
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 – Erin Manning (Concordia University) presents: “When Tables Dance: Technicity in Motion”
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 – Nora Zuniga Shaw (Ohio State University) presents: “What else, besides the body, might physical thinking look like?”
Thursday, April 29, 2010 – Alanna Thain (McGill University) presents: “All the Single Babies: Adorable/ Automaton?”
Friday, April 30, 2010 – Antonin de Bemels (Independent Artist) presents: “Scrub solo 3: soliloquy”
Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr
ABOUT IN MEDIA RES
In Media Res is dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship.
Each day, a different scholar will curate a 30-second to 3-minute videoclip/visual image slideshow accompanied by a 300-350-word impressionistic response.
We use the title “curator” because, like a curator in a museum, you are repurposing a media object that already exists and providing context through your commentary, which frames the object in a particular way.
The clip/comment combination are intended to both introduce the curator’s work to the larger community of scholars (as well as non-academics who frequent the site) and, hopefully, encourage feedback/discussion from that community.
Theme weeks are designed to generate a networked conversation between curators. All the posts for that week will thematically overlap and the participating curators each agree to comment on one another’s work.
Our goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst scholars and the public about contemporary approaches to studying media.
In Media Res provides a forum for more immediate critical engagement with media at a pace closer to how we typically experience media.
In Media Res is a publication of MediaCommons. MediaCommons is a strong advocate for the right of media scholars to quote from the materials they analyze, as protected by the principle of “fair use.” If such quotation is necessary to a scholar’s argument, if the quotation serves to support a scholar’s original analysis or pedagogical purpose, and if the quotation does not harm the market value of the original text — but rather, and on the contrary, enhances it — we must defend the scholar’s right to quote from the media texts under study.
For more information, please contact In Media Res’ coordinating editor, Avi Santo at asanto@odu.edu
Best,
Avi Santo
January 31, 2010 at 4:09 pm · Filed under Theory, Thoughts
I have been reading Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy for the first time. No, I can not believe that this is the first time I have read Descartes directly. I have spoken and read about a potential mind/body split via dance scholars and other philosophers since the beginning of my training in dance. Of course, dance studies has regarded such a split as contentious since its beginnings and the concept has long since been discredited.
Working on dance and technology I have come up against the critique that technology gets away from the corporeal focus of dance. I often find myself questioning the importance of the body and corporeality altogether, rather than trying to defend my work with the digital by anthropomorphizing digital media, or by defining the digital in terms of and as corporeal qualities.
Recently, it seems that several scholars are articulating the central importance of the body to dance studies. In the summer 2009 issue of Dance Research Journal, for example, Gay Morris presented the historical trajectory of interdisciplinarity in dance in relation to the interdisciplinary basis of cultural studies. Coming to the conclusion that dance scholars can ground themselves in a focus on the body, Morris suggests that dance scholars can use the common ground of the body to stabilize the field while diversifying its implications. Where does this take us when we think about movement in the digital realm? Must we only work on movement as digitally fragmented space-time when it exists in terms of the body? And, must this body exhibit corporeal qualities? If I work on the movement of digital communication networks as dance practice must I define my experiment in terms of the bodies that are connected via digital communication systems? I ask myself, is dance really always defined by the body? And, although this has historically been a seemingly common ground in dance studies, can the body continue to be that grounding stable entity?
Answers to these questions become increasingly clear as I read Descartes’ thoughts on the mind/body relationship. Although he presents a split, his argument performs relationships in the mind/body entity, or between mind and body as more complicated than the simplicity to which the “mind/body split” is so often referred. In fact, Descartes argument performs the very movement, fragmentation and multiplicity that digital networks and systems so aptly exhibit. Thinking the mind and the body in various temporal and durational situations, Descartes works through the complications that might perform the fact that there is no split between the mind and the body. In the case of Descartes’ meditations, it seems impossible that a whole field define and ground itself on the “body,” since this subject/object is such an unstable entity.
December 5, 2009 at 7:38 pm · Filed under Events, Theory
Jane McGonigal provides an amazing and seemingly unintentional response to Hubert Dreyfus’ earlier remarks.
McGonigal explains how the average young person who is a gamer will spend 10,000 playing games by the time they reach the age of 21. This is also the same amount of hours that they will spend in secondary school. Incidentally, in Outliers Gladwell argues that 10,000 hours is the amount of time to spend on something in order to get mastery.
So, McGonigal asks, rather than working on fictional problems on games, what if we could harness the collective 3 billion hours spent gaming a week on real-world problems. Jamais Cascio with Institute for the Future has a phrase: Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals. With Cascio, McGonigal works at the Institute for the Future to build games that deal with real world problems such as the world without oil.
For Jane’s slides visit: slides@avantgame.com
August 10, 2009 at 4:31 pm · Filed under Artworks, Theory, Thoughts
I’ve been incredibly strict with myself over the past three months about not getting too tech heavy for the piece that I’m working on. Last fall when I was spending all of my time calibrating sensors and insuring that my bluetooth range was strong enough I ended up feeling as though my choreography was suffering. I’m interested in the balance between tech and choreography. On the one hand I suppose my tech is a part of the set. Sometimes I think I should get a designer just like choreographers often work with set designers, lighting designers and sound designers. Why is it that I feel the necessity to produce everything for myself…that I feel as though my creative process would suffer if I were to shift my artistic product by relying on others to program for me? And, again this brings me to how integral process is to my product. My product is process. Somehow nearing the end of the choreographic process and the date of my performance I am once again finding myself diving head first into programming sound interactions. I am pleased with the fact that I have waited…despite the reality that the sound may fall short of what it could have been. The interactions will be fairly simplistic and sound output not as layered and nuanced as I would otherwise like. I was able to focus much more on developing the choreography in its own right thanks to my persistence that I wait until the end of the process to really plow forward with tech. I simply prioritized my choreography. This leads me to question the role that tech has in my choreography though. Do I really need it there on stage? My movements and choreography is implicitly affected by previous experiences that I’ve had working with technology, why is it necessary for my audience to experience a live interaction? I’m still working with a proscenium arena, so the technology is not in this case helping to complicate performance power structures or other binaries. Still, it seems that there is aesthetic quality that comes with using technology and real time interactions that is productive for me. I’m not sure at this point how it is pushing the movement and choreography, although I know that it is. The sound pushes me to perform differently and draws me into the space and time of my performance. I am curious to theorize these thoughts and experiences that I’m having while deep in my creative process. How do my last minute creative decisions based on technology affect my theoretical inquiry? And, am I really staying true to my theoretical interest and opinion throughout my creative process, or do I step away from this perspective in order to all more movement and flexibility in my process?
May 21, 2009 at 11:55 am · Filed under Artworks, Theory, Thoughts
I recently read Patricia Zimmerman and Dale Hudson’s “Cinephilia, Technopilia and Collaborative Remix Zones” published in the latest issue of Screen. Zimmerman and Hudson perform what they call a “radical historiography” to indulge “interventionist pleasures.” This methodology has me thinking about remixing history in dance and what this is.
If I were chose a movement to return to it would be Judson. How can we reengage avant-garde activism in today’s digital culture? Trajal Harrell seems to do just this drawing not only on Judson, but also on voguing and European tanztheater. In his most recent “Quartet for the End of Time.” He takes what has happened and pushes it forward, remixing and opening potentiality in critical movement practice.
This remixing is not a repetition, and appropriately so. Can movement be repeated? No. When I wave my hand in the air I perform the same choreographed action (a wave of the hand) multiple times, the movement that I perform morphs with time based on variables such as body fatigue or rhythm. Rather than perform an exact repetition of my movement, I loop the choreography. When I loop choreographed movement it is not repeated, but layered. The movement is the same, but calling my movement a loop as opposed to a repetition shifts a perception that enables progression within and beyond repetition. It seems that the historiographic remix enables movement loops.
April 10, 2009 at 1:28 pm · Filed under Link, Theory, Thoughts
I have been thinking a lot lately about archiving digital artwork and why we could have an interest in obsolescence, failure and frustration. Also, how do we differentiate between what is new and trendy and what is valuable theoretical example.
A conversation with an architect friend of mine drew me to question dance notation in a very practical way. As she designs a performance space (a hypothetical performance space), she wonders how dancers write their work. Or, do they? She shares her architectural diagrams with me and we think about how she documents architectural movements in space. Can she animate her structure? Or, is it a static picture of potential movement.
With this in mind, I come to consider Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual. He talks about movement, virtuality and affect in space and time. He draws upon Spinoza, Deleuze and Bergson. Massumi introduces his book by talking about thinking the body and understanding how this thoughts interacts with his ideas about movement and culture. Is movement possible? Or, is movement, rather, an in-between space. Our movements are mapped by static positions that we only move between. From a dance perspective, I would clearly disagree. We aren’t only moving between static places. We are moving spaces. Of course Massumi’s argument is more complicated than this and in a way can not even be summarized or quoted. Massumi says himself that his text is comprised of many terms that come in and out to work with and challenge each other. The argument itself is a choreography and the circularity makes it resistant to summation or quotation without decontextualization. Massumi doesn’t move from one static point to another in his text. Rather, he embodies what moving spaces as opposed to moving between places would be.
This makes me question any time of static dance notation or mapping. I recognize that scholars have questioned this very notion of notation for decades, but I think we are in a new age where the questions reemerge with contemporary examples…just like Massumi uses pre articulated theories and explains through his book how new media examples further enlighten pre articulated theories. The recent launch of Synchronous Objects is a great place to question new media examples of dance notation. The Synchronous Objects team doesn’t claim that their project notates every aspect of a dance. They also recognize how this is one way to explore a dance experience. Revealing how different camera angles along uncover different interpretations of what a live dance experience was, the project accounts for several modes and forms of documentation in a digital age. I must admit that I was initially incredibly resistant to this project. I had several questions about what the site could actually give a viewer and how the site ignored a lot of different qualities that a dance could potentially exhibit.
These questions, I realized, were hypocritical. Just like I think that exploring digital virtuality is just one way that we can experience and explore the body in contemporary space and time, this project attempts to do similar things. I would call Synchronous Objects a choreographic project in its own right as opposed to a notation project. Each time I experience One Flat Thing Revisited with a different feature of the Synchronous Objects site the project becomes something new. One thing that I am particularly interested in, for example, are the different digital visualizers.
I was recently asked how working with live interactive performance technologies was aesthetically interesting. This question was followed with an inquiry about what we actually get from the visualizations that come from the interaction. Can we really see what the dance is from the visualization? This, though, isn’t the point. The point for me has to do with what we can’t see from this visualization. How does it not work? Dance is ephemeral. This we know. Digital technologies, too, are quite ephemeral. Digital visualizations of dance are merely new ways to explore and inspire spatio-temporal exercises.
Once I approached Synchronous Objects from this standpoint the project came alive for me. What I find interesting about Massumi’s project is that he takes spatio-temporal exercises from a time before the developed digital virtualities that we have today and engages them with new media examples. We can use projects like Massumi’s to begin to realize how physical and digital virtualities can exist together and enable each other. They aren’t necessarily dichotomous and they aren’t necessarily complimentary. Rather, they are two qualities that exist in our contemporary reality. As artists, we explore these situations.
April 10, 2009 at 1:01 pm · Filed under Link, Theory, Thoughts
Well, there is a lot going through my mind lately. As finals are approaching I am considering potential paper topics and allowing for all of the musings that I have had over the past several months come flooding back into my thought process. I am currently working on my paper for the Dance Under Construction conference at UCLA, which will be on micro-movements associated with iPhone and how Apple markets a certain kind of choreography with their patented device. The one US iPhone patent uses language like “embodied,” “gesture” and “performance” to describe how their multi-touch user interface is a unique way through which a user can interact with the world around her with “just the touch of a finger.” How is this digital (anatomically digital) choreography changing our associations with transcribing the space that we live in? Perhaps, though, these technologies are no different than using a computer and a mouse when it comes to transcribing Internet spaces as opposed to real spaces. Are the iPhone and other similar digital devices furthering our Internet experiences even more because of the portability? How often do we see someone navigating themselves through a city not by looking at street signs and the sights around them, but by looking at the GPS bubble on their iPhone? What might deCerteau have to say about this?
Well, since I am having so many thoughts about many different things, perhaps I should add them all in different posts. Yes, more to come on my musings after this post….
April 4, 2009 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Events, Link, Theory
I will be leading this week’s New Media Working Group! Check out the invite/description below and share your thoughts! Join us if you’re in the area.
The New Media Working Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, April 9, from 2:30-3:30 pm in the Berkeley Center for New Media Commons (340 Moffit). Please join us to discuss Brian Massumi’s latest book, Parables for the Virtual, where he considers virtuality as it relates to movement. Paying particular attention to “The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image” and Massumi’s description of virtual affect in relation to Ronald Reagan’s account of watching himself move on television, we will discuss virtualities of movement.
Copies of the reading are available at
http://nmwg.notlong.com/
March 7, 2009 at 9:46 pm · Filed under Theory, Thoughts
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone on the phenomenology of dance as re-languaging. A liminality between the two faces of an object: presence/absence. I’m curious how this does or doesn’t relate to a relationship between the real, or more apropriately physical, and digitally virtual (as opposed to S-J’s physical virtual force).
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