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

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.

This Friday, December 11 at 6pm PST I will premiere my latest dance-tech piece, “Fragment 3.” I am writing to invite you all to participate in my performance by uploading material of your own to CiTu’s “The Art Collider (TAC),” which is an interactive networking system that I will use throughout my performance.

Please find instructions for easy ways to connect via Connect and Participate site. I would recommend “Live Camera” if you want to input live video, or “Flowmixer” to input prerecorded and/or mixed material. Then, you can simultaneously connect to other footage from the system by opening up links from other live projects. TAC is a fairly new project that is still in the final development stages, but the system seems to be working quite well. I will project a sampling of any material in the network throughout my performance.

Please find a description of my project below and I look forward to seeing you on the network!

“Fragment 3″ is the third fragment in a process-based series that choreographer Ashley Ferro-Murray has been working on since Fall 2008.

Exploring the space between digital spectrality and digital saturation, this piece moves through various networks as it leads an audience through various iterations of digital choreographies. Wireless accelerometers used throughout the choreographic process inspire the conceptual context of this piece. These sensors are deleted are not worn in performance to explore the body in movement as it exhibits a digital tone in the absence of digital technology. In contrast to the spectral presence of the sensors, the performance space itself is saturated with digital interface. A live video feed of the real-time performance will be input into French digital installation artist Maurice Benayoun’s online network for artistic collaboration, The Art Collider (TAC). Simultaneously, Ferro-Murray projects real-time images from other artists using TAC.
In association with BCNM (Berkeley Center for New Media).

All the best,
Ashley

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)

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

How does this relate to artists such as William Kentridge who look to make the invisible visible in art projects such as Parcours D’atelier: Artist in the Studio? Kentridge uses art products to make the invisible visible. How, then, does his product relate to those social networking processes that we’ve been exploring all day?

Also, as Davis uses game theory to understand the scale of social interaction with his projects that work with geo-tagged photographs etc, I wonder how we can use performance theory as it relates to game theory to understand connections between social media and art pieces that engage similar concepts.

Oops! We lost him on skype…