I will be setting up the UC Berkeley Graduate Program in Performance Studies 10th Anniversary and will stop at noon to move with my colleagues. Join in my friend Beth’s international public art performance and celebrate National Dance Week: Sign up to “dance anywhere” and post your dance documents online.
danceanywhere.org
I post photographs and videos of my work to my dance-tech.net site. As school winds down and summer begins I will be working much more on my own work. Watch the blog for updates on artistic progress and my dance-tech site for detailed accounts of my technological explorations and discoveries. I am currently refining the sensor technologies that I configured for my piece and am developing the choreography for my next show, which will be in Oakland, CA this August. Watch a video clip of my November 2008 performance at dance-tech!
How do we write about a performance that we have never seen? I wish I could travel to see each and every performance that I am interested in and that pertains to my research. Clearly this is not possible. That doesn’t mean, though, that those performances that I did not get a chance to see did not exist. Sure, I could very easily research the performances that I was not able to see: watch video documentations, consider the performance venue, talk with the artist, consider production photographs, talk with the dancers, understand any technological components, watch the content of any projections, look at the program, read press releases and reviews, watch documentation of any pre/post-show programing…the list continues. Do these considerations really, though replace what it is to experience a performance live? I think not. And, when I am judging the efficacy of using digital media in interesting ways I am often considering the way that media elements effect the tone in a theater and the perception of a viewing. Just reading a description of a performance is simply no the same thing as watching it. Or is it? Perhaps by considering everything about a performance except for my own experience I am producing a less biased account of what happened. Sure, this account is much less personally phenomenological. I am able to take a more neutral stance, however, on a digital effect.
Just some food for thought.
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.
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….
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/
Check out my page @ Dance-tech!