In this short clip I perform a movement study with four accelerometers. With more movement in my body you will notice more movement in the video projection and sound output. I will continue exploring interactions with sensors as I develop them alongside my choreography without sensor technologies. All of these choreographic explorations will be developed over the next year as I work toward my next evening length performance.
I’m beginning to think in choreographic experiences again. Journaling and allowing my experiences to materializes in creative impulse. I’m currently trying to decide whether or not I want to use interactive technologies like wearable sensors in my composition, which I will show at Oakland’s The Milk Bar this August 14th. I am thinking of using this composition to explore interaction that is virtual in the physical sense of the word. Friends recently made a video that deals with analogue/digital conversion, the physical choreography that comes with drawing, and mechanical construction as performance. I think I am going to “interact” with these different artistic processes. I have gained so much inspiration from learning how to program. I am interested in how much of this has to do with the technical aspects of live interaction, and how much with having the opportunity to exercise my intellectual/creative abilities in new and interdisciplinary ways. Nonetheless, I will also continue learning more about microcontrollers this summer. I’ll be learning how to use the Arduino Lilypad, a textile based microcontroller and will continue exploring Jitter!
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.
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
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
For the month of May I will participate in a discussion on Critical Motion Practice through the -empyre- list on art and technology. The discussion will feature thoughts by scholars including Johannes Birringer, Laura Cull, Sarah Drury, Nora Zuniga Shaw, Stamatia Portonova, Stelarc and Erin Manning. Please sign-up and join in our discussion!
I am just returning from a weekend at UCLA for the 2009 Dance Under Construction conference. This year’s theme was The Politics of Choreography, Choreographing Politics. This graduate student conference has been moving from UC campus to UC campus for the past eleven years drawing graduate students focusing on any aspect of dance practice to share their research and engage in conversation. As MFA and PhD students in performance studies and dance converge for one weekend it is astounding the different scholarship that seems to hearken similar questions. Whether dancing, performing a workshop, or embodying a traditional academic lecture, budding academics recount different dances from concert dance, performance art and social dance to everyday movement as dancing. The state of this conference stands as exciting proof that current graduate students are able to get their degrees in dance as a rigorous academic field. I have begun to question, though, what this means. As someone who is in school with non-dancers I am consistently questioned and challenged as to my notion of movement, the body, ephemerality, virtuosity, sincerity and more. Scholarship in other fields that parse these concepts directly, or indirectly are what inspire my dance interventions and choreographic engagements. Once I enter a dance context, though, it seems that we often feel more comfortable using these terms in a contemporary dance context without considering not only scholarship on these topics outside of our field, but a long tradition of dance history that his dissected and deconstructed these and similar concepts. By no means am I suggesting that by existing within a dance only context we become less self-critical. I was pushed and inspired in many other ways this weekend as I grew to question my academic stance on performing lectures and ideas, or whether or not talking about dance in terms of capital and commodity is beneficial. Experiencing my own micro-choreographies and macro-politics in relation to technology has inspired me to question the long lasting effect of my research. How is what I am doing NOT merely a trend? William Kentridge often asks this question as he uses technologies that he feels make a long-lasting political statement as opposed to those that merely play with our instantaneous desires for digi-trends. So, the dance conference experience was inspiring and challenging. I only hope that we continue working both inside and outside of this community. Susan Foster reminded the audience at the keynote panel how the interdisciplinary status of this conference was so unique. I hope that in our academic inquiry we continue to embrace the interdisciplinary nature of our field by working outside of it, even as dance as a discipline continues to grow.
Check out my page @ Dance-tech!