Call to Participate!
Dear friends,
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
mixing
I just had a skype conversation with Robin Gareus from Citu CiTu research center (Création Interactive Transdisciplinaire Universitaire) Universités Paris 1 and Paris 8. We worked on uploading some of my videos and connecting a live video feed to TAC and were successful at all attempts! This program is wonderful so far. Easy to connect with and easy to upload video for live mixing. Working with technology in my work often makes it incredibly difficult to put quick performances together or painlessly try things out. I think that this tool will be a wonderful rehearsal model to say the least. In addition I am hoping that I can use this tool to demonstrate my process to colleagues in a quick way. Anywhere that I have my computer and internet I will be able to set up a completely interactive performance system. Furthermore, I am energized and excited for the show I have coming up on December 11. I can’t wait to connect with TAC and see what happens.
Images
Photographs courtesy of Daniel Bruggemeyer
These are selected images from “Fragment 2,” performed August 2009 at The Milk Bar in Oakland, CA. This is one of several pieces in a larger project dealing with saturation and minimalism of a digital presence in movement installation. I will premier Fragment 3 at the Berkeley Center for New Media/Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society Holiday Gala on December 11.
tech tech and more tech
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?
Dancing with Sensors
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.
Choreographing in the summer…
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!
Thinking in Loops
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.
My work.
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!
Recent 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….
