August 9, 2009 at 8:09 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
So much to consider right now. I’ve been rehearsing and programming like crazy as I prepare for my show at the milkbar THIS Friday August 14. I’ve been spending the last several weeks dancing with Nina Haft at Shawl Anderson Dance Center, beginning a Feldenkrais workshop with Mary Armentrout at Shawl and entering a fieldwork with several other bay area artists. As I condition myself I’ve been gearing up to condition my own thoughts and thinking on dance within the academy and my choreographic practice. I had a lovely conversation with Petra Kuppers about her forthcoming manuscript last week. While writing rhizomatically on process, movement, poetry, documentation, practice, theory, experience, embodied memory and more through history, theory, practice, experience, theorizing history, historicizing practice, questioning history and the archive and more… Petra has created a manuscript of folds. As Tim Murray’s new book, The Digital Baroque looks toward the Deleuzian fold and Petra’s book seems to move toward exemplifying it I wonder how my practice, theory and experience are folds in themselves as they fold together. The Feldenkrais and work with Nina have pushed me to realize that within my own process I experience each installation of my work through micro-movements and attentions.
This is how I’ve been approaching my choreography and how I’ve been literally folding my tech into my practice. My movements are inspired directly from experiences dancing with sensors. I wear sensors on my wrists. What happens when I move? The three axis accelerometers that I’m working with respond with sound output…sound interactions that I have programmed. This time programming is my immobile creative process. Sitting at a computer much like I’m doing now I connect object to object with things called “patchcords” in Max. I make things talk and I map virtual movement through a program of physical movement and sound. Different sounds and interactions push my momentum in different directions. Programming I feel sometimes like I’m connecting random points to other random points…on the contrary, these points are not random, but represent specific functions that when connected correctly in the appropriate map produce a specific product. This map makes something happen. Perhaps this process pushes me to choreograph in a similar way as I experience the programmed product through my own movement. Lately I’ve been feeling like my movement process produces a boring product. What does it mean? Is there an overarching theme? How are my dancers relating to each other? How am I relating to my dancers? My movement is random. My movement is spastic or frantic. What I am trying to convey through this display of somatic intention? As I move myself it feels as though I represent a technical process…a technical process grounded in a theoretical exploration that is inspired by artists including Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and most lately Anthea Kraut and Petra’s work. Also, as I read of Erin Manning’s philosophical explorations through technology and movement I implicitly move and respond to her ideas. My movements, therefor are not random. They are not spastic or frantic. Rather, each movement serves a particular function. This function when connected appropriately in the choreographic map produces a product based on my technical and theoretical process. My product is process and represents or repeats process.
Recently I received some feedback. My intention in my look may not be clear. How am I as the performer relating to the movements? It looks as though my body is moving me while myself is waiting to see what my body does next. Often this is my relationship to technology and to theory. I am programming and learning to program. I am reading and theorizing the theory that I read and I am writing my own theory. As I do both of these things I am often swimming in the darkness waiting for my next inspiration to pop. This is a guided swimming. My objects are pushing my swim in a very particular direction with a specific function. I am trusting them and experiencing them until I am inspired by my experience and produce the next step, which will also undoubtedly serve a very specific function. My artistic process too is representative of this experience as it performs the very process.
Perhaps my movement is boring. Is it artistically “responcible” to make my audience watch my process? Why is this interesting? Where is the humor? Where is the entertainment? Is there humor or entertainment in my own map of folds over folds in folds and as folds?
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.
March 4, 2009 at 6:47 pm · Filed under Theory, Uncategorized
Technologically, when we digitally loop materials and we program loops into our network we complicate the possibility for what Gilles Deleuze calls the “following present,” or repetition, which is where he locates the virtual. In the case of Deleuze, the virtual characterizes a very physical presence, repetition. This virtual presence as a physical quality as opposed to digital reality is one that philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone uses to philosophize dance in her book, Phenomenology of Dance.
Lest we forget that although these considerations of the body and the real in media driven movement and looping are repetitions of well-articulated theories on the body and the real, our experiences of Deleuzian repetitions in everyday action are nonetheless confused and complicated with the introduction of “new” media and digital presence. For this reason I’m interested in how my research on digital environments are pre-established concepts in a new context. I will, therefore, ground much of my research in a historical situation of dance experience in relation to the body and the everyday with the hope of locating a new articulation of these terms; or perhaps new terms altogether.
There is space in dance scholarship to move through experiences in relation to digital limitation and/or distraction and phenomenological experience. The digital is no longer so “new” and technologies have forever mechanized movement practice. So, rather than forget previously articulated ideas, I hope to consider contemporary technologies and dance performance in relation to a historical theoretical perspective.
