December 5, 2009 at 9:29 am · Filed under Events
This month the email list -empyre- continues a conversation on viral networks with Patricia Zimmerman, professor of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College, and Program Director at WITNESS. I have so enjoyed Patty and Sam’s thoughts on viral media as it relates to ethical, political and social issues and look forward to to any resonances between this discussion on -empyre- and today’s forum. I will be thinking particularly about Patty and Sam’s points that:
**In the current environment of the user-generated, imagined virality, and circulatory vortex of Web 2.0 media, the capacity to produce and share media, testimony, and visual evidence is more widely dispersed.
**Amateurism has been redefined and reconfigured not as an adjunct to other forms of media but as an infiltration of other forms of media. Media practice, therefore, is no longer solely and exclusively about visibility: circulation and aggregation have acquired equal if not greater importance.
November 22, 2009 at 12:34 pm · Filed under Events, Thoughts
PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN FROM MY PHONE
After spending a good deal of Friday participation in protests at UC Berkeley I wrote the following letter to contribute to the conversation on viral networks happening on the -empyre- list this month. I wrote this letter soon after Friday’s events without much time for reflection. It has since become clear in comparing stories with friends and reviewing video footage of the event that we can always continue to strengthen networks. Where the networks felt strong on Friday there were other places where those networks were weakened by police brutality and a lack of communication between University Administration, law enforcement officials, faculty, and students. I hope to hold onto my words below and my immediate feelings of strength in community as we continue to think about potential weakness in and between certain networks and how to strengthen forces.
Letter written at 10:30am on Saturday, November 21, 2009:
Good morning from Berkeley,
I wasn’t participating in yesterday’s discussion about viral networks/UC protests because I was standing in the rain with close to 2,000 Berkeley protesters while we waited outside of Wheeler Hall as friends and colleagues occupied the building. So, please forgive me if I am returning to an already closed conversation, but allow me to indulge in a reflection on yesterday’s successful and widespread strike activities.
At Berkeley there are four groups representing different populations of the campus. As far as I know, there are two faculty groups, one graduate student group and one undergraduate group. With representatives from each group serving on all other committees, these four groups are in close communication and have used what is being referred to here as “grassroots” activism to successfully hold a 5,000 person walk-out in September, several events in October and a three day strike this week. Starting from the four groups email is used to communicate with departmental representatives who then communicate with departments. Whether organization is departmental, building wide, or committee based, the word hasn’t stopped there.
The fact that the students involved in yesterday’s building occupation were communicating with fellow organizers and activists via email, twitter and facebook seems significant. Of course there are debates regarding whether or not viral networks and online activism have replaced the need for physical protest. It is, after all, easier to sign an online petition (of which there have been many connected to the UC Strikes) than it is steer clear of office resources for three days, or stand in the rain for hours on end. I am sure that we are all well aware of examples supporting both sides of that argument. Still, twitter and facebook updates kept a good deal of protesters mobilized yesterday. Consistent updates from the inside of Wheeler assured a wet crowd that their support was indeed necessary, building occupiers’ view from the top floors of Wheeler Hall were shared through twitter accounts to help students spread evenly around the building to block police movement, and facebook updates alerted crowds immediately when arrests were taking place and how to best continue supporting the occupation efforts.
Just like anything else it seems that they way a viral network is organized and implemented corresponds directly to its efficacy. I think here of artist
Zach Blas’ proposed GRID project. The movement from one GRID to the next produces new GRIDs. It is the movement between networks that produces the change. It seems that in the case of the UC protests the efficacy of the system depends on successful movements between different networks. It is the movements between online networks such as email lists to online petitions, between different physical networks such as departmental meetings to banners hanging outside of buildings, and between online and physical networks such as buildings occupiers to their twitter followers. This is what has felt like the viral aspect of the system.
In solidarity,
Ashley
May 14, 2009 at 5:07 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
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
May 5, 2009 at 11:18 am · Filed under Uncategorized
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
