virtual musings on notation and exploration
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.
