connected spaces?

From: Scott deLahunta (sdela@ahk.nl)
Date: 07/28/00


<x-flowed>Hello --

Many thanks Johannes for filling us in on the interesting details about the 
workshop at Hellerau and to Doug for opening up some critical questions 
related to "live simultaneous/ telematic web-based and interactive 
performance projects". I am here in Arizona working on the documentation of 
the Cellbytes project. In addition to the general announcement site that 
stimulated Doug's posting -- there are now a set of several linked pages 
that provide SOME reflection and analysis and quite a bit of description 
related to the process of the project. You can go either through the main 
site http://isa.vprc.asu.edu/cellbytes/ or directly to the documentation 
pages http://isa.vprc.asu.edu/cellbytes/scott/ --

Hopefully this site will provide some response to Doug's request to know 
more about how this sort of work is being approached and a bit about why. I 
find that in the context of such an intense two week project that is 
largely a practical exploration (and most of that in problem solving form) 
that critical positioning evolves slowly and may need the distance of some 
time to find a coherent form. I have written a bit on the site about this, 
but not much. Of course, I am avoiding one of his questions regarding why 
do these sorts of projects continue to employ the techno-rhetoric, 
especially in the press releases, that they do. I have different responses 
to this -- one of them being that the art of rhetoric and of advertising 
are the same -- to persuade someone to take a look, to pay attention. This 
art is also context dependent -- so I don't have a problem with most 
performance work using emerging technologies to advertise themselves as 
'future' or 'cyber' something. Some are just better poets with it than 
others. I know that many of these groups are as tired as everyone else of 
having to use the same tiny lexicon over and over.

Something to add to this --- a quote from Johannes' posting [25 July Re: 
HELLERAU WORKSHOP 2.0] captures a flavor of this sort of experimentation 
and research that seems essential to me -- having his 'spectral analysis' 
done (you might want to read the post) revealed an unusal pattern. Johannes 
writes:

"On the left side (serial processing: the logical,rational and speech 
side), I sometimes show strange patterns, flatlands, so called 
"Todstell-reflexe" (simulated dead reflex), you know, like when an animal 
feels it is trapped and pretends to be dead. I don't know what it means."

I feel the same way looking in on some of the work that has been done here 
during CellBytes (and there has been a lot) -- I don't know what it means 
yet. We will certainly see faster networks with the possibility of full 
motion video streaming (such as what we are using here), but I don't know 
if we will ever witness a critical mass of dance performers and 
choreographers making multi-site simultaneous performance work in the 
future -- maybe we will. Maybe we won't.

Comments on the cellbytes documentation site are welcome.

best,

Scott
---------------------------------------------------==|
---------------------------------------------------==|
   Scott deLahunta and Susan Rethorst
   Writing Research Associates, NL
   Sarphatipark 26-3, 1072 PB Amsterdam, NL
   mobile: +44 (0)797 741 2060
   tel: +31 (0)20 662 1736 / fax: +31 (0)20 470 1558
   email: sdela@ahk.nl

   w1: Writing Research Associates
       http://huizen.dds.nl/~sdela/wra
   w2: Dance and Technology Zone
       http://www.art.net/~dtz

---------------------------------------------------==|
---------------------------------------------------==|
</x-flowed>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 03/28/01 CST