<<Differentiating between "artists" and "technologists" in that way simply continuing to "ghettoize" even as you attempt to broaden the participation and audience. I am very disturbed that the same tendency towards specialization and "tech school" training that we see in the Universities is being continued here in this community.>> Well, Jeff, I think Richard was writing with a bit of humour. I don't think we need to go into attacking dichotomies, they seem a bit uninteresting to me. I agree with you. It's quite obvious that most of us work in the studio and behind computers. I also think that my small observation about the public outreach for the Hellerau workshop was misunderstood. I mentioned that it was an interdisciplinary workshop, with only two trained dancers, but it appeared, in its announcement, to focus on movement relations to technology and interactive design. I thought it was interesting and curious that we built a dance stage (with Marley floor) and ended up having a Guckkastenbuehne, so to speak. Not that it doesn't make sense to have a dance floor, on the contrary. I just remarked that our workshop was not necessarily a process focused on choreogrpahy, spatial composition and design, but we worked from the available interactive software systems into the marley, and then also explored other possibilities (the face, the brain ECG interface with video projection). When you use video projection, you have a little problem too, namely to invent a physical structure or form onto which you project, no? I then made a perhaps ill-advised comment on the "intelligent stage" as I had observed it at ISA (a Guckkastenbuehne, too). If you now invite an audience to a dance concert (interactive, multimedia, etc), but retain the traditional blackbox and its separation from the audience, you have one thing. If your performance on the intelligent stage is not for an audience but part of a telematic event and a live netcast, other questions arise (for example, how it is filmed for the streaming video, how it is represented in a netcast, whether it is filmed-with-focus-on dancer or say, with focus on image movement, stills, delays, abstract space, music, etc). How would you do a telematic performance with, say, zeitkratzer? My point was that advanced intermedia design, with new technologies, could be much more sensitive to its choreographic composition and content and dance forms as theatre forms and as spatial/architectural forms or musical forms if indeed interactive designs, potentially and definitely, transform the old theological-theatrical structure. Personally I am very much interested in working precisely on the issue of "environments" and spatial/plastic/sculptural conceptions for the interrelations between space, dynamic movement and narrative expression by the performers, and media components (controlled-designed or dynamically modifiable in live mixes), since I believe that our expansion of space, through telematic media or sensitive "systems", have an impact on h o w we perform in space (directionally, and wholistically), how we engage our audience and our fellow artists in the production, which, I argue, is also the production of n e w e n v i r o n m e n t s. New perceptions of what organic movement can be, what a new biotechnique can be. How memory and recollection function in hpermedia environments. How we retain anything. Even more so, one should think, if your audience is dislocated (online), dispersed. Even more so, if your production is directed for a CD-ROM/DVD platform, or a website, or shifting contexts (music, dance, installation), and production transpositions, where the material site of the process falls away. Two days ago, at the "Dance from Japan" festival in Duesseldorf, I saw that Nigel Charnock had previously performed his "FEVER" (Shakespeare Sonnets in Voice, Dance and Music), with jazz clarinetist Michael Riessler and a string quartet, at the Tanzhaus. My friends gave me the CD, "Fever / Ji-Virus" by Riessler (ars acoustica/wergo release), a music CD, in which we don't see Nigel, but we hear him. His dance is now a vocal/musical performance. As another example for my concern with environment, I now want to quote from Josepha Haveman's recent comment on her work for CD ROM (on the ISEA list): >>The expense of creating a CD ROM consists simply of the time, imagination, content and design that it takes to do the job. It takes a lot of each, for sure. But that should be true of all art, so we are used to that. A tip, though: Once you have developed a working template, for instance by using MM Director, you can mostly just keep plugging in the content as needed. As with most serious work, it is the finessing that takes as long, or longer, than the basic production... something that often appears to be misunderstood by the 'CD ROM development community'! That's where developing web pages becomes more popular: it can be done 'quick and dirty', here today-gone tomorrow, and as you [Nik] say: "anyone who has a text editor can learn and write html"... For me, since I am somewhat overloaded with content, creating any sort of page is a visual and aesthetic matter.... After all, the design's function is to support the content and ideally, design should be 'invisible' in itself. The web does appear to carry pages by 'anyone' and hence I find it a singularly unsophisticated and unattractive environment, a.k.a as a mishmash of 'anything goes'... IF it 'goes'! The good sites, which exist as well, can be wonderful... but those might have taken as long to produce as a CD ROM! Meanwhile, let's remember that all of this will be soon be out of date again, all that is, but hopefully content, good design and clear communication!>>>> end of quote. I think what Josepha says about content, design, and environment (and stability or locatability of site) is important, since site and environment, and how we direct and build our dance or movement forms, has to do with, as I have argued, how we understand the human figure, the bodied subject of movement, the individual or the group, in its affective connection to intelligent embedding. The intelligent connection, if that is what it is, needs to be mutual, dialogic. Here I see real potentials for further investigations, on our part, of biotechnologies, neural sciences, genetics, xenotransplantation, etc, if we indeed claim, as you seem to do, Richard, that we can think technology as intelligent as we like. How intelligent do we like it to be, how t r a n s g e n e t i c , in relation to the human and bodily and literary and musical intelligence with which we create new dance forms and new architectures for the experience if such performance forms? *greetings Johannes Birringer AlienNation Co./OSU_Dance http://www.aliennationcompany.com http://www.wexarts.org/thefold/
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