Robert mentioned recently that he visited the ICMC in Berlin, and I
think several other choreographers, dancers, and performers were there,
too. There was also an interesting series of concerts at the Podewil
club. Phill Niblock did a concert, and he and his Experimental
Intermedia organization have supported independent artists and musicians
for years (since 1968); he has nurtured many intermedia projects with
emerging artists combining music and audio with moving images (e.g.
Spring Festival of Mixology, New York).
I missed Robert and Curtis in Berlin as I had to go back to Duesseldorf
since I wanted to visit the Dance from Japan Festival at the Tanzhaus. I
saw Dumb Type, a multimedia performance group from Kyoto whose aesthetic
is very strongly visual-media (digital video, computer-controlled) and
sound oriented, and has a very contemporary posthumanist, artificial
intelligence/genetics- feel to it, if one can call it that. The
overstimulated brain, in the dance, has problems remembering, what the
memory cells contain are media images (from TV and video games, urban
advertising graffiti).
>From the comments Robert made -
(I found the suggestions concerning a link with ICMA very helpful, and
Curtis Bahn has already responded to that - please let us know how we
can cooperate and create a joint forum) -
it seems clear that we won't get around some distinctions that still
operate in the art and entertainment fields, such as between music and
dance. Each field has its practitioners (whether or not they work with
electronic instruments or interactive designs) and audiences, and each
field has its underlying and sustaining school, academy, training, or
popular culture system (and distribution). Although there always have
been cross-overs, the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration and method
you imply has never been consistent (and probably was not
supported/funded institutionally or organisationally); we can look at a
few models, say, the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, IRCAM, MIT Media
Lab, ZKM, Banff, but even if we look at these, we can see how they were
weighted, or in what direction the research and production tended
(music, visual art, digital media, robotics, etc). I am not aware of
too many interdisciplinary art and technology programs that give weight
and support to the development of new dance techniques (involving media
technologies), and this was one of the main currents of my writings to
this list over the summer, namely my concern that the software
development or the available interactive design systems or the
online/netart capabilities, as they stand, have not been impacted by an
equally fervent experimental development and growth of performance
techniques and composite formal methods (composition, choreography,
spatial design, cinematography, installation concepts, dynamic
communication design, etc) on the side of movement research.
The same questions that I had about the aesthetics of interactive
design, and the content of works that are developed with interactive or
intense media, probably apply to current work in motion capture or, as
it will be called at our new lab (OSU) in the future, in "Human Figure
Motion Synthesis, Analysis and Animation". That's not a name for a
research lab I could have ever come up with.
(" Analysis-Synthesis Techniques" was one of the workshops at ICMA, by
the way. Another one addressed "HCI": "Human-Computer-Interaction :
What is a user-friendly interface in a musical context?")
Well, then. I propose that we continue to create research/production
contexts in which emerging interactive technologies, ideas, and
prototypes can be explored with dancers, choreographers, composers,
filmmakers, visual artists, engineers - something like an Experimental
Intermedia Performance Series committed to the development and
distribution of new performance techniques. I suppose this is what
many among us are doing (ISA, Shinkansen, Sophia Lycouris's projects,
Scott deLahunta's projects, and so on). Perhaps the framework of IDAT
is too large (Richard, what do you think?), and smaller but frequent,
interlinked projects might work better, if they at the same time help to
foster changes in the existing separate art, dance, theatre, and music
school strata. We need not only organisational support for artists
working in intermedia forms, we need to instill methods, laboratory and
production structures for intermedia art, so that interdisciplinary art
(and its composition methods and techniques) becomes more recognizable
by young students, professionals, writers and audiences.
For those of you interested, I am creating an "Interactive Performance
Series" (IPS) at OSU, which will involve labs, masterclasses, concerts,
and symposia. For June 2001, I have invited Tomie Hahn, Curtis Bahn, and
Dan Trueman to be artists in residence at our Summer Workshop in
interactive dance technologies, and I will seek further collaborations
and joint projects with musicians and engineers, but all of these
projects have a strong emphasis on movement research (I include
movement-images and animation into the spectrum of movement, but the
labs will always have a physical studio dimension for the development of
new performance techniques and new works).
If I succeed with the interdisciplinary direction of these new
workshops, they will feed directly into our dance&technology graduate
program at OSU, be visible to audiences, and will be fed and motivated
by the work and research our student artists are doing. If there are
20 or 30 other projects like this in your countries, whether in schools
or independently, we could locate a stronger and more consistent
discourse on intermedia performance, and annual platforms like IDAT
could be held to which substantial new works are invited and presented
to the public. The role of the Internet? A possibility might be to
explore the feasibility of teleconferencing, or to observe how
netcasting evolves to a point where we could work together from distant
locations and develop new techniques together in this way. But once
again, I wonder how one can create new work, based on new techniques,
without having substantial studio time to rehearse and compose such work
(Jeff and Sita will know about this), and how, if at all, one reaches an
audience over the net that can participate, and discern the aesthetic
content of such work.
cheers
Johannes Birringer
AlienNation Co.
http://www.aliennationcompany.com
OSU_Dance
http://www.wexarts.org/thefold/
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