dear all, very strong responses to the discussion we started (after "Wearable Computers" came out) or continued (after Scott's post a little while ago)! Dawn raised some very sobering questions, I believe.... >>>>Has [the critic] really had an in depth look at the work over the past decade to say with confidence that the marriage of art and technology never took off? On the other side of that coin I ask - did it take off? Where did it take off. I still feel like an outsider since Mark and I do not have a research team and lab at a university to support us. We are trying to blend in with your average dance company. But we're really not that. But What are we? And then I ask with all seriousness - where are the major works of dance that use Xtechnolgy that have been taken seriously by the art critics/writers besides BIPED? Maybe in Europe but I am asking about the US? Is it because we that are making these works aren't "famous" enough to draw the attention? Is is because the works aren't "good" enough? Are they being judged by standards of dance without Xtechnology - meaning do people know how to experience these works - as one of our dancers writes "to only see the piece as a piece in older modes of thought, however beautiful, instead of trying to think through the challenges and opportunities that these new technologies bring? They may not be new in terms of the last 30 years, but they certainly are in terms of thought and dance history. And finally -are we a movement?? >>> The responses , e.g. from Kent, and Jeff, and now from Doug, urge us to look at our situation and whatever has taken off in light of our histories (I completely agree with Doug) and thus in light of the contexts in which we work, and in which the work is seen, and in which discourses form around intermedia-works. Doug's reference to "Experimental Intermedia " is very helpful, and also his discussion of Sally Banes's book or role (small correction, Sally's book, published in 1993, was titled "Greenwich Village 1963 - Avant-garde performance and the Effervescent Body," and it indeed was more of a cultural history than a dance criticism book, it explicitly tries to paint a portrait of convergences at the time, within that specific political moment, convergences of new ideas/practices in off off Broadway theatre, happenings, fluxus, pop art, underground film, and dance...............) That palette should give us pause (also, remember that Phill Niblock is a musician) - and the important issues you mention, Doug, about video art for example, also ought to give us pause to rethink our own relations or shifting positions vis à vis these histories of performance/art and media, since we do operate in a dance historical continuum, but if you look at the trajectories, they are very mixed up. For example, there is no resaon why we would h a v e to see ourselves as operating in the "dance world." You can present your work in numerous other contexts. If you come from a dance training and choreographic background, or a theatrical background, you can still see the continuum in different ways. I used to think of my work as multimedia performance, and working with movement and dancers meant for me, 10 years ago, that I was inspired by film/video, as I am today by design and architecture, and back then I was trying to sort out my continuum by reflecting on the history of performance (having discovered many interesting strategies of artistic form in multimedia works by Bob Wilson, Mabou Mines, Wooster Group, Squat, John Jesurun, Pina, and others but really needing to work out my relationship to the visual arts and music and film) --- so re-discovering a tradition of experimentation meant understanding where performance art came from, and in Europe, as well as in the US, it was always more closely centered in visual art, and here many fascinating trajectories open up, also in Japan, in Latin America - if you think of the participatory work of Hélio Oiticica or Lygia Clark, back in the 50s/60s). So I think each of us may have different traces; for example I find it fascinating that some of the Bauhaus people (although working in visual arts) created dance experiments [Schlemmer, Kandinsky]; or think of the history of sound experiments (cf. Douglas Kahn, "Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts; or Hazel Smith/Roger Dean, "Improvisation Hypermedia and the Arts since 1945"), or art experiments with technology that have been going on for ever (and here "ars electronica" just continues the continuum, and when we think of our group here, we are actually perhaps closer to some of the conceptual experimentations in media and electronic arts that are described in, say, Timothy Druckrey (ed), "Ars Electronica: Facing the Future," or the book by Peter Lunenfeld, "The Digital Dialectic," up to the new book by Lev Manovich, "The Language of New Media," Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2001 -- he starts out with Dziga Vertov!). So I partly agree with Doug, it is not helpful to think of dance & technology as a movement, and certainly not as a revolution or avant-garde. Nor is it helpful to think of it as dance. We produce hybrid multimedia work which in many ways may be movement-based or -derived. But we are n o t a minor subgenre of dance. Now, this may confuse our affiliations, which is good. But I think we are part of a major development during the last century to think of performance processes and collaborations that interweave genres and visualizations of ideas, conceptual matters, in movement, video, sound, word, design, etc., with the use of media/technologies a given, since they are part of the toolbox. That "dance technology" has created very few works that are interesting and aesthetically eye-opening should worry us at times, no? So now, what does this mean? Doug argues: <<When a movement positions itself as revolutionary expectations are extraordinarily high. Video Art in its inception was positioned as an egalitarian art form intent on democratizing culture. It failed miserably. That does not mean that much good and important work was not and it not still being made. The success of some video artists in becoming mainstream artists confounded the notion of democracy and video as a tool for social change.>>> Interesting point. Dance & Technology tends to be underpoliticized, for sure, it has no vision, utopian or otherwise, and certainly no manifesto. It therefore cannot have any cultural impact that would be equivalent to the debates or cultural reactions/receptions that we have seen in architecture or pop or techno or film. It cannot have any impact on writers and reviewers either since we have not generated a significant discourse around the issues. Just think of the red herring of interactivity. There was a vital political effect, I think, that came out of the 60s interventions practiced by visual artists through actions/performances, or how else could I explain to myself the role that Joseph Beuys had in Europe? But even his role may have been confined to the art world, and not the popular culture. Today's more interesting experiments in mediated art may happen again in the art world or the net, parallel to the music industry which has a much wider appeal globally. Independent film is marginal. Dance is miniscule on the barometer of experimentation. Complex experiments in design/installation (virtual words, interactive installations, mixed reality works, telepresence works, robotic works) will interest the technology industry (software development, commercial applications, animation/film, game industry, pornography industry, business performance) more so than the art world or the general audience. So we may have to discuss the question of intervention/participation, perhaps starting at the institutional level, or the venue level (where you exhibit). Or the question of conditions of production, and how we produce (Kent's fine comment on "Beta releases, artistically!), and for whom. I certainly didn't think my brief comment on "Wearable Computers" would bring this up, I was basically amused, at our own inability, it appears, to generate a more significant and thoughtful impact on writing and journalism. The journalists, of course, might have to reflect on history too, as suggested above, since interface design has little to do with saxophones; on the other hand, we most likely don't produce work that can be compared to the level of experimentation in Wagner, Strawinsky, Cage, Zimmermann, Wilson (he just got bashed for his choreography for "Siegfried") or the "Victory over the Sun" collaborators in Russia back in 1913), or closer at hand, nor does much of our work engage the politics of feminist, queer, Chicano, black or postcolonial visual artists, and the point about "Biped" is well taken, but obscures the fact that Merce has been experimenting for 40 years, and Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar have spent a considerable amount of time and thought on developing these collaborations and what they wanted to get out of them. Incidentally, Doug (re: analog video), most of my students in the dance lab have not held a camera in their hands before, so it's a first time encounter with video, projection, editing, framing, etc. This will take time to (re-)enter choreograpy or performance or movement or design. Trisha Brown dancing with a film projector strapped to her back? History, remembered by very few. greetings Johannes Birringer OSU/AlienNation Co. http://aliennationcompany,com
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