Olá list, I've not posted for a long long time, so here is something. I was very lucky to be passing by London at the time of Dance Umbrella's Virtual Encarnations 2002 and be able to stay for most of the events thanks to Gislaine Boddington and Estelle Neveux of Future Physical. In addition, I was also pleased to meet several dancetech artists and discuss their work. Overall my stay in London is having a tremendous influence in my phd research for providing the crucial contact with current work and artists. That's why I'm going to to back between December 5 - 8 for the Future Physical's Wear Me! Network Exchange. Interestingly right after is the Monaco Dance Forum 10 - 14. For programmes look up http://www.futurephysical.org and http://www.mddf.com. Hope to see many of you there. I hope to soon also be able to post another report on Cosign 2002 (2-4 September), which I attended in full, presented a paper and participated in the dancetech panel with Robert Wesler and Frieder Weis of Palindrome. Best wishes to all, Isabel ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Isabel Valverde Department of Dance University of California Riverside, CA 92521 USA Commented Report on Virtual Encarnations 2002 - Live Chat Room 14th September 2002, ICA THeatre, London, 10:30 - 5 pm Focus on collaborative/interauthorship processes With Merce Cunningham, Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, Shabana Jeyasingh, Paul Kaiser, Marie Claude Poulin, and Martin Kusch. Moderated by Gislaine Boddington (shinkansen/ResCen) The Live Chat Room followed the pre-established plan beginning with presentations by each artist/team and their collaboration work, Merce Cunningham making a short appearance. After lunch there was some discussion about issues related to different work approaches to the use of tech in art making, later open to the (scarce) 'live' audience. In general, to Gislaine Boddington and I bet most people's surprise, to the exception of Kondition Pluriel, the participants were still skeptical about the recent concepts of interactivity - one-to-one responses, non-linear narrative, and even the meaning of installation. Linked were contrasting if not opposing positions towards the possibility of emerging vocabulary and ways to talk about the work, issues to do with content versus tech or less dichotomic reasons to do the work, the body-tech interface or its replacement, natural versus manipulated movement, work for stage or/and public participation, with or against the epistemological shift, kinesthesia versus visuality, and the variable access to technology. In my opinion the participants' postures sketch out specific trends in the overall future visions and methodologies in this hybrid art field. Maybe not just but also because of the small 'live' audience, I wondered where was London's digital dance 'community.' I feel lots of politics of presence and support going on when it comes to relations between artists and arts organizations. I wonder why the discussion wasn't open to the web audience as well, rather than only being web casted? A web window could have been open or people could have called posing questions or make comments. Or then, if this choice is exactly part of Future Physical's politics of enmeshing live and virtual bodies, should the Dance Umbrella promoters be blamed for doing a weak job? But still, these are just a few of the possible reasons for this event's reduced attendance. To Gislaine Boddington, director of shinkansen and moderator of this Live Chat Room, this initiative wants to continue to explore the essential political importance of local and distant connectivity through video conferencing/internet communication; The freedom of speech through all media exchange; The right to transmit everything and continue to use that freedom of exchange and what and how we want to say, bridging geographical distances but acknowledging the time differences. On the linked continuous problem of the access to the needed technology it was indicated that whereas corporations have the technology, most artists have to beg for funding to lend it. Financially as a choreographer you just have the theatre. The call was made for the need of investment in the theatre and art center infrastructures, a permanently installed workstation and more following the club scene and some universities, or it will be very hard to find collaboration or funding, and to create more venues allover the world. Ex: African choreographers in Kenya, South Africa, Burkina Faso need and want to be in connection. What is uniting the efforts is the belief in dance's important inputs and impact in the visual media; the idea that virtual dance is not replacing dance but changing the way we perceive (and do) dance. Ex: Forsythe's algorithm thinking, into choreography, and Cunningham's concept of dance as a visual art, live and on the screen or choreographing with Lifeforms. Although of fundamental importance and with Boddington's outstanding moderation, summarizing, and facilitation, I think the live chat got rooted in buzzed content words like collaborative/interauthorship processes without getting into the depth it required. Whose fault? Besides staying superficial and basic, it showed, to the exception of Jeyasingh, a western viewpoint mainly referring to the London local community. Out of the discussion regarding the emphasized politics was, for instance, the 'labor' implicit in the intercultural potential of tech and its application and impact from other cultures' positioning on this mater. Although lacking address on the collaboration theme of the chat, this was an obvious aspect of discussion. Based on the artists' presentation of their work, the collaboration between Merce Cunningham and Kaiserworks (Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eskkar (what about Michael Girard?)) and Mark Downie (of MIT) followed the two previous works hand-drawn spaces and biped. Riverbed asked Cunningham to 'collaborate' in their work tools and after the results Cunningham invites them to collaborate in Fluid Canvas producing the animated scenario based on Pools' imagery and other animals' mocap moves. Their 'collaboration' process seemed to follow more strictly the choreographer's separated way of working with visuals artists and musicians, only juxtaposing all elements at the time and space of the performance. In this type of collaboration based on chance procedures the length of the piece was the only restriction/rule. Therefore, there are no intentional connections between the different arts as well as within the choreographic construction, focusing on its autonomy, the interaction between the elements being only experienced 'live' by the participants and perceived by the audience. (Compared to musical ways of making the composition clear for electronic instruments/sounds - John Cage's visual notation added to the whole and changed everything - as a way to account for the noise sound no longer physical. 40 years ago when Cunningham was for the first time invited to collaborate with an electronic music composition he couldn't count as he was used to do with other music, so he went and did the dance based only on the time duration of the piece of music - and this started his by chance method of assembling different movements/elements.) Making a short appearance to talk once more about his choreographic vision and practice using digital technologies, Cunningham made his affinity with this medium clear by considering the computer and dance as things you look at. The visual was his first (automatic) connection between the two mediums. Not by talking, but seeing through this possibility with tech allow additions into movement to come about. Whereas first Cunningham would try himself, later he would choreograph through "Lifeforms" as at one point he was unable to teach the movement to the dancers through physical transmission. In the process of learning the Lifeforms movement he sees all kinds of movement possibilities never thought of or thought impossible, making things happen which couldn't otherwise. If one of the dancers got the movement then he knew it was possibly as dancers pick it up in various degrees - visually. And with the practice, the dancers are able to get it faster and remember it adapting to a new visually mediated method of learning by looking at the computer animation and trying to embody it. Focused on visual moving models rather than having the choreographer performing and describing its initiation, Cunningham then continues to alter the dance tradition dramatically. Is this a matter of replacement or of multiplicity of different channels of working influencing each other, even if we keep thinking they are separated? His process came about by looking at the skeleton from mocap or even Lifeforms renderings. "There are still things we can do but our mind gets in the way of what is possible. The only way to do it is to do it, and with tech it becomes more visible as you find out limits and things you don't know" (B - providing a deeper understanding of our body?) Revealing new things through the doing there is a crossover moving choreography and dancers into virtual realm and the virtual realm into the real. To Cunningham the purpose of art is to see your world different, being aware of the world's things from another awareness. Regarding the collaboration among the digital artists, from their statements it seems that they have a very solitary work as well, contacting mostly over long distant. (Kaiser directing?) Although they affirmed to have a three way very fructuous conversation it is interesting to note their conflicting visions towards the work in terms of whether approaching it from a visual or choreographic perspective of dealing with moving bodies in the computer graphic domain. Kaiserworks represented the visual/digital art straightforward approach from a more conventional modernist angle. Their interest is to detach the movement from the physical body into the virtual domain, via its abstraction and visual aesthetics; refusal of interactivity without knowledge (?) or interest in more fruitful possibilities other than one-to-one (user-computer) responsiveness. Instead, the emphasis is going towards algorithmic research to create a more autonomous (AI) pieces of visual media work which includes the improvisation of the machine in assembling and combining the given data. Rather than hybridizing the arts the aim is on keeping their distinct development. Specialization? Kaiser was provocative when questioning the possibility of non-linear narrative, interactivity and what not (the whole paradigm shift). To Kaiser it seems to be a matter of constructing aesthetically pleasing pieces of artwork keeping the geniality of the artist intact. This even if or even because his is an art for the masses either in the theatre, the gallery, or the street. To Mark Downie (a PhD student at MIT) the most pertinent point was the importance of content to drive the work, to build the tech systems rather than only changing them superficially. This approach denotes also the privileged (American?) position where the collaborators have it all, the knowledge, the funds, the space, and specially the technologies to build the envisioned 'tools,' leaving the great majority of artists outside of this work context. Yes we could say that this shouldn't prevent artists to build their own systems but would this prevent from doing interesting and valuable work? Kondition Pluriel on the other hand, emphasized the utility of using previously existing technologies, much like assembling disperse pieces adapting them to the specific piece at hand and allow the work to develop in integration with tech. Martin Susch and Marie Claude Poulin have an interest in developing new thinking about the body in space. Poulin feels spoiled for profiting from over 20 years' expansion of ideas, such as the independence of dance as an art form, thanks to artists like Cunningham. She learned to see the body as an aspect of the nervous system through a deep practical understanding of the body as this system through Kinanthropology. Finding no big difference between other forms/mediums and the body as technological tool, in her investment on installations and body-tech interfaces, she was attracted to work on the body but with new ways of approaching. Susch's background is in video, media arts. His installations started very simple with camera tracking and video, scratching step by step to find a language to communicate. Throughout their 2 years of collaboration close attention has been given to balance media and movement choreography using technology. The need to defined a language through the concept of movement projections. Always moving with forward and backward steps, with a media proposition and how to bring it into space. Live media and space as a choreographic installation. Scheme II's work and process develops 5 media propositions, starting with no data and building it up through the performance. It also uses prerecorded video material (to take away of the calibration) a 3d virtual representation of the building where the performance happens. Theirs is an architectural connection between the inner space of dancers' bodies and the outer space of the spatial context. Through the use a set of about 24 accelerometer sensors in head, leg, and forearms used and interpreted differently, the micro/felt movement of the inner body and its macro outer expression into space projections actualizes the here of the body and the somewhere else of the mind? Kondition Pluriel represented the effort of dance and visual/digital artists to pursue a common research from concept to practice about the interface of body and digital medium, the inner and the outer space architectures. Their close collaboration on all aspects and layers of the creative process, develops step by step with the attention to the delicate balance between an increasing number of elements of the choreographic and digital interactivity. Shobana Jeyasingh is a mature Indian-British choreographer moving into the new media. In her new work she will use real time telematic communication to work on the moving link between London and India, as one of the two dancers will be in India interacting with one in London. Using web casting and building the tech needed to access the theatre and Bangalore, in her new work Jeyasingh wants to focus on social impact of digital connections in the survival of family networks living a diasporic existence. The idea of new identities crossovers from people moving around the world, since emigration patterns are not a conscious but more practical attitude. Changing the way people live, "in India mothers get found of their laptops" to get a hold of their family dispersed over the world - the family network is the new way of keeping in touch. It makes the living possible through this technology. It is a phenomenon reaching all the generations or even more the older, the family keepers. In contrast she noted that as spoiled westerns 'we' actually can reject technology because we have the privileged access. It becomes more an everyday tool. Ex: video conferencing facilities - research for her web cast needs. While between colleagues of the same corporation they have the finances but don't use it - claiming not to be the perfect situation. Whereas even going back to using the telephone, to Indian families it is a survival tool/role as for instance is the only way the elders can see their newborn grandchildren. Because of Jeyasingh's move, I was surprised about her question on interaction, installation, denoting a refusal or resistance to the transformations/amplifications undergone by these terms within the digital domain. This questioning reveals the impasse we can fall if the new meanings for older vocabulary as well as new terms don't become accepted as a shared language and the basis to discourse. The resistance or refusal to understand the specificities of language vocabulary typical of new media can also be due to lack of information on the very politics this process of signification have undergone, and the confusion brought up by the appropriation of traditional terms giving them a different meaning. Doesn't this mean an epistemological shift affecting semantics? One thing is true, even without using tech in the works they inevitably imply an integration or dilemma with it because of its presence and role of in our lives. And it has been this presence or the resistance to it that have been enabling us to re-question the very purposes of live, and the role and place of all technologies including the ones we didn't know we embodied and without which, like the perceptive languages, we couldn't even be what we are. Do we need to get back to the basics all the time? To question interactivity, installation, etc? This only reflects the need to still understand what we mean by these concepts nowadays, and the transformational aspect of spoken and written language as everything else. Otherwise take a position upon it. Only after these understanding or questioning can we go further in what we believe to be purposeful to engage with, be it with or without 'tech,' but always integrating what their presence makes us more aware of our - virtuality - spirituality, imagination, our embodiment, and what encompasses our face-to-face communication. Maybe with this awareness we will be able to know more about bodies/ourselves, due to the lack of it, (as with organ malfunction, or a strike) and acknowledge the crucial importance of other than the logical and rational mind functioning, etc, that is, the bodily based contact normally ignored or diminished, at the end of the hierarchical chain where speech is on top. The discussion followed with the old revelation of the myth of interactivity by Kaiser, whereas Kondition Pluriel is headed to their prolific research in terms of interdisciplinaractivity. Kaiser argued against the silly use of one-to-one interaction in many of the installations and performances and, after all still trying to generate some sort of active influence of the visitor into Loops, they gave up not finding anything interesting. With Kaiserworks/Cunningham the collaboration is separated maintaining its visual dominance and emphasis even if juxtaposing the different disciplines. Although including kinesthetic reactions for being about movement, this is not the focus of the work as in Poulin/Kusch's project where kinesthesia rather than visuality is expanded to the screens. Of course all the works involving bodies include kinesthesia, vision as well as all the other perceptive experiences and representations. All the elements are present at all times but what defines the overall work is where the emphasis is, and normally with the impact of digital tech it is mostly on visuality, a resistance to it or a combination of both. The emphasis or stress depends on the movement, the choreographic approach and the work's concept. I think that in the cases presented of collaboration between dance and digital technologies there was a clear evidence of, on one side the visuals - the dancing body as moving image (Cunningham's concept of direct connection between dance and visual arts), and Kondition Pluriel's emphasis on kinesthesia - the actualization of performers' inner body sensations and its expansion to the specific outer space context. About the relation with the product and process oriented work, whereas KP is about the process of continuous research extended to each time their work is installed and performed in a certain space (it's site specific orientation as a way to assure this intent), C/K's process is oriented to the production of a visual end product as with Loops, even if the piece plays with AI improvisation and infinite data recombination based on algorithms. Although Fluid Canvas and Sheme II, are both media and live (multilayered), in C/K's Fluid canvas the elements are juxtaposed with purposeful no direct relation to their process of construction whereas in Sheme II the integrative performance of elements of the different elements reflects the artists' quest for the role of technology in expanding the body's knowledge and understanding of its processes. Bringing attention to the inner-outer body partnering with tech they offer the audience the process of actualizing the very experience of the virtual, and of virtualizing the physical body experience. Therefore, KP strongly believes in the importance of a research in interactivity/responsiveness through technology to further the dialog between performers and media, as well as the work and the audience. The work is both developing the nervous network between the body and tech, as well as between the work and the audience. (Isn't this related with the AI research?) The work of digital artists such as Susch at KP is an example of working in close dialogue with the dancers, assembling the right materials (cables, connections sensors, transmissors/receptors, etc,) to make the right connections linking the performers' body and computer system, as well as intricate programming/choreographing of the relation between the dancers' movement, and the selection and movement of the media (sound and video). In Scheme II these connections are continuously evolving in increasingly complex ways, with the addition of elements and combinations of parameters throughout its various sections. Discussing the unstable and unsystematic link between dancer and digital apparatus, Poulin questioned - "how am I changing as a dancer?" She referred the process of learning to work with this tech implies sharing the tools between performer and digital artist. To the most heard responses like: "I feel a don't have no body" during the (impact of) the first body-tech interface experiences, Poulin explained that is a consequence of focusing outside, in the visual or aural effect generated by the movement, resulting in the sense that the body disappears - "I don't know how to do it." Confronted with this situation of erasure of the body, many dancers distance themselves and stop instead of trying to surpass this first altered experience. To Poulin who, like other performers, continues the challenge of keep trying to adapt to this new state, she said that there is "The need of forgetting the technology is there, bringing it to the back of the mind" while focusing on dancing. "It is there but not in the first degree relation nor in an one-to-one connection." It's a process of learning to work with it to build and wear the right gear, and to bring the experience into a stage environment. To Boddington's question about what kind of new vocabulary is emerging with the work, there were as well contrary opinions. Kaiser responded and supported by Cunningham that this is a non-verbal vocabulary only by looking and doing. But, to Boddington's further reference to the present discussion and research in places like RESCEN about acknowledging the difficult verbal articulation of processes that are non-verbal Jeyasingh argued that giving shape to the link between the work and verbalization changes the work itself. It's a new take, a new process of creativity. To her this approach is a conscious reflection moving away from the romantic idea of the artist as the doer towards including a capacity to rationalize the creative process. Is this a new hybrid interest instead of the division between artists, and critics or theoreticians? Here I see and it has been noted an increasing interest in artists involvement in theory and the various art and knowledge traditions implied in their work as well as the reverse. This I think it is at the core of the new discourses both artistic and theoretical. This new research concept is palpable with the seemingly advent of trends, such as conceptual art into the art of computer prototypes, of the importance of the idea, of the political involvement as required part of the works content. But attention, total emphasis in content if of this nature only can actually kill the work as the criteria of quality, in my opinion, should include the aesthetic production from conception through process and output. On the other 'side' the theoreticians need to try to understand the artists' works by, if not also producing work, at least have an inside experience of its making and the interfaces involved. The discussion denoted a variable level of friction or even incommunicability between what I consider representative artistic strains, denoting the artists' specific disciplinary or interdisciplinary attachment to choreographic, visual, and/or 'dancetech' (trends) artistic communities, they see themselves integrated. Thus, it showed how complex art and digital technologies realm is becoming, begging for more critical theoretical analysis and questioning that helps compare and relate the different developments and their implications to the continuous changes of this hybrid field. Although artists are no more naïve about their integration in the art world and society, as Jeyasingh pointed out, they don't normally take the responsibility to reflect and theorize about the general development of different artworks and their different connections with other cultural and scientific realms of research. Like the role played by Boddington and shinkansen in this live chat room series, there is the need of intermediaries to bring people together to share their thoughts about their work widely, to confront each other, the organization of more festivals where different artistic propositions in this area are presented and intersected. Only coming together is it possible to perceive the relations and commonalities of the works being developed and the concerns they raise. There seems to still be a strong connection to Marshall McLuhan's acknowledgement that the content of the new medium is mostly another (previous) medium, and that this use of the medium can blind us of its very character. In observing a quite different amount of works I realize that not only new digital media is used by all subjects regardless their artistic background and aesthetics, thus including traditional trends, but it also can perpetuate old ideas as revealing new ones. The modernist ideal of transcendence, of expanding the human being with the help of new technologies is tricky only because one needs to know what sort of evolution and aesthetic posture are we aiming towards. And is here that different or opposing concepts and practices confront each other. Almada, October 2002 --_-1176110473ma-- ---------------------------------------- The Dance-Tech mailing list has recently moved to a new address. To post a message, send email to dance-tech@dancetechnology.org. To unsubscribe, send email to lists@dancetechnology.org, with the words "unsubscribe dance-tech" in the message body. ----------------------------------------
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