WebPage Act l, ll, lll

WebPage Act l, ll, lll
Creator	Joana Chicau
Year	2016
Bio	Joana Chicau [PT] is a communication designer, with a background in performance - classical ballet and later contemporary dance. In her practice she investigates the possible connections between – and coexistence of – choreography and graphic design, aiming to open the possibility to unveil new aesthetic, energetic and social dimensions of design production processes.
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Website	http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl/~jo/notebook/series/series_thinkinginaction.html

Choreography as a tool for a wider conceptual, perceptual, experimental view of code for graphic design. Choreography as a way to rethink space, time, and composition structures in web environments. Choreography as a rule-finding/rule-escaping practice. Choreography as an instrument for questioning the conditions, protocols and procedures of composition processes in design. Choreography as a counter-move, a counter-apparatus, force reverted. Choreographing design started as cross-referencing of composition methods, with the aim to transcend the boundaries between the fields of choreography and graphic design. This research led to her project ‘WebPage Act I, II and III’, an assemblage of graphic experiments in a live performance setting combining principles of choreography with the formal structures of coding.

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“The term ‘choreography has gone viral. In the last five years it has suddenly mobilized as a general referent for any structuring movement, not necessarily the movement of human beings. Choreography can stipulate both the kinds of actions performed and their sequence or progression. (…) Sometimes designating minute aspects of movement, or alternatively, sketching out the broad contours of action within which variation might occur, choreography constitutes a plan or score according to which movement unfolds. Building choreograph space and people’s movement throughout them. (…) Web services choreograph interfaces; and even existence is choreographed. Choreography, then would seem to apply to the structuring of movement in highly diverse diverse occasion, yet always where some kind of order or desired to regulate that movement,“ (Rosenthal et al, 2010)

Choreographing design is a starting point in how to relate to my interests as an individual to my design practice and to the current technological media culture. As I mentioned before, digital media apparatus represent a network of people, politics, aesthetics, economies. The computer is the device most explored in my practical work as a designer, and the computer screen as it is conventionally presented carries a very particular mode of spectatorship. I am interested in the relationship between the user and the visual system he/she encounters, and to challenge the tensions between stasis and the ability to move, materiality and immateriality, and the different perceptual experiences that may arise from the act of viewing and interacting with it.

An important point in developing my project towards a live setting was the question of presence: being here and now. Breaking the distancing between mind/body, self/other, subject/object, designer/design piece; discovery/invention. This way, enhancing the idea of process over product: processes of becoming, becoming structures, becoming in the form of words, text, visuals, graphics. Simultaneously the actions throughout the composition process are being stored in the history of the computer, making it possible to re-create it.

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  JoanaChicau Performance Setting

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