RESEARCH GROUP: MOUVEMENT

A research group composed of Katia, Ana and Ugo.

What is Movement? Space, Time, Memory (broader analysis - Philosophy of motion)

How do we experience, understand and manipulate  movement ? 

How do we deal with the extensive amount of definitions and approaches that movement produces ? 

How do we move within this diversity?

How does this diversity fuel and orient artistic practices toward unexplored spaces ?

1- MOVEMENT & SOCIETIES

How does movement affects individuals and societies ?

How individuals and societies produce movement?

Reading list:

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 2012 (Sociology, Emancipation, Migration, Liquidity) http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Ugo/liquidmodernity

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1907 & Matter & Memory 1896 (Cinematic brain, Duration, Matter, Memory, Universe)

Bateson Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972 http://ejcj.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/1972.-Gregory-Bateson-Steps-to-an-Ecology-of-Mind.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2Vr19BkziXhhNBG9jyj__8YnsufjAXq1dRXA31h0cReGZKsQuGPdPf5Kk

Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age, 2014 https://cup.columbia.edu/book/everyone-dies-young/9780231175890

Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, 1991 http://www.rybn.org/ANTI/ADMXI/documentation/ALGORITHM_DOCUMENTATION/QUANTUM_V/PARALLELISM/HOLOGRAPHIC_UNIVERSE/1991_Michael_Talbot_-_The_Holographic_Universe.pdf

Non-Lieux de l'Exil, Collective Research on Exil https://nle.hypotheses.org

Alexis Nuselovic, Exiliance: Condition & Consciousness http://www.fmsh.fr/en/node/24595

2- MOVEMENT & ARTISTIC PRACTICES

Does this diversity of perspectives can re-orient our artistic research / practice toward unexplored spaces ?

How can the movement be translated in artistic practices? Can we encourage expression through forms of movement? Does movement encourages expression?

Which tools can human use to perceive the movement in a different way or recognise the invisible?

How can an artist adapt the space and means to affect the (cultural, physical, imaginary) movement?

How can we adjust the speed of movement trough artistic media? 

How can we amplify the sensing of movement? 

How can the movement be controlled?

Reading list:

Douglas Kahn, Noise water meat, 1999 https://monoskop.org/images/9/91/Kahn_Douglas_Noise_Water_Meat_A_History_of_Sound_in_the_Arts_no_OCR.pdf 

Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise, From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond, 2017 http://www.wordsinspace.net/shannon-archive-2017/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Mattern_MakingNoise.pdf

Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images, 1971 https://monoskop.org/images/c/c2/Wenders_Wim_The_Logic_of_Images_Essays_and_Conversations.pdf 

Etienne Souriau, Time in the plastic arts 1949 http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Ugo/methods/session3

Frances Yates, The Art of Memory

SPACE/TIME  The Chicago School of Media Theory

SESSION 2

20.03.2019

This session is organized in two steps:

1- A collective lecture of Gregory Bateson’s ‘’The Epistemology of Cybernetics”(1972), led by Steve. This helps to unpack key concepts develop by G.Bateson, like those of feedback theory, the transition from the theory of energy to the theory of information, the transformation of differences into messages, the link between behavior and the process of thought, the immanence nature of the mind, the screen of consciousness and the conception of memory as a time course. Another benefit of this clarification is that it allows us to link Bateson's ideas with thinkers i.e: Margareth Mead, Vilem Flusser, Claude Levi-Strauss, Henri Bergson. The work of Gregory Bateson seems unavoidable for an understanding of contemporary global networks (neural, informational).

Bateson Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972 http://ejcj.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/1972.-Gregory-Bateson-Steps-to-an-Ecology-of-Mind.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2Vr19BkziXhhNBG9jyj__8YnsufjAXq1dRXA31h0cReGZKsQuGPdPf5Kk

2- A individual reading session focus on exploring and extracting possible definitions of movement within the frame of The Philosophy of Motion.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-theories/

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/aztec-philosophy-understanding-a-world-in-motion/

3- ANA:

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind - synopsys

http://ejcj.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/1972.-Gregory-Bateson-Steps-to-an-Ecology-of-Mind.pdf

The mind creates the world that we perceive on a physical and psychological level. It is the command control, a self-regulating system of our movement through our lifetime space adapting itself to the outside stimulations, possibilities and boundaries. Our understanding of body movement and space recognition is based not only on physical senses; those are strongly connected with our psychological experience. It is necessary for human mind to constantly challenge the perception-determining beliefs to find new ways mind-expanding while observing and acting in order to learn, upgrade and adapt our mind movements in the intellectual climate. If applied, those mind-movements may someday possibly lead humans to a better approach of ecological and social responsibility and defining new scientific territories while making progress in our mind-evolution, which is today more urgent than ever.

Aldous Huxley explains the man lost’ his ‘’grace’’ which animals and God still have, because human behavior is corrupted by deceit or even self-deceit and is capable of internal confusions. Bateson argues that art is a part of man’s quest: ‘’…I argue that art is a part of man's quest for grace; some-times his ecstasy in partial success, sometimes his rage and agony at failure. I argue also that there are many species of grace within the major genus; and also that there are many kinds of failure and frustration and departure from grace. No doubt each culture has its characteristic species of grace toward which its artists strive, and its own species of failure. Some cultures may foster a negative approach to this difficult integration, an avoidance of complexity by crass preference either for total consciousness’’ (Bateson, 137-138)

The grace is a problem of the integration of diverse parts of mind–the multiple levels if consciousness and unconsciousness. The art of a culture can have meanings and validity in a totally different culture because it is the expression of the grace and psychic integration and the outcome can be recognizable across cultural barriers. The frustration of integration can be identified by the cross-cultural recognition and the form of information of physic integration is coded in artwork. So how do we recognize the artistic pursuit of grace through the code of artwork in different cultures? "Le style est l'homme meme " ("The style is the man him-self") (Buffon).

Bateson is not interested in finding the meaning of coded message, but about the most general meaning of the chosen code. We can understand ‘’meaning’’ as an approximate synonym of pattern, information, redundancy and restraint. ‘’Any aggregate of events or objects (e.g., a sequence of phonemes, a painting, or a frog, or a culture) shall be said to contain "redundancy" or "pattern" if the aggregate can be divided in any way by a "slash mark," such that an observer perceiving only what is on one side of the slash mark can guess, with better than random success, what is on the other side of the slash mark. We may say that what is on one side of the slash contains information or has meaning about what is on the other side. Or, in engineer's language, the aggregate contains "redundancy." Or, again, from the point of view of a cybernetic observer, the information available on one side of the slash will restrain (i.e., reduce the probability of) wrong guessing. (Bateson, 140) The characteristic of an art object is strongly connected with the characteristic or rest of the culture. What sorts of relationships can be defined in this situations? We can change our focus of attention from smaller to largest universe/units of message material and the combination of a message and our perception can constitute a message about personal relations. But still there is the complex layering of consciousness and unconsciousness that creates difficulties when we try to discuss art or ritual or mythology.

‘’The matter of levels of the mind has been discussed from many points of view, at least four of which must be mentioned and woven into any scientific approach to art: (1) Samuel Butler's insistence that the better an organism "knows" something, the less conscious it becomes of its knowledge, i.e., there is a process whereby knowledge (or "habit" —whether of action, perception, or thought) sinks to deeper and deeper levels of the mind. This phenomenon, which is central to Zen discipline (cf. Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery), is also relevant to all art and all skill. (2) Adalbert Ames' demonstrations that the conscious, three-dimensional visual images, which we make of that which we see, are made by processes involving mathematical premises of perspective, etc., of the use of which we are totally unconscious. Over these processes, we have no voluntary control. A drawing of a chair with the perspective of van Gogh affronts the conscious expectations and, dimly, reminds the consciousness of what had been (unconsciously) taken for granted. (3) The Freudian (especially Fenichel's) theory of dreams as metaphors coded according to primary process. I shall consider style—neatness, boldness of contrast, etc.—as metaphoric and therefore as linked to those levels of the mind where primary process holds sway. (4) The Freudian view of the unconscious as the cellar or cupboard to which fearful and painful memories are con-signed by a process of repression.’’ (Bateson, 144)

It’s common that any actual event is uniquely determined within the terms of cybernetics and it is a subject to restraints. ‘’Restraints’’ are factors, that determine inequality of probability and in many different shapes they combine an unique determination. Man’s brain in terms of cybernetics is continuously solving the clues (sources of information) to find solutions that will guide him in his selection. The ‘’thinking’’ system is self-corrective in regard to some of its internal variables. The cybernetic observer would call those information restrains. We have to consider also the stability of the system, which depends on the operational product and its transformation and the characteristic time. The restrictions or limitations of human brain are the information from the system which are immanent and he has to adapt its actions to its time characteristics and the effects of the past actions.

We cannot say the computer is a ‘’mental process’’, because is a part in a larger circuit which includes man in its environment, from which the information is taken and given back to obtain an actual effect.

The interest of the cybernetics are not objects or events, but an information that is carried by objects or events. It is a propositional or informational aspect of those matter subjects in the natural world.

Kahn Douglas: Noise, Water, Meat

About water and movement

John Cage’s Water Music in 1952 was one of the first works that moved toward theater and performance. Jackson Pollock was dripping and pouring paint over canvases laid flat on the ground. Both actions were a manifestation of movement, fluidity, water, sound, image and performance. It was a period of progressive dissolution of disciplinary constrains that spilled over to the next generation of artists, who came from many disciplinary and media backgrounds and start to work in a performative way. New performance modes known as happenings and events were set by Allan Kaprow and George Brecht. The ideas of the movement were fluidity, noise, performance, sidciplinary and media breakdown in contrast with the previous period, that was rigid, dry, inactive and silent. ‘’If we were to continue to divine water in arts, it would necessarily invoke an ecological self.consciousness, including the nature of the body, where materials and techniques themselves become political’’(Douglas, 224) Water was involved in John Cages performances, but it was also present in the conventional music as theatrical activity, for example, when a hornplayer empties his spit out from the horn. Vladimir Mayakovsky was dreaming to ‘’make the ocean waves pluck at strings stretched from Europe to America’’. (Douglas, 224). His unrealized idea has developed over more recent times a whole genre of long-stringed instruments.

My personal research on cybernetics:

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:~brumatana/Comparative_Criticism