Reflection on my practice - Trim Three

Title

Introduction Current Practice (resource: here you can use the descriptions of recent work)

Where does design and dance collide?

I have been working with graphic design and dance parallel to each others; and I started wondering how to intersect them both.

I have previously studied graphic design, and I am now exploring different media formats as well as extending my research strands towards a more phemenological approach. For this, I am taking my knowledge on dance practice and use it as means to reflect and create upon.

Here are some keywords / brainstorming of ideas I've been through: body language - performance - articulation - movement - sequences - patterns - choreography - structures - diagrams - grids - systems - codes - algorithm - hypertext - gramathology - visual statements - construction of narratives - communication - visualization of information - experience - perception - . speech and body.

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Relation to previous practice

How does your current work connect to previous projects you have done? (resource: here you can use a) the descriptions of older work b) extracts from your interview.)

At first, in the design field, I was mainly facing the “blank“ paper paradigma; Then, came the “blank“ screen. Both spaces for information display highly interest me. Most recently, a 3rd dimension to space intregated my practice. White space should not be considered merely 'blank' space, it is though an important element of design which enables the objects in it to exist; information display crosses multiple interfaces. At the moment I am most driven by the interaction between spatiality and movement of the body. My current research relies on movement as an agent for communication, a sensory motor for understanding the world around us, bringing consciousness in focus. Communication in its definition relies on movement, as the instance/act of transmitting information to people by using different means.

Following my background in dance and performance, I am willing to investigate further on sense experience and how knowledge is achieved by the interrelation between

brain - body - world.

“There are differences between the chalk and the rest of the universe, between the chalk and the sun or the moon. And within the piece of chalk, there is for every molecule an infinite number of differences between its location and the locations in which it might have been. Of this infinitude, we select a very limited number, which become information. In fact, what we mean by information—the elementary unit of information—is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them.” - Gregorory Bateson

Relation to a larger context

As part of my theoretical research I have been investigating on different philosophical strands that focus on experience, such as empiricism, a fundamental philosophical position that claims all knowledge arrives directly from sense experience; and most lately phenomenology the study of our experience — how we experience.

As for the study of how different disciplines deal with experience, I have been looking at the fluxus and the "instructions" avant gard movement, conceptual art, minimalism, as well as performance art, and choreography in dance. It is of my interest how in this practices the role of the body in human experience is emphasized, the tecniques and technologies applied.

As for understanding the topics above, some of my main sources have been motionbank.org and sarma.be; and a more historical approach athttp://www.ubu.com/dance/index.html .

I have also been looking at some digital archival initiatives specific from dance companies, and what has been made within the motion capture and choreographic dance techniques, for both "storing" body information and as means of compositional technique. To be mentioned William Forsythe and his studies on choreographics objets; and another on going project of great importance is Thinking with the body: Mind and movement by Wayne McGregor (Random Dance: http://wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/thinking-with-the-body/?video=4)

I also visited If I can't dance archives, which gave me a good idea of how contemporary art practice is dealing with the concepts of performance and performativity. Some recent and relevant field trips, may included the performance/exhibition from Anne Theresa at Wiels, the video art exhibition "Dancing Light / Let it move you" at Huis Marseille and a "Art and Language" exhibition at MacBa. Besides assisting a few performances, a workshop with Simone Forti's team was very helpful to better understand choreographic methods and its further pratical use.

In my readings, on one hand I have been focusing on choreography and dance related practices. An example is the book "Moving without a body" by Stamatia Portanova, who presented an overall approach of dance towards technology, the friction between virtual and physical, both reflecting on virtual bodies, and within a cyborg perspective, as well as intermedia techniques in the performance realm.

Also studying the dance-technology Isabel Maria de Cavadas Valverde in "Interfaces Dance-Technology: A theoretical framework for performance in the digital domain", points out the integration of virtual into the physical and vice versa, naming artists designing practices as fluid and dynamic, instead of separate organic and mechanical entities.

On the other hand, reading texts related to language and representation system's. Deleuze and Guatari, Umberto Eco, Guy de Cointet, to name a few. As well as computation and software studie's related authors, to reflect on media usage.

Research strands

WHAT HOW WHY

on EXPERIENCE / MOVEMENT / Phemenology

Being movement (of the body) one of the central concepts in my research, as being something that defines how you relate and perceive the world, how you get information what of it, how you process it, how to make oneself conscious of different aspects we are surrounded by.

One of my references being Alva Noë, one of the theorists that inspired the EEC programme - Embodied Embedded Cognition, as to better support my recent projects and deepen my knowledge on my exisitng interest towards choreography and performance;

Noë investigates the structures of experience and consciousness (phenomenology); Presenting experience as the "basis of accessibility", allowing humans into "achieving access to the environment".

In an interview with Marlon Barrios Solano, part of the Embodied Techne Series (2012), Noë discusses "Dance As A Way Of Knowing".

He explores the idea that human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, in motion, as a way of being part of a larger process. Motion as "sensory motor understanding is what brings the world into focus for consciousness."

Noë highlights the fact that motion relies on a "temporally extended involvement", which enhances sensorial perception and consequently produces sensorial change: "transformations that happens in you while you go across the process; what is that transformation? Is understanding, is seeing connections, is knowing your way around."

Dance as a way to enact experience, thinking in motion - "dance in a sense of performance is an enactment or modeling of this fundamental fact about the world around us, which we dynamically interact with.".

In dance, along with similar kinesthetic experiences, the human body reaches an intense sensorial perceptual experience, composed of information from many places in the body, finding the need to have an understanding of/ control over of sensory consequences of their own movement. It can be seen either as personal, depending on the case- collective, confrontation - creating great awareness.

The question concerning corporeity connects also with Merleau-Ponty's reflections on space (l'espace) and the primacy of the dimension of depth (la profondeur) as implied in the notion of being in the world (être au monde; to echo Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein) and of one's own body (le corps propre).

A another reference on sense experience and humans perception is Brian Massumi's reflection on Feeling, Emotion and Affect on his book Parables of the Virtual, Movement, Affect, Sensation . “For Massumi, affect is precisely a matter of how intensities come together, move each other, and tranform and translate under and beyond meaning, semantics and fixed systems, cognitions. Part of the assumpstion here is that, even in the most reactionay circumstances, nothing happens if affective intensity has not already paid us a visit. This refines our understanding of why territory - spatial and temporal - is always “existential territory“. It has as much a territorry that enables movement as something that keeps everything in its place, it is movement itself.” Reading / Feeling - If I Can’t Dance Archives.

In my works developed throughout the trimester, such as the photobook, I have been positioning the viewer/spectator as the performer, proposing a tighter relation between communication artifact/interface and perceiver. SPACES - encyclopedia as a general space for knowledge. Some other prototyping experiments taken throuout this year, reflect on the virtual and physical space, space between the body and technology, as Susan Kozel focuses on the chiasm or "space between" bodies and mediated images, where perception and the notion of body / identity / subjectivity

on COMPOSITION /

A great number of researchers uses motion capture technologies and programming tools for both studying movement and generating new dance compostions.

Aready in use grahic user interfaces

I've been following my research on choreographic scores, and this stands by "writing movement". the communication system, that stands for movement, which is very rich: alphabet - linguistic, numbers - mathematics, even graphic elements. And all this to explain movement, which is something that is actually performed, acted, and that doesn't really exist in other form.

Focus on spatial procedures and the architecture of movement maps so well onto computer algorithms and virtual spaces

- How do we find our way through built spaces?

By looking at the sequence of images it is possible to analyze and possibly re construct both the physical trajectory as well as the the rhythm that follows. This is a way of documenting the event through the users/ reader perspective. An inner site, that allows to comprehend the interplay between the built space and the person in action: "an empirical examination of the cognitive processes involved in spatial learning, and the orientation behavior on which this is based, can be traced in psychology to the early work of the american psychologist Edward Tolman, who introduced the concept of the "cognitive map". from Pattern: Ornament, Structure and Behavior, by Andrea Gleiniger and Georg Vrachliotis

This "human-environment interaction" creates a parallel towards how people behave, react to spacial elements and structures, either in regards to analogue or digital medias. In this case, the process of "wayfinding", getting acquainted with the piece, by means of following very concrete physical attributes aims to point to the same patterns in the realm of publishing.

on DOCUMENTATION / RECORDING / DATABASE

They are connected, one feeds the other. Things are re visited, re configured, re created. It becomes something new too. You are always going back to history, you are part of it and add to it. So for me it is hard to separate this two moments. They coexist.

both avant-garde and deeply traditional

In the near future I would like to better understand how to structure databases in different ways and explore compositional innovations that could come along with it. Looking at the past and future in the present moment. I believe that not only imagery, but other forms of content, such as sound and written text could enhance and generate better understanding of this kind of experiments. As in different choreography databases, in which different language systems are integrated in scores.

Lev Manovich, Database as a Symbolic Form

Conclusion

/ Objects / Subjects

hybridization corporalization / mediatized / embody

spacde/motion

I want to have the freedom to perceive (choreographic) objects as something physical or not. For me, there is the object and subject. The subject/ performer, that enacts and the object / something that triggers the action.

I also want to think of the processes, that might or not depend on the media being used, and deal with composition / database issue. Experiment and understand the bridges that can be established.

A choreographic score still leaves independently of the dance. You may also write something that never happened, and go through a more speculative, imaginary approach.

explore the archival history of dance. Cultural perspective.

the role of physicality and art in the information society?

"mental processing of environmental stimuli is strongly based on visual perception theories and cognitive representation. In the 1950's, American psychologist James J. Gibson pointed out that the human (and animal) system of perception is evolutionary organized in a manner that enables it to recognize environmental attributes, such as spatial depth or movement , directly from invariants in the visual input. Gibson coined the term "affordance" in his book published in 1979, The Ecological Approach to visual perception. This describes the attributes of an object or a complex constellation of stimuli that suggest certain courses of action (…) The concept of affordance was popularized largely by the american cognitive scientist Donald Norman for the fields of ergonomics and user-friendly designs of computer systems. As previously mentioned, the concept can be applied to the geometric aspects of architectural spaces, such as spatial shapes, as well as to ground plan configurations, lighting, and signage or orientation systems" by Andrea Gleiniger and Georg Vrachliotis