Platform and Scale - Michael's tutorial
Motion alphabets
"The birth of choreography resulted from a moment of crisis,a moment of loss, of disappearance, of death of both the dance and its dancer(...)Choreography attempted to deal and barrish the final absence." Gerald Sigmund
The speech disappears as a choreographic score is being explained: https://vimeo.com/125775432
Voice and Choreography from Yvonne Rainer
further references: http://www.yhchang.com/PERFECT_ARTISTIC_WEB_SITE.html
tex conversions (text > web > film (text as image?))
"What we are offered in its place is the experience of a passage between several surfaces, in a layering that draws an analogy between the stacked pages of a book abd the additive condition of even the most monochrome of canavases, which, however objectified it might be, must notheless apply paint over its underlying support. Indeed, as the book's "pages" unfurl, this voyage appears to be one of a search for the work's "origin" being suspened equally between the mteriaity of the work's canvas flatbed (the modernity "origin") and the image projected on that opaque surface as the index of the viewer's originating desire to open up any given moment of experience to something beyond itself ("reality as origin"). In both encompassing and enacting such desire, fiction is then, the acknowledgment of this ver incompleteness. (...) It is the impossible attempt to transform sucession into stasis, or a chain of parts into a whole."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQPKG1efWGg
Type and Numbers : writing movement : Choreographic machines
"Ultimately what results from this is the tense relationship between choreography as an abstract notation in a relational code on the one hand, and dancing body on the other. There is nothing corporeal in chroreography. It is a substrata of a social order, which it simultaneously produces and represents . Thus it is just relation: relation of the signs to another and to the body, which they nevertheless have to exclude. Choreography is an inhuman machine that guides and produces the body without ever being able to assimilate it." - Gerald Sigmund
I gave my dancers ‘ and myself ‘ the following general instruction: “Take an equation, solve it; take the result and fold it back into the equation and then solve it again. Keep doing this a million times.
I imagine that in this new form, performance and recording and notation ‘ three strands of the performing arts that have always been separate ‘ will be fused. So that you can have the notation shaping the performance, the performance shaping the recording, the recording shaping the notation, and so on. Perhaps this new process, which builds on itself, can bootstrap a new way of making art.
Where I’d start is with the score. What’s been missing so far is an intelligent kind of notation, one that would let us generate dances from a vast number of varied inputs. Not traditional notation, but a new kind mediated by the computer. ”
"Forsythe’s choreographic methods are frequently based on suc-cessive procedural translations of movement, a concept rooted in his re-viewing of classical ballet steps as sets of codified movement tasks and their subdivisions. In these translations, which Forsythe has referred to as “algorithms,” individual or multiple procedural constraints offer potential movement parameters and allow performers to develop complex improvisational modalities. Key examples include adding improvisational tasks or movement pat- terns to extant material, extracting or extrapolating individual constraints, splitting group improvisations apart into solos, and “crashing” together different movement structures. These operations result in profusions of new physical states, forms, and dynamics that serve Forsythe as resources for composing new pieces. Over time, works and sections of works develop reflexive physical- cognitive histories, to which the ensemble returns as they revise the composition of the choreographies produced."- William Forsythe.
"Whether they are islands of re-connection, experiments on mind-body stimulation or a spiritual search for essential motion, contemporary dance works express the concerns of our time: they question the value we give to existing in real space and time, and make us face or realize our desire to challenge the physical, social and psychological laws that govern us, and to actively enter the “dynamic reverie” (Bachelard, 1943, p.8) as dreamers of our perception."
1. Fase. Four movements to the music of Steve Reich. Choreography: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlZulJ0RtAU
and about phrases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVARoknuUcg
page.236: http://aaaaarg.org/ref/c53571ad74ad61c47dc53840cb2269bf
2. Trisha Brown: "She mapped paragraphs of texts into their elemental parts according to various rule sets and structures, as if trying to establish or break some code (fig. 20). As such, these drawings feel related to Alighiero Boetti’s Biro pictures (1970–1988) (fig. 22), for which the artist deconstructed words and phrases along a letter-based alphabet register to one side, with the words spelled out in space like a musical score, demarcated by commas in their given alphabetic register. What Brown describes as “a traveling phrase” that unfurls itself in multiple directions."
Brown’s seminal systemized dance Accumulation, in which a series of simple gestures accrue successively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86I6icDKH3M
"semiotician J. L. Austin, whose influential text How to Do Things with Words, published in 1962, proposed the concept of the “performative utterance,” a form of speech in which words enact rather than describe; Austin coined the term performative in order to point to the actlike character of language. In other words, under certain conditions signs can produce reality; one can do things with words. Although Austin had originally planned to isolate certain utterances under the notion of the performative, he soon understood that a clear-cut distinction between a constative (reality-describing) and a performative (reality-producing) way of speaking could not be made. If every utterance contains both constative and performative aspects, it is tautological to speak about “performative language.” And the same principle applies to artworks. It makes little sense to speak of a performative artwork because every artwork has a reality-producing dimension.
on walking:
Brunce Nauman : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDhuZ2Ya2wM
Lucinda Childs Dance Company performs. Dance (1979) - Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjYS5PQ8KZY
Texts and Machine, Latour:
"Linguistics differentiate the syntagmatic dimension of a sentence from the paradigmatic aspect. The syntagmatic dimension (AND) is the possibility of associating more and more words in a grammatically correct sentence. (…) The number of elements tied together increases, and nevertheless is still meaningful. The paradigmatic dimension (OR) is the possibility, in a sentence of a given length, of substituting a word for another while still maintaining a grammatically correct sentence (shifting to another matter).
Linguistics claim that these two dimensions allow them to describe the system of any language (powerful means of describing a dynamic of an artifact)."
(on Marcel Broodthaers "variant" on Mallarmé's poem): "the verse itself becomes layered into the movement of its own vanishing horizon, with each of its words consigned to the bottom of a signle page (...) the poem itself made radically spatial by the irregularity and dispersal of its lines on every page, sometimes even running across the gutter of the book, to transform the verses into somehing like an image."
“between geometry and the gesture” Trisha Brown.
The concept of symmetry, central to geometry and to mathematics as a whole, evolved during the 18th century, and is often equated with the emergence of modern mathematics. In common usage, symmetry refers to a correspondence between the parts of a figure or pattern.
A major development in our understanding of symmetry occurred when the correspondence was conceived of as an OPErATION on the figure, rather than a PrOPErTy of it. For example, the equality of the lengths of the sides of a square can be expressed as the invariance of the square under a quarter turn. This represents a crucial shift away from a static, figurative conception of symmetry and towards a dynamic, operative one.
With the notion of a symmetry operation two natural possibilities arise.
1. the possibility of composing two symmetry operations, one after another, and, conversely, decomposing a symmetry operation into simpler components.
2. the possibility of interpreting any operation on a space as a formal symmetry, be it pure, pleasing, or otherwise.
Questions about configurations of incident lines date back to the Greeks, but it wasn’t until much later that the mathematical study of perspectival symmetry, projective geometry, took form. .. For Dehn, these new geometries brought an intelligence to mathematics implicit in sensory experience.
It has become more and more apparent that different systems can be visualized, that, say, different types of spaces are compatible with experience. This is not to imply that the mathematician can now choose his assumptions at will. Not only is such arbitrariness likely to result in developments without beauty, but it is also likely to lead to contradictions that make all of the work an illusion.
"This is surely a different imagination of the postmodern fate of the medium than what other critics have proposed, such as its dematerialization into a “phenomenological vector” of opticality or horizontality or its permanent dismantling into the aggregative apparatus of film or video" See Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea.”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_in_mathematics
http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/agree-to-disagree-online
Philip Ording: A DEFINITE INTUITION
Arithmetic or arithmetics (from the Greek ἀριθμός arithmos, "number") is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics. It consists of the study of numbers, especially the properties of the traditional operations between them — addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.)
Elementary algebra
The number 0 is the smallest non-negative integer. The natural number following 0 is 1 and no natural number precedes 0. The number 0 may or may not be considered a natural number, but it is a whole number and hence a rational number and a real number (as well as an algebraic number and a complex number).
The number 0 is neither positive nor negative and appears in the middle of a number line. It is neither a prime number nor a composite number. It cannot be prime because it has an infinite number of factors and cannot be composite because it cannot be expressed by multiplying prime numbers (0 must always be one of the factors).[40] Zero is, however, even.
The following are some basic (elementary) rules for dealing with the number 0. These rules apply for any real or complex number x, unless otherwise stated.
Addition: x + 0 = 0 + x = x. That is, 0 is an identity element (or neutral element) with respect to addition. Subtraction: x − 0 = x and 0 − x = −x. Multiplication: x · 0 = 0 · x = 0. Division: 0⁄x = 0, for nonzero x. But x⁄0 is undefined, because 0 has no multiplicative inverse (no real number multiplied by 0 produces 1), a consequence of the previous rule. Exponentiation: x0 = x/x = 1, except that the case x = 0 may be left undefined in some contexts. For all positive real x, 0x = 0. The expression 0⁄0, which may be obtained in an attempt to determine the limit of an expression of the form f(x)⁄g(x) as a result of applying the lim operator independently to both operands of the fraction, is a so-called "indeterminate form". That does not simply mean that the limit sought is necessarily undefined; rather, it means that the limit of f(x)⁄g(x), if it exists, must be found by another method, such as l'Hôpital's rule.
The sum of 0 numbers is 0, and the product of 0 numbers is 1. The factorial 0! evaluates to 1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_element
Conditional (CASE) expressions
CASE WHEN n > 0
THEN 'positive'
WHEN n < 0
THEN 'negative'
ELSE 'zero'
END