Joana's Chapters
ONE
Background in dance practice, … While dancing, the awareness of the presence of the body (even in its most microscopic gestures) made my understanding of performativity
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“Our current interface centers on that Cartesian notion of the mind-body split, a centuries-old mythology of disembodiment that devalues the physical. We're intoxicated with the idea of being disconnected from our bodies. In discussions of VR, for example, there's much talk about disembodiment and fear of it – even though headmounted displays and datagloves are dependent on a sophisticated fine-tuning to the body. I'm interested in embodiment. The only way we can actually live in a virtual world is through our bodies. Now, dance originates from learning and experiencing just how the physical body operates. Understanding movement comes not from the abstract, but from working physically. Everything I do concerns the embodiment of our physical language within technology. … They don't understand the table's rules, which enable the piece to operate. But experiencing it is not about discovering its operative systems. This piece is not a videogame where you win or lose. It's about being in connection to it through one's body. By letting us listen to our physical experience of ourselves, this work moves from technology to art. LifeForms synthesizes movement very intelligently, but synthesis is not sampling. When you synthesize, you create movement within the computer tool rather than from the physical world. Motion capture is "choreographic sampling." Choreographers can use movement samples much as composers use sound samples. Choreographers are able to record, or capture, their own movement directly into the software. Sampling opens up the range of applications and complexity available. A hand gesture can be mapped to the spine and legs.” 1 What is choreography? I understand choreography to be any descriptive notation of movement in the wider sense. Choreography is the written language of movement. Wiiliam Foresythe´s notion that choreography is a ‘class of ideas’, with the idea being ‘a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action’. 2 Forsythe named ‘choreographic objects’ as ‘as alternative site for the understanding of potential instigation and organization of action to reside.’ “”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 ir desired to regulate that movement,“ - Susan Leigh Foster 2 “”As Michael Klien writes: ‘Choreography is everywhere, always in everything. i no longer see pictures, I see movement and interrelation, exchange and communication between bodies and ideas.” 2 > 1700 - a new calligraphy “Choreography was the name given to the first successful and widely form of dance notation, invented by Pierre Beauchamps, Louis XIV’s dancing master, and put to print by Raoul Auger Feuillet. Choreographies were notated scores of dances, and choreographers were the people who could read and write the notation. In this first meaning, choreography established an innovative and enduring relationship between the body, space and printed symbol. Feuillets system was based on a notion of space in which bodies and their movements could be organized according to abstract and geometric principles”. He’s notation positioned the body as a vertical and singular entity traveling across a geometrically defined horizontal grid. “Thus the notion erased the local origins of dance steps in order to place all dancing on the place of pure geometry where each dance’s specificities could be documented using the same universe principles. “ 2 Dance notation doenst imply the presence of the body, it is instead visual-grammatical formulation, > Post-Modern / 60’s onwards approach “Choreography became the unique process through which this momentum-filled body was tapped as a vehicle for expressing issues for both individual and universal concern. It no longer referenced a standard or shared repertoire of movements, as it had in Feuillet notation.” “Everyday movements became dance, and dance became everyday;” 2 , essentially non-technical as in the former dance standards. Simplicity and proximity to everyday movements, leading to spontaneous and unpretentious choreographies. “The repetition of simple sequences of movements became a popular device - one of numerous parallels between dance and Minimalism in the visual Arts”. (..) “Conceptual art was not a mere desire for ‘ideas’ but an attempt to free materiality from objecthood.” Both conceptual art and minimalism New methods for composition emerged, repetition, variation (chance), reiteration. It was a time for dancers to re-define choreography as methodology and expression of the body and the fundamentals of movement itself. Together with this conceptual framework, many interdisciplinary modes of creating performance emerged, “these collaborations took a variety of forms, sometimes juxtaposing performance in the different media, and sometimes constructing new intermedia genres” 2 “”Modernist identity as the art of movement, while embracing its capacity o critically decode forces, already choreographing our gestures, habits, language, thoughts, tastes and desires.” (…) “By moving (or by opting to remain still) dance demonstrates how its decodings are not mere conceptual propositions but actual possibilities for action.” 2 “But if dancers can endure, dance itself is ephemeral. The current attraction to its dematerialised materiality reinforces, politically and esthetically. (..) Dance’s dematerialization as ephemerality offers ways to create works that resist, bypass, politically compromised notions of the art object as commodity, fetish, or surplus-value.” 2 Examples/ sources / inspiration/ individual choreographers from the late twentieth century of post-modern dance, which carried radical/ experimental performance practices / formal and aesthetic innovation to the dance field. Yvonne Rainner “Rainer’s performances led to a new conception of the body in art: the body’s movement not being predictated totally on image or sigh or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, time, line, movement “ “According to Rainer; the alternatives (to renew dance) are obvious: stand, walk, run, eat, carry bricks, show movies, or to move or be moved by one thing rather than oneself.”Searching for pedestrians or everyday gestures, desiring to be moved by a thing, dance was drawing from as well as expanding Marce Duchamp’s notion of ready made.” 2 “Trio A lasts about six and a half minutes and consists of of one continual phrase if task-based movement performed in such a way as to minimize effects of rhythm, phrasing and dynamics in dance movements. This is achieved by by hiding the transition between actions. No pose is ever struck , as Rainer later explained: ‘No sooner had the body arrived at the desired position than it would go immediately into the next move, not through momentum but through a veery prosaic going on. And there would be very different moves - getting down on the floor, getting up. There would be this pedestrian dynamic that would suffuse and connect the shoe thing. So the whole thing, hough it would be composed of these fragments unrelated both kinetically and positionally or shape wise, would look as if it were a phrase.’ ” 3 “Rainer’s Trio A (1966), enacted the choreographers explicit interest in Minimalist sculpture by distributing and dispelling the dancers energy investment across a choreographic though line that structures the piece as if it were an ’uninterrupted surface’. This even distribution of energy within the dancer’s body and across her movements is the kinetic equivalent to that ‘unitary form’ in sculpture proposed by Morris and other Minimalists. ” 2 Her minimalistic movements and the anti-spectacale approach to dance, avoiding the exhibitionism typical from other dance modes: “”the body - its actual weight, mass, and unenhanced physicality” 3 Rainers intention seems to be to have reduced movement to the simple phenomenological experience of mundane physical activity. ”(..) Trio A actions are performed in real time without attempting to either to hide or to exaggerate the real effort expended in them.” 3 “ Rainer was one of the first to demonstrate that this relationship need not to be based on the seductive presence created by the dancers lea sure in exhibiting her or himself but throughout conceptual appreciation f the finite materiality of the dancing body.” 3 “The body remains the enduring reality (..) by enduring , it can resist normative social and aesthetic ideologies”, towards a transformation of bodies into sites of resistance? 3 De Keersmaeker In Rosas Danst Rosas “the movements seem to be very personal, private , idiosyncratic, (..) seemingly endless repetition. This is a play of surfaces rather than an expression of depth. The minimalist monotony of the repetition of mundane gestures suggest compulsion to conform prescribed behavior.“ 3 Merce Cunningham His compositional processes challenged the modern conception of dance, as “an inner subjectivity by using chance procedures for devising movement and sequencing events.” 2 —— “..While using literary theory and philosophy, particularly Maurice, Blanchot and Nietzche, MacKendrick argues for a notion of the dance in which what matters is less its ephemeral quality, its self-erasure, burt its constant reappearance, its reiterative power of returning to embodiment and presence only to transgress. MackKendrick pays particular attention to stillness and intensification as two modes of embodying transgression and choreographing countermoves”. Lepecki , intro 3 “Stillness as compositional strategy - for e.g..: in 1957 Duet by Paul Taylor. “
List of References
1. http://www.wired.com/1996/10/schiphorst-2/ Thecla Shiphorst - Life Forms 2. MOVE. Choreographing you. Art and Dance since the 1960’s. 3. Of the presence of the body - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_dance
Key Concepts
Choreographic Thinking / Intensify perception / Organic Functionalism / Corporeality / Presence
// Perception as Action (maybe the difference between my approach and Kenya Hara’s) - to re integrate visual perception with the body as a whole. “The body (…) is a cause of sensations. It is more than an instrument for action: it contributes to the life of consciousness and memory in a psyco-phisical parallelism of processes that assume meaning and relief only when they are connected.” - Lea Vergine “Body Art and Performance - the Body as Language”.
TWO
Introduction
1. ephemera phenomena movement (and its absence) evoke the political dimension of the ephemeral. minimal and decorative ecology and technology physical features of the body and physical features of technology. body relating to its own conditions. assuming unexpected circumstance, which also requires the intensification of energy flows, so that aesthetics, politics, and corporeality may fuse in the formation of more potent subjectivities.
“Hyper accelerated” and regimented modes of experiencing temporality take over and determine our individual rhythm of life. Time becomes essential. How can we respond with other modes of extending, compressing, and distorting temporality? Transform our experience of time/ presence of the body?
What if the world and the bodies in it operate according to this logic? What if perceiver and perceived are mutually defining?
…incorporating temporality / ephemerality / … in the design vocabulary
To propose a re-articulation, at a much more fundamental level: choreo-design. co-formation of compositional and thematic concerns. Make invisible forces (elements of choreography) appear as physical manifestations of design / kinetic assemblage of body and matters.
2. “”Apeloig composes creates
3. “We do not know what to do with our physical bodies, which need massages as much as massages.”
“While dealing with shape, color, material, ad texture is one of the more important aspects of design, there is one more: its not the question of how to create, but how to make someone sense something We might call this creative awakening of the human sensors: the design of senses. (p.68)
The physicist Hermann Ludwig Helmholtz (1821-1894) said, “Everything is an event on the skin” Come to think of it, the sense of sight is the response to the stimulus of light on the retina, a circular membrane of 4cm diameter. The sense of hearing is likewise to movement of air (…) All human perception originates in the responses of membranes to things physical, stimulation transmitted to the brain through the nervous system. (p.100)
Design is not only concerned with color and form. Research into how we sense color and form, or research into the senses, is a critical subject of design. And observations of how the human senses work will give design new pointers.
Design … it holds emptiness or nothingness within… (p.413)
The elements that could not be simplified any further (after modernism) were identified as color , form, texture, material, rythmm, space, movement, dots, lines, pleas and so forth. (p.419)
Design as … the pursuit of shape and function, even while operating on economic energy.
Design is not he act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials, it is the originality that repeatedly extract astounding ideas the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life.
Design is not subordinate to media, design explores the essence of media. ”
4. "From app stores to art book fairs and zine shops, from darknets to sneakernets, from fansubs to on-demand services, and from tweeting to whistleblowing, the act of making things public, that is to say publishing, has became pivotal in an age infused with myriad media technologies. The tension between the publishing heritage and novel forms of producing and sharing information has shown that old dichotomies such as analog versus digital, or local versus global, have grown increasingly irrelevant given their bond with hybrid media practices based on both old and new technologies, and their existence within mixed human and machine networks. This is why by publishing we mean to engage with a broad set of intermingled and collaborative practices, both inherited and to be invented, so as to critically explore and actively engage with an ecosystem in which multi-layered interactions occur that are: - social, technical, cultural and political; - involving actors both human and algorithmic; - and mediated by networks of distribution and communication of varying scales and visibility. For this journey, we seek students motivated to challenge the protocols of publishing (in all its (im)possible forms) using play, fiction, and ambiguity as methods and strategies of production and presentation, in order to experiment on the threshold of what is possible, desirable, allowed, or disruptive, in this ever expanding field."
List of References, II
1. Designing Design - Kenya Hara
2. Typorama, The Graphic Work of Philippe Apeloig - Thames & Hudson, 2013
3. http://www.internetagemedia.com/manifesto/
4. PZI
Key Concepts
Choreographic Thinking / Intensify perception / Organic Functionalism / Corporeality / Presence
// Perception as Action (maybe the difference between my approach and Kenya Hara’s) - to re integrate visual perception with the body as a whole. “The body (…) is a cause of sensations. It is more than an instrument for action: it contributes to the life of consciousness and memory in a psyco-phisical parallelism of processes that assume meaning and relief only when they are connected.” - Lea Vergine “Body Art and Performance - the Body as Language”.