User:Karina/thesis outline

5 OCT

What you want the thesis to be about?
I'm investigating the tension between documentation and experience. As technology advances, we are trying harder and harder to capture experiences. No matter how much we try to explain or document the action, we are only communicating a fragment of it. Whether sharing holiday photos on social media, or culinary shows, the viewer will not receive the 'full picture' unless the viewer experiences it themselves. Even then, it is a personal / subjective version of that experience. We can try to fill in those missing gaps by backing it up with more media: showing more photos; playing certain music (summer soundtrack); or explaining how something smells. The more we add to this 'archive' / collection of documentation, the closer we are to sharing the experience, yet are we getting any closer? What tools could help us do that? Will we ever manage? What may happen once we achieve that? (Will that be a simulation? - possibly too far? maybe final thought for thesis?)

Instead of looking at experiences as a whole, I will mainly focus on social dancing. The research is a fluid connection between psychological theory regarding topics such as: memory; falling into flow; spacial awareness; (graphical) notation; and unspoken-communication / interaction between the dancers, as well as practical experiments related to these topics. There is no strict rule whether I take a theory and create an experiment out of it, or create an experiment and find appropriate theory to back it up. One experiment leads to another as topics are related. (The experiments are the methodology / correlation between thesis and graduation project.) The experiments are conducted with both participants who dance, and those who do not. Although the focus is on social dance experience, most experiments do not aim for the participants to dance. Topics such as: social interaction; non-verbal communication; or spacial awareness can be expressed in other forms (think Sims).

Reasoning why I'm interested:

• importance of mix reality (viewing experience from different perspectives / using different media (film + notation + sound), resemblance vs. representation - Nelson Goodman)
• future of experience sharing / publishing
• simulations - can we push it too far?
• experiencing someone's experience? will it ever really work? will it bring social / political awareness or respect? what's the danger behind it? (again, possibly too far. maybe final thought for thesis?)

Reasoning as a dancer:

• how can I best communicate an experience?
• to what extent should I communicate my experience, and let the viewer / student have their own? (structure v.s. fluidity, not so B&W)

Dance is a non-verbal language passed down from person to person. If it isn’t recorded, it will be lost. Swing almost died out, until it was reintroduced by Frankie Manning and Norma Miller in the 1990s. Choreology, graphical or written dance notation, is a method for conservation, yet there are many versions. They range from overly simplistic footstep maps which only communicate footwork, to Lebanotation which represents many aspects such as direction, body part movement, duration and dynamics of the movement, yet is difficult to read and requires time to learn do decode the language. Conserving dance with the use of video is fine if it’s for watching purposes only, yet once it is used for teaching or recreation, it becomes too fast and/or time consuming to constantly rewind small sections.


How it relates to your research at the Piet Zwart so far?
Special Issue 02: Pushing the Score

• look into graphical notation and scores
• John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Rudolf Laban and Rudolf Benesh
• Levine's Time Perception - clock time v.s. event time (how that relates to Wiener's Newtonian v.s. Bergsonian Time)
• structure v.s. fluidity: how does that translate to dance?

notes from Karina/self-directed/Capturing Memories In Time

• how to capture memories?
• dr. Brenda Milner’s procedural memory, structure of memory / neuroscience and muscle memory
• Psychology of dance

previous written piece: Time Perception in Dance

• Levine's Time Perception - clock time v.s. event time (how that relates to Wiener's Newtonian v.s. Bergsonian Time)
• 3 experiments backed with psychological theory

• experiment 1: basic choreology analysis
  • which analysed rhythm, spacial orientation and notation systems
  • with the psychological base of dr. Brenda Milner’s procedural memory
  • and artistic base of: Merce Cunningham; Rudolf Laban; and Rudolf Benesh

• experiment 2: Jive mix up
  • aimed to see how much the fluidity of a dance was disturbed when the order of the choreography was changed
  • with the psychological base of dr. Brenda Milner’s procedural memory
  • with the theoretical base of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s take on flow

• experiment 3: Learning a new dance style
  • noting the experience / challange of learning Swing basics during a private class without any prep
  • with the theoretical base of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s take on flow

Bibliography
Goodman, N. (1976). Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. 2nd ed. Hackett Publishing Comp.

Laurel, B. (2000). Computers as Theatre. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ [u.a.]: Addison-Wesley.

Slater, L. (2005). Opening Skinner's Box. 1st ed. London: Bloomsbury, pp.205 - 223.

Ted Talk, (2009). Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness. [video] Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?language=en [Accessed 3 Mar. 2017].

Wiener, N. (1965). Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pr.



Old notes
I'd like to

• publishing the unpublishable
• capturing an experience
• how to capture an experience?
• to what extent can we capture an experience?

• capturing an experience or relationship
• Sean's connection
• notation
• archive
• dance as language (conversation between people)

• how can I best communicate an experience?