[-empyre-] critical motion nowhere and everywhere at some time

[Johannes Birringer]

hello all:

thanks Norah for drawing attention to a question that perhaps might like to see 
itself addressed in this month's discussion, namely what would constitute 
"critical motion" and what
such a term or concept implies for us here, to address, and why. 

Your brief reference to work (and dissemination of research) which, admittedly, 
I was able to experience first-hand (and i am thus partial)  in London during 
the recent Forsythe festival, 
was refreshing in its questions... can you say more about "counterpoint"?


(I love Forsythe's worktitles:  "Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same 
Time")...


<<<<   Norah Zuniga Shaw wrote:
The interactive moving animations reflect on, work on, re-invent the
choreographic structures in a dance. They were generated at the intersection
of choreography, animation art, geography, architecture, theory (maybe) and
even I suppose a form of activism in that they are reaching out to invite
folks in to the dance and into some ways that we see patterns in complexity.

Are they a technological approach to movement? A critical one? They are a
mix of analytical and creative. They seek to generate new creativity while
representing a form of it (namely counterpoint in William Forsythe's One
Flat Thing Reproduced). They seek to invite a certain kind of "dance
readership." Counterpoint itself suggests some pretty radical ideas about
ways to relate and find agreement in motion that don't require unison (or
unity). The work is created in a complex community of practice that requires
both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary practices for creation...
>>>


I was in a production workshop over the last 10 days and am barely able to 
shift energies now from physical work and computing/editing and designing
to the reading of such a highly complex and philosophical debate that we have 
had here. 

 I could not read the debate in a linear way, as it began,
with Stamatia and Ashkey lighting out, and Erin following. 

Then i got to a point where i did not want to read further.  Did anyone else 
have this
sensation? 

 The discourse, I began so sense, was becoming less than particpatory, but i 
could be wrong. ??  I am sorry if I misunderstood.

What readership, Norah, was invited, in your work?


with many regards
Johannes




Johannes Birringer
artistic director, DAP Lab
School of Arts 
Brunel University
West London 
UB8 3PH   UK
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
http://www.danssansjoux.org


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Re: [-empyre-] critical motion nowhere and everywhere at some time

[Johannes Birringer]

-Original Message-
From: Johannes Birringer 
Sent: 13 May 2009 19:24
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: critical motion nowhere and everywhere at some time


hello all:

thanks Norah for drawing attention to a question that perhaps might like
to see itself addressed in this month's discussion, namely what would
constitute "critical motion" and what
such a term or concept implies for us here, to address, and why. 

Your brief reference to work (and dissemination of research) which,
admittedly, I was able to experience first-hand (and i am thus partial)
in London during the recent Forsythe festival, 
was refreshing in its questions... can you say more about
"counterpoint"?


(I love Forsythe's worktitles:  "Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same
Time")...


<<<<   Norah Zuniga Shaw wrote:
The interactive moving animations reflect on, work on, re-invent the
choreographic structures in a dance. They were generated at the
intersection
of choreography, animation art, geography, architecture, theory (maybe)
and
even I suppose a form of activism in that they are reaching out to
invite
folks in to the dance and into some ways that we see patterns in
complexity.

Are they a technological approach to movement? A critical one? They are
a
mix of analytical and creative. They seek to generate new creativity
while
representing a form of it (namely counterpoint in William Forsythe's One
Flat Thing Reproduced). They seek to invite a certain kind of "dance
readership." Counterpoint itself suggests some pretty radical ideas
about
ways to relate and find agreement in motion that don't require unison
(or
unity). The work is created in a complex community of practice that
requires
both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary practices for creation...
>>>


I was in a production workshop over the last 10 days and am barely able
to shift energies now from physical work and computing/editing and
designing
to the reading of such a highly complex and philosophical debate that we
have had here. 

 I could not read the debate in a linear way, as it began,
with Stamatia and Ashkey lighting out, and Erin following. 

Then i got to a point where i did not want to read further.  Did anyone
else have this
sensation? 

 The discourse, I began so sense, was becoming less than particpatory,
but i could be wrong. ??  I am sorry if I misunderstood.

What readership, Norah, was invited, in your work?


with many regards
Johannes




Johannes Birringer
artistic director, DAP Lab
School of Arts 
Brunel University
West London 
UB8 3PH   UK
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
http://www.danssansjoux.org


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Re: [-empyre-] critical motion nowhere and everywhere at some time

[Johannes Birringer]

storically, how has OSU's collaboration on such research evolved from, say, 
Labanotation software and DVDs offered for dance reconstruction [preservation] 
and videodance to the online Synchronic Objects?

1989 [ clip ]  2001  [clip]  2009  [clip]

Tim's last remark on indifference  and "choreographic intervention" also struck 
a note with me, if indeed (in a larger political and global world beyond 
concert dance
and arthouse installations and interdisciplinary university research centers)  
indifference can be a principle of terror, as it is of the Sublime
(are we reminded here of Stockhausen's comment on 9/11?) 

Question (to Norah), why was One Flat Thing chosen, and not, say, "Three 
Atmospheric Studies" or the equally disturbing "Decreation"?

regards
Johannes Birringer

>>> Tim wrote>>

Also interesting is your suggestion that, within 
the scope of the network, which encompasses both 
the daily activities of -empyre- and the 
technological interfaces of choreography,  "the 
body becomes both a possessed and  performing 
body, simultaneously actuated and improvising. 
The body not as a single, intentional agency, but 
as a host for an artificial entity."  This would 
certainly entail what you call an "indifference," 
and, here, indifference would envelope 
traditional attitudes of performance and 
theatrical perspective that are organized around 
the centrality of "the subject" as organizing 
principle, not merely as interactive host.

I might have mentioned on -empyre- once before 
that Jean-François Lyotard used to tell me that 
indifference is the most effective form of 
terrorism.  Here terror could involve a 
choreographic intervention that foregrounds the 
prominence of the unsettling prosthesis in an age 
of otherwise willed alignment.

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Re: [-empyre-] critical motion nowhere and everywhere at some time

[Johannes Birringer]

dear Deborah, dear all


may I return for a moment to a mail you, Deborah,  sent me about “tank man 
tango”, in response to my question regarding its address…….

<<
It's a memorial- my greatest hopes for it are that it brings life to the past, 
recollectivises a lone hero figure, and gives people a way to participate in 
culture and history at once. >>

<>



that makes your intention clear, i think, sorry i didn't realize it at first.

I think it's a very interesting project (against forgetting, creating echoes) 
and I am partially fascinated to ponder what such a memorial or remembering 
might mean…

and whether here, in this particular context of our discussion (after Stelarc 
joined and wrote his provocative posts about involuntary movement & accidents) 
it manifests a small kind of intervention (practice) of a different kind, what 
kind?  

 a movement (to be filmed/uploaded, remote-sensed, distributed)?

a distributed critical motion? or a distributed futile gesture  (as I always 
considered Francis Alÿs' action piece, performed by hundreds in the Peruvian 
mountains -- Cuando La Fe Mueve Montañas  -   a completely futile, if beautiful 
and aggravating gesture,  one that others -  curators mainly - have refered to 
as having a "politics of rehearsal"... 
(http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/88)

what are such politics (in the artistic contexts,  the activist contexts, the 
YouTube contexts")? And is the claim that “things now move too” in its 
connection to “Indifference is necessary for an  erasure of agency at the 
critical moment that allows a coupling” a political statement or a an 
apolitical disaster (abandoning the notion of agency)?

a movement ?  (tank man tango ---  the notion of a tango again mixing up the 
cultural references a bit where it becomes confusing)   

expressed in this way, as a dance or an action shared with many others

... I had occasion to review the fantastic work of a Peruvian photographer 
(Fernando Castro)once, in a gallery in Houston where I haved lived most of my 
recent life, this was about 10 years ago, and he had done fine-grained and 
complex studies of this one iconic photo of the man in front of tanks at 
Tiananmen Square and then reshot new "scenes" with actors and tanks, it was a 
haunting study of the confrontation of a single human (with agency) against the 
power of an implaccable state military machine  (and as I grew up in the 60s, I 
remember the Prag Spring in 1968 of course and the tanks rolling into Prag and 
the people there trying to stop them with flowers, which did not work).

then again, what is Tiananmen to you, Deborah,  or to the Chinese citizens or 
the  Chinese artists today or choreographers, photographers and video artists 
and …(“organs in excess” - how would I address them, include them in this 
conversation, Stelarc?).  I agree with you that “Unexpected  kinds of bodily 
trajectories have been generated”, but my memory is still my own, and my 
critical aliveness (if so) is not helped or “enriched by the seductive, smooth 
and speedy motion of machines”.

I again want to thank Ashley for her retelling of her experience in the 
Kentridge exhibition, to which I will return next week. I much enjoyed Erin's 
account of the blue tag game in Viger Square garden/downtown Montréal I also 
thank Norah for inviting me to look at counterpoint tools. 

http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html#/counterpointTool

I found it very hard to participate, I need to spend more time trying to 
understand the tool and the underlying philosophy for the creation of the 
synchrononous objects. 


This makes we wonder also about the gestures that were used last week and 
before (“Cuando La Fe Mueve Montañas”)……  about collaboration, participation, 
learning. Synchronous Objects is meant to be a teaching tool as well?  Is this 
what Emio Greco / PC's Double Skin/Double Min and “Capturing Intention” project 
is about, also?  To share with many audiences the principles of composition, 
making, moving, understanding. (http://www.dancebooks.co.uk/titles/5343.asp)

How is movement composition thus shared non-indifferently?


and how do you/we recall 1989?

(for me it was the autumn when the Berlin Wall came down, the autumn of 
openings, not closings, a paradox of course in the global constellations (the 
Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 exactly on the days when I was filming in Prag, 
i had traveled eastwards , since 1990, from the border-line/wall-line in 
Berlin, slowly and methodically trying to make my way across the eastern sides 
i did not know, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia. some of these countries or 
imaginary communities no longer exist.  On my video tapes, many traces of 
people I met and worked with or spoke to).

 

with many regards
Johannes


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Re: [-empyre-] swarms, task envelopes, trajectories and displacements...

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:


thanks to our moderators for their generous invitation to participate.

If it's all right, I won't wish to speak about my own work at the minute, but 
wait a bit, 
there is still time & space needed for response to what was said earlier,
and what Laura Cull has now set in motion. 



>>
Indifference is necessary for an 
erasure of agency at the critical moment that allows a coupling. 
This  coupling can result in Chimeric Flesh.

We are fascinated by the diverse locomotion of living things, of the 
flocking behavior of birds and the swarming behavior of insects
>> [ Stelarc] 



>>
In december of 2008 i did a 365 hour performance in mixed reality called
Becoming Dragon, in which i used a motion capture system and wore a hear
mounted display so that i could be immersed in Second Life for the entire
duration.one of the main explorations was to see
if one could learn the new movement required for a new identity using
virtual worlds...

In this way, I find the notion of indifference to movement difficult, as
in my experience movement is always closely tied to desire and affect. In
fact, considering the practice of Theater of the Oppressed, and the
trajectories of feminism and cyberfeminism, it seems that learning not to
be indifferent to movement is critical, learning to listen to the body. In
my experience as a transgender person, it has taken me years of work to
learn to allow my own desires to exist and that has come through listening
to myself and exploring my own body and movement and desires and affect.
>>  [Micha Cardénas]


so i want to extend greetings to the borderlands hacklab, and all the
swarms. 

it was  pointed out to us  [by Reggie Cortez Woolery] that mobs are not 
auto-poietic
but can be used to do another body's bidding, inflicting violence upon real 
people.

perhaps the dialectical positions (<>) could be addressed, to get a 
stronger
grip on the political assumptions underlying the notion of task envelopes.  It 
would
also perhaps be fruitful to think about the collaborative practices addressed,
both artistically and academically/discursively (research practices), in their
relations to soloism and the position of solo user (say, someone visiting the 
data
base interface of Synchronous Objects), and the conceptual position of imploded 
singularities.


for Dragon, i found i small haiku, written by the Japanese poet Basho:



Furu ike ya!
Kawazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto


The old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water



--------


with regards
Johannes Birringer
Dap-Lab/dans sans joux
www.danssansjoux.org


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Re: [-empyre-] learning movement, mixed realities, desiring slippage

[Johannes Birringer]

hello:


fascinating citation from a dancer (something we need to hear more here) about 
practicing inventive curiosity,  and Dana Caspersen,
ending in the reference to Takasui, helps with her reminder of conscious 
activity of  body-minds never inert but always responsive as well as generative
and listening-in, hearing in  (perceiving-in lightand being 
in-sound) I 'd almost claim that it'd be impossible to dance with an 
indifferent body that is "beyond its phenomenological subjectivity, 
beyond memory and anticipation," as Stamatia argues so eloquently,  but then 
again, i am not a buddhist and could very well be wrong.

thus the slippage seemed actually very beautiful, about the hear mounted 
display...

 [Micha wrote]
>In december of 2008 i did a 365 hour performance in mixed reality called
>Becoming Dragon, in which i used a motion capture system and wore a hear
>mounted display so that i could be immersed in Second Life for the entire
>duration.

oops, this should say "head mounted display"

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regards
Johannes
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Re: [-empyre-] critical / indifference and in/direct politics

[Johannes Birringer]

es, cooking habits, dreams, imaginaries, 
micropopular tendencies, technological obsessions, we may not yet be able to 
fathom.  Our work itle is "Ukiyo"  [moveable world]


we started with some simple techniques,  reading some haikus,
then moving through them, singing them, listening to them, responding to one 
another and to the projections

all the while,  Gekitora is making animated Avatar choreographies in Second 
Life, and
our performers, in real space, are currently learning some new moves from the 
avatars.

some of the movements are difficult, if not impossible, certainly not 
inadequate, just challenging.



Now i want to end, for now,  with a brief mention of our guest artist, Elegand 
Child,  a terrific movement artist from Japan who came to us via Brasil and a 
meeting in Dresden (where she danced "Movement A" in 2007:  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocEO7w7uQkI), and after some years of nursing 
injuries to her body.

Elegant Child performed a 25 minute performance in our studio, the other night, 
 (with Tom Waits'  "Bone Machine")  which she constructed and composed out of 
involuntary movements happening across/traversersing  12 areas of her body, and 
she told us that she used involuntary movement/motions of her body-  which she 
considers healing and necessary for healing of injuries -  as an important 
choreographic source or tool. 

 If I understand this paradox correctly, she deploys/explores 
controlled/incontrollable involuntary movement to dance and develop particular 
rhyhthms and tempi which I associate with repetitions and variations (and what 
African dancers might call the return beat) - and thus with the opposite of 
oblivion, namely with memory and deep listening. 


This is what I find critically unsupportable, perhaps, in the notion of (what 
Stelarc calls) "assemblages" or what was refered to as indifference in the 
sense in which "locomotion" of an intelligently designed robot or virtual 
avatar might be. If my body were extended into remote spaces and into mixed 
realities, now could I not be partial and perturbed by "violent propulsions 
across time zones".  I am disturbed by propulsions. 

and, to take up Sally Jane:  "Laban's notation of movement was developed in a 
context favouring the liberation of bodies , and became the model for large 
Nazi demonstrations before regaining, in the anti-establishment context of 
performance art, a new subversive virginity."  

that last one, i am not sure about. 


So I am not sure how we are critical before we create and  define our values or 
discuss values, unless sof course we want to motion towards  motion as 
something abstractly philosophical. 
Not sure evolutionary biology is helpful here either, now that it is is 
frequenly heralded as  influential for a more precise understanding of 
intelligent design /understanding by bulding, and thus for the current 
fashionableness of "embodiment" for theories in ubiquitous computing, business 
and management, and the psychology of human memory, etc. 

It is impossible now to complete these thoughts. i really wanted to tell you 
about the way my back hurts from the avatar choreography I am learning. I am 
highly motivated to dance like this creature in Second Life,
especially since I partly shudder at second lives and such virtual playgrounds. 
  Yet, i had also glimpsed in our laughter something that Sondheim noted:

>>The bvh files are complex and avatars perform, most often at high-speed,
with sudden jumps and motions that involve them intersecting with them-
selves. The motions appeared convulsive and sometimes sexualized.>>


In the next few days I might try to tell you you about my shuddering at the 
countless hours spent programming interfaces and reheasring them for 
interactive movement performances with projective worlds and wearable spaces, 
much wasted time. My experience is the opposite of what Laura carefully 
implies/asks:   ..

>>Is it that working with very new technology is somehow self-justifying to the 
>>extent that such practices involve a generous form of public experiment - 
>>showing what the body can do in connection with these various new softwares, 
>>sensors and so forth>>

Since most interactive performance art I now find problematic and dysfunctional 
(artistically, ethically), i would be hard pressed to answer this positively.  
It has not been a generous form of public experiment, i fear.


regards
Johannes Birringer
http://www.danssanxjoux.org










 

  

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Re: [-empyre-] tasks / collaborations / critical motion nowhere and everywhere at some time

[Johannes Birringer]

it would be interesting to hear more from Stelarc about the task envelopes and 
how he works with engineers, with artificial intelliegence programming and the 
various operational systems involving couplings and assemblages.  i was always 
impressed by the strangely lyrical quality of the performances of the 
synchronously enhanced stelarcbody,  however one might perceive harnessed or 
thwarted gestures and motiions.
  
and   then i watched a performance, once, of a duet between a dancer and a 
robot, feeling mystified by the fact that the robot took on a critical posture, 
almost reminding others of the possibility that in such interactive 
relationships  (one wearing sensors which are mapped onto the other)  the 
dancer could be the problem, not the limited moveability of the machining 
architecture. 
the duet was a quartet, by Margie Medlin (Australia) > 
(http://www.quartetproject.net)

Margie came to visit my lab, one summer, and witnessed our struggling with 
various sensors attached  to your bodies and then moving inside our clothes, 
and then our designs moving back and forth with the imaginaries, the building 
hot and spacious and the nights dark, what moved are and were relations in 
space (spatial relations) but what does that mean, when so many diverse 
materials are inolved (narratives, stories, film projections and photographs, 
live music and electronic sounds, palpable gestures, voices, garments and 
objects that have their own lives and the environments  and their memories 
(that lab took place in an abandoned coal mine in germany) :

the collaborative process (as Laura and Norah have invited us to discuss) is 
most complex and of course carries its organizational and psychological 
challenges, its critical potentials for human interaction within somewhat 
narrower artistic or research contexts or broader social/political/economic 
contexts,  the latter intertwining with the former.  At the moment, in London, 
i don't have my Deleuze/Guattari with me in the rehearsal, no; but we study the 
cross between manga and Muybridge, thinking through Second Life  and the 
original or older meanings of the (Sanskrit) "avatar" backwards to the russian 
revolution and the early 20th century engineering experiments in Russia,  have 
brought my Gastev with me and show some images from his feedback tests to our 
performers. we compare a 1920 image (from the Technical Institute of Kazan) of 
an apparatus used for measuring the volume by which the arm expands when 
different kinds of music are heard with the new audiophonic garments we will 
wear and the torsions we experience moving with a fashion design that is 
intense beautiful (aesthetic) but also restrictive and conceptually felt, 
impacting anatomy or proprioception or behavior or recognitive processes.   
Last week we worked on real-time, feeding back to the virtual environments we 
project/move with. there is a space in Second Life now that almost looks like 
our own performance diagram, the five hanamichi that cross or touch each other 
gently and allow the performers to be in some kind of vague center.

our new piece, "Ukiyo", is a choreographic installation, for audiences and 
visitors to enter, move around in, move about in, listening and creating their 
own stories (the spectator, as Rancière notes, has always been emancipated, and 
doesn't need to be "activated" or "animated"), sharing time with us.   it is 
not an interactive installation, just a space where moveable worlds can be 
imagined or conjured up.  one of the subtexts that i hope to deploy amongst the 
"synchronous objects" we create (digitally) in real time is a story about the 
Réduit, and about the communist revolution, a failed engineering project, with 
faulty prostheses but a strong utopian spirit, no victory over the sun, but 
still..



it makes for lesser charm, don't you think, to talk about one's work process 
and the negotiations of creative action and thought, the necessary engagements 
of spaces of involvement and intimacy, if the work has less presence in the 
world, public circulation, preservation,.  what i think here may already be 
unevidenced tomorrow, it becomes uncritical  & narcissistic, when the 
collaborative energies shift, other subtexts take on different currencies, the 
environment (moving along in conversation or creatice exchange with our 
Japanese colleagues and the guests that have come, reprogramming our initial 
assumptions, learning the crossing of borders and confusion of roles,) 
evolving.  so much was written about ephemerality of motion (dance), no? 
so, unknowable events then, intimate only for those of us who remember  or care 
to remember :


that was the historical point I wanted to make about Kentridge or Forsythe, (or 
Laban or  Bacon) you can't forget that one is able to share some thoughts on 
the matter because  their substantive work is already remembered (in museums, 
in exhibitions, and numerous performances seen aroun

Re: [-empyre-] habitats / collaborations / critical motion nowhere and everywhere at some time

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all


Sally Jane's poetic description of her afternoon in  La Villette is quite 
riveting, 
and i was particularly interested in her evocation of the 
play/game/capoiera/kung/soccer and walking rhythms
observed on the lawns,  the polyrhythms she evokes remind of the opening of a 
book i once read while
staying with friends in Cuba and working (making a dance-film) on the beach 
near La Habana -  . "The Repeating Island"
by Antonio Benítez Rojo.



I also last night read a draft of a paper sent to me by Liz Waterhouse, a young 
dancer with the Forsythe Company, and
former MA student at Ohio State University where i first met her. 

She writes about living and dancing "amidst" a collective, a company, a living 
organism, a family, a habitat (adaptable space,
when they tour work and movement) and she sets out to write how : 

"as a dancer with the ensemble I engage with space both as an abstract realm 
for thought and as a real context for acting. 
In this case study of my creative niche, I develop space as a cooperative, 
enacted, and environmental phenomena. 
I wish to impart spatial knowledge as the distributed and embodied experience 
of an ensemble in which I am part..." 
 
and she goes to describe what she calls her "spaces of involvement"  (as a 
communal space of research and creation,
of habits and development of shared memories, language, and references to speak 
about what they do,
promoting "repertoires and individual agendas" ..

 The writing continues in a hauntingly beautiful manner.


so i am in the garden this morning, thinking about the scenes in La Villette
and the  scenes in a company, when you work together and live together for five 
or 10 years, and longer,
and what the latter means (in terms of a daily practice and the accumulation of 
knowledge and critical awareness,
emotional dreamings).


[blackout]


now i am back at the studio, and on the way ran into William Brown, who directs 
the Centre for Culture and Evolutionary Psychology
and the Evolution and Behaviour Group, at the university where i work, 
[http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~hsstwmb/]
and he tells me a story which makes sense of course, after reflecting on what 
Sally Jane described.

He did some fieldwork in Jamaica and the Uk where the Group motion-captured 
people who like dancing or moving; these were non-professional dancers
and they were asked to move around. 

the scientists were after the question:  why would one move around in this 
manner?  why would a human (or animal) do this?

one hypothesis that emerged, and which will make perfect sense to you, is that 
such motions are motivated by selection purposes,
the mover elaborates and struts his or her stuff to attract attention and 
arouse, to test their effect on others and select the responses
from others. It is sexual selection display.
[JJ Gibson had done some of these studies regarding animal motion and 
proximities, animal environments and domains of activity. if I remember).


this makes me worry a lot, after i have been learning the avatar choreography 
in UKIYO. 
it is elaborate, to an extent, and pleasing to me
but not sure whether it can arouse anyone else's interests. 
ah well.  

regards
Johannes Birringer
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Re: [-empyre-] tasks / collaborations / critical motion nowhereand everywhere at some time

[Johannes Birringer]

hello Laura

thanks for your responses and suggestions.. and i will take a look at  Soft 
Materials.

I think i had it in mind  the other way round, however.  The robots are 
programmed to move or have AI programming enabling them to learn as they evolve 
along,. and the robots i watched in Quartet"s were altogether more interesting, 
 sort of along the lines, but differently,  of Louis Philippe Demers'/Bill 
Vorn's  La Cour des Miracles  (interactive robotic installation,1997)  -- an 
astonishing work of machining movement choreographies that blows you away. 


 Soft Materials, created during what some call the 'Digital Revolution', sees a 
return to the physical object in an arena of embodied play. Ironically, the 
objects in question are technological creations, and ones that mimic our own 
animal physicality'. 

I found this idea of the robots' learning to move very interesting  It 
comes back to paying attention, imitation, repetition, experiment
... but how might the model work in relation to technochoreography?


and, thanks for your follow up on Deborah Hay.

I have not seen this latest work of her, but read the interesting interview 
with her in TDR (The Drama Review : 51 / 2007: Dance Composes Philosophy 
Composes Dance Series on New Choreography, Part II ), which actually was part 
of a special series of published papers on dance and philosophy, I think the 
piece on her work is called ""The Story of O,O"", and at one point, Deborah 
speaks about watching herself moving (on video),   and she disarmingly (when 
interviewer asks her why she does not always now dance herself, solo, but gives 
her propositions to others), makes a moving comment about her age, and what it 
is like to watch "just an older woman dance" there.  This has stuck with me. 

and i don't think we have addressed the critical issues involved, in our 
cultures and their various obessions and fetishconfusions, with age and 
non-surgically modified slowing down, changing our bodies, becoming changed.


regards
Johannes 

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Re: [-empyre-] theory/practice and becoming-avatar

[Johannes Birringer]

hello

Micha's post on the transreal was very welcomed here, i am sure you gave us 
more to think

>>>
queer strategy of blurring boundaries and
categories and continuing to push that limit, not only the line between
genders and sexes, but between the real and the virtual, the human and the
machine, but still holding onto an affective sense of compassion or
holding onto a consideration of the ethical stakes of such an
intervention.>>

and with Haraway, also again more grapple with.


<<"when species meet"
expresses this incredibly well. This quote gets to an explication of some
of the ethical questions involved in bringing together people and machines
or people and other species:>>>



Not sure that we have found a way into the transreal in the new installation 
our ensemble is working on,
but we are composing the mixed realities of UKIYO now,  and are moving back and 
forth  (can one say that?) between
real and second lives, and we are also (in the scene called  "Kruchonykh 
collider") learning some mixed languages: 
haikus and zaum

with charming propositions from the beginning of the 20th century russian 
revolutionaries


06/10
slow down to zero.  
   Symphonies around the 7th parallel
   Orchestra at the equator
   …
   Get ready. /  Switch on./  Automatic operation./ Stop.


.

..  


 
(this one was for the mineral workers)


thanks to all of you for such ongoing tremendous discussions.

Johannes Birringer
Dap Lab / dans sans joux
http://www.danssansjoux.org
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Re: [-empyre-] Narrative, and speaking traces

[Johannes Birringer]

what it is, or is it 
exploitational? experimental? anxietal?)  is received by different 
communities/audiences, and how you narrate the work organizationally when you 
produce software interaction design with abled and differently abled performers 
in company or in schools or therapeutic environments;  
I noted recently also the work of Petra Kuppers (The Tiresias Project , an 
Olimpias Disability Culture Production), featured recently in TDR, with a 
stunning photograph of one of her collaborators on the cover.  It is certainly 
the case, i think, that methods are altered when dis/abilities are involved as 
a conscious /acknowledged fact. 


regards

Johannes Birringer
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Re: [-empyre-] Narrative, speaking traces, control systems, and the myth of interactivity

[Johannes Birringer]

occasion, abjective, and also artistically not 
as satisfying to me as i had thought earlier, say, in the late 1990s when i 
began to observe my peers starting to use real time interactivity de rigueur. 

I also thought it opened up a new era (the interactive paradigm), involving our 
audiences in many new ways.   

That was certainly a fallacy.  

The audiences i have met over the years could care less about interface design, 
if the work was not good or interesting, making the time they spent coming out 
worthwhile;  of course this is all relative.  But look at the trends,  many 
works have to be designed for limited "user" capacity, you see an increase in 
one on one performances, restricted access, in the museums the gadgets break 
after a week, your see online performances perhaps rising (multiplayer 
environments) and game-like  plays/performances provoking momentary interest, 
but hard core gamers tend to get bored by art games, and dance or theatre or 
art audiences are probably only mildly dazzled now by the failed promises of 
"interactive art", a myth of democratization if ever there was one.   Most 
interactuve art is merely reactive, you cannot change the parameters and thus 
your input it rather limited, and functionality quickly bores, so does causal 
(cause and effect) listening/behaving. 

Interactive art is necessarily cybernetic and thus all about control systems, 
not emancipation.   

But then, emancipation could be emancipation into a better control system.

regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP Lab

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Re: [-empyre-] undocumented worker

[Johannes Birringer]

Dear all:


from a peripheral perspective on the discussion here, 
i was struck by Hana's (replying to Margaretha) comments on a desire for, or 
nostalgic longing for
something like an undocumentable/pure (?) presence --  in an event or an action 
or a performance

>>a moment without feedback, without a document, without a traceable trace -->>>
 
This was in response to Margaretha's claim (unfounded or uncorroborated, i 
assume)..


>>i too have created relational artworks that play with and overlap different 
>>periods of time to induce a re-orientation, but increasingly i am intrigued 
>>by practices that might bring people into the present moment, and that remain 
>>completely undocumented. it fills me with a sense of release and relief to 
>>even think of it - a moment in this hyper media saturated world, a moment 
>>without feedback, without a document, without a traceable trace - think of 
>>it!>>


While this indeed is an intriguing thought, i would venture to say it's 
impractical, from an artistic point of view;  
your work won't exist and won't have that many relations, and problems paying 
your rent, 
(and i don't want to go into the political implications here)
 if it is not recordable and (re) producible for dissemination,
and potentially able to be archived and collected.

the plots of collection for time based (live art) works, vis à vis other kinds 
or work,  would need to be differentiated. 

Your contesting of the archive does bring to mind some of the unusual/out of 
the ordinary, long durational works by Tehching Hsieh 
(http://www.tehchinghsieh.com/), who appeared on the scene in the 70s and 80s 
and then was almost forgotten/marginalized and deported from the scenes of 
mediation. banality, power and symbolic capital..


 I think the one-year piece where he punched a clock every day at the same 
hour, was documented by the self-same/framed photograph of the action repeated 
every day for a year, and in some of his performances (like the one where he 
lived with LInda Montano tied to her by a rope for a year) he did not collect 
documentation or refused to collect it or refused to have the audio tapes he 
made played back, etc.

Now this is all academic, of course, since this extraordinary work is visible 
to all in a fabulously edited catalogue (book) on Tehching Hsieh:  OUT OF NOW, 
edited by Adrian Heathfield earlier this year. 

I am so glad the work can be traced back now and tracked a little, and feedback 
forthcoming to Tehching Hsieh. 
the postcards with Tehching living outdoors for year look great. 


regards
Johannes Birringer
dap lab,
london

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Re: [-empyre-] Returning to Relational Aesthetics, Queerly

[Johannes Birringer]

Hi all:

very good point, Simon, and you just stopped short of saying that "relational 
aesthetics"  is parasitic. 
i was quite surprised that "relational aesthetics" gained any currency at all, 
actually, coming so late
and having little to say about performance and performance art and 
installations that took place
outside of documenta and some galleries, and now it appears Bourriaud is also 
curating.. i remember
a few months back that students had been to the Tate and then returned to the 
studio with puzzled
expressions,.,...

i tried to find out more about the curating, and discovered the following 
"product description":

Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009
>>
Few books introduce a word into the language; this is an example of one that 
does. The term 'Altermodern' is an entirely new one, coined by leading critical 
theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud as the title for Tate's fourth Triennial 
exhibition opening at Tate Britain in February 2009. It describes art made in 
today's global context which is a reaction against cultural standardisation and 
commercialisation. This art is characterised by artists' cross-border, 
cross-cultural negotiations; a new real and virtual mobility; the surfing of 
different disciplines; the use of fiction as an expression of autonomy; concern 
with sustainable development and the celebration of difference and 
singularity.. the book will focus on each of the four main facets of the 
Altermodern. It defines these as the end of postmodernism; cultural 
hybridisation; travelling as a new way to produce forms; and the expanding 
formats of art. 
>>


I like the bit about surfing.


I'm still reading Marc's long texts, so am behind.

regards
Johannes Birringer

http://interaktionslabor.de



-Original Message-
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Simon Biggs
Sent: Sun 7/5/2009 10:30 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Returning to Relational Aesthetics, Queerly
 
That was a refreshing post.

Relational Aesthetics took off in quite a big way in the visual arts over
the last decade. Strangely, it has had little impact outside this domain.
Discussing elements of Bourriaud1s work, whether with anthropologists or
literary scholars, I am struck by how little travelled his ideas are.
However, what also becomes apparent is how the ideas he proposes are clearly
evident within other prior theoretical frameworks.

A key concept that could be mentioned here is Ointertextuality1, drawing on
Derrida1s deconstructive methodologies, Kristeva1s work on interculturality
and, before both of them, Bakhtin1s work on pre-texts and etymological
context. All of these approaches situate how meaning is constructed as a
social process, where the relations between things establish their value.
Initial critical practices that engaged this theory in more than a cosmetic
manner included reader-reception theory, which has been a well established
framework in literary theory since the 19701s. Latour has also drawn
explicitly on this line of thought when he developed, with John Law,
actor-network-theory, seeking to articulate expanded forms of agency that
reflect how things happen in a highly mediated world.

Bourriaud1s book seems, in this context, a rather late comer to the
demolition of modern tropes and narrowly constrained to a very specific
readership.

Regards

Simon


Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.bi...@eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/

si...@littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk




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Re: [-empyre-] the exhausted, deeper down

[Johannes Birringer]

hi all


greetings from germany.

i was actually waiting for the collapse and i did feel exhausted, unable to 
catch up with the energy of some of you, the good and the beautiful. 
in fact, my file, what i have saved of this excited and exhausting 
conversation, is about 280 pages long,  deep into the tropical july.
i am still reading marc leger's long essay at the beginning, which is nothing 
but thriling and vexing. 
 then i collapsed.


during day and night, i have workshop in the coal mine, and go down under.  
so there is less time than i hoped to partake in this.  apologies.

with many regards
johannes birringer

http://interaktionslabor.de




-Original Message-
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of naxsmash
Sent: Mon 7/27/2009 7:03 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: [-empyre-] please welcome Alex Donis
 
Hi -empyreans-,

Just when you thought 'queer relational' might have collapsed from  
sheer exhaustion- (electronic ss of sighs of relief or  
frustration..)  it's a pleasure for me to introduce Alex Donis.

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Re: [-empyre-] danger anyone?

[Johannes Birringer]

Hi Robert
what moments of danger or passing intimacies do you have in mind?  

i tend to think (am not thinking of October actually and hardly see them
as having or being a model of dominat art history in the US, surely not beyond)
site specific art or other art, relational or digital or non, the discussion 
itself
reflects what someone  -- i believe in reference to Francis Alÿs moving 
a bit of sand on the mountains or rather having it moved by hired hands - 
has cynically called "futile gestures".  Why would "queer" (being queer or
protesting to be so or performing queer) be dangerous to anyone?

of course the question is site specific.   

our little county capital will go queer this weekend and celebrate its 
christopher street fest, everyone will have a good time, it's been normalized,
the festival and the love parades.


regards
Johannes   


--->
So indeed -- and via ones angle(s) of vision, ones orientation(s)
(sexual and positional and ???), ones political, aesthetic, ethical,
and embodied subjectivity -- how, why, and when are some "things" left
out and other "things" left in?  How to use one project in a way that
can highlight queer relations, aesthetics, etc. -- even if said
project was never meant to "queer"?  What can be said (more than has
been said) of "queer relational" -- as well as a "queer politics of
aesthetics"?  What politics -- normative ones, to be sure -- are at
work in dominate art history, which October is an exemplary model/mode
of dominate art history in the US (and beyond)?  What antagonisms --
or agonisms -- need to take place for queer to emerge -- flash up in
that moment of danger?  What -- or more to the point -- how and when
is queer ... relational?  Backing up ... is "queer" dangerous,
anymore?

Robert Summers, PhD/ABD
>


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Re: [-empyre-] bridging & flying machines

[Johannes Birringer]

 

this is a very beautiful evocation of bridges (in Gloria' Anazaldua's writing) 
and
the transformation you address, Christina. 
thanks for recallng Anzaldua, 
she was an inportant inspiration in the 90s for many for us.

thanks also for sending me a link to your video, "soda lake (unbound'),
which i first couldn't watch as our network here in the Mine was too slow,
and so it stopped, after a few seconds, a black and white ghostly panorama
of a figure, a women perhaps, or a man, trying to open some tent or sail
or heavy parachute that might have dropped her/him from skies to shores
of desert or ocean in white (salt lake) or outdoors somewhere,  frozen.

when the film started to move again (the network here being fickle) i am spell 
bound
by the movement in this film: broken up into  5 parallel (horizontally placed) 
film frames
in almost constant motion and some less so (slowed, then blurred forward),
the center frame seems a bit larger  (but changes place on occasion)
and over the rustling sounds (the parachute that  is being unfolded or the tent 
that is constructed or some not yet known
da Vincian flying apparatus or perhaps fishing device) are unfolding an
uncertain plot , uncertain emtotions, there is no resolution for this person 
there on this
beach-head or sky-line, the unfolding  seems unsuccessful but perhaps
it is the contrary as i do not know the purpose of the flying apparatus,
or modes of preparing the
flying machine,  

and at the end the breath of the dance of this effort
and the gliding motion of this split screen film finally become smaller and
smaller, a little windown in the black center of things, and pfffh, it is gone.


this is quite an unusual and thrilling, mysterious film noir dance video,
the protagonist is a woman, but one cannot be sure,
i recognize a tattoo  and the effort of the
labor in the sky, the effort seems real, 
the meaning of the dance osbcured and multiplied
in the segmentational transitions. 


PS
dear Robert,  thanks for your reply, i need time to answer, I think i was a bit 
casual on purpose,
as i am not in the filed you mention (for which you think October is relevant); 
I read Douglas Crimp
but not only in the autumn, 
and for AIDS activism, high academic jargon never much mattered, I'd think. 


regards
Johannes



-Original Message-
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of naxsmash
Sent: Wed 7/29/2009 8:28 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] a last minute plea for discussion about transfeminism
 
>

For the longest time, a book called "This Bridge We Call Home" was in  
the bookcase by my bed. Every night I 'd see
that title and it would comfort me.  The image of a home on a bridge,  
and calling (naming ) , this imaginary sound , resonated
with a sense of power and hope.  Now for some reason the book has  
gone, missing.   I find it on googlebooks, though, in excerpts..

Opening the introduction, I find the late Gloria Anzaldua walking  
along the cliffs at Santa Cruz-- a walk I have taken so
many times as well, as I try to get ready to teach up on the mountain  
above us.

She muses on the natural bridges, huge limestone remnants of arches  
that rise just off the edge of the beach, and how
the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 brought down the closest to shore  
of three.

The tension in all writing and speech is a kind of bridge between 2  
unstable conditions , one/the nature of words as representations of real
and two/the nature of words as constructions of real.

Queerness, for me involves the exhilaration and hope in the ex- 
tensions between these.

It is a 'tentative' but also a tent, a mobile unit.  I pitch my tent  
on a bridge...  a sliver, just a shimmy, shimmer, of temporary  
architecture.

The real-- is an earthquake, it will come and change things, rearrange  
things, without warning. The natural bridge falls.  Unlike words, or  
my tent on the bridge,
The real is pure process, the real is that quake that will come. The  
limestone bridge will fall, the beach will disappearmy legs may  
break, my lungs may give out, I may not run fast
enough from the tsunami.  I know this which is why I can speak :  
because I can anticipate pure process.

There is no 'woman' but there is a place on the bridge 'for woman' .I  
mark it x, I stay there, it is my mobile device, my free phone ... I  
walk the bridge, my home.

I like Gloria's naming too, for this walker on the bridge:  
'nepantlera' : those who facilitate passage between worlds.


-christina




Micha wrote:
>
>
> and i know the queer/feminist divide is long and painful and deep, not
> just from reading about sandy stone's experience but also from my own
> personal experiences with some second wave feminists...
>
> Really my own work even seek to sort of expand the notion of
> gender to the point that sandy stone said during one of our talks "i
> worry about the notion of gender floating away here". Of course  
> there is
> still gender base

Re: [-empyre-] bridging & flying machines

[Johannes Birringer]

this is a very beautiful evocation of bridges (in Gloria' Anazaldua's writing) 
and
the transformation you address, Christina. 
thanks for recallng Anzaldua, 
she was an inportant inspiration in the 90s for many for us.

thanks also for sending me a link to your video, "soda lake (unbound'),
which i first couldn't watch as our network here in the Mine was too slow,
and so it stopped, after a few seconds, a black and white ghostly panorama
of a figure, a women perhaps, or a man, trying to open some tent or sail
or heavy parachute that might have dropped her/him from skies to shores
of desert or ocean in white (salt lake) or outdoors somewhere,  frozen.

when the film started to move again (the network here being fickle) i am spell 
bound
by the movement in this film: broken up into  5 parallel (horizontally placed) 
film frames
in almost constant motion and some less so (slowed, then blurred forward),
the center frame seems a bit larger  (but changes place on occasion)
and over the rustling sounds (the parachute that  is being unfolded or the tent 
that is constructed or some not yet known
da Vincian flying apparatus or perhaps fishing device) are unfolding an
uncertain plot , uncertain emtotions, there is no resolution for this person 
there on this
beach-head or sky-line, the unfolding  seems unsuccessful but perhaps
it is the contrary as i do not know the purpose of the flying apparatus,
or modes of preparing the
flying machine,  

and at the end the breath of the dance of this effort
and the gliding motion of this split screen film finally become smaller and
smaller, a little windown in the black center of things, and pfffh, it is gone.


this is quite an unusual and thrilling, mysterious film noir dance video,
the protagonist is a woman, but one cannot be sure,
i recognize a tattoo  and the effort of the
labor in the sky, the effort seems real, 
the meaning of the dance osbcured and multiplied
in the segmentational transitions. 


PS
dear Robert,  thanks for your reply, i need time to answer, I think i was a bit 
casual on purpose,
as i am not in the filed you mention (for which you think October is relevant); 
I read Douglas Crimp
but not only in the autumn, 
and for AIDS activism, high academic jargon never much mattered, I'd think. 


regards
Johannes



-Original Message-
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of naxsmash
Sent: Wed 7/29/2009 8:28 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] a last minute plea for discussion about transfeminism
 
>

For the longest time, a book called "This Bridge We Call Home" was in  
the bookcase by my bed. Every night I 'd see
that title and it would comfort me.  The image of a home on a bridge,  
and calling (naming ) , this imaginary sound , resonated
with a sense of power and hope.  Now for some reason the book has  
gone, missing.   I find it on googlebooks, though, in excerpts..

Opening the introduction, I find the late Gloria Anzaldua walking  
along the cliffs at Santa Cruz-- a walk I have taken so
many times as well, as I try to get ready to teach up on the mountain  
above us.

She muses on the natural bridges, huge limestone remnants of arches  
that rise just off the edge of the beach, and how
the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 brought down the closest to shore  
of three.

The tension in all writing and speech is a kind of bridge between 2  
unstable conditions , one/the nature of words as representations of real
and two/the nature of words as constructions of real.

Queerness, for me involves the exhilaration and hope in the ex- 
tensions between these.

It is a 'tentative' but also a tent, a mobile unit.  I pitch my tent  
on a bridge...  a sliver, just a shimmy, shimmer, of temporary  
architecture.

The real-- is an earthquake, it will come and change things, rearrange  
things, without warning. The natural bridge falls.  Unlike words, or  
my tent on the bridge,
The real is pure process, the real is that quake that will come. The  
limestone bridge will fall, the beach will disappearmy legs may  
break, my lungs may give out, I may not run fast
enough from the tsunami.  I know this which is why I can speak :  
because I can anticipate pure process.

There is no 'woman' but there is a place on the bridge 'for woman' .I  
mark it x, I stay there, it is my mobile device, my free phone ... I  
walk the bridge, my home.

I like Gloria's naming too, for this walker on the bridge:  
'nepantlera' : those who facilitate passage between worlds.


-christina




Micha wrote:
>
>
> and i know the queer/feminist divide is long and painful and deep, not
> just from reading about sandy stone's experience but also from my own
> personal experiences with some second wave feminists...
>
> Really my own work even seek to sort of expand the notion of
> gender to the point that sandy stone said during one of our talks "i
> worry about the notion of gender floating away here". Of course  
> there is
> still gender based v

[-empyre-] border sounds

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:


thank you for all these view points.  
I became interested in the absence of sound (and the moving body) in the 
discussion on screens and projective media
and now i see John Hutnyk has raised this issue very well.   But some thoughts, 
in your longer recent postings, perhaps can be looked at again,
I am grappling with them,


>>
In so many ways the city, and the border, is an audio-visual enclosure>>

I not sure where you locate "border" and what you mean by it?Are you 
implying that the border crossings apparatus (and you don't mean airports, do 
you?) is a scripted film? a media architecture


Is this the "media architecture"  (now spatial location or design become 
metaphor?) or script that  Ricardo Dominguez seeks to disturb, using, i quote, 
">>multiple orientations of sonification - you can scroll down and see visual 
poems to be presented on the cellphones as one layer of the tools safety 
protocols for those crossing the Mexico/U.S. border - another element of border 
crossing sonification is part of the navigation>>


How would this practice of helping immigrants (illegal border crossers or 
migrants? they all need to have cell phones, yes?) be connected to the "border 
documents"  John Hutnyk mentions, when he speaks of:


<>

Can you tell us what you could possibly mean by "filming your way across"?

I think the theoretical language here, political as it sounds, operates in a 
kind of Second Life.  At the same time, the conflict issues you mention -- 
migration, racism (profiling, the war of terror, security hysteria) and capital 
(economic restructuring, cultural economy etc) -- are of course very real, and 
so are the prevention measures of your or my crossing some/certain borders  
[e.g, i hear, at the moment, between Australia and the UK, such crossings 
become diffiuclt regarding application for work visa). 

Were you thinking of the potential "ubiquity" of "witnesses" to protest against 
perceived injustice?   as might have occurred during the recent unrest and 
uprising in Iran, when the video of the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan went onto 
YouTube (in everyday parlance that now means "around the world") and then the 
song ("Khas o khashak") appeared: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FPJNvKRy0E


I am not I see any connection between the video trailers on YouTube and the 
claim:

>In that sense, transporting cinematographic practices to open spaces
disturbs both its particular architecture and the urban logic,
allowing the dismantling of the apparatus and its renegotiation in
more fluid forms.>

It would seem to be always the opposite, under capitalist / global 
domination-diffusion systems, namely that the apparatus goes on, healthy and 
strong, and panoptic and postpanoptic (I have seen term used lately, but what 
would it refer t to -- the online dimension of I post you you post me the 
nighbors post their cell phone video on youtube about what happens on their 
streets and everyone soon gets access to the CCTV system anyway so we can 
control one another?) systems perfect their mechanisms.  Artists "negotiate" 
the apparatus, yes. I have heard this said, and believed its idealism a little 
bit,  some time ago, and I also remember the border workshops of 20 years ago,  
down on the California/Mexico border;  they also negotiated, would you agree, 
Ricardo.  When you enter Texas, via the Río Bravo del Norte at night, there is 
little for you to negotiate. The musique concrete might be gunshots, police 
sirens, and dogs barking. A blinding light will be pointed at you. 



with regards
Johannes


Johannes Birringer
director, DAP Lab
School of Arts 
Brunel University
West London 
UB8 3PH   UK
+44  (0)1895 267 343  (office)
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
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Re: [-empyre-] the depth of projection - uses of space, networked spaces, control

[Johannes Birringer]

hello all;


David Chirot's long posting on projection and projectiles was intricate, and 
very thought provoking, there would be  so much to debate, and your examples 
are of course lovely, unusual   (Leni Riefenstahl alongside Jenny Holzer, or 
Pipilotti Rist?)

>>
   If one examines the situation in the inverse, then, what the 
Projection does is not Control, but offer Safety, Security.   And if a person 
has the illusion of safety, then they feel they are not threatened by control.  
Control vanishes fro the site of projection and is distributed among the entire 
mass of "individuals" who al seem to think amazingly alike when it comes down 
to safety and security.   Self-censorship replaces the need for censorship and 
outright physical enforcement becomes unnecessary...
>>

>>
As long as one believes that one is more 'democratic, more "free," and More 
"moral" than others, then nothing one does in the name of safeguarding these is 
seen in any way as being immoral, criminal, anti-Democratic, hypocrisy raised 
to the ultimate degree.  >>


Your conclusion seems to be to draw attention to the issue of how apparatuses 
and their mechanisms generate "security"  under specific economic and 
political/ideological conditions, and some of your analogies draw on fascism as 
well as on contemporary gloablized neoloberal capitalism  (the systems 
themselves have been studied as "capturing technologies," yes?). Regarding new 
diffiusion stretegies and "democraticizing" media (YouTube, Twitter, blog 
journalism, Wikepedia, etc), would you then argue that these are in fact not 
democratic at all? or only pseudo democratic charades (theatricalized under the 
banner of the new amateurism?).  Is not the projection of security , as 
categorical Imperative, failing all the time? and to what extent does it 
succeed?


regards
Johannes Birringer
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Re: [-empyre-] More on audio borders, sound walks, prisons, and structures of learning

[Johannes Birringer]

e vineyards, 
 up the hills, along the river, for 2 hours,
 then we had to draw the experience on paper, then recompose it = dance it.

always with a partner  (s)he leads,  then you lead. 

my partner was Manuel, a male dancer from Vienna. I took him far out into the 
hiils, past large farms and then crumbling shacks, fences half covered with 
moss. One turns romantic, undoubtedly, even without seeing.  One learns to 
appreciate such climates where a deeper understanding of body and mind also 
perhaps leads to a deeper respect for humanness and one another, caring, for 
the vulnerability.  after all, Manuel led me home (after I had led him "astray" 
into the thickets) , back to the campus, across the whole urbs,  and we ended 
up, i could sense, in some glass elevator going up and up,   before i was 
allowed to open eyes.  i had them closed at all times, and trusted and allowed 
being led through what sounded in my ears like wind, branches, bells, water, 
then traffic, cars, train,  bikes, strange sounds not definable, cracklings, 
textures that i also sensed with feet.,  I heard screeching tires, someone 
yelling, and horns honking, and so I'd wave at them, the honkers unbeknownst to 
me.  perhaps they found it odd that an older man was led around by a younger 
man, as if we were a couple exploring the brave new world, say, after a 
hurricane.

Later Manuel danced my wave, in front of the water basin and a strange 
beautiful curved sculpture that sits provocatively in front of the old baroque 
façade of Krems Donau-University, which used to be a wealthy imperial tobacco 
factory,  and was then converted into this future looking place of ("live 
long") learning, surrounded in all parts of the campus by artworks and 
sculptures., and the local high security prison right on the opposite side of 
the baroque facade of the academy.  Beyond, neighbors  had hoisted a large 
banner  complaining that the new structure has taken away their vista to the 
Donau.  They phrased it ironically: "Thank you, Donau Universitiät, for 
enhancing our sights. Your neighbors". 


regards
Johannes Birringer
dap lab / dans sans joux
www.danssansjoux.org


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Re: [-empyre-] networked_art

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:

happy October to all.

Am i understanding your invitation to mean, Anna & Helen, that we are asked to 
read http://networkedbook.org/   .alongside and with the empyre 
debate here?  
how many networked books/writings about networked_art  are there now, five, 
eight?  
 and i see the blogs.Anna's "Data Undermining" is 34 pages long ("pages" 
once you copy and paste the blogessay into something that can be printed out).  
This promises to be a heavy month, and is there s u c h much  time to read and 
read-write?

and speaking of much time, or time to be had to think, after experiencing one's 
artistic or other work , and others' artistic and other work,  i tend to 
believe that media theory cannot be written today and tomorrow and for the next 
week.

If you suggest, Anna, that >>This is very interesting because it suggests that 
networked scholarly or perhaps theoretical writing about contemporary media and 
media arts has the potential to perform a transformative role in media history 
*canons*>>, you may be onto something (but transformational is a religious 
concept of course and I am a non believer)
that has become live, lively, for example also in the debates (on CRUMB) 
regarding curating the time-based arts or digital arts, or in educational or 
political debates about the need for art or funding or venues, and then there 
are many more debates,  but one perhaps cannot confuse the liveliness with the 
reflective and critical process of writing histories or media histories...i 
do hope the books on Now don't appear now or  tomorrow, but in a while, so one 
can look back further as well.

I am not sure i say what i mean. 
But i wonder whether websites and blogs, blog comments and postings/repostings, 
YouTubes and other new networked/distributed disseminations,  or so-called 
collaborative editings, -- "Schnipsel" in german (fragmented bits) ---   amount 
to an embodied pedagogy or studio practice (not to speak at all here of 
physical traditions)  that relates to what you call the canon  (our cultural, 
literary and artistic traditons or cultural knowledges?) and if they do, how to 
create formation, or influence the museum and the institutions of HE? --  the 
professor as the contemporary knowledge dj, re-mixing tapes for the next 
student blog?I have to read Gregory Ulmer's Learning Screen/Electracry, 
cannot comment on it yet. 

small example --  I went to Alan Sondheim's website 
(http://www.alansondheim.org/)n  recently, to see whether there might be text 
that could be used to reflect on dance and Second Life, something my students 
or dancers could grapple with.  I found this data site, and had no real time to 
start the data undermining
so Sondheim will not quite collaborate on canon formation for me. 

PS

I did show "Aletsch" (a film he made) in the studio today, a formidable, 
gripping work.  It's not available online, and is not coeditable. 
ah, there is a bit (extraction):
what you get online, is a Schnipsel   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhS08Kro70I&NR=1
Since it has religious connotations and antedates Chris Crocker ("Leave Britney 
Alone"), it is worth stuudying perhaps.



with many regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP Lab
London


-Original Message-
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Anna Munster
Sent: Fri 10/2/2009 9:37 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_art
 

Thanks for that insight into your own motivations Helen, I look forward to also 
hearing from Jo about where she was coming from in terms of initiating the 
project.
But I wanted to pick up on a couple of things in your post:

You said:


and then:

< the need for "other" histories. The ones familiar to us were written 
yesterdayToday there are more media theorists; they understand more; we 
need their perspectives; we need new histories, multiple interpretations. And 
we need them - not a year from now when today's views might appear in hard 
cover already well worn, but online, where every interested person can see and 
respond to them today.> 

This is very interesting because it suggests that networked scholarly or 
perhaps theoretical writing about contemporary media and media arts has the 
potential to perform a transformative role in media history *canons*. You also 
referred later in your post to Stein's idea about the shifting role of the 
'prof' from traditional transmitter of knowledge to a facilitator - almost like 
a networked platform itself, which disperses, aggregates, queries and 
distributes ideas. 

In keeping with some of those ideas, would you think of a project like 
Networked as a new kind of *text_book*, one which doesn't distill, summarise 
and codify the cannon but rather one aimed at generating a critical thinking 
with (rather than about) networks?

best
Anna




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Re: [-empyre-] networked_art & performance

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all;


Helen's response hints clearly at the transitive nature of 
computational/networking environments and the performative dimensions of using 
the environments in real time  (and collaboratively) and in movement (in a 
larger sense, not dance..but moving bodies, minds, data, data objects, 
space, relations, languages, IT protocols, and cultural modes of expression).

To what extent are they "open" though (in an "interactional" feedback scenario 
or circuit, in a communications structure or system sense, in a politcal 
sense), and what is possible with mixing and re-mixing (re:  collaborative 
writing, collaborative editing, recompsoing, decompsoing)?, and what exactly is 
it that changes?


Anna's comments on writing and publishing, yes,  i understand well, and i love 
it myself when a book comes out quickly (say, a one year turn around). but 
even then, the writing will have taken three or four years?  so there is a 
time, a duration and a small but critical  form  of sedimentation of thought 
that needs to happen., some kind of seasoning that allows perspectives and 
constellations and some of us write about work we have experienced, and 
sometimes (I prefer not so much unless it is necessary, if the work is older 
than/prior to my life experience) we do research on work we have not 
experienced to write/speculate on it.  Imagine speculating on early computer 
art? Imagine speculating on early Wagner or early Leonardo da Vinci for that 
matter. or on Clara Rockmore's performances with the Theremin...(would you call 
that an early mode of interactive/networked art?  how flexible is the notion of 
a flow environments, does it include electromagnetic waves?

Media histories, understandably,  are often written about works that we have 
seen  or  have seemed to understand and get excited by   (and some of that will 
be of the peers in the "community" of arts and performance, screen based media, 
dance, what not.   the sense of community, actually, is important, isn't is, 
since the practices are also a discursive community.Cf. Stanley Fish: . 
is there a network in this class?  is there a networked in this class?  whose 
responsible this? 


now, can we or could we possibily keep up (in real time and the present and the 
present writing)  reflecting on and incorporating the fragmenting 
disseminations (the millions of Schnipsels) that accrue continuously online (as 
well as off line) and become nearly completely unmanageable, as data files, as 
information, as sound and video and text bytes, as so much debris, and flotsam 
& jetsam,  the constant accruals of text, blogs, writings, postings and 
repostings.(which function much like advertising, to some extent)[ G.H. 
Hovagimyan   mentions:  >>>advertising money spent on the Internet just 
surpassed that spent on Television in the UK. Obviously a networked 
media>>> not surprised]


  I received an invitation from a performance company (Troika Ranch) who have a 
premiere next week in Nebraska, of an interactive dance work called Loop Diver. 
 By sheer coincidence, when the title of the work was mentioned in my MA module 
on "Mise en Scène" last week (in my class, to continue the Fish metaphors), one 
of the students had been an intern in New York when the piece was constructed  
and could talk about it first hand, and about the first workshop showings of 
the piece in 2007.  

Then i went to the website [http://www.troikaranch.org/vid-loopDiver.html] , 
and there is video,  photographs, texts, previews, reviews, and a blog of the 
company, comprising many pages.   I saw one page, where the 
programmer/designer, Mark Coniglio, speaks about their many weeks of pondering 
what screens for projection to use, how to use them, and where to use them, and 
so on.  Thinking aloud.  This reminds me that also in my lab we tend to have 
the tendency to write/publish online all of our loud, and less loud thinkings  
[ and facebooks probably add the "fans'"  and "friends"  comments on the loud 
or less loud thinking, oh,]

how does this sediment into discourse, analysis, theorizing and 
mediahistorywriting, and then pedagogy/reflection and research/study? 
or how does art circulate amongst such.?


regards
 
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab
School of Arts 
Brunel University
West London 
UB8 3PH   UK
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap



>>>>>
  Booby traps abound in making this answer..   But here goes:

For us  network  has the solidity of the noun it is . As in a network  
of computers, it  is a system that implies structure.

While networked (adjective, a modifier) implies something  that is  
open and  changing.  As in a networked environment, it  conjures flow,  
change,  relationality

But we're interested in your post. Write on, please.

-- Helen


On Oct 3, 2009, at 6:38 PM, Anna Munster wrote:

>
> I th

Re: [-empyre-] time, context, participation?

[Johannes Birringer]

hello all


this last longer post by Gregory Ulmer was not easy to read, and partly i began 
to stop, reading,  and then went back to a post a few days ago, by Ian M 
Clothier  -- about contexts and context shifts.
Did not also several commentators bring up the issue of "time" again, and the 
simultaneities of (different) threads at some same time?  
this month i cannot seem to focus, although the subject appears to be clear 
 networked_book, collaborative/participatory writing...

i had a little time today and went to the networkedbook.org/  - to have a look 
at the participations and the transformations or changes in the writings, and 
then i tried to leave a commentary (observations on lack of comments and 
participation) in/on alongside Anna Munster's "Data Undermining"  - thinking my 
comment on the lack of comments would show up on the right side, that large 
empty margin (inviting duets, layers in the score), but it didn't, it got 
sucked away and disappeared, apparently when you post comments they are 
moderated/screened first. this has probably been pointed out and i had 
forgotten.

"leaving a reply" is not participation.  It is like (mis)placing a coat in the 
coathanger room and forgetting it. 


now,  I gather there's not much participation happening in the networked book 
site; yet there is in the empyre list, i have enjoyed the discussions at times 
- especially recently the remarks made on "infrastructural aspects of networked 
practices" and the harmless and non-transgressive nature of 
(networked)(media)(activist) art.

What, if i may ask Anna, are the interesting shifts " in aesthetic and design 
practice toward the underlying conditions in which knowledge is currently and 
might differently be produced in networked cultures" -- if you are trying to 
collaborate on new knowledge production in this context (networked book), and 
this context, it appears to me, is not what Ian asked for 

 >>>
2. Context that is media independent. 
Much context to date is dependent on the media that is under discussion however 
there must be a context on practice that is not limited by media. Everyone 
knows that net.art is not a category like 'sculpture' but we currently persist 
in media associated context. 

3. Context that is not necessarily anchored in a sense of place. 
This is necessary because media practice is occurring within, beyond and 
in-between the art/museum institution and the broader spacetime of social 
communication media and it's adjuncts. Social communication media are driving 
creative possibilities rather than vice versa. 

4. Context that is relevant multi-culturally. Really important in global 
context, many are all a little tired of Western only context.

5. Context that is shared. Rather than singular contextual identity (Foucault, 
Baudrillard, Hayles, Manovich) context is provided by several simultaneously 
(us).

>>

I am particularly worried that Gregory's frame of academic references is 
precisely what Ian is hoping it would not be.

If I misunderstood Ian's post, then can we have a discussion please, and also a 
closer look, if possible, at these contexts and how you would mash up (here on 
soft_skinned_space?), or  alter the languages, modes of collaboration, cultural 
perspectives,  etc, multiplying the contextual identites away from the naming 
that occurs here. 

Lastly, the issue of generational differences interests me of course (Alan 
Sondheim, i trust, was not born digital), and i wish to know more about what it 
takes to be born digital or grown digital, and why this would matter in the 
discussion on the participatory writing.  i don't see much participatory 
writing (in book or essay or diary or dissertation form), since, as in a dance, 
as I tried to explain to Anna's Data Undermine margin, 
you need breathing room, open spaces, gaps, intervals where you can see / hear 
an other move, perceiving how such movement evolves and unfolds. 


 The texts in the networked_book site don't have that rhythm,  they seemed 
static, en bloc, blcoked or blocking,  but then again, i have very little 
experience with electronic (mutlmedia writing) literary practices.  I am not 
sure about any of the claims made for the consumer as author.  Therse claims 
never worked in the theatre either. 


regards

johannes birringer
director, DAP Lab
School of Arts 
Brunel University
West London 
UB8 3PH   UK
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap



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Re: [-empyre-] time, context, participation?

[Johannes Birringer]

yes,  right, i am sorry about confusing threads and authors, Gregory, 
that was a mistake. 
the text i had difficulties with was Patrick's


>>whether he should be there genealogically or not but rather what we might 
>>have forgotten about him. So, in the below quote what I think is also 
>>important but tends to get overlooked when we make him the precedent for the 
>>open 'e-text' (in the prosumer context at any rate), is the sense of 
>>temporality embedded in his ideas.>>

This last one, of course, is Anna's response to Patrick, and her dialog about 
"the networked author/producer/reader/consumer network" --  which i am not sure 
needs, genealogically or otherwise, Roland Barthes as a predecessor figure 
amongst all the other limited structuralist/poststructuralist theoretical 
positions that, I tried to remind myself, are from a particular, 
historical/geographical context-specific euro/north american theory canon that  
--  presumably? --had already been partly displaced in the 90s and after.  

(Incidentally, it was a revelation to hear Paul Gilroy, author of "Black 
Atlantic", speak at a recent gathering ("Reintroducing Humanity into the 
World", keynote at the 2009 IAPL meeting)  and curiuosly, he said that the 
author of that important book was dead). Was he riffing on the old 
post-structuralist jokes.  But is hip hop dead too?  

  it is interesting to hear claims about context shifts, internationalism or 
globalized/democratized network_art culture when academic context 
parameterization seems not to have shifted too much.  here I naturally agree 
with Patrick when he asks:  >>how does one determine the framing mechanism for 
conversation without applying filters, and what filters are appropriate? >>

this makes me wonder, Helen, what or who (which engine of the future?) decides 
how to know what is "unrelated" -   how you filter out , and how you protect 
the "vulnerable" networked networkculturewriting..
How can it not be not invulnerable, according to the claims being made to its 
proliferating & delayed openness?

(>>comment sections on blogs are very vulnerable to unintended use  such as 
gambling, sex, profanity and just plain stupidity. A recent 
look at one of Michael Mandiberg's works on turbulence that allowed for 
comments showed  a collection  over time of  2000 unrelated comments, all of 
which had to be 
removed.>>)






regards
Johannes Birringer




>>>
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Gregory Ulmer
Sent: Thu 10/22/2009 10:58 PM

 
Johannes Birringer wrote:
> hello all
>
> this last longer post by Gregory Ulmer was not easy to read, and partly i 

clarification:  Gregory Ulmer has not yet submitted a long post to this 
list.  Maybe next week.

Greg

> began to stop, reading,  and then went back to a post a few days ago, by Ian 
> M Clothier  -- about contexts and context shifts.
> Did not also several commentators bring up the issue of "time" again, and the 
> simultaneities of (different) threads at some same time?
> this month i cannot seem to focus, although the subject appears to be clear 
>  networked_book, collaborative/participatory writing...
>>>>
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Re: [-empyre-] final questions for Patrick and Jason: the visual and indexing networked information

[Johannes Birringer]

hello

thanks for this. Christina, 

[and i need to respond more, also, on your wonderful offer to schnitzel your 
video material..which i have not gotten to, although i did show your 
SODALAKE to the whole Scandinavian crowd at a panel in Oslo, and it behaved 
wonderfullyin spasm and in strange manners altogether unexpected)


this evocation of your sound project was very intriguing
and i wonder whether such soundworks can & could be discussed equally
here in regard to the networked books/writing questions, and the issues that
came up about infrastructure, density, collaboration/participation and delay.

how would be discuss it in regard to video/media works and shared editing or 
re/mashing?

to some extent, you are raising a challenge to the methodologies of composition 
( i just attended a seminar on Cage/Tudor and their relationship)
and use of softwares and generative syntax, and perhaps there are other 
examples available where this worked for partners and for interpreters/users or 
audiences/"readers"/'listeners" ? 

I encountered an interesting project at this year's Subtle Technologies meeting 
in Toronto (http://www.subtletechnologies.com/)
perhaps you all know this, but i mention it here: 

Julien Ottavi spoke about the " BOT: virtual networked lab" (Collaborative 
online platforms and networked audio practices) and "APO33" -
describing the ideas and mechanics behind BOT, a virtual networked lab that 
allows us all  to explore collaborative online platforms and created networked 
audio practices.

I add Ottavi's  own description below, but what I found most fascinating was 
that he now connects various studios of various people in diverse places with 
one another (via ongoing streaming / network), taking real actual existing or 
happening sounds from the places and combining them into a form of 
(Cagean)"silence"  or music, transforming the sounds or providing the patches 
with which each "provider" of their room sound also becomes a listener of this 
kind of inter-networked-geographic sonic fugue. of many many many 
rooms.

>>
BOT makes up a virtual community, in the continuation of the ‘POULPE’ project, 
with a view to assemble a collection of entities in one location in order to 
diffuse their production to many more places. They stand for a new approach to 
digital phenomena : networks, multi-motionless geolocation, interconnection of 
on-line produced or processed data, automation in the treatment of reality and, 
especially in the case of BOT, sites for experiments, always accessible from 
anywhere.

“A machine always depends on external elements in order to keep existing. Not 
only does it act as complement to the man who builds, activates or destroys it, 
but it asserts its difference from other machines – real or virtual, non-human, 
a proto-subjective diagramme.” - Guattari


There is a machinic side to BOT, a call for inter-dependence, for relations and 
discussions between heterogeneous elements, that has as much to do with the way 
reality is split and reproduces itself (as in a utopian language of an 
electronic diktat), as with the way we confront the otherness, through our 
body, our actions, our activity and our environment (urban or natural). BOT 
must be seen as long term constructions of a living and spreading machine 
network; BOT spread from city to city, from countryside to mountains, they 
invade our living spaces, cupboards, offices, balconies… Everybody can 
eventually participate in a BOT, create one and connect it to the community at 
large, and thus fertilize it, feed it, accompany its development, teach it, 
make it more autonomous, more or less ’social’, possibly even ‘humanize’ it? A 
Bot is an excrescence of reality.>>

(cited from)
http://www.subtletechnologies.com/2009/?page_id=224


with regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP  Lab


-Original Message-
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of naxsmash
Sent: Wed 10/28/2009 6:24 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] final questions for Patrick and Jason: the visual   
and indexing networked information
 
no, i think that the sound space/ sonification field is far from  
narrow-- it's not obscured by the visual-- sound cuts 'below'  
vision... thanks for sharing the links here for turbulence's sound  
projects.
I had a strange and powerful 'turning away 'from the visual experience  
in working with carbon sink data on the tallgrass prairie in 2002--the  
most rich and interesting expression of the datafields was through  
sound using an extra layer of
meaning/ stealing-- from John Cage-- This was slipstreamkonza which I  
made with the wonderful and amusing help of Henry Warwick (mister H W  
of -empyre- postings). For my part I feel the most interesting  issues  
in sonficiation have
to do with poetics and syntax (as usual in my wor

Re: [-empyre-] re-un-mixing

[Johannes Birringer]

hello all, happy halloween

I am in a dark room, trying to catch up with the whole discussion and last 
week..  I am on page 98 of my pasted/copied document of this month's 
debate. (167 pages)
i just read Anna's questions about "visualizations" again, and Helen's good 
responses on "sonification"   ( vis à vis Gregory's posting on "practices of 
imaging") -
and now i arrive at Jason Freeman's further elaboration on sonifacation, from 5 
days ago, and outside I hear the small explosions of fire crackers. sensing
the dressed up folks milling in the streets, the ghouls, zombies and skeletons, 
 vampires, Muerte,  and all.  I heard that "Colin" , a new movie, is shot from 
the zombie perspective.  aha. 

i wish to thank Christina for her response, just now, to my notes on sound and 
video and re/de compositions of material that is on line or networkable, 
shareable for re-editing.  I do indeed
hope that we could have more time to talk about such "re-un-mixing" - as you so 
beautifully call it, Christina, and also look at cultural shifts of this   
(Tropicalism is a good place to
look, for example the couples/couplings there or the relations between 
musicians and Oiticica and the visual artists and architects).
 we have not talked much about black expressive traditions, have we?  or the 
continuations of oral cultures,  the differences between the notion of 
electracy and chinese or japanese conceptions of, say, calligraphy, 18th 
century prints, and anime/manga, and current re-Hokusai-ing (ukiyo-e). 

and i would like to have been able, were it not almost midnight and more 
explosives outside, to tell you about the experience of attending (as a 
participant, moving around with the
performers in the commons, the communal space created) a dance installation by 
Opiyo Okach and his company (based in Kenya).

Their work is called "Shift  Centre"  and was presented at the London 
Dance Umbrella, a beatiful and unforgettanle experience or being with performer 
and other audience members in a call and response situation, without a word 
spoken. 

 I would have liked to thread the oral and kinaesthetic and durational 
(temporal) experience of sharing that performance into the discussion
on what some of you called networked writing and what some of you refered to as 
participation-product (the produser?).  

thanks to all for this lively autumnal month (autumn only in the old europe and 
the west) ( i also appreciated the response to the panel on labor value / 
immaterial labor )...  Christine's, and others', comments on time delay 
and needing time to reflect is something I agree with much.  I was not able to 
read the networked_book writings, except in a fly over.  so i did not feel any 
comment was warranted.

I think blogs are the instantaneous flies, and they will not be sustainable, 
most likely, as anything worth reflecting on.  what value a blog? or how does 
blog become transsubstantiated? translated?
some or much writing, without a doubt, as some art works and some dances and 
much music, travels and crosses all kinds of borders and thresholds over time, 
connecting people in a commonality or empathy for the sharing, which in 
religious or post religious  times has also sometimes been communion,  a meal, 
a session with the spirits of ancestors.  that form or sharing differs from 
re-unmixing, does it?

yes,  it also is necessary to ask whether the centres  (and the patrilinear
theories/theorists accounted for in much discussion here) can be shifted. 
 

regards


Johannes Birringer
DAP Lab




-Original Message-
From: Christina McPhee [mailto:christ...@christinamcphee.net]
Sent: Sat 10/31/2009 1:33 AM
To: soft_skinned_space; Johannes Birringer
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] final questions for Patrick and Jason: the  visual  
and indexing networked information
 
Hi Johannes ,

> thanks for this. Christina,
>
> [and i need to respond more, also, on your wonderful offer to  
> schnitzel your video material..which i have not gotten to,  
> although i did show your SODALAKE to the whole Scandinavian crowd at  
> a panel in Oslo, and it behaved wonderfullyin spasm and in  
> strange manners altogether unexpected)
>
I had suggested to Johannes that he and his dancers could choreograph  
a live mashup of this film, special thanks to Pauline Oliveros for  
"Ghostdance: Ultima Vez' (Deep Listening ASCAP))

http://vodpod.com/watch/2396669-soda-lake-unbound-by-christina-mcphee?pod=x0y1

which is also just now screening at the XOy1 conference on gender and  
cyberculture at Barcelona (thanks to Dr  Remedios Zafra)



I just thought that in a sense the project Sodalake Unbound is about  
re-un-mixing my own knotty nexus of naxsmash and releasing its  
energies into a live dance lab -- i  imagined that there could be  
sensor-enhanced
movements by th

Re: [-empyre-] Thanks to Christina McPhee

[Johannes Birringer]

Dear all:



i have kept quiet this month
but wish to say thank you to Christina,  after hearing this, 
and express my regrets that she decided to resign from moderating and from
shaping/inspiring the discussions/explorations & balances on this list. 
good luck to your artwork and activities, Christina !!

regards

Johannes Birringer
www.aliennationcompany.com



-Original Message-
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Renate Ferro
Sent: Mon 2/1/2010 5:34 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: [-empyre-] Thanks to Christina McPhee
 
The online community of -empyre soft-skinned space bids adieu to our 
collaborator, Christina McPhee, who has decided to step aside from 
moderating -empyre- after years of tireless service.

Christina has been a moderator of -empyre- since its earliest years 
(the list was instigated in 2002 by Melinda Rackham).   Succeeding 
Melinda, Christina served tirelessly as the managing moderator of 
-empyre- for many years until spring 2008, when she passed the baton 
to Tim and Renate.   During that time,  Christina helped to spearhead 
the three moderated conversations in 2006 and 2007 that were featured 
as part of the documenta 12 Magazine Project.  The list 
discussions<https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-March>: 
Is Modernity our 
Antiquity?; <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-July>Bare 
Life; and What is to be done (education)? were produced and edited by 
Christina.Last spring, 2009, she was responsible for arranging 
the three -empyre- scholarships to the Anderson Art Ranch in 
Colorado.   She has been one of the corner stones of our listserv and 
we will miss her moderating energies, creative ideas, and dedication 
to -empyre-.

While we look forward to receiving her lively posts as a subscriber, 
we  wish to take time out today to thank her for her loyalty, her 
energy, her creative inspiration, and her dedication to the moderator 
team.

We will announce February's topic later in the day, but for now want 
to pause to extend our  thanks and best wishes to Christina.

Christina McPhee:  Biography
Christina McPhee (central coast California/San Francisco) is a media 
and visual artist.  Her work is involved with the poetics of 
post-digital abstraction and environmental crisis.  She works in 
drawing, photomontage and video. Recent video installations and 
screenings in 2009 include VIBA Buenos Aires (November), Cinema by 
the Bay, San Francisco (October), Chapman College/Guggenheim Gallery 
Los Angeles (for "Because the Night") (October); ISEA, Belfast 
(July)'; Pace Digital Gallery, New York (April); and Videoformes 09, 
Clermont-Ferrand (March) .  Drawings and photomontage from "Tesserae 
of Venus', considering the future of carbon atmospheres on Earth, 
showed  at Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (October-December 2009) 
and were featured  at the NADA fair/ Art Miami with Silverman 
Gallery.  New critical writing about her film work appears with 
Sharon Lyn Tay's new book, "Women on the Edge : Twelve Political Film 
Practices" New York: Macmillan and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 . 
 BOMB Magazine has published a new interview by Melissa Potter 
with Christina McPhee online 
at<http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=5307>http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=5307

<http://us.macmillan.com/womenontheedgetwelvepoliticalfilmpractices>http://us.macmillan.com/womenontheedgetwelvepoliticalfilmpractices
<http://silverman-gallery.com/exhibition/view/1770>http://silverman-gallery.com/exhibition/view/1770
<http://christinamcphee.net>http://christinamcphee.net
<http://naxsmash.net>http://naxsmash.net
<http://www.vimeo.com/christinamcphee>http://www.vimeo.com/christinamcphee
-- 
Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Managing Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University
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Re: [-empyre-] movement and animation

[Johannes Birringer]

hello all:

thanks for such a stimulating discussion, and i am also anxious to learn more 
about Japanese manga and how Tom reads  content/narrative,  and their impact, 
or impact of the "animation machine" on our perception of what movement is. 

In fact, i had wanted to ask  - after reading the elaborate and sometimes more 
technical analyses (provided by Tom) which i loved, what the presumption of 
"movement" is in the constellation movement  / animation or what Tom Lamarre 
from the beginning of his posts called "movement in animation".  

Is this a generally accepted simple term for you all, is "moving image" or 
(Deleuze) movement-image not something that needs much further and closer 
interrogation, if we were to approach it from our phenomenological 
sensibilities as movers and as people living and  perceiving through/with  
movement?

What kinds of movement are we talking about, and when Tom addresses Japanese 
manga characters or avatars, and their "movement,"  what theoretical or 
physiological/kinetic or empathetic models are you applying, and what qualities 
are interpreted in your analyses of compositing (which were not so much 
addressing characters and how they move, human non human or other wise)?

When i am asking about how you interpret "movement" inside moving images or 
animation, i am addressing the animate in ways in which it affects our sense of 
bodilness and our grasp of what it means to move, or not, or acknowledge 
gravity or constraints, mirror them, or intuit them, and the psychogeogrpahies 
of our being in specific environments  -- and i have been wanting to ask this 
question since Thursday, when David Heckman wrote about:

>animation[and] a whole bunch of really important cultural, 
>technological, and economic questions that are related. While the visual 
>aesthetics of animation are significant,
there is also an aesthetic dimension to the temporality of animation. How 
motion is represented is, in my opinion, often related to how space and time 
are experienced.  The constraints of space and time are significant both in how 
they contribute to our notions of reality and how they exist in tension with 
our desires.  >>

when we raise animation's relationship to our empathies and desires, and our 
moving through space,  i think we are also asking what Renate perhaps refered 
to in terms of real dimensional movement perception/expereince of projected 
images in architectural space; Renate is near  something I recently read in an 
intervierw with video artist Bill Viola, when he comments on how important it 
is for him to install his projections in a real space which, to him, can 
resemble a Renaissance chapel or the kind of virtual reailty projected in such 
immersive environments [cf. V. Valentini , 2009, "On the Dramaturgical Aspects 
of Bill Viola's Multi-media Installations," Performance Research, 14 (3), 
54-64.]

I wonder what kind of movement reception we can infer from cosplay activities 
in urban space or from other dramatiurgies, and how such dramaturgies flow back 
to motion graphics, or whether industial practices are being adopted 
(variously) for other kinds of "movement" by  creative users , and how.

regards
Johannes Birringer
dap lab
west london






>>>.

Dear Tom and Lev,

I have enjoyed both of your perspectives on animation and visualization
this week.

Tom your discussion of assemblage made me think of my own process. I am
happiest when manipulating and assembling disparate forms mixing and
merging them to create flows of images, ideas, thoughts, writings and
actions. Both the content in the frame as well as the space between or
outside (as in another project or thought) comprise the work,.  But let's
take that one step further.  When my work is ready for exhibition I like
to see it  projected in an installation in real time within architectural
three-dimensional space (as opposed to screened on a flat surface), where
the movement of the human body is allowed to negotiate between creating
further layers and surfaces or interrupting others.

What do you all think about the classic ways in which we view animation in
the movie theater, or television and now you tube/the internet?  How could
other potential forms for reception unleash animation and the flows in
indeterminacy?   I don't think that 3-D animation comes near to what I'm
imagining.

Renate


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Re: [-empyre-] movement and animation

[Johannes Birringer]

and dance,  & in current cross over studies of gestures and 
movement as they are also imagined in neuroscience (with emphasis on 
neuroplasticity).

What Paul describes as :

>>>
Animation is about *anticipation* of movement as much as it is about actual 
observed movement (maybe someone could reformulate that in a Deleuzian idiom!). 
The animators have to find a way to distil anticipation; the viewers actually 
experience that anticipation of movement as an affect.>>


is beautifully and extensively studied by movement researchers who also 
choreograph or work with movement animation (dance / film  / animation).  What 
you call "anticipation", Paul, has been described very eloquently as  
"pre-acceleration"  by Erin Manning* (and i would say in movement experience we 
of course have post acceleration, the slow down and cool down of our motion 
exertions, being pulled by gravity and weight and exhaustion and excitement and 
so on... and how we might also see the detrimental effects on our 
consciousness or brains  slowly when imaging is affecting us fragrantly  (seen 
the things flying at you in "Avatar" and feeling dizzy?, our eyes crossed and 
hurting?   ...and surely they study this in the games industry I would think.), 
and Manning offers a good reading of E-J.Marey's movement machines of the 19th 
cenrtury,  during the time of Muybridge's motion studies, which I suppose 
predate the "animetic" or animatic machine Tom suggested. 

Thinking about the affect of such movement perceptions,  one might speculate on 
why recent animation and animated films have been so very successul, in 
(cross-)cultural terms, and how the movement experience is , or is not 
connected to the content/myths and ritual archetypes or motor archetypes 
(connected intensely to our emotional experence of our animal natures, 
energies), or whether this is a general psychological effect of animation 
intrinsic to its medium. 

(but have many of you not argued there is nothing medium specific about 
animation anymore? has "animation"  thus chaged into a different medium or 
plays on a different pyschosocial frontier?).

regards
Johannes Birringer
artistic director, DAP lab
London
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/ukiyo.html

_ *Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: 
MIT Press, 2009.

_  For reference to our company's work on UKIYO, a mixed reality choreographic 
installation involving real performers and animated characters/avatars, see

http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/ukiyo2.html
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/TOKYOLAB.htm




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Re: [-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of open source

[Johannes Birringer]

it is disturbing and yet now apparently more acceptably commonplace  to think 
(in the era of current culturally mediated narcissisms) progressively of self 
modifications and enhancements, and as Stelarc might phrase it, having done the 
Extra Ear project or doing it as we speak, of operational augmentations of 
ageing bodies, bodies less flexible or abled than they could be if they were 
being prototyped properly for all kinds of new reperformances.   

I am going to comment on the notion of "reperformance" another time,  once i 
have looked a bit more closely at what Marina Abramovic is up to, being present 
at her own exhibition or presenting herself as a prototype in performance of 
her selves as performance artist (former, and the enhanced present one, or 
retrospective one).

She is actually, now at MoMA in New York City, a retrospective 
prototyperperformer, as far as i can imagine. For an older generation if live 
artists enjoying their ephemeral events that took place back then, she is the 
writing on the wall.   

(see:   
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/arts/design/14performance.html?pagewanted=1) 

I am running behind, in a manner of speaking,  the synthetic biology  
discussion at the moment, sorry,  

but wanted to ask Micha what he imagines "prototyping" (and I do not mean to 
take seriously any notion of avatar "prototyping" in Second Life, I am afraid) 
to be if it  "can open up spaces of experimentation with new forms of living 
which challenge current forms of biopower", you are refering to transgender 
practice or life? Did you see transgender a a form of prototyping the self, 
what notion  of self?

>> Davin wrote:>> At one point in time, discrete objects were things that were 
>> considered prototypes that could be thrown into an existing system and 
>> tested. Increasingly, it seems like the prototypes are geared to test 
>> individual and collective consciousness.  In other words, maybe we are the  
>> prototypes?  Being tested so that we can be effectively processed, 
>> shrink-wrapped, labeled, bought and sold>>

May I alsio ask, in this context, what Gabriel Shalom meant by 
"autodocumentarian subjects" ?


greetings 

Johannes


Johannes Birringer
director, DAP lab
School of Arts 
Brunel University
West London 
UB8 3PH   UK
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap




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Re: [-empyre-] seeing yourself as a mountain - the limits of open source

[Johannes Birringer]

rience: a dopple ganger or facsimile
of the real. a placebo: a stunt man.

>>

I'd suggest it's hard to define prototype generally for all categories;  art is 
a particularly cumbersome variant of "object"/"behavior", or valuable, 
and if you now think of bio- art, there probably is no "concrete need" for 
tissue culture self -experimentation;
 so it wouldnt come under your best case scenario even if, in some cases, bio 
art may indeed contest or work towards volatility of an idea, an ethics, a 
scientific method, an ideology. 


regards
Johannes


Johannes Birringer
DAP Lab
School of Arts 
Brunel University
West London 
UB8 3PH   
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap



Gabriel Menotti wrote: 

>society' but also the implications for our ways of thinking about the
'prototype' as
>that which ties the old debate between 'synthetic' and 'natural' (Sonia
Matos)

In that sense, one could also say that prototyping also ties creationism and
evolutionism as complimentary ideas of /genesis/ - the feedback cycles of
correction leading to a qualitative leap ('creation') and emergence of the
final object?


>It is in this process of constant re-design that knowledge shifts,
encounters new subaltern meanings. (SM)

Precisely. But shouldn't we go as far as to say that that's the only place
where subaltern meanings can become manifest - after all, if they prevail
over prototyping and become standards, how can they still be considered
subaltern? I think I echo Davin's concern:


>As a thought experiment, I think there is much value to thinking
>about our everyday practices as "prototyping." On the other hand,
>I think we do lose something if we embrace this metaphor with
>too much enthusiasm. (Davin Heckman)

I think the idea of prototype is particularly fruitful because of the
special place prototyping occupy in the technical topology of the industrial
age, and how it is ressignified by the present paradigm shift in modes of
production and material culture. But I also wonder if it will remain
meaningful as we get into different cycles (of marketing, of manufacturing).

Best!
Menotti


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Re: [-empyre-] Process as paradigm

[Johannes Birringer]

hello all.

i enjoyed reading Susanne Jaschko's comments  on "processual art" , and the way 
she ended her comments:

>>life/emergence can be found in various artistic practice, can unite those and 
>>which potential this type of art has to not only convince on an aesthetic 
>>level, but also can have a social/cultural impact.>>

what is generated in processual art?

for whom? and who uses or partakes in generative creativeness in a semi or 
total autonomous system?

what life? whose life?

where is the space/time for social choreographies, (to what end?) and if 
emphasis is placed on non-outcomes, what does this mean for 
aesthetic/conceptual perceptions of art or art reception or games or game 
receptions or AI systems and AI-systems-receptions.  what are the different 
cultural receptions (if these would be amongst behaviors emerging) that you 
have noted?  do curatorial practices  (or pedagogics) evaluate how behaviors of 
interaction or reception of the processual affect exhibitions and performances? 

regards
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
london


>>Yann Le Guennec writes
>>

I think that the term 'generative' is now closely linked to what is 
called 'generative art', dealing with algorithms and systems, looking 
for some kinds of emergence. That's ok, but a 'generative artwork' is 
also often defined by its autonomy and self-containment. Is this 
approach compatible with the picture as a result of a process where the 
involved system is wide and open, closely linked to other systems (the 
internet + its users , for example)?

Furthermore, with the expression 'generative image', one can think that 
the image generates something, not that the image is generated by a 
system or process ?
>>> 






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Re: [-empyre-] Process as Paradigm - / cracked media

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:
 
may i ask whether this month's discussion was meant to be in response to 
(inspired by)  an exhibition curated by Suzanne and Lucas ?
.."el proceso como paradigma" ?  Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial  
/  Gijon, Spain ? 

thanks much for giving us the reference to the catalogue

(..>>The full catalogue of the exhibition can be found at 
http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/en/714-catalogue >>)

I was just able to download it and look forward to glancing at it, but am not 
sure I can read everything, and perhaps others faced the same dilemma, and we 
have not seen or experienced
the exhibition and its processual-ness.  

Also, often catalogues of art exhibitions (a pity that tradition never quite 
came to happen for performances and site specific works and such like; music 
concerts?
opera? machinima? why is it that only the visual arts developed this reflective 
or reactive or processual medium of the art book/art catalogue?),  these 
discursive things, this "cracked" writing on an exhibition or exhibitions -- 
well they  in many cases do not even reference the actual exhibition,  since 
the essays were commissioned beforehand so the catalogue could appear in tandem 
with the exhibition process or anticipate a reception or force one and so 
often the illustrations are wrong or misleading too).

am I making sense?  

how can we discuss an exhibition (or its implied thesis or paradigmatic 
proposition) that many will not have seen? but perhaps some of you who did 
experience its processual-ness , or showed work in it, can speak a bit more 
about what objects or performances, prototypes or processes or nonobjects and 
interactional strategies you set in motion there?  

thanks !
 
regards

Johannes Birringer
dap lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
http://www.danssansjoux.org


PS.  my allusion is to Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, 
Cambridge, 2009
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Re: [-empyre-] Process as paradigm / systems theory

[Johannes Birringer]

hallo all:


just wanted to thank Yuanyuan for the considered reply,
and the commentary on "growth pattern" (see at bottom)

To what extent might one participate in your organism system as a performer?

E.g, we are looking for a particular kind of autumn leaves for an envionmental 
dance work
currently in rehearsal here with our ensemble, we saw these leaves in Japan, 
and smuggled some back across the
border but they were hard to keep in their shape, they have become very 
brittle, and
we like to wear them in the dance, and make them sound.   

have you worked with plants in relation to performance
or an inter actional installation? have you worked with musicians
who like the electrical energy of plants and transfer it into sonic behavior?
do you invite tending or care? 
do you have  representations of the cultuered leaves to look at? what is their 
scent? 


Susanne's response:

>>> JB's question brings up another question that I just want to mention: about 
>>> the documentation and archiving of such ephemeral, performative and 
>>> therefore often experience-based works >


I will need to look more at actual performative work or relatively-speaking 
performance work in your exhibit and how you are (re)situating or renaming 
performance (and what you refer to as the production of presence),  i have not 
gotten that far yet in the catalog, but soon.  You are not situating the 
"performative" in Yuanyuan's plant organism & its adaptive response to 
environment? 

are you calling audience adaptations performative, and why? 

Is there such a reception phenomenon as "audience" (as in" auditorium" or 
spectatorship or observership or other forms of engagement in response to an 
offering) in regard to the "growth pattern" project, why would there be?  or if 
such work processes constitute a hypothetical "observership"  -- long 
durational, as i asked in an earlier post? --  how do they replace all older 
conventions of aesthetic or kinaesthetic reception?   Hmm, i am thinking nowe 
of Ken Goldberg's Telegarden, and the issue of a certain duty of care that I 
have come across in performance experiments by artists who went into extreme 
habitats or exposed themselves to such.

What degree of performance and "presence" is indeed demanded, I hear Susanne 
asking, in such "living" systems or in relation to such constellations as "data 
clouds" , networkds, communication grids?  
what responsive, committed, surprising,shy, perplexed, transgressive  or 
awkward  "behaviors" can you report, since you do address behaviors in your 
catalog, yes?  It is also presumed, in your catalogue, that biological systems 
and biotechnological procedures are articulate  as forms or "means of 
expression"? 

can we hear more about these forms of expression and how they relate back to 
your or others's conception of the artistic?
 
and thanks here also to Ursula Damm's wonderful longer text about processual 
situations and methodologies in a reclusive (non public-performative) 
transdiscipline environment,  at the Bauhaus University,   can you say more 
about what you meant by these microprocesses (viz:  life sciences, programming 
organisms,  or artefacts, or art works),   and the trial and error, in regard 
to processual art, Ursula?
And are not there already traditions of code? 


regards
Johannes Birringer
dap / dans sans joux
www.danssansjoux.org






>>I have received Johannes Birringer's letter. In the letter said: "Along with 
>>the now standard embrace of the life sciences and biology. Okay, so we are 
>>talking about programming organisms? processual organisms? can you give some 
>>examples of how participatory this is and where and when and for whom?"
 
.. ...

I like the "growth pattern", which is a project in the book named "process as 
paradigm", page 66-69."A living natural system takes on the form of a 
manufactured pattern. leaves are intricately cut into a bilaterally symmetrical 
pattern and suspended in tiling square. Plant cells are totipotent. This means 
that, depending on the ratio of auxins to cytokinins, the cells have the 
capacity to differentiate into any organ in the plant. Here the cultured leaves 
are provided with the hormones that cause the cells to produce new leaf tissue. 
The newly growing leaves are extending the form of the traditionally inspired 
botanical motif." 

I believe that every living organisms have an ability to respond to their 
environment,  have an ability to reproduce and to adapt. All of the have 
processual grow and develop. I guess it can be seen as a celebration of Nature 
and the healing powers extended by an intact natural environment.

And about art in the system, everything in the world in natural systems, social 
systems and s

Re: [-empyre-] access to spaces to work in

[Johannes Birringer]

hello all


just reading comments on "free culture," in relation to media arts or other 
practices, i am feeling compelled (also after Gert's activist posting on "A2K") 
to
throw in just a small comment on the need of space to experiment in, space and 
equipment and adequate logistics that enable people to come together
and try things out physically, perform, rehearse, build, project, write and 
compose in real-time processes of performance-making. I have often worked in 
spaces that did not
work for such, and almost none of the spaces, whether they worked for us or 
not, were ever free. 

>>
Of course, as you mention, the media arts scene already works on a
particular ideal of autonomy inherited from various legacies of artistic
practice (avant-gardism, for some) and also from academic economies of
gifting (aligned here with science), so it's embrace of free is not so
surprising. It should also be acknowledged, however, that this is quite a
marginal example in the vast spectrum of 'culture industries' that are
encountering a drive toward free culture. It's even minor in relation to
contemporary arts. It's also extremely dependent on grants and funding
>>

I was also curious to see how curators now think about spatialities, 
architectures and time in the new media arts, the installations, performances, 
events, and platforms (if online but also down-to the real spaces), how to 
provide for workspaces (they are not free either)? 

 i am beginning to read Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating  Art 
after New Media.  Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 2010,  and there are some 
excellent insights there (re;  older spaces of the museums and galleries and 
their white cubes and black boxes and media lounges etc, and how do adapt them 
or change the curating methods)  , unfortunately the chapter on "time",  which 
is ostensibly including "performance" and "performance arts" is not much 
informed by any real knowledge (and the sources reflect this) of 
media-performance artists or choreographers  who work with real/virtual 
interface designs and develop resonant and responsive environments for 
performers to interact in. 

I wish to address some of these issues this summer, and thus mention a lab I am 
involved in (see below), for your interest.  I mention it because it took much 
careful planning to find a site that might enable us to do experimentation with 
some of the processes that were mentioned in this month's and last month's 
discussions and debates.  This site is not free, and small enrollments fees 
will be necessary, for access to knowledge and experimentation space, with 
tools. 

If others here have had different experiences, and found open space systems for 
performance (?)  please do let me know, and comment on how you deal with the 
operational and organizational logistics of rehearsing with software and 
performers. 


announcing:: LIVE.MEDIA+PERFORMANCE.LAB   ::

http://www.empac.rpi.edu/events/2010/summer/workshop/

LIVE.MEDIA+PERFORMANCE.LAB
August 16 - 22, 2010 

We are pleased to announce the first summer lab for interactive media in 
performance to be held August 16-22, 2010. Directed by Johannes Birringer and 
Mark Coniglio, the workshop offers intensive training and possibilities for 
experimentation with mixed reality and real time architectures, programmable 
environments, interactive design and the integration of time-based media into 
live performance and installation.

The workshop addresses emerging and professional art practitioners, scientists, 
researchers, and students from different backgrounds in performance and new 
media committed to sharing their interest in developing a deeper understanding 
of composing work focused on real time, interactive or time-based experiences 
and multidisciplinary collaborative processes (video, sound processing, 
projection design, lighting, choreography, and directing).

Résumé and informal letter of application are due by June 30, 2010. More 
information on this workshop can be found on the EMPAC website.

>>>>
regards

Johannes Birringer
Interaktionslabor
http://interaktionslabor.de

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Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:

in the heatwave we have here (in my region), to think about ontologies of 
creativity or creation is not the easiest warm up task for trusting. 
(in theatrical terms, as mentioned here by helen varley jamieson, i trusted she 
refered to the physical performance studio, not the internet  [how do you
warm up together with a trust exercise in front of your screen? with other 
avatars -- i am interested in this and have not seen the
UpStage festivals, so need to expore how you make work together]}.  

I wanted to ask, initially, whether the opening moderation sought to avoid the 
notion of art or artmaking (and the completion of an art object or
performance recognized as / in its artistic medium-ness, its form, which has 
already been addressed beautifully by Kevin's allusions to regularities
of the material & and the judgement of it .. lest I misunderstood this) 
and, instead, proposed to open debate on "social
interaction in reflexive mediation" (Simon)? 

 I had assumed this proposal meant to examine discursive or mediated/performed 
activities of exchange
by so-called communities (so-called social networks).

The notion (or ontology) of creative exchange thus seemed to be concerned with 
what social ensembles do (on the internet, or in mallists like this one,
or in "cyberperformances" or online gaming etc) and how we think of such social 
ensembles  (and whether they warm up together or agree on
a creatve form),  is the notion of (art) form or media form necessary?  and if 
not, why not, and how did religion enter into this discussion?

I suppose the religious dimension of platonic/metaphysical dimension is needed 
since  many of you addressed ritual processes of some sort,
but I wonder, being sceptical about dispersed network communities not obliged 
to cultural knowledge transmission or physical transmission of forms (in the 
creative sense
of art, which keeps being mentioned,  and I believe Helen refered to artists 
making performances on UpStage, rather than speaking of creative social 
ensembles 
experimenting with processes of working together, inventing together, "writing" 
or conversing together ), whether Simon did not initially propose a very 
different
topic, something that has to do with social assemblages?

Now, if i can ask a second question, why do we look at social assemblages or 
interaction in terms of an ontology of creativity, rather than under
a different, say, poltical or social lens of modes of leisure, consumption, 
spectacle, sport, fashion, or other nodes of capitalism, or self-euphorization, 
 and how does
a poltical (or was it national? ethical, religious?) notion of community creep 
in, in these euphoric days of the world cup where 22 soccer players must stand 
there before the game
for 2 minutes and hold up a banner  togehter : "stop racism"? 

why are social networks, or facebooks or twitters considered community building 
in a creative/artistic sense, after babel or not?  is the creative here always
associated with the artistic, and then what "artistic" terms are meant? 

Simon quoting Kevin
> 
>> So how do we attend to creativity's ontology as a condition of being social,
>> without ending up with just another form of instrumentalized "freedom?"


indeed. 


with regards

Johannes Birringer
Interaktionslabor
http://interaktionslabor.de


Simon quoting Kevin
> 
>> So how do we attend to creativity's ontology as a condition of being social,
>> without ending up with just another form of instrumentalized "freedom?"


>Taking this idea of individual sublimation and considering how this dynamic
might work in heterogeneous social contexts between people we can ask how we
learn to use our languages, our means of expression, across human languages,
media forms, scripts and materialities, and learn to be ourselves
(pluriliteracy as an ontology)? Perhaps the manner in which we sublimate
difference is as much about fear as desire?

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Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:

thanks for the clarifications, Helen, and for other comments that followed 
today, such as Davin's post. 


>>>>>
I think you are right to note that creativity and desire and community
do not always move without conflict.

> This is an interesting portrayal of the mechanics of desire. I agree that 
> desire is a motor for creativity, both individual and collective. But how do 
> we actually move together into these commonly held futures you mention? A 
> quick view on history may show that such moves have seldom been made without 
> ruptures and conflicts. We could try to focus on the expression and 
> actualization of collective desires from the viewpoint of complex systems, in 
> which local interactions generate large scale changes. Politics, then, would 
> emerge from a creative construction of the social actors, with all their 
> common / opposed desires.

I think these are the ontological stakes of consciousness.  What we
think has implications for what do.  What we do has implications for what
we think.  And, if we live in a true community, our ideas and actions
are bound to modify, be modified, contradict, and/or complement the
negotiation of being.  >>


My questions were addressed precisely at these issues of conflict or 
contradiction, in a poltical and organizational sense, but also at the easy 
assumption  (a kind of idealism) that networks (communicating via mobiles phone 
or internet or cybergames) equal communication equal creativity equal art.  
Eugenio's example, as well as the backa palanka example, may not indeed answer 
Julian's commentary on competitve excellence or values (cultural and aesthetic) 
associated with artistic form, and artistic forms are still being mentioned 
here without that we all have clear insight into what was performed or 
exhibited (again, I admit not having seen the creative manifestations). If 
performing an assemblage ( and i am still not convinced, Helen, that theatre 
and cyberperformance have much in common according to the rehearsals you 
describe) is valued here as creativity, then that is all right with me if you 
explain what kind of "culturally transformative art" (as Julian calls it) is 
meant,  and whom dies it transform, and how is it accountable to audiences and 
receivership. One would think that the "desire" to excell" and make a living is 
fair enough, Julian,  but this may not answer the question (Simon's) whether 
sharing a method of creating or being creative together (for different ends, 
perhaps, and not the creation of an artwork), as a social choreography,  can be 
defined as an ontological principle.  

what is a social choreography, and who benefits from it, and who is 
experiencing it as physically, emotionally and spiritually enriching in a 
communal sense (and now we are back to ritual)?  Is there a "relational 
consciousness" and what would it be like?

regards
Johannes Birringer
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Re: [-empyre-] communities / machines

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

well, following Simon's excursion, i had thought we had moved on quite a long 
ways (from discipline/punish and the panopticon), and are, if anything, living
in more uncontrollable predatory societies or situations. but what interests me 
about the discussion here is that is claims "communities" where i see none, 
and i want to learn to understand. 

Helen writes:

>.many - actually, most - of the communities i consider myself a member of
are not physical communities at all. i value & enjoy face-to-face
meetings, & sometimes there are things that are more efficiently done in
the flesh, but most of my networked community interactions are
virtual/remote & this is perfectly successful.
>>

I would argue there are no such communities (non physical ones) that work 
perfectly successfully, unless
you argue that networking itself (via internet protocols and communications) is 
a form of non-dissociative "sharing" (of what) and understanding different or
indeed shared (culturally transmitted) methods of working (rehearsing, 
composing, performing together, as musicians, say, do when do perform in a 
concert for audiences ).
It seems you are arguing for "creativity" in regards to non distinct, non-forms 
 or, if i understood the irony of  Eugenio's comment,  facebooklike 
ant-community. If Lady Gaga has 11 million facebook friends,
what does that mean?  Not much, in my opinion. 

Since you initiallly introduced the training on which all theatre forms (and 
other performing or visual arts forms) are based that apply a range of artistic 
criteria and sustainable knowledge (and surely filmmaking 
also has criteria which may or may not appy to YouTube, and so do design and 
architecture, no?), I was surprised how quickly creativity (among artists as 
you say) is shifted into cybersapce and net-conditions.

Now, it appears that the creativity addressed here iks closer to the machinic, 
as i gather it is explained in some writings on assemblages. 
I found an effort at defining this in Andreas Broeckmann's piece "Remove the 
Controls": 

"Today's social environments are fully permeated by technical apparatuses, 
tools and infrastructures which form complex assemblages of objects, spaces and 
behaviors. Our bodies are fitted with cyborgian extensions (glasses, walkman, 
car, elevator, pace-maker), and the way we work, rest and play is intertwined 
with our machinic environment. We are ourselves part of the machinic 
assemblages that surround us.

The principle of the 'machinic' relates not so much to particular technological 
or mechanical objects connected to or independent from the human body. The 
'machines' can be social bodies, industrial complexes, or psychological or 
cultural formations, such as the complex of desires, habits and incentives that 
create particular forms of collective behavior in groups of individuals, or the 
aggregation of materials, instruments, human individuals, lines of 
communication, rules and conventions that together constitute a company or 
institution. These are examples for 'machines' which are assemblages of 
heterogeneous parts, aggregations which transform forces, articulate and propel 
their elements, and force them into a continuous state of transformation and 
becoming.

As an aesthetic principle, the machinic is associated with process rather than 
object, with dynamics rather than finality, with instability rather than 
permanence, with communication rather than representation, with action and with 
play. The aesthetics of the machinic does not so much concern itself with the 
intention or result of artistic practices, but with the translations and 
transformations that occur within a machinic assemblage" (cited from 
http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/zkp4/45.htm).


I got the impression that the discussion so far proposed to celebrate this lack 
of "concern .. with the intention or result of artistic practice".  
Broekmann seems more optimistic (than I am ) that something will come of it, 
when he suggests to look out for those "moments" when something interesting 
might happen.:

"looking for those moments, those forms, those planes of consistency where 
auto-production emerges of its own accord. Or rather, constructing such zones, 
watching and waiting for it to happen - the way it can happen on the dance 
floor, or on a listserver. Not pure chaos, which tends in the end to be rather 
uninteresting, but chaos articulated on a plane of consistency, selected and 
articulated, so that complexity arises of its own self-organizing accord."


regards
Johannes Birringer
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Re: [-empyre-] intimate networks

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:


the question about "intimate networks" is a good one.  I would argue that in my 
experience, whether dance or theatre rehearsals, music rehearsals, etc.  and 
laboratory work (and some lab projects of course can involve members or 
participants not physically present), in the sense of artistic or inventive 
(software development, interface design, wearable design, iterative design 
processes involving inter-actors) method, an intimacy and also a protectedness 
are unavoidable for the concentration of intentions.  I do agree completely 
with what has been said here about artisic intentionality, which lies on the 
other side of the
"assemblage" (machinic aesthetics) theories i cited, cautiously, not yet having 
hacked into that sci-fi.  

Perhaps we could discuss some examples of intimate creative networks that need 
physical presence (in relation to dancing and the larger sensorial and 
kinaesthetic processes  – Raul reminded us also of this – , that seems to go 
without saying), and some that may not need them, seeking to locate the 
specifics of creativity and what you mean by it. Obviously cooking is creative, 
and one can cook together (not online I am afraid) , but we were not talking 
about cooking, were we? And yet, relational feasts, as they have been implied 
in this discussion, seem to be based on the joy of participation, consuming 
participation.  Game environments?  Yet surely participation in itself is 
neither, necessarily,  a presumption of art (whether object art or performance 
or processual art) nor a presumption of creativity.   It is a presumption for 
games, surely. 

I would like to ask Melody whether one could bring up the example of a 
"conference" as a creative assemblage that combines the assumptions of 
participation, performance presentation, dialogue, networking and intimacy (in 
the private meetings that inevitably ensue), agon, prejudice, difference and 
translation   and i am thinking here of the just completed DIGITAL ART 
WEEKS in Xi'an, China  --  organized, i believe, by Art Clay and a team of 
(mostly western) curators for the event in China. An imported conference?   I 
heard some amazing stories, about how exciting the event was, and also about 
last minute cancellations of some panels (cancelled by the hosts) where the 
papers or presentations had not been available in translation. 

The issue of translation does come up constantly, in  work I am involved in,  
as recently my lab ensemble collaborated over a period of two years with 
artists and researchers from Japan, and since the process involved dance and 
software development (for the creation of a mixed reality installation, we call 
it "Ukiyo"), the contradictions could never quite be resolved, as we needed to 
share our physical journals (our body knowledge, movement methods, and 
inventive or improvisational processes, but also our approach to sound 
processes and image processes) as well as exchange software processes that 
required us to be in the same room, as the sensors had to worn on bodies. 
Nevertheless, we also include improvisations  with avatars (in Second Life), 
and those avatars we were happy to greet from afar, and they didn't need as 
much translation.

Translation, however, in organizational terms, quite apart from contents, is 
immensely politcal (public?) and of course intimate, as it involves the 
nonverbal registers and tonalities of cultural communities, research scenarios, 
artistic (official/state sponosred, institutionallly sponsored, and independent 
) parameters/infrastructures,  and psycholoigical front and back stages,  and 
here i think the term "imagined community" quickly reaches various critical 
borderlines.

has anyone been at DAW in Xi'an?

regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab / Interaktionslabor

PS.  one aspect of the latest collaboration turned out to be quite beautiful, 
we made a silent dance film together, having barely needed to talk about it, we 
sensed what we wanted.
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/butoh.html




>>

Yunzi Li wrote

 
Dear all,
I am deeply impressed by all the topics and ideas told. Talking about
"privacy", especially the Facebook. I want to put "censorship" into
question. As I come from China,  so I know much about Censorship happening
there. Some websites like Facebook, Youtube are banned in China, if so, the
"imagined community" established by digital media may be prohibited by
official. I know some communist countries also share this problem.
Melody

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 4:37 AM, Eugenio Tisselli  wrote:

>   Christina,
>
> It's very interesting that you bring up the question of "privacy" as a
> possible precondition needed for innovation (and, if I understood correctly,
> also creativity). But I wonder if "intimacy" would be a better way to
> characterize this "separateness&

Re: [-empyre-] thinking images and social choreography

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

this has been another fascinating week of discussion, thanks to you all.

may I ask Kriss about the notion of "thinking images" and whether this was 
meant to be
in reference to Raul Ruiz?  (You wrote...:  "for him cinema is something that 
thinks (it is poetic), and, if I 
understand him correctly, not ideological"). 

As a brief reply, and Simon has also picked this up, this idea of `"thinking 
images" was so new to me when it was first mentioned to me; 
back then i began to understand it more in an interactional sense when the 
conversations I had with computer
scientists and programmers moved on; the case we discussed  -  and this is 
published in a recent book under
the chapter title "Artificial Intelligence / Thinking Images" [*] - was a dance 
performance by Trisha Brown company with Paul
Kaiser and Marc Downie,  where the projected visual images/graphics were 
composed with an artificial intelligence engine/motion sensing
environment that allowed the "images" to respond to the movement/choreographic 
pattern danced on stage and unfold
or emerge according to the parameters and the generative algorithms programmed 
for the environment.  In this
sense, I gathered, the "images" were able to make up their mind and behave, as 
"creatures" in a simulated
graphic field that also resembled a kind of movement world  (mostly abstract 
figurations of course, not representations of the dancers).

Interestingly, this kind of machinic or digital "thinking" is thus emergent 
also only in response to the machining
architecture or interactional/relational setting. The images have to be 
programmed to think, and Marc Downie
mentioned to me that they have a bird brain. 


and may I also ask James Leach about his interest in "the design of 
technological objects and choreography"
and how this relates back to the many interesting thoughts you posted on Papua 
New Guinea and "everyday
reality  (gardening, animal husbandry, processes of production, kinship, 
hunting , subsistence horticulture and 'ritual' forms of planting, etc),
especially the ethics of responsibility that you mentioned.   Would you 
entertain a notion of "social choreography"
in this case, as a creativine machining architecture  (pattern based?) of the 
social,  yet with the crucial difference
that there is no software involved and no algorithms in computational terms, 
but a modus or gestus of
social patterning based on a specific cosmology?  

Would then such patterning, creative and autopoietic at same time, be 
considered a naturalized, interactional/social relational
"program" of communal mediation? and to question Simon's search for non human 
agency  ("individuals [in a community] recognizing
they can enhance their capacity to act, to bring themselves and the world into 
being, through collective action"), would such a search
not contradict all anthropological evidence, unless you interpret swarm 
behavior, for example, as expressive of a behavior to enhance
the common good?Why have swarms become such a hot item, or have they?  as 
metaphor? 

>> James wrote:
>>There was never any intention in my mind to define a human against objects or 
>>technologies, but rather point out that what is and isn't counted as human in 
>>particular worlds shapes the way people make themselves appear to themselves: 
>>and where creativity lies is an element in this wider complex>>


The notion of choreography in dance is historically committed to (human) 
intentions and structuring composition of movement in time and space,
it is a human activity and expresses creative decisions or particular cultural 
knowledges [kinesthetic,musical rhythmic] learnt through physical training
and formal codes and particular methods of improvisation, so to apply it to the 
machining architecture (I am taking this term from the architect
Lars Spuybroek) or something indefined "between"  (say, between movers or 
social agents and an environment which may also move
or be considered unstable, changing, evolving, responsive and impacting or even 
intelligent in the sense in which architects may now build augmented physical 
structures),
tends to make the term social choreography unspecific and vague, no? where lies 
the responsibility?  is it always shared, as in contact improvisation?
A movement behavior in an urban situation, involving contact,  can also be acts 
of violence, swarms
can create havoc, etc, competition and exclusion reign? 

Then what model of social choreography do you study now, James, in a 
non-shamanic and non-Amazonian context?


with regards
Johannes Birringer
Interaktionslabor
http://interaktionslabor.de

*  reference to J.Birringer, Performance, Technology & Science (NY: PAJ 
Publications, 2008), pp. 261-86.
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Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology / Le don

[Johannes Birringer]

just before the dawn of the weekend,
I'd like to echo what Christina wrote regarding the interview/conversation
between Raúl Ruiz and Kriss  Ravetto   --

http://vimeo.com/433722?pg=embed&sec=433722

it is truly wonderful, listening to Ruiz,  and what he says regarding poetry 
and cinema,
yet in light of last week's discussion (and James's posts), the final part of 
the interview
is stunning (after the clip of "Le Don" was shown).  Here Ruiz discusses the
idea of (self) "re-ethnification" of indigenous people in Latin America (in 
Chile),
while pointing to his cinematic allegory of the blind filmmaker telling the
story of the "gift" to the Coya people:  (one projector, one radio) which they 
take apart and rebuild in wood.  

In light of what James claimed:
>>
However, it seems to make little or no sense to call any of these things 'art', 
as they are not separated from everyday and prosaic acts - and those acts, as I 
have said, are the ones that reproduces the world (makes it appear over and 
again - Latour)  in the form recognisable as a human world, to Reite people. 
But unlike the world Latour describes, they are not in the business of 
consciously creating 'the social', or 'society' as an entity that can be 
discussed, analysed etc..>>

It appears that conscious self-re-ethnification (ironically savvy) require 
considerably creativity that, hmm, may or may not be recognized by the people, 
but most likely is, as their or our cosmology is examined and narrated. I won't 
comment on the ethnographer's perspective, western or non western, that's a 
much longer discussion, yet i was not sure why no one questioned James' 
narrative last week in the least, surprisingly.
But now James is off line, Simon says. (why sorry?, am I missing a pun, as non 
native english speaker?).  May I ask Kriss whether she likes to comment on "Le 
Don" ?

with regards
Johannes Birringer

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Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Johannes Birringer]

hi all


it was mentioned that the hacklabs or grassroots or alternative organizations /
spaces you described this week might be like


 >a disorientating space that combined
> apparently ad-hoc activity, gatherings, open resources and anarchic
> imagination to provide inspiration and great compost for a whole load of
> people to come together and then go and find out what they could do to
> hack around given structures. 

spaces or temporary zones, in other words, where things might happen or do 
happen and then 
the energies disperse or people move on, dissociate,  or sustainability (of 
anything really) becomes an issue or is actually
rarely achievable, and yet the "social" or "organizational" creativity is 
claimed.  Why is that?

>There is a often a flourishing of
>identity and shared purpose that comes out of such conditions...the
>phrase 'network ecologies' has become commonly used, right?


I am not sure whether i would trust the common usage, and if I could remember 
it more precisely, I would recount you the
harsh critiques i read the other day (in the german press)  about Green Peace 
and its fumbling social networking in the face
of the catastrophic oil spill from the BP offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of 
Mexico.  

I think Ruth was somewhat trying to address the illusions harbored by "network 
ecologies:" and hactivism, when she wrote

>>We all know now that the high levels of connectivity promoted by
networked thinking and action have the potential to be exceedingly
generative; releasing energy and ideas by allowing us to connect across
distances and differences. Obviously these networked environments have
appeared to offer boundless possibilities, freedoms and new orders of
productivity. This is what lies behind the reification of digital
creativity by politicians and economists...Ironically many arts
organisations survive on the surplus dreams of this promise of a new
route to unlimited economic growth.>>

yes, and wasn't there a "blueprint" launched  for the UK's creative industries 
this week?  

what i am trying to get at are the terms and underlying hopes that were 
articulated
last week about activism, grass roots,  or this exceedingly generative 
creativity mentioned above, the
shared passions, the "community," the collaborations. and so on.  but we can't 
say for sure what impact
social networks have. can we?  and what kind of  impact?   impact now is also a 
government
assessment term, and rings hollow as it will be used ideologically and with 
economic repercussions. 

what i gathered from the posts was a generally shared claim that people 
involved, intermittently,
with these spaces you described explored and "learnt a lot about different ways 
of organizing." 
 

Magnus did address this briefly:

>>Yes, this was sometimes controversial at The Chateau: whether we were
a community at all or just "...different folk sharing different spaces
at different times, for example" ;)>>


I think the posts raised so many - perhaps not easily answerable - questions 
that almost none were asked this week.


regards
Johannes Birringer
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Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Johannes Birringer]

dear Simon, dear all


"Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not 
satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty"
(Hakim Bey)



yes, i must agree with you, and i share you skepticism regarding the 
"blueprint"  for the UK creative industries and "digital futures"  ("Creating 
growth: a blueprint for the creative industries") that was launched. 
At the same time, i notice that you refer to "the system" and you seem to think 
that grassroots or other (non affiliated?, alternative?) arts organizations or 
social networks are not part of "system" or are not in themselves following 
blueprints or organizational models of system. In my questions I was merely 
trying to pose a doubt about the illusions (and utopian or transgressive 
metaphors associated with them) attached to autonomous zones and the many DIY's 
and DIWOs  we have seen or have been engaged with or romantically interested 
in.  Perhaps in some cases (of those of us here on the list who are employed by 
institutions or work partly inside them and imagine working partly outside 
them) it would be more honest to say that we have been consumed by the systems 
we inevitably become a part of. 

As to the histories of creativities, i value what i learnt this weak about 
Furtherfield and the Chateau, and i tried to imagine the  "methods and ideas 
around contemporary networked media arts
practice" , as Ruth called them, while i kept doubting the cohesion of 
something defined as collaborative communitiy of networks. What if social 
networks, as they were described here, are always dissociative, apart from or 
including the fact that they are economically and psychologically nor 
sustainable.  

It might be valuable to look at the failure of anarchism as an example and, 
yes, reread the impossible manifesto that Hakim Bey wrote in 1985:
"The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism"

http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html

what a fascinating and strange text!


regards

Johannes Birringer
Interaktionslabor
http://interaktionslabor.de
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Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Johannes Birringer]

mic value, following 
Simon). 
Is property the wrong term or are we not always involved in properties?  and 
who owns what is not to be owned (if authorship is not accountable, then how is 
creativity with project outcomes measured and understood, rather than, let's 
say, played out in the field, for some gain, the further field of project 
proposals for EU funding available to cultural program partnershps with at 
least 4 differently located participating organizations with a annual budget, a 
project director, and defined task forces  and signatures and budgets  and 
assurances needed, etc )?

I'd be interested in the replenishment question Magnus mentioned, and i agree 
that temporary alliances shift, and re-form, and continue. The seeds grow.  In 
terms of the educational spectrum, we also see it, clearly, each year:  new 
pupils, new students might join the social networks or look for platforms and 
find the workshops and labs and interest groups that provide knowledge, tools, 
opportunities to experiment with creatitivies.  

Currently I'm also reading Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook's book on "Rethinking 
Curating: Art After New Media"  - puzzled as i was about the subtitle and 
curious of course to learn about "embedded", "adjunct" and (more or less) 
"independent" curating.   Curating is not collective either, is it?  group 
shows? group labs, group workshops and activities surely happen, as do grouped 
activisisms and love parades (horrible what happened in Duisburg yesterday, I 
am afraid).  But the book, i think, is largely discussing the roles of curators 
(persons) in relation to institutions that display and distribute outcomes of 
creativity.  Curators will be held accountable or won't get invited anymore. 

how then do you situate curating, and education, in regard to the imagined 
model of social interaction?  
do our schools promise any new model, or do they operate according to the older 
models?  universities?  
museums?  theatres?  dance studios? 

Lastly, I wanted to mention that i was perplexed realising that James Leach now 
participates in a project I am little bit aware of:  "Choreographic Objects: 
traces and artifacts of physical intelligence"  (funded by the AHRC).   I had 
asked James here about this, but he seemed to have already left us to return to 
the field.

"Choreograohic Objects" is described as a series of workshops focused on 
choreographic initiatives in the same investigative context  - namely  engaging 
theories of knowledge production and knowledge transfer (from the social 
sciences) to ascertain how  knowledge (in dance?) comes to be embodied in 
transactable forms (objects) and how these objects participate in the creation 
of further cultural value.

I assume that the "objects" in question here are dance works or choreographic 
methods that can be analysed, observed and experienced (through the "physical 
journals," as Olu Taiwo has called bodily cultural knowledge),  but how do 
James and his colleagues formulate cultural value (in the producers of the 
dance or the receivers and participants - the audiences?). 

Does the notion of "creativity as social ontology" imply that there are no more 
audiences?   
But can there be a culture, and a history of cultural values, without audience 
recognizing value or feeling valued by the art?


regards
Johannes Birringer
http://interaktionslabor.de
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Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all, dear Ruth


I don't think there should be a need to apologize for 'poorly timed 
interjections' as i believe this months debate is/has been ongoing and your 
response to postings that
went out here over the weekend is much appreciated, 

in fact I was interested in your telling us that you were trying to engage in 
this discussion, after presenting
Furtherfield activities as a case study, while you were also engaged in other 
organizational discussions (with folks, and with visitors like AOS 
activists/artists and their interesting
"squatting" methodology) at the same time, and in reflecting on 
political/economic pressures and budget problems.

thanks for your commentaries, i think you put it quite beautifully, and i of 
course agree with it. 

>>
.learning together about tools for conviviality. These went on to be 
sustained in a diverse number of ways. These ways moved through and between 
people and places and grew differently in new contexts but the effects are 
sustained and amplified. Sometimes it is not so important that an identifiable 
organisation or institution or project survives. What is important is that 
people are able to apply and redistribute these newly learned values into 
different contexts.
I think that these projects are understood as creative in social and 
organisational terms because they generate infrastructures to serve their 
purposes rather than operating through pre-established models (that would 
prescribe what they could do). Sustained relations are an important part of 
this process. >>


I feel close to what you are saying, and it is surely true in my experience 
that lasting relations (which may also changed and be refreshed and added on) 
matter and are crucial for a sense of satisfaction or fulfilment gained from 
creative and artistic networking and all the other aspects of organising that 
you mention, that Magnus mentioned, and that are now also positited by Scott -- 
these changing and dynamic "third spaces" that also compose themselves as 
systems or organizational forms of their own.  


[i was also happy to hear from James, on his journey on some boat?  to the 
further field.  I hope he comes back to speak a little more about the 
choreograpjic objects.]

While probably everyone taking part here values reflection and critical 
discourse as creative expression in dialogue with others,  the abandonment of 
"the indiviidual" seems a bit premature (?the "author" is a thing of the past? 
, Scott,, i doubt it very much). this very discouse here is driven by very 
individual experiences, I should think, even if it is productive and also 
accurate to argue the way Scott does (quite by Davin):

>>I believe both that creativity is enabled by communities (among other ways, 
>>by recognizing
and validating  creative work as "real work") and is in most cases
actually the outcome of a collaborative process .>>>

(and not to forget audiences or people who walk through the streets to read the 
graffiti and find pleasure/displeasure in them).

David continues:

>>Circulating around this, is a running discussion of how ideas can
have radical implications for being, for our notions of reality.
Purely individualistic "knowledge" is held up in ethical distinction
to collectively held "knowledge," but certainty is never a luxury for
viewers (or characters).>>

I look forward to hearing more about the examples one could find about 
collective knowledge, and the effects of , say, ethical distinctions
that place higher value on the "network". 
But, to come back to Ruth, when i asked questions about impact I was actually 
not so much worried about  goverrment
terminologies or quantification as about the psychic impact the struggles for 
new or alternatiive social/organizational practices, struggles carried
out by context specific or project specific grass roots and non affilitaed 
groups, have on the individual.  
How one makes sense of one's field work, how one survives in it, how one can 
grow and love it, and how groups
feed back, what purposes are served, and how one sustains energy to keep doing 
it rather than becoming exhausted and disillusioned. 

(Sometimes networks can also produce disservices or reproduce unequal 
relations).  (Pluriliteracy, hmmm,   not quite here. english spoken only.) 


It is here, i think  – and surely everyone on this list can tell a story or has 
her or his own experience of working in groups, schools, organizations, 
parties, teams
ensembles, workshops, etc.  –  that the harsher side of social creativity and 
dissociation emerges.  

I agree with Scott that "[T]he challenges to developing better environments for 
creative practice... are not mainly problems of conceptualization, they are 
problems of articulation and of the logistics of formulating those environments 
in ways that they are able to compete and coexist with existing institutional 
structures."And I would add that these problems of articulation and of the 
logistic

Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Johannes Birringer]

hello all

the weekend has just started so i hope discussion need not end,
or at least I might want to thank a recent post by Scott in which he responded 
so thoughtfully to some questions about creativity/creative writing and 
e-literature/publishing, as well as the specific question
about why there might be number of "reasons the creative writing system has  
not yet warmed to digital writing"  .  

I think your response was quite persuasive;  and hearing from Tim's summer 
school of Criticism and Theory added to this picture. 

Scott suggests
>>
Within the university, it might make more sense for digital 
writing to be practiced in other environments, third spaces that share 
characteristics of literary studies, creative writing, design, 
computer programming, and visual and conceptual art. Hopefully that 
third space will evolve.>>

this is interesting; do you see any such programs anywhere? or do you have  any 
hope for such programs anywhere? given what Patricia Zimmerman just refered to 
as the "retro-activist seances summoning legacy articulations"?

 The interdisciplinary drive seems to have largely failed, as far as i can 
tell; departments and schools (say, sciences and humanities) are talking to 
each other but rarely invest in joint research labs or MA/post graduate 
programs in creativity, and if som they tend to be focussed (say on music 
technology/creativity).  Maybe I am wrong, perhaps in your experience they are 
emerging everywhere, and growing. But one suspects that universities, or 
museums or most curators would find it hard to devolve to dark matter and 
quantum creativity.  In your scenario, Scott, digital writing/performance 
indeed would seem be nurtured well in an environment where writing and 
performing involve computer programming, design, film, sonic arts and 
visual/conceptual art.   I should have said, involve people who can teach 
programming, design, film, editing, sonic art, visual art, and facilities to 
create testbeds.  This would be a university "workshop" I'd enjoy teaching in 
or learning from.  So far I don't see that happening (at universities i know); 
literature or creative writing students don't receive software /coding tuition 
&  rarely get encouraged to hang out with computer engineering students. The 
computer science students don't seem to come across the river to experiment 
with performance writing although i have seen design students potter with 
interactive interfaces involving a kind of detective story (with found film 
material/film clips).  oh, here  i meant to ask whether Chris could elaborate 
on "terrible performance and terrible theater look very different".?


Has Furtherfield offered workshops in universities and high schools?  or are 
there practical and working relations that happen between non profit arts 
organizations and the arts and science research fields that some here may 
comment on please? 

Tim says:
>>Just lack week I listened to a faculty member at SCT lament that too much 
>>attention is being given in the academy to the "entertainment" of creative 
>>writing, performance, and the arts. >>

this is a good one. 
Did you attract a lot of participants to come to the Cornell to experiment with 
the "entertainment"?  
could you also please elaborate on why you think the "now traditional forms of 
shaped discourse such as the listserv (empyre?) and new media sites such as 
CTHEORY ..."  have explosive power?
exploding what?

with regards

Johannes Birringer





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[-empyre-] Conservar, Documentar, Archivar.

[Johannes Birringer]

ountry, and that creative 
solutions needed to be invented, without recourse to arts councils and cultural 
ministries and wealthy corporate sponsors,  for example forming an independent 
bottom up collective seeking to generate opportunites for work and for 
dissemination.  and so here it is -  

Elgalpon.espacio:   espacio de creación y diffusion de proyectos artísticos
Cipriano dulanto (ex-la mar) 949 +pueblo libre
http://elgalponespacio.blogspot.com/

Lorena and her friends call the space they've created "un espacio cultural 
autogestionario"  -  and i trust there are perhaps others, many others, of this 
kind, and yet the information may not flow enough, across the regions and 
borders and up north, east and west, and language and economic means & time are 
perhaps one issue, but online dissemination/presences – in our so-called 
"social networks" - may be the other, and i often feel that the communities I 
belong to (say, the network of dance technology and its elaborate online forum: 
 http://www.dance-tech.net/-- a truly amazing , growing "archive" of living 
performance-media experimentation with video commons and dancetechTV, 
interviews and workshops and bulletin boards) still tend to be isolated 
(english spoken, but rarely if ever any other language and language system, 
thus awkwardly separated from the asian regions and their activities, 
publications, and debates). 

May i ask how in Vanina and Claudia's groups the "links" (and thus the 
connections i am trying to discuss) are sought or found? located?  
  I notice that Ludion focusses on Argentina,  while taxonomedia on its 
homepage has a large range of links that appear go north/northwest to the US 
and Canada (and the Netherlands) or organizations based there?  are questions 
about such geopolitical links meaningful,  and are there organizations that are 
located nowhere (rhizome?  forging-the-future.net/  ?) or are trans-local?  and 
then the question is not important?  But was not the specifically located media 
archive an important challenge you raised?


with regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab
West London
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
http://interaktionslabor.de







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Re: [-empyre-] Conservar, Documentar, Archivar.

[Johannes Birringer]

thanks for these initial responses to my small post (and thanks Claudia! for 
recounting some of your thoughts on CheLA),
which was actually a question and it included a couple of examples of media 
arts and performance practices and "building" (practices that in most cases 
also are documentaries, or self documentations, and that produce media and 
disseminated materials and artworks but also experiences and 
events/collaborative organizations and networks), which I felt responded to 
some of things there were said by our colleagues who posted in the first 
/second week.

[It seems to me that issues of "Ephemerality and/or Sustainability" were also 
much at the core of the July discussions on this list ("Creativity as a social 
ontology"), when we heard from organizations such as Furtherfield, ChIT and 
Chateau, and others in the UK,  and alternative social/organizational 
practices.]

I suspected that there  a r e  issues of finding (notwithstanding Lynn's 
optimism, and she may be right of course, but the "traffic in  culture", as two 
anthropologists, Marcus and Myers, i think, called it, is not addressed thereby 
nor the interesting imbalances one might locate amongst the workshops and the 
academic/non-affiliated axes), 
as i was trying to raise questions of location or geography, and the nature of 
links, as they regard media/art production and conservation, and all the 
activities that Ricardo remembers, the media labs and workshops, etc. 

"Trespassing  geographies  is very much what this is about, on every level," 
Lynn argues, and I wonder whether this is as easily done as it is claimed. 



respectfully

Johannes Birringer



 claudia wrote

Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Conservar, Documentar,  Archivar.
Hello everyone,

I respond taking as a point of departure some of the very interesting
remarks pointed out by Johannes.

I find very stimulating his concerning with the politics of the art &
technology scenery. One of the cases he comments -the setting up of CheLA
(Centro Hipermediático Experimental Latinoamericano)- presents interesting
edges. 
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Re: [-empyre-] "Archiving New Media Art: Ephemerality, and/or Sustainability." translation approach

[Johannes Birringer]

dear Empyricals

last week brought some very incisive postings here, starting with Jon's 
thoughtful descriptions of his work with Still Water & the Forging the Future 
alliance, .and the questions of "weak archive" and metaserver / "inverse 
archive" -- again I think these are concepts and methodologies much deserving 
of more discussion here, more than has happened so far, one might guess.   
Thanks Claudia for responding also in much greater detail to my questions about 
Taxonomedia  and also cheLA (which i tried to follow up with some conversations 
with friends from Buenos Aires who, hhmm, also tell me that they don't live 
there most of the time, which is another issue that was then discussed here, 
regarding "location" and translocation of archiving).

today i want to make just a small post here, as Yann Le Guennec's  programmatic 
text on >>l' archive recombinante<<  took us by surprise, along with her 
sending it not in english, inviting translation.  

i am working on german translations of it, and send a first version. The next, 
more compressed version is inspired by Cynthia Beth Rubin's wonderful, 
wonderful post on "Layered Histories", to which I'll  respond later as well.
I am now asking a Latina friend of mine to help with a Spanish translation of 
>>l' archive recombinante<<

[Le Guennec File 1  tr.1)


Ein rekombinatorisches Archiv ist der temporäre Zustand eines Prozesses des 
Archivierens. Dieser Prozess neigt dazu,  verborgene und verschüttete, aber 
dennoch prä-existente Daten aufzubereiten und eine Geschichte des Vergangenen 
zu rekonstruieren. Die jeweiligen, sich gegenübertretenden Positionierungen 
dieser Daten-Verarbeitung bringen neue Konfigurationen ans Licht. Die Struktur, 
in der diese Datenteile als wiederauftauchende projiziert werden, ist selbst in 
diesen Flusses der Transformation eingeschrieben. Das rekombinatorische Archiv 
ist demgemäss ein an bestimmte Zeitpunkte gebundene, scheinbarer Zustand eines 
Prozesses, der die Vergangenheit in die Zukunft verwandelt. Das 
rekombinatorische Archiv gibt eine Richtung vor in der Ordnung oder der 
Unordnung der Dinge. Der permanente Wechsel der Assoziationen zwischen den 
Artefakten, und die Kraft der Verbindungen, die diese Assoziationen 
unterstützen, machen die Projektionsstruktur aus, mit der die Datengewinnung 
arbeitet. Die Projektionsstruktur ist unterschiedich und hängt von den jeweils 
wiederauftauchenden Daten ab. Mit anderen Worten, es entsteht eine 
Wechselwirkungsschleife zwischen der Projektionsstruktur und den 
wiedergefundenden Daten. Diese Schleife leitet die Evolution von einer 
transformierten Vergangenheit in eine emergierende Zukunft. Lesen Sie 
tausendmal das selbe Buch und die selbe Seite, und beobachten Sie das Bild, das 
in Ihrem Bewusstein davon entsteht, indem es sich forwährend davon ein neues 
macht. 

Das rekombinatorische Archiv ist eine Kompression von Zeit. Die Technologien 
der Datenaufbewahrung und Katalogisierung definieren ständig den bestehenden 
Kontext alles dessen neu, was vorher war und was zukünftig möglich sein wird 
und dementsprechend auch verknüpft sein wird. Dieser Kontext ist die 
Zielstruktur etwas sich stetig unter dem Einfluss dieses kybernetischen 
Wechselwirkungen der wiederauftauchenen Daten Verändernden. Die Zielstruktur 
entzieht sich ihrer selbst durch ihre eigene Dynamik. Diesen Vorgang nennen wir 
Evolution. Was sich mit den digitalen Netzwerktechnologien und ihren 
Konvergenzen mit der Biotechnologie abspielt ist die Diffraktion aller Modelle. 
Die probabilistische Explosion der zukünfigen Entwicklungen besteht in den 
Verkopplungen der Datenvisualisierung, die eine Manipulation der Szenarien 
ermöglicht. Diese Manipulation der Schnittstellen verstärkt den Effekt der 
probabilistischen  Explosion. Mehr als je zuvor sind,  an diesem Stadium 
angelangt, alle Wahlmöglichkeiten des Zugriffs erlaubt. Die Fülle dieser 
Freiheit ist proportional den Regeln und Beschränkungen der Kontingenz, die den 
Rahmen unserer Existenz einschränken würden, d.h. den Rahmen unseres 
Bewusstseins dieses Zustands des Archivs, das wir im Begriff sind aufzubauen.  


<<

regards
Johannes Birringer
dap lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
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Re: [-empyre-] "Archiving New Media Art: Ephemerality, and/or Sustainability." curatorial approach

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

this just came in from a graduate student, and you might like to hear about it 
and pass it on, it seems to touch upon our subject, and Patrick's interesting 
warning voice,  in a nice way.  I adore the way curators talk about antiquated 
concepts/data of the human. 


<< Post-Human//Future Tense>> 

Exhibition Dates: 
November 1st - December 17th
Exhibition Space: 
Columbia College Chicago, Arcade Gallery, 618 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago

Jurors: 
Jason Salavon (UofC)
John Manning (SAIC)
Melissa Potter (Columbia College Chicago)

As we enter an era where humanness is becoming an antiquated
consideration, what will humanism be in the future of cybernetics, networked
communications, artificial media saturation and synthetic biology?
Post-Human//Future Tense explores this concept, academically referred to
As Post-Humanism, through the lens of current graduate students, a contingent
who has the unique experience of developing their craft alongside the
current technological push. Through the exploration of where technological
advancements and digital progress will take society, Post-Human//Future
Tense awakens a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive today.

CALL FOR ARTWORK
Eligibility: You must be a currently enrolled graduate student in a
Post-Baccelaureate, MA, MFA, or PHD program to be considered for this
exhibition. Post-Human//Future Tense is accepting artworks including, but
not limited to sculpture, installation, painting, digital video works,
film, interdisciplinary pieces and performance works. We are looking for work
that explores the concept of a "contemporary post-human condition" or the role
of the human body (or lack of role) in a society enmeshed in technology.
Artwork Deadline: October 11th, 2010.  Full submission details available
at: http://bit.ly/9MiZbB

CALL FOR PAPERS 
Post-Human // Future Tense is also currently accepting submissions of
scholarly papers that deal with the Post-Human, again, you must be a
currently enrolled graduate student to be considered for this opportunity.
Writings could consider, but in no way are limited to: What is the role of
embodiment in a Post-Human Society? How will Post-Humanism affect the
discourse of contemporary art? Will a Post-Human society have  any use for
art at all? Were the early seeds of Post-Humanism planted in the reductive
absurdism of the high  modern? Does technology actually ENHANCE humanism
by bringing the world closer together, allowing for  shared ideas,
communication, and societal democratization? Papers deadline: October
15th
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Re: [-empyre-] "Archiving New Media Art: Ephemerality, and/or Sustainability." translation approach

[Johannes Birringer]

brechen aller 
Modelle. Die probabilistische Explosion der zukünftigen Entwicklung deutet sich 
in den Verkopplungen der Datenvisualisierungen an, die eine Manipulation der 
Szenarien ermöglicht. Die Manipulation aller Schnittstellen erhöht den Effekt 
des glücklichen Kollektivs dieses Sichbewegens im Auseinanderbrechen, denn mehr 
als jemals zuvor gelangen wir an den Punkt, den dem alle Wahlmöglichkeiten des 
Zugriffs erlaubt sind. Der unbekannten Leichtigkeit dieser Fülle des Freiheit 
entspricht, umgekeht, die Kontingenz der Regeln und Einschränkungen, die den 
Rahmen des Erfahrbaren jeweils bestimmen mögen, d.h. den Rahmen unseren 
Bewusstseins dieser Archivbeweglichkeit, die wir im Begriff sind zu gestalten.  


<<


I end with a bizarre anecdote, glimpsed this morning in the Guardian:

" Jonathan Franzen's book "Freedom" suffers UK recall  
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/01/jonathan-franzen-freedom-uk-recall]

We read that Freedom had to be recalled as the author claims that  this edition 
contained mistakes in spelling and grammar . The errors were discovered 
yesterday (apparently a problem that occured at the printers, 4th Estate, who 
printed not the last edited file version of the novel)...Franzen revealed 
that the UK edition of a novel dubbed "the book of the century" is based on an 
early draft manuscript, and contains hundreds of mistakes in spelling, grammar 
and characterisation.

hmmm. what does one make of this. naturally, we hear that some will buy the the 
erring edition precisely now for that reason, namely the "errors." 


regards


Johannes Birringer
dap lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
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Re: [-empyre-] "Archiving New Media Art: Ephemerality, and/or Sustainability." translation approach

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all;

may I raise a couple of questions, directed at some issues that were brought up 
in the beginning, when Vanina and Claudia spoke so eloquently about their work 
with archiving / writing, and here I want to address the writing (blog / & 
online digital processes,   to some extent I am thinking here of a 
live-document-hypernotational creative research site such as "Synchronous 
Objects" [http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/] where choreographic process is 
turned into a polyphonous new artifact or reflection - creation);  first of 
all, in regard to what Claudia called the "weak archive"  

<> [Claudia on 09/18]


and then want to connect this on to "workshop productions" as a form of 
transcultural modular exchange of practices, knowledge, methods, organization 
and (self)-documentation which, when coupled with the writing /blog that is 
published, becomes an archival living process of a sort,. and here i wish to 
ask how others feel about that. its effect? its reason for being, its obvious 
ephemerality and also its underlying impact which is sustained, i very strongly 
believe (since the practices are passed on, utilized, transformed..)

How can blogs be archives? and how do they work as archives?  
can workshops be productive (afterwards) also in terms of being living 
archives, documented and conserved? is there a need to conserve workshop 
productions?


I refer you to Ricardo' post (09/27) where he speaks of the Amauta project in 
Cusco that he was part of, and he mentions the important workshops that were 
arranged then, and how they contributed to the development of intermedia 
practices, use of resources, and methods, etc.  It's great that the website is 
alive still, and its content accessible in spanish and english (Proyecto 
AMAUTA:  http://www.amautaproject.org/).

Surely many of you have been involved in workshops, whether artistic or, if 
this is your main interest,  documentarian and technical, say a workshop on 
best practices in video or digital documentation, software or web design 
workshops, hacking conferences, performance workshops, and so on. Like 
conferences,  they come and go,  thousands happen, and so do the modules and 
classes in universities and schools (the latter of course not quite documented 
in the same way as a museum will now document its exhibitions and collections.  
But teaching is interesting to archive, no?   and theatre, one would think, 
such a main cultural form, for so long? how come so few archives? No digital 
archive of our theatre productions?  A friend just wrote to a british theatre 
librarian to inquire about it, and was told that

 <<  The British Library does document some performances on video but these 
tend to be studio scale pieces and probably not the 'plays proper' you seek. We 
do have a substantial collection of audio recordings made at the National   
Theatre, RSC, etc., but not video. There is some collection information on the 
British Library web site here: http://www.bl.uk/dramasound
You may be interested in the Nation Video Archive of Performance, which is 
administered by the V&A Theatre and Performance Department. I should think this 
is more the sort of material you have in mind. Details here:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/thatre_performance/video/video-archive/index.html
 >>

The Digital Performance Archive, once based in Nottingham Trent Univ, was 
shelved, and the Live Art Dept then dissolved,  and what is left of it is 
called, i heard, DRIP-DROP.   drip-drop?   
(http://www.bristol.ac.uk/theatrecollection/liveart/liveart_DPA.html).  well 
DRIP-DROP apparently means Digital Resources In Performance – Digital Resources 
On Performance’,  and the archive is from 1990-2000.  and then?

So I wanted to ask Ricardo and others here whether it is worthwhile to devote 
time to blogs and the writing of workshops that will be disappeared, hidden, 
forgotten perhaps and minimized in effect, once we as participants all move on 
to make artworks or new performances.   I directed one such workshops this 
summer, at EMPAC in upstate New York, and it was the first 
Live-Media+Performance lab there, and we documented it fully, and there are 
photographs and films, and multiple versions of films and the software patches 
we created for the interactive environments,  from the workshop productions or 
experimentations;   furthermore, a blog is being written and continued.  But 
who cares, and who ever would stumble on this site, and take a minute to see 
whether information or critical reflection is relevant, and to whom and why. so 
is a workshop preservable?   

http://empaclivemediaperformancelab.blogspot.com


thanks.  


Johannes Birringer
dap lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
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Re: [-empyre-] "Archiving New Media Art: Ephemerality, and/or Sustainability." translation approach

[Johannes Birringer]

and then on to translations..
here is a first version of >>l' archive recombinante<< in spanish, sent to us 
by Angeles,  to  be followed by a differently adapted version soon:


>>l' archive recombinante<<


[File 5   tr.1 ]

Un archivo recombinante es un estado temporal de un proceso de archivado.

Este proceso tiende a volver a surgir de los datos enterrado y oculto, pero 
orden pre-existente para reconstruir una historia pasada. La colocación de 
estos elementos emergentes volver a uno contra el otro saca a la luz nuevas 
configuraciones. La estructura en la que estos elementos se proyectan de nuevo 
emergentes es a su vez en el flujo de esta transformación. El archivo es 
entonces estado aparente recombinante, a la vez, el proceso de que transforma 
el pasado en futuro. El archivo es una dirección recombinante en orden, o 
desorden de las cosas. El cambio permanente de las asociaciones entre objetos, 
y la fuerza de los lazos que el apoyo a estas asociaciones, definir la 
estructura de proyección de la que minería de datos se realiza. La estructura 
de proyección varía en función de los datos re-emergentes. En otras palabras, 
no es un circuito de retroalimentación entre la estructura y proyección de los 
datos que se encuentran. Este ciclo de retroalimentación unidades de la 
evolución del pasado hacia un futuro surgir. Vuelva a leer n veces el mismo 
libro en la misma página, y observar la imagen que crea en nuestra mente en 
Para constantemente re-calificar. El archivo es una herramienta de 
transformación recombinante.


El archivo es un recombinante de compresión de tiempo. Indexación tecnologías 
de redefinir los contextos de la existencia de algo pre-existentes y futuros 
posibles que están vinculados. Este contexto es el estructura objetivo 
constantemente redefinido bajo el impacto de lare-emergencia del lazo 
cibernético de los datos. Escapa de la meta estructura en sí en virtud de su 
propia acción. Eso es lo que llamamos evolución.

¿Qué sucede con las tecnologías digitales y la convergencia de redes la 
biotecnología es el patrón de difracción. La probabilidad de explosión de las 
futuras existe en las interfaces de visualización de datos y manipular los 
escenarios. Esta manipulación de interfaces para la amplificación efecto de la 
probabilidad de una explosión. Más que nunca, en este nivel, todas las opciones 
están permitidas. El alcance de esta libertad es proporcional a las normas y 
limitaciones que la contingencia se diseñado para limitar el alcance de nuestra 
existencia, que es parte de nuestra conciencia de este estado del archivo que 
estamos construyendo




regards
Angeles Romero
aliennation co.
houston, tx
http://www.angelesromero.com/
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Re: [-empyre-] The archive

[Johannes Birringer]

hallo all

thanks, Ricardo , for your very considerate response, much appreciated. And I 
agree with all you, necessarily, and had almost anticipated that you would 
raise these distinctions, but also recommendations on the significance of 
recording such encuentros, and the need for access to such workshops/blogs or 
documents to those who may not be able to attend many of these workshop or have 
dedicated media arts etc,  facilities and studio. From my experience of having 
worked in Cuba and Brazil, the differences  in availability of resources were 
wide ranging at times and at other times negligible, and in Belo Horizonte we 
worked with about 70 participants in a "media lab" that was held in a wonderful 
old fashioned theatre in the park - Teatro Francisco Nunes- , the municipal 
park being as important to us as the stage. 

If you are interested in the 2008 laboratório [Performance e Tecnologias 
Interativas] here is a modest documentation:  
http://interaktionslabor.de/lab08/index.htm> workshop

  
i enjoyed the first  version of Cynthia's posting where she explained the 
creative "l' archive recombinante" she was generating after "Layered Histories: 
the Wandering Bible of Marseilles".  The limitations of recording
or documenting interactional digital art and performance works are pretty much 
expected, and thus inspire various kinds of fantastical 'solutions.'   Some may 
indeed also be mundane,  like make up redressing parts of the stuff that could 
not be filmed or sound-recorded because of bad lighting conditions etc.  When i 
put up a film excerpt from a performance, into the public domain, i try not to 
use footage from the actual performance, but only specials we shoot under 
different light in the studio. Of course often we don't have the right lights 
for these shoots either, when we have combine lighting design for the live 
performers with projection design for the digital images/3d worlds. 

with Cynthia's last post, i cannot help wondering (and differing) what is 
imagined here  and where this will be the case/place, who will have these high 
end capturing technologies at their finger tips? 
 I sense that this month's discussion is also about unquestioned archival 
"privileges,"  if we read Ricardo and what he says about the discussion here 
often being perceivable "as mainly North-Western cultures/societies centered, 
not in the scope maybe but in the way of understanding other people's contexts."

with regards
Johannes Birringer



From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 
[empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Cynthia Beth Rubin 
[...@cbrubin.net]
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2010 4:14 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: [-empyre-] The archive

Melinda and all:

In my previous post I used the term "fake" to describe recreated elements in 
the documentation of an inter-active work.  I was referring to compensating for 
poor documentation which is the result of the quality of video recordings.

In a very few years we will have video cameras which easily capture intense 
color in dim light, which simulate the instant adjustment that our eyes make as 
we shift our focus from one kind of light to another.  We will have sound 
recorders that can replicate the complexity of stereo sound bouncing against 
walls and back again and mixing subtlety in the space (of course by then stereo 
will be distant memory).  We will have 3D cameras which capture the spatial 
relationship of audience to installation, or performer to projection (if those 
distinctions exist then).

Are distortions which are the result of the technological limitations of our 
time acceptable as the standard of documentation?  Is there something more pure 
about misrepresentation by machine?

best wishes,

Cynthia B Rubin
http://CBRubin.net


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Re: [-empyre-] Culturally specific archives

[Johannes Birringer]

hi all

thanks Jon for this text excerpt from your writing, and it seems you are 
grappling in a very interesting way with Diana Taylor's potentially confusing 
"so-called" juxtaposition --  between the  "archive" of supposedly enduring 
materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called 
ephemeral "repertoire"  of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, 
dance, sports, ritual).  Obviously it is tempting to look at the embodied 
performances/performance techniques in this (second) sense of the repertoire, 
and am I correct I reading you as making a direct analogy between embodied 
cultural practices/techniques and digital media practices/machining 
architectures?  

could you please expand on this idea of recombinatorial "digital repertoire" ?  
when you say it can dispersively (randomly?) propagate and then becomes 
beautifully un-controllable, are you not mixing too many metaphors now that 
distract or distance us from the values that were mentioned earlier when Craig 
tried to speak of located, localizable cultural values and protocols to 
preserve them? (I am also thinking of Craig's mentioning of dignity, and  
Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Or is the argument you take from Taylor, and carry into the "digital culture"  
a cynical one, implying that there can be no stable archives, no authentic 
bones, no dignity anyway, nothing to rely on, since the repertoires are always 
already debunking the myth that we are anything but posturing, hopelessly 
autistically self-referential, the us  archive generation (Yann suggests this  
-- am i misunderstanding? is document documenting itself a generative process?, 
a perversely creative loop?)

regards
Johannes


>>
Taylor's use of the word "repertoire" is suggestive of the malleability of 
re-performed culture.  Although she notes that dancers often swear they are 
performing exactly the same dance as their predecessors, Taylor writes that, 
"as opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that 
are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and 
transforms choreographies of meaning." 


Taylor's repertoire is emphatically embodied rather than written, with explicit 
contrast to print and implied contrast to scripted media such as radio and 
television. Yet it is less broadcast media's dependence on *scripts* than its 
dependence on *hierarchy* that ties it to the conservative view of the archive 
as regulating adherence to the original. Open software programmers, Wikipedia 
contributors, and YouTube mashup filmmakers constantly script and re-script the 
digital repertoire; new media writing escapes the centralized control 
characteristic of broadcast because it is editable. Furthermore, new media are 
not exactly disembodied in the way that a pre-recorded show playing on a screen 
is disembodied. New media may be non-geographic, but they network people into 
active producers rather than passive consumers, and even when mediated by 
machines, they execute rather than represent. This means that many of the 
"bodies" that perform new media--a browser running JavaScript, a
 Playstation running C++, an Intel CPU running machine language--can be 
modified and distributed inside emulators and other virtual environments. If 
anything, the fact that the digital repertoire can propagate by a dispersed 
populace using DIY tools makes digital media even more uncontrolled than the 
analog repertoire.

Excerpt from the chapter "Unreliable Archivists," in Richard Rinehart and Jon 
Ippolito, New Media and Social Memory (MIT Press, forthcoming)
>>.
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Re: [-empyre-] Culturally specific and unreliable archives

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all


thanks much, Jon, for responding to such a great extent, and Ben Bogart picked 
up some of threads here, pointing to what he believes is the near impossibility 
of digital preservation and "migration" / "proliferative preservation."


i was struck by Jon's writing, and even before you mentioned it, I went into my 
browser to see whether this "Unreliable Archivist" was indeed an art or an 
archive performance project once staged at the Walker Art center, near the end 
of the last century (1998), and indeed, there it was, or is. (and then you say 
it has been "frankensteined"?)

http://www.walkerart.org/archive/B/AE7375061D34E519615F.htm

Without wanting to  comment much, this is indeed a provocation to archiving 
methodologies or concepts, and also, as your answers suggest, raising more 
questions as to the difference, which I tend to see and want to make, between 
art works or media arts project preserved or preservable, and here i am 
thinking, yes, of culturally specific productions,  a dance or an installation 
or a site specific work produced locally, or an interactive work produced in 
particular contexts at particular times for audiences/visitors, etc 
(subsequently, if you like, recombinatorially archived or through "this 
variable activity" as Jon calls it after his Merce Cunningham reference),   and 
artworks that invite/depend on unreliable participants in the first place or 
perhaps are the kind of inherently technology and network-dependent processes 
addressed by Ben Bogart.

Jon suggests:
>As I understand the Mukurtu archive, a boy from a village might have to sit 
>down with his grandmother to see certain images of his relatives, and the 
>occasioning of this bond that is ultimately more important than the 
>photographs viewed. The fact that this bond is social rather than financial is 
>one of the many things that distinguishes indigenous protocols from DRM. 
>>

yes, this is the point, to some extent, made by "Art and Cold Cash,"  but the 
cold cash always impacts the social relations and the perceptions constituted 
for cultural/artistic values and social prestige or cultural capital. 

My question is (reading your fascinating with:  " [t]he most notorious aspect 
of the Unreliable Archivist, however, was not how it worked but how it failed") 
-
how unreliable does it get, or how uncontrollable does it become (the artwork 
or process and the archive "we" (Yann's autistic Us Archive Generation)  
constitute)?

Example: is not an installation such as George Legrady's "Pockets full of 
Memory" [http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/pockets-full-of-memory/] dependent 
precisely on what the audience participants will do, what they will contribute 
and share to "make" the work (and its 'self-organizing data-base') work, in 
other words how well the unreliable archivists perform?  But this method or 
this principle may not apply equally well to a Merce Cunningham choreography 
or, say, to a work by Patrick Mahon (from the Art and Cold Cash collective) who 
early on, when the exchanges with the south started, was making interrogative 
drawings that took up the symbolic language of currency (they appear like 
strangely ornate baroque-like etchings coalescing into beavers and 
officious-looking buildings and such) and yet his repertoire was also  
inflected with imagery from everyday Northern/ Inuit life: broken skidoos, 
someone gutting a seal, garbage dumps, and such. 
 


thanks
Johannes Birringer
DAP lab


>>>B. Bogart writes

I believe that technology and IP, as it is currently practised, makes 
any preservation nearly impossible, and certainly complicates even 
migration. I think choices regarding what technologies an artwork should 
depend on should be a careful decision, that can't be limited by the 
here-and-now pragmatics of what warez software can easily be acquired, 
or happens to be preinstalled on our computers

..

When I pass on, to whom will I entrust the software that makes up my
artworks?

>>>
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Re: [-empyre-] localized scenes, digital arts & education

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

thanks to all for an inspiring discussion, 
there is much to learn, and i am still thinking of the initial question that 
was raised at the beginning:

//...looking at look at how (or how not)  
exhibitions, symposia or publications decode across cultural, gender  
and political bounds to both Chinese and Non-Chinese audiences...
 explore, amongst other topics, how digital practices operate  
in a regulated exhibition system; and the emergences, frictions and  
dialogues between artists and curators within contemporary Chinese  
distributed and digital practices.//

what is meant when you mention regulated exhibition systems?
how does this connect to the presence of international-run galleries
which, i gathered, have opened up in Beijing and Shanghai (and other cities),
and the market, and also the festival circuit  (China's increasingly strong
presence at the Venice Biennale, or documenta for example);
but then again, how do you discuss "new media arts" on 
a very small local level, say, a particular gallery or performance space
in the 798 factory district. 

can one in fact understand a larger picture by looking at a tiny fragment (Jian 
Wei Shi Shu)?

and what happened to small independent/alternative art galleries or performance 
spaces?

I remember visiting "Hart Cafe" , located on a small side street inside the 798 
Dashanzi district,
for an evening of french underground films and chinese electronic music, there 
was also a dance improvisation
(duet between dancer and musician), we exchanged CDs,  drank wine, and there 
were many languages spoken
in the cafe, just as if one were in london or new york.  this was in 2004. 
there were some video artists
exhibiting, in some of the other galleries, there was a multimedia heavy metal 
performance one night,  
there was body art, but i am not sure one could think yet of a digital art scene
or come across networks organizing "digital practices" or building production 
infrastructures and facilities,
but it had to happen, surely.  The Beijing Dance Academy had just built a TV / 
sound stage to begin to
look at video dance & choreography for the camera. choreographers in Hong Kong 
had worked with media
already in the early years of the new century, but there were probably no 
interdisciplinary time arts courses
in the universities yet, and working with software composition in performance 
was not a tradition; but
international work of this kind was shown in China, and the Olympic Games 
probably affected everything.
it also probably is easy now to get hold of any and all softwares (for 
interactive design). Li Yifan from
the School of Art Design (Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication) gave me 
several DVDs of student
works that were quite interesting, so I guess we probably would like to know 
more about how graduate
schools took on the "digital."  

I tried to look up the Hart Cafe online, now in 2010, and am 
impressed/surprised to see how it defines its range of practices now;

http://www.hart.com.cn/

::Hart Production is a full-service production support company for 
international productions in Beijing.
>>
We provide our clients with everything needed to shoot successfully in China, 
including: 
1. Government Permits 
2. Location Scouting 
3. Hiring Talented Local Crews 
4. Casting 
5. Renting Camera, Lighting, and Grip Equipment 
6. Purchasing Film/Tape Stock 
7. Processing Post Production 
8. All China Logistics (travel, hotels, catering, etc.) 
9. Transportation (trucks, vans, cars, picture vehicles, camera veh
>>


what are the frictions and  
dialogues between artists and curators within contemporary Chinese  
distributed and digital practices (how to localize these?), and how are they 
owed (or not) to the international
market interests (collectors interests, Biennial interests) on the one hand,
and how are younger Chinese artists (working with a range of media and 
performance)
perceiving/absorbing the dynamism that Melinda mentions, on the other, with 
artists from elsewhere flocking to Beijing and
Shanghai "as they were moving to Berlin a decade or so ago"?  The market values 
of saleable art dropped in 2008, i thought,
but our subject - new media arts - is not so sale-able, yes?   Is the maneuver 
that Cindy Zeng/ Lao Dan  and Hart Cafe undertook a logical one?


regards
Johannes Birringer
London
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
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Re: [-empyre-] localized scenes, digital arts & education

[Johannes Birringer]

Dear all, dear Edward


thanks for your recent response, and commentaries on the independent scene.

I felt a bit foolish afterwards for thinking that the website (Cindy Zeng/Lao 
Dan and Hart Cafe)
meant that they had expanded or changed their policy and were alive and well; I 
tried to
contact them directly but have not heard back, and this makes your observation
on the impact of internationalization on the local scene more poignant to me 
(and I was referring mostly
to the 798 Dashanzi district, which in 2004 looked thorough alternative & 
independent), when
i think of similar efforts to sustain grass roots or independent media labs and 
spaces here or elsewhere,
everywhere. How do these infrastructural and political-economic developments 
affect the
new media arts and performance making as such, how do they affect or influence 
the discourse?

You mention some alternative plaves in the "centers"?
and what kind of "new media arts" or contemporary digital performance is 
curated there, and what
is curated/supported for traveling /viewing outside of China? 

in the northern hemisphere (or southern - if one were to think of the chinese 
cultural presence in Brasil as well), 
how is contemporary chinese art met in the discourses or cracked media?

with regards
Johannes





>>..Edward schrieb:


Although I don't want to take this off-topic too much, I just wanted
to chip in with some quick responses to your question about
alternative spaces, as this is one of my interests, and try to link
this to new media.

> and what happened to small independent/alternative art galleries or
> performance spaces?

As you probably know the international gallery system has been adopted
with bravado here. Admittedly it serves as a very important bridge
between the local and international participants, but at the expense
of somewhat reducing the options available for new developments, or at
least slowing these possibilities down.

New media work has suffered from this "dumbing down" (ok, that went
too far, perhaps simplification is a better word) of the scene,
probably because of it's potential complexity. I guess this is not a
new situation, either here or elsewhere.

As for "alternatives", some exist in the centers (Beijing, Shanghai,
Guangzhou, Hangzhou), their patterns often borrowed from conceptual or
institutional critique, but given the local twist there are different
possibilities for these activities and different results with
different meanings.

I've been here three years and I've not heard of the Hart Cafe. The
website looks like it's dormant and there is no address given. But
this is the way things work, people come and go, spaces open and close
without fanfare or warning. The way Hart are positioning themselves
suggests that they needed to broaden their appeal, to better position
themselves at the commercial end. This is a common and realistic tactic.

Another "tiny fragment" which this makes me think of would be Shan
Studio  set up by two artists, Sheng
Jie (Gogo) and Yang Tao to provide workshops and support for artists
working in new media. These grass-roots initiatives pop up every now
and again and are a good sign of diversity.

Best,
Edward


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[-empyre-] without fear or/of favor

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all


last night BBC 1 showed a substantial one hour documentary film on Ai WeiWei, 
i presume because of the current exhibition or long -durational installation of 
"Sunflower Seeds"
at London's Tate Modern.

the film focussed  -- in hushed tones and with western curators and gallery 
owners
pontificating and only one commentator responding to any of the questions in a 
language
other than english -- on  Ai WeiWei's life and artistic formation, some of his 
outspoken/political actions and
the amazingly wide range of artistic activities;  the early sections on his 
childhood and father,
during the years of the Cultural Revolution, and his departure for New York, 
were moving and
illuminating.  

The ending was a bit confused, as we see crowds of mesmerized people delving 
into and
lying in midst of a sea of millions of handmade/handcrafted porcelain sunflower 
seeds, 
and then only during the final credits is it mentioned briefly that the 
installation is no
longer accessible to the public.

I didn't understand that as I had not been able to go there yet myself.

When i checked the review's I found a blog that apparently records
conversations between Ai Wei Wei and viewers [ 
http://lihlii.posterous.com/ai-weiwei-without-fear-or-favour-bbc1]

and a commentary, cited here for you:

<
Imagine's film about the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei reserved the one thing that 
most people already know about him for a hasty back announcement over the final 
credits, as Alan Yentob mentioned that health and safety considerations had 
limited access to his Tate Turbine Hall installation of 100 million 
hand-crafted porcelain sunflower seeds. On film, visitors rhapsodised about the 
sensual pleasure of burying themselves in the seeds and the Proustian memories 
of childhood it conjured. After which Yentob forestalled a rush to the 
Southbank by explaining that none of these joys were available any longer. You 
couldn't blame them for not making more of it though because this was a 
fascinating film, and the fiasco over ceramic dust would have made for an 
unjustly deflating ending.

It would have been interesting to know how Ai Weiwei felt about it though, 
because he appears to be an exacting judge of finish. In one startling scene in 
the film he was shown touring a factory that had been working on an 
installation for him, destroying giant ceramic vases that had, for some reason, 
fallen below the standards he required. Perhaps this was an art work in itself 
– or an allusion to one – since one of Ai Weiwei's early pieces showed him 
smashing a valuable Han dynasty urn. Either way it was a smashing bit of film, 
effectively solving the art documentary's perennial difficulty in making 
aesthetic discrimination dramatic to watch.

There was an odd paradox here. Ai Weiwei has pretty consistently been in 
trouble with the Chinese authorities – courageously campaigning for a proper 
inquiry into the death of schoolchildren during the recent earthquakes and 
suffering beatings and surveillance for his pains. At the same time he 
collaborated in the design of the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing and clearly 
still has an internet connection, because he conducted part of his interview 
with Yentob by webcam, after the BBC's request to visit him in China had been 
turned down. In other words, the Chinese authorities appear to be 
simultaneously infuriated by him and proud of him, as an artist of 
international standing. One can only hope it buys him enough space to continue 
working.
>


regards
Johannes Birringer
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Re: [-empyre-] without fear or/of favor

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:


thanks Edward for your reply to my impressions on 798, and your very helpful 
additional comments and explanations. I am sorry to learn of the 
"gentrification" of 798 but perhaps that was, sadly, inevitable, even if one 
might look at other scenarios (I am thinking of Metelkova in Ljubljana, after 
the collapse of socialism) where occupation of a site by alternative groups 
generated its own dynamic and power.

Now Li Zhenhua asks why I brought up a documentary film on Ai WeiWei shown in 
Britain, and what it has to do with media arts.

I felt inspired to do so for two reasons.  First, i think installations or 
(fake) site specific or immersive art works using media attention to 
create/perform event-character have much to do with media arts and new media 
arts dispersive or generative strategies and links to social networks and the 
internet, and of course film and news media and blogs contribute to the 
happening and the discourse of the event.  I saw the release of the documentary 
as part of the artist's and the curators' and promoters'  media arts strategy, 
and thus part of the common promotional discourse with which contemporary art 
(whether paintings of the Cultural Revolution or, say, Wu Meng’s “Gravity” 
series based on earlier performances) dresses itself up.

Furthermore, i thought Rebecca Catching's posting on the complications 
surrounding her exhibition "Shifting Definitions" was stunningly revealing of 
many aspects, and more, that came up or did not come up in this month's 
discussion.
The issue of censorship needed addressing, and issues of gender bias, 
sexuality,  and xenophobia probably are forbiddingly complex but also necessary 
for a fuller, critical debate on the formation of new media arts practices, the 
discourse, and the curatorial challenges. 

Isaac leung stated that "if we look at formation of new media art practices, it 
is impossible not to see the various institutional mediations that shape the 
knowledge and logic of what “new media” is to be.  The discourse of new media 
can hardly be solely tied to the subject itself; rather, the subject of new 
media is inevitably a social construction.".   One couldn't agree more,  
and I am thankful to Rebecca for describing in such detail the counter 
surveillance or counter-interventionist tactics deployed at and via her gallery 
and the exhibition  (for example the beautiful example of the "digital copy" 
that was confiscated or the "passing around of performances" via small hand 
held video player devices).

The mobility and these various dissemination strategies raise many questions, 
at the same time, not least to the the curatorial thinking on art, media, 
performance, networks, today. 

The disappointing side of the "Without Fear or Favor" was its complete lack of 
a critical approach to its material and an inability or unwillingness to look 
more carefully into contexts;  for example, it briefly mentions Ai's 
involvement in the so-called notorious 2000 "Uncooperative Approach" exhibition 
held during the Shanghai Biennial.  I remember how the black catalogue, titled 
"Fuck Off,"  was sold under the table in a bookstore in 798, as if it was a 
forbidden or underground cult object, and the documentary makes the tiniest of 
quick allusions to the Zhu Yu performance of "Eating People,"  except that this 
was not a performance but a series of photographs.

I would, on the whole, be really interested in hearing more on the relationship 
between performance / live art and media arts in China and how younger 
generation media and performance artists situate themselves toward their 
audiences, who are the audiences, who sees such performances or gets a video 
monitor or ipad passed around to?  and - to come back to Isaac leung, how does 
one avoid the East/West trappings   as you say:"Many discourses concerning 
contemporary Chinese art are based on the premise of polarized East/West 
aesthetic values that tends to pander to the knowledge and logics of the art 
centers in the West.  These common conceptualizations imply that the trajectory 
of art within China is operated in a monolithic and unidirectional way, that is 
to say, from the West to East" but what about the diaspora, the many 
Chinese artists who have gone to other places?

regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab  



___>Li zhenhua schrieb: 

I am wondering what this to do with the media art issue?!
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Re: [-empyre-] the self and the (machinic) other / a post-systemic condition or a post-art condition?

[Johannes Birringer]

hi everybody
when not shoveling snow at the moment, i've tried to catch up with this month's 
debate,
and appreciate the threads i was able to read, on game subcultures, 
immersion/playing
and gaming experience, especially the posts on game preservation 
(fascinating)..

now am puzzled by the question of the frameworks and whether one can move 
beyond them
and where would you move?  I gather Adam Trowbridge opens up some difficult 
areas for
discussion: 

>>The really new media, as featured in games and on Youtube and endless
dark corners of the Internet, highlights how self-involved and
tiresome the visual art world can be when it chooses to remain stuck
in (or worse, attempts to colonize really new media for) Twentieth
century theory and practice. Radical, exciting culture is happening
far outside the existing art world, as it always has. Hopefully we can
find inspiration in these new emergences as examples of really new
media art and interesting art cultures (or cultures engaging in
activity we can recognize as similar to art) rather than attempting to
select the most art-like elements to drag back into or onto white
boxes.
>>

and so i tried to follow there and went to the (dark) corners to watch
the "chatroulette" video or “performance” No Fun, which Menotti references,
and admit of not having the vocabulary to quite frame this piece for myself
(or others i might talk to), it's neither a performance nor a game, it seems
to me; and so if that is an example of "irrational interaction" (Trowbridge),
or playful fun house stuff in online culture, where does it take us?
one commentator to the video suggests:

<>

and so one might see why gaga platforms and art museums or theatres are not 
likely to mix gently yet,
but surely someone will want to study or explain the phenomenon, even if, as 
Adam argues, that is what the producers
might like to avoid (not sure about that, given the Mattes' exhibition record), 
or so i understand his proposition:

>>[we] are moving towards irrational
interaction based on anonymous collaboration and action in order to
escape from the overproduction of media, marketing, messages,
branding, surveillance, study, investigation, knowledge and, most of
all, information>>

this is a lot to escape from; more or less you want to escape culture 
or (critical) frameworks as such?what am i misundestanding?


with regards
Johannes Birringer


Menotti schreibt: 

>>
About this, another work by the Mattes comes to mind: the
“performance” No Fun. [1] Does it have ethical or aesthetical
implications any stronger than other performances done within
chatroulette subculture (e.g. the batman guy [2], piano improv [3],
tits or chicken die [3])? Or its particular meaning and value arises
from the fact that it is framed as art – and therefore deserves a
critical consideration that these other performances don’t (it is
reviewed in certain websites, etc)?

It is telling that, for the performance to be framed (i.e. circulate)
as art, it has to become a video piece. In what is this different from
a speedrun or machinima, who become actual works only after they are
recorded? How does the Mattes’ piece incorporate this mediatic
translation into its strategies? Is the performance any different from
a candid camera prank because it depicts death? Is it any different
from a “faces of death” episode because it includes the reactions to
it? And what can we say about the reactions to the performance's
recording?

Best!
Menotti

[1] http://vimeo.com/11467722
[>.
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Re: [-empyre-] the self and the (machinic) other / a post-systemic condition or a post-art condition?

[Johannes Birringer]

thanks for your reply, Menotti
and your comment on the " self-made fake found
footage" (what self, though?) is interesting and makes we wonder
what the meaning of DIY pretends to be in these contexts of
the irrational and autistic online interactions  (i mean socially autistic in a 
critical
sense, as elaborated in the writings of F Scott Taylor,  sorry i don't have an 
online references, only printed out notes
from a lecture). 

now , when you say let's go back to videogames, it seems that
that was the problem, that no commonly agreeable framework
was found there either, here in the discussion, and that 
various overlapping frameworks led to a blurred sense
of performance/play and online subcultures, not to
mention the holding on to an accepted frame of the museum/gallery
and cultural institutions  like that which collect and preserve
the archives and the repertoires on which civilization 
and cultural transmissions/reinventions depend.  That is why I found
the postings here on preservations of games (and game
environments, however hard they might be documentable)
so intriguing, as the discourse on preservation is owed to the arts
and the academic sectors (history, anthropology, library studies, etc)


regards
Johannes




From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 
[empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Gabriel Menotti 
[gabriel.meno...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 4:50 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] the self and the (machinic) other / a post-systemic 
condition or a post-art condition?

> and so i tried to follow there and went to the (dark) corners to watch
> the "chatroulette" video or “performance” No Fun, which Menotti references,
> and admit of not having the vocabulary to quite frame this piece for myself
> (or others i might talk to), it's neither a performance nor a game,

Just for clarification:

I classified the piece as a "performance" because that how it is
classified by the artist's themselves. Personally, I wouldn't call No
Fun so, since the work seems to be activated more through its video
recording than in the actual ephemeral and serendipitous interaction
within chatroulette. In a way, it's a kind of self-made fake found
footage. It depends on the recording, else it is lost in the chaotic
flow of chatroulette (which is worse than being "banned from youtube"
right? at least if you need to produce evidence of something).

One way of thinking through frameworks would be to compare how a piece
such as No Fun fares differently on chatroulette, on youtube, on vimeo
and on a proper art exhibition (instead of comparing it to Velázquez,
as do the review also linked on the video's comments [1]).

Going back to topic, I believe that videogames are the easiest object
to adapt to this sort of critical perspective.

Best!
Menotti

[1] 
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/06/artseen/eva-and-franco-mattes-aka-0100101110101101org-reality-is-overrated
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Re: [-empyre-] the netopticon

[Johannes Birringer]

Hello all, hello Marc

what if one were to choose not to see the ironies in the Surveillance Studies 
Network report

 ("surveillance society is better thought of as 
the outcome of modern organizational practices, businesses, government 
and the military than as a covert conspiracy. Surveillance may be viewed 
as progress towards efficient administration, in Max Weber's view, a 
benefit for the development of Western capitalism and the modern 
nation-state." )

or the similar manifesto of the  PCSO Watch project (which has "declared that 
'We are all Police now'")

and took them at face value, arriving at the question you raise at the end and 
leave unanswered...

> what does watching the watchers allow us to do?>

Different agendas, same persisting power relations, and thus one wonders
where (as Simon writes: "Wikileaks has, by turning the Panoptic gaze back upon 
the observer, struck a
significant counter-attack in what might be considered an asymmetric info-war") 
the counter is.

with regards
Johannes Birringer
 
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Re: [-empyre-] the netopticon

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all, dear Christina


now you've moved from the stuffed MGM logo lion via
Foucault on ethics to "newstweek" proposing the manipulation and falsification 
of news content. 

>>
This could just as equally be performed in any cafe, school, library or airport 
with a remote user logging 
in and manipulating news content read by wireless network users>>

I am not sure why you'd want to go there. 

"Leaking" information of a certain kind (private, confidential, classified)  is 
of course a rather serious matter 
as well, and surely involves  discussion of ethics and journalistic practice, 
addressed for example in Christian
Caryl's article in the New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011 (Why 
WikiLeaks Changes Everything)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/why-wikileaks-changes-everything/

Incidentally, reading this issue of New York Review of Book was baffling,  it 
begins with a review of
George W. Bush's "Decicion Points"  (and what he remembers as decisive), then 
moves to the myth of Cleopatra, 
and then to Annie Cohen-Solal's biography of the art dealer Leo Castelli ("Leo 
and his Circle").
(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/very-wily-believer/)


Here again i am not sure I'd follow Christina when it is suggested that:  
>>  Living inefficiently might be seen as a form of rebellion. And what 
could be more inefficient than art-making? ?

Reading about Castelli and the artists who painted (for his gallery and 
dealership) -  most efficient and most rewarding, one gathers.


regards
Johannes Birringer








Christina schreibt:
>>
Thanks, Julian! I look forward to checking out the sites.  In fact,
there is no way to be sure that any of us is experiencing the same site
unless we do side by side comparisons because we have yet to have a
trusted platform. (That doesn't prevent people from trusting)  This
comes up whenever the issue of Internet voting is raised and underlies
arguments against on-line adjudication.
>>>


On 1/10/2011 8:51 PM, Julian Oliver wrote:
> " Can we safely use the Internet for communication as individuals if our every
> action, what we write to each other, watch, read, can be known by government 
> as
> it occurs?  Will there not be a massive chilling of speech?"
>
> And then what about the network itself, and our dependence on it? What if it 
> did
> not disperse a unanimous reality with which to contest or comply?
>
> Here is a project that explores this complexity.
>
> Newstweek allows for network users to manipulate the network enabled 
> world-view
> of others. It is a small, innocuous device to manipulate news read by other
> people on wireless hotspots (cafes, schools, airports).
>
>   http://newstweek.com/
>
> Here is an incredibly geeky and thorough video of the device in action:
>
>   http://vimeo.com/18637790
>
> Shorter video here:
>
>   http://vimeo.com/18579619
>
> Cheers,
>

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Re: [-empyre-] Vigilar y Castigar

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all


I'm reading Gabriela's post and Marc's further elaborations on Foucualt 
(Vigilar y Castigar) with great interest, 
and am quite prepared (as this month's discussion comes at the right moment for 
me) to reflect on what Gabriela
calls the "everyday effects of surveillance in our lives", 
and what Marc picks up in his analysis of the increasingly
efficiently mechanized/administered processes (the  "complex mix of objects, 
agents 
and networks exploiting and connecting via functional means with mediums 
such as digital networks, social media and the Internet across the board") that 
have become the 'physics of
power.'  

i probably (not sure what others here think?) will need to reflect on my own 
behaviors vis a vis networked
communications, and whether it's sustainable to to be online at all times, and 
why there is such pressure
to be accessed (by mails and information) at all times, and whether it's good 
for the health to be 
accessible at all. 

Gabriela's students chose to perform a panopticon situation, and we watch the 
watchers watch two men
performing eating, working, having leisure time, sleeping, and repeating. one 
dies at the end and is dragged
off stage,  Gabriela can you tell us more about why students wanted to "perform 
Foucault" and how they
understand their investigations (of their lives? or of the panopticon in your 
country?) and the "upload" to youtube? 

and while reading i wondered, Marc, what "netbehavior" you find politically 
meaningful as a mode of
sharing ideas or information or as a mode of counter-surveillance or self 
policing 
(i tried to read http://www.netbehaviour.org/  but on my possibly cracked 
browser it is only an empty yellow page but after some search i stumbled 
across Alan Sondheim's flickered
writings and some else's reporting on the experience of being "kettled" by 
police in the London student
demonstrations (December 9). 

are we thinking that social networks or the internet are becoming a form of 
kettling?  are we then doing
our own kettling by participating in a sustained unsustainable cynical 
darwinism that will wreck us?
does the netopticon only concern the accessed/accessible?


with regards
Johannes Birringer
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Re: [-empyre-] vigilar y castigar

[Johannes Birringer]

al spaces" and if so, then what do we learn from the art 
or how do we experience it as anything other than the same (in other words, is 
such art an expression of Davin's suicidal faux-resistance? or is it 
inconsequential, simply youtubed and dissolved in the ocean?  are there any 
consequences to youtubing?)

And, Davin, i think public consciousness, whether in the United States or 
Afghanistan or Tunisia or elsewhere, is never effectively managed. 


with regards

Johannes Birringer
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Re: [-empyre-] Wearable Technologies, or dances with horse

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

quite fascinating posts to start off..
and I was not aware (in performance contexts) that there was such a heavy 
contest going on about
"what materially makes a wearable"?  what new contexts are you referring to 
where wearables are an issue?
(in terms of how you might like to define it?) - would you agree that in a 
performance context 
(whether stage or everyday life although I tend to think the latter is 
different from the former)
the wearables are what you wear for a particular purpose?  Are the wearables 
here meant to
be associated with technologies (have function other than being worn?) or 
purposes, and if they are second
skins, then we don't have to worry, yes?

Then they are us. 



Can I ask Janis,  whether you were referring to a particular fashion show?

>>
Much of the work shown seemed to be more about the idea of technology rather 
than about
actually using it. Waifish models, in the spirit of androgyny, performed a
kind of improvisation of a person who clearly did not fit into the typical
gender roles ascribed in society
>>

hmm.  they were wearing unused wearables?


as to the question of the skins, I think one example that came to attention (in 
the bio-art / new media art scene)
was Symbiotica (with Oron Catts) trying to "grow" a wearable except that it 
probably was'nt going to be large enough
for Lady Gaga, and perhaps was not intended as a costume or second skin anyway. 
As you know, The Tissue Culture
Project has created some fascinating installations  exploring the potential –as 
well as the problems –  involved in tissue engineering. 

Perhaps this is what Valerie is hinting at, that growing / or medically 
inserting your third and fourth ears on your arms or legs (with network 
capabilities and memory)
may indeed alter operational possibilities or anatomical architectures,  and 
further complex enhancements may limit what you can do on the stage or the 
team...

Now, Symbiotica's "Victimless Leather" (2004), was a miniature leather jacket 
that lives inside a bioreactor. The work, I was told, was a reaction to using 
animal skins to make clothing/wearables. 
Tissue engineering may offer an alternative indeed, yet the artists grafted 
cells from a living animal  – a mouse –  onto a polymers structure of in the 
shape of a jacket.  The idea was that the cells will stay alive,
multiply in a protected environment.  I take it the work is ironic,  as the 
“semi-living” being thus created could not really be worn, but it raises issues 
as a fetish object anyway.  And about protective environments.
And what did the project perform?

Janis argues (or uses Barad) that "science performs" or that " science, as a 
knowledge-based
endeavour, is inherently “performative” ...  hmmm, what is it that is 
performed?  The term performativity 
tends to be used these days quite a lot and I often wonder how it is used, for 
what end and in regard to what situation.
Would you really use such a grammar if you referred to a dancer (the dance 
dances) or an acrobat performing a particular action
for a particular end, in a theatre or a circus,  and would it be at all 
meaningful to say that wearables perform or are performative?
In the Cirque de Soleil, the wearables don't perform.  (and at London's 
Sadlers' Wells recently, Bartabas and Ko Murobushi performed with horses,
or the other way round,  the horses wore out the dancers).

I'd ask more specifically what it is that is performed, what is augmented and 
what is (as you imply in your reference to social autism, Janis) reduced and 
shrunk.


with regards
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap

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Re: [-empyre-] Wearable Technologies, or dances with horses

[Johannes Birringer]

hi all;

thanks for your response the other day (Danielle)., and I probably concur with 
all you say
and had brought up my questions to Valerie, actually, to find out more about 
how a conceptual
response (and a conceptual work such as I one I refered to, amongst more 
directly staged
performances with human and animal performers) can approach the issue of 
materiality
(what materiality defines a wearable, what wearables define performance or 
other functions
and in what contexts specifically and for what purpose), i think my main 
concern was to
get under the skin of the performative science to see who wears it, in what 
context, for what
audience, and for what purpose.

As to laboratory (and performanvce studio culture), i think bio-art has begun 
to present
a particularly interesting challenge to either paradigms of knowledge 
production (science and
art/humanities), and also is a kind of materials science, i think "Victimless 
Leather"  is a wearable
if you see it straight on (with the necessary irony) as a jacket that can grow 
or comments (as 
a wearable might) on bio-reactions.

I guess i am interested, from the performer (and programmer proints of view) in 
the bio-reactions
that are expected, desired, or played with when you wear sensors, whether 
openly or built into
fabrics, but meant to extend or augment your gesture or movement, behavior and 
appearance,
your sounding and your listening, and various other aspects of your kinesthetic 
or proprio-ceptions.

as kinaesthetic proprioceptions (and tactile etc. and cognitive experiences), I 
suggest, they happen in the wearer/performer; 
and the performer / audience divide you now address, in regard to Ashley's 
posting on “Noisense,”  is a natural, in most
concerts or performance, conventional or other. The performers would have 
trained with their instruments
or worn them to find what they do and how the performer body/mind processes the 
actions that are effected
(in the environment or on the body, in the system) and are effected for 
dramaturgical of theatrical
reasons.  I quite agree with Ashley here, if we are talking studio/laboratory 
work that grows into public 
presentational performance – the rehearsals are controlled and specific.  The 
audience would not partake in 
the same process but observe, witness and experience empathetically, as they 
always do, and yes, the discussion
about whether a theatre audience needs to know the functionalities or the 
causalities of interactivity, that's a debate
and now an old one. You make your own choices, i guess.   

In installations designed for audience interaction with a system and, if so 
arranged, with specific wearable instruments or
clothes or devices (analog and digital), is a whole other ball game, as 
probably everyone here has experienced when
designing interfaces intended for audiences to intuit, figure out, explore, 
play with, and have fun with or be immersed into.
hmm, would be interesting if they designed fashion runway shows like that, to 
let your audience slip on the new
Chalayan or wear the new Helen Storey, like her "Say Goodbye" dress before it 
has dissolved or as it is dissolving, i wonder
why this has not been picked up yet by dancers, probably because it's too close 
to the skin and the lure of the erotic.

audiences, in other words, are always included  (especially when they appear 
excluded), and when one asks what
the participation in experiential processes is, again one probably needs to 
differentiate from case to case
(the immersant in Char Davies' "Osmose" has a different experience from the 
onlookers, I assume, but once the
onlooker has worn the gear and floated in the Virtual World, then later when 
onlooking can reexperience the
process as we all do when we remember what certain things/sensations feel like.
 
It would, probably, be quite fascinating to look at social uses of wearable 
technologies ("social choreographies"),
and ask whether and how they differ from arts-based/contexted performances.

regards

Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab
dans sans joux
http://www.danssansjoux.org
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Re: [-empyre-] Wearable Technologies, or dances with sound

[Johannes Birringer]

but I'd rather bring up Janis's questions again:

>What do fashionable wearables communicate and
what is the context of use?
>  How do they amplify one’s fantasy? 
>Do they reveal new forms of social interaction?

I'd be interested in hearing from others.  As for sensors in dance performance 
(or wearables as they are now called, but were not before), they proved 
"fashionable" at one point, but i think they have run their course and will 
soon be 
relegated. They don't further any complex choreographic composition, they 
hinder.  As to fantasies, yes, they generated a few pretensions (about gesture 
controlled environments and navigational immersivity in virtual worlds), also 
now relegated to the mythologies that always come along with new technologies.  
 The use of gesture, or its social role, however, is an important subject that 
I hope we come back to.

with regards
Johannes Birringer
Dap-Lab




Susan wrote:
>>
I am interested in questions about how wearable technologies interface with 
their cultural contexts.  In that regard,
Sarah's questions about performability and spectacle are interesting.  Don't 
wearables (in the traditional form of performing dress)
always invoke spectacle, to a greater or lesser degree?  (Of course, the idea 
of spectacle itself could be queried, are
we just talking about Debord here? Or spectacle in a less or differently 
politicized sense?)  In public, we are all performers,
as Baudelaire knew (the flaneur was also a dandy).  And performances encourage 
counter-performances, so audiences may either participate or retreat.
And performances have both insides (the phenomenology of wearing something) and 
outsides.
How do wearable technologies fit into that history of everyday performativity 
that fashion itself has written?
In regards to materiality, Valerie made a good point about situating the 
technology in wearable technology (I'm also concerned
with situating the wearable in wearable technology)>> 
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Re: [-empyre-] Wearable Technologies: or, dances with sound

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all


-- well this last posting by Michèle is very thought-provoking, 
and makes me rethink some of responses i had to the "unspectacular" 
interactional performance with audio-wearables  (i had initially wanted to draw 
attention to other modes of reception and engagement, actually, namely the 
sounding of the garments-accoutrements and built in/attached sensors, but then 
got caught up in talking about the activiations or actuations of the sound via 
the gestureal and the touch. Now, obviously, there are some important sensorial 
processes (and cross modal perceptional tasks) as work, as i tried to connect 
the gestural (touch) or haptic to the sonic. 

Michèle schreibt:
>>
In response to some of the things that have been discussed to date, I think 
now, in the context of wearable technologies (where we are considering the 
internal and external architectures and augmentation of the body) that it is 
perhaps less interesting to talk about the notion of the ‘spectacle’ where the 
main concern is to create memorable appearance (unless perhaps this is to 
convey message as discussed below in Wonderland example) and to turn our gaze 
more fully to ‘Human-Garment Interactions’ (David Bryson) and the importance of 
both physical and digital materiality where we look to augment the senses 
through a better understanding of both the technological, material and 
inter/intra psychological dimensions.
Textile and garment technologies now have the capabilities to augment the body 
both inside and out,...
>>

this notion of an inside augmentation I had not thought about, as in the 
rehearsals in our studio (on design and performance), I mostly work on the 
physical performance side and how the dancer or performer is processing both 
the physical kinesthetic experience (of working inside augmented realities and 
programming environments) and proprioceptive relations, as well as the 
"controller functions" that are given to the human body through worn sensors or 
remorte control devices but also amplificatory or bioradio devices that pick up 
internal "movement" (pulse, etc) and also operate on the thresholds.  In the 
work (and research projects surrounding it) of Emio Greco | PC, in the 
Netherlands, we find an interesting instance of a company showing their 
installation Double Skin/Double Mind (2007) to  open up their physical movement 
practice to audiences invited to learn or enact some of the principles of 
choreographic, generative processes  – "inner" intentions as well as the outer 
shape of gestures and phrases. The company installed an interactive system in 
the foyers of theatres where Greco’s work was shown, inviting audience members 
to dance with the “living archive” of Greco’s principles of movement, in front 
of the digital mirror created through video, computer notation graphics and 
other co-descriptions. 

I wonder, Michèle, whether such augmentation (inside and outside) that you 
address could be displayed in such installations,  to let audiences and users 
explore intrapsychological dimensions, and how wearing and moving in an 
outfit/garment or an exoskeleton, and how interactional experiences affect / 
transform understanding and perceiving of inner/outer architectures?

I find it certainly quite telling that some programming in the performing arts, 
say the FuturePerfect festival in NY (www.futureperfectfestival.org), 
explicitly focusses on the perceptual psychology and immersion experiences of 
their audiences, (cf. the ZEE installation by Kurt Hentschläger  at the 3LD Art 
& Technology Center in 2009)
 

with regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP Lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
http://www.danssansjoux.org

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[-empyre-] Wearable Technologies and dresses/bodies in flux

[Johannes Birringer]

 surround 
intermixes” [Arakawa&Gins],
but what exactly are these emanations, how do you describe them, in 
psychological/emotional terms, or in economic terms
or in terms of social relations that are virtually/tenuously or more 
deliberately and even profoundly stitched and cross-patched?

 Is this discussed [and by whom?, I don't see much debate in fashion theory, 
nor in dance or performance studies
of the new media arts contexts?) in terms of gender, age?  social class and 
tribe, in terms of race? and regarding sexually 
explicit or implicit styles , deviancy, perversion?  the body in flux 
(wondersome recent conference at Southampton:  
http://www.solent.ac.uk/news/2011/thebodyinflux.aspx)?
the goth body?  and how mass media play across these categories now or how 
fashion/advertising/entertainment
in the late age of perverse capitalism is a rather chaotic mess, no?


regards

Johannes Birringer
dap-lab



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Re: [-empyre-] Week 4 of empyre: Wearable Technologies

[Johannes Birringer]

yes, it's been interesting to see that the subject of wearable technologies
has not caught the imagination of many of the folks on our list
(not sure what grades have to do with it, as many here are artists, and not
grading, I trust), so maybe it was the nature of the conversation, did it not 
flow?
or maybe the subject was not investigated and reflected on in ways that 
attracted 
more attention, or is "fashion" a soft subject to some out there? just 
wondering,
as I have heard comments to this effect this before and was always puzzled 
about the
(low) status of fashion in the arenas of art theory / and / media criticism or 
activism.
i guess there's a prejudice against textiles and clothes, and if this is so, 
where
does it come from and what does it indicate?


with regards

Johannes Birringer
dap/dans sans joux
http://www.danssansjoux.org


>>.
It has been quiet this week on empyre and I'm hoping that most of you have 
turned in your grades and finished your semester on this half of the hemisphere 
at last.  I've been traveling the past few days so I'm a day later in making 
introductions. I'm hoping that we can end this week and this month's discussion 
assimilating some of month's threads and introducing new ones.  In my travels I 
was thinking about the past few week's discussions and my own physicality in 
relationship to technology and personal/public space. I wear my DROID.  It is 
in my pocket or my hand or my satchel at all times "attached." In fact this 
morning as I went to take my walk I slipped my DROID in the front zippered 
pocket of a rain jacket and then when it got warm just took the jacket off and 
wrapped the arms around my shoulders.   My smart phone is a toggle to the 
networked world. Like Freud's nephew Hans and the management of his mother's 
absence or presence,  I manage my networks of friends and fami
 ly, a virtual toggle.  For me wearable can be associative. Does technology 
have to be actually embedded into a garment or can it just be associatively 
connected.  Any thoughts about this?  Perhaps to extend this conversation and 
others from last week I'll introduce our last set of guests.  Welcome Daniel, 
Sarah, and Lucy. See their biographies below.
>>

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Re: [-empyre-] wearables, distributed

[Johannes Birringer]

hi all

I think it was Sarah who wrote that she is interested in the "distributed 
nature of wearable systems at all levels,"
and i was wondering why that is being assumed, that wearables are distributed?  
  Did not David argue the
exact opposite when speaking of habitus and the "distinctiveness" of social 
performativity which would
then seem to require some kind of expressive or articulated difference from 
general circulation;  
i guess one would have to discuss more specifically how aesthethic and 
functionalist wearables 
distribute anything, or how they are distributed.
I was also curious about the contention to work from "people" (material) to 
"concept" and why this is an advantage?
>>
In terms of craft, one of my main proposals is that we work from the material 
to the concept (or function) – and here material can mean cloth, circuitry, or 
people. In this way, wearable technology and systems might become grounded in 
patterns of the everyday instead of being characterised as gadgetry.>> (Sarah 
Kettley).

Referring to wearables as gadgetry seems to run somewhat against the various 
interesting points Danielle has raised regarding
body worn technologies; i think I understood Danielle to be arguing almost for 
a magical/spiritual or metaphysical dimension
of our beloved wearable technologies  ("Despite relatively little advance over 
the years artists, scientists and other researchers 
rather stubbornly continue to push in this area" --- yes, indeed, a strangely 
futile faith in the future, reminding me of
the bizarre gestures of Cuando la fe mueve montañas.)
I'd like to hear more about the magic of "bringing us back into contact with 
our most visceral freedoms"? and how you distributed it or how you incited 
interest
in body worn technologies as learning tools? 


with regards
Johannes Birringer
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Re: [-empyre-] this month's discussion on wearables, distributed

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

well, it's been announced the month's discussion is nearly or practically over,
and one already has a sense that for some reason the discussion didn't come 
together,
or discussants posted and left/did not return, some returned but it felt we 
were not
having a conversation, or debate on some of the issues proposed between us, 
from the beginning,
is this just my impression, or do others feel the same?

what made this month's discussion difficult, in your opinion?

with regards
Johannes
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Re: [-empyre-] social wearables and scanners

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

I liked the response by Van Dyk:
>
The discussion is missing the simple fact that the 'greater public' are not 
fooled by these bits of technology that have the potential 
to overtake the body and affect a colonization that would negatively affect 
their most visceral freedoms>>

except that one might want to discuss further how they overtake or undertake 
bodies, and in what contexts.
and what are our most visceral freedoms?  (see Guillermo Gómez-Peña's 
newsletter posting, which is quote below)

I think much of what we have entered, this month, was either 
artistic/performative territory (and as I said, in previous
times we would speak of costumes and equipment/instruments in the theatre, not 
of wearables, so the idea of a "wearable"
seemed intrinsically connected to the interactional fucntions, the prosthetic 
functions the technological bits or the integrated
"intelligent" clothing or the sensortized accessories have for us), or social 
territories outside the primarily aesthetic/art sector,
even if fashion straddles both, but the link to Human Interaction Design, and 
the research/marketing agendas developed by product designers
and mobile tech interaction designers were maybe not as much touched upon.  

But i had the impression that many of us here were talking about interactions 
(from/with the body-worn technologies) with others
and with (augmented/responsive/unresponsive) environments, and thus the issue 
of colonization and self-colonization may have been
part of what we worried about or explored; 

again, we worry except when we don'; when we tend to think that clothing, and 
accessories we wear, 
are not for function alone, but for social and psychological purposes that 
always exceed primary function and involve various backstage scripts,
and are we fully conscious of the choices we make and what gestures we have 
adopted, and then again, often we are fully/performatively conscious
of the roles we play, and thus colonization (if you look at the text below) is 
a fractious political problem.

regards
Johannes Birringer

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>From our friends at NAFTAZTC

State-sponsored sexual harassment vs. the sinister human scanner
 by Guillermo Gomez-Peña
 
“We pledge to treat you with courtesy, dignity and respect.” (2nd paragraph 
from ICE’s “Pledge to Travelers” posted as you arrive in a US airport)
 
Definition of Airport: A bizarre laboratory of human and civil rights 
violations where regular citizens from all ages, social classes and races, men 
and women, are more than willing to give up their rights  all in the name of 
the “freedom” to travel between two places.
 
It’s 9 am in the San Francisco International Airport and I am patiently 
standing in line at the security checkpoint, waiting for my turn to be 
humiliated. I take off my shoes, my belt and jacket, and place my laptop, 
wallet, coins and keys on a plastic tray.
 
The thing is that, with my long braids, my feather earrings and my Tex Mex 
jacket, I don’t exactly look like a “real American.” A Filipino security 
officer signals me to go through the human scanner. I tell him that I object to 
a full body scan. “I’d rather be hand searched.” He asks me, “Why?”
 
I reply that I simply don’t wish to be seen naked by bureaucrats I will never 
meet. “It’s an ethical issue.” He clearly does not know the meaning of the word 
“ethical.” It’s not in his training manual.
 
If you decide to object to the sinister human scanner, and I have objected more 
than 30 times, give and take, this is what will happen to you:
 
The Filipino officer calls a second officer. An African-American male in his 
mid-30’s asks if I wish to be searched “in private or in public.” “I want you 
to be accountable for your actions. Do it in public!” -- I whisper to him 
defiantly. He puts on his white rubber gloves and begins the ritual of 
humiliation.
 
He tells me to open my legs and raise my hands to shoulder level. He begins to 
“pat” me on my torso, back, neck and arms. It reminds me of one of my troupe’s 
performance exercises but devoid of tenderness. He then meticulously feels my 
hair (in case I have a mysterious weapon hidden inside my braids?) and asks me 
to open my mouth.(Is he looking for microfilms of subversive literature and 
maps hidden behind my teeth? Which action films has he seen lately?) He then 
searches around my waist with his fingers and finally…he kneels right in front 
of me. “Is there a particularly sensitive part in your body?” –he asks me. 
“Well, of course, my genitals. Aren’t yours equally sensitive?” –I respond.
 
He continues to follow the Homeland Security script. He fondles my ankles and 
legs firmly and finally reaches for my genital area and around my testicles, 
looking for an “underwear bomb”. I tense my whole body. He looks at me 
intensely and asks, “Are you Native American?” “Yes, in the larger sense of 
term,” I reply.
 
I can detect in his eyes that he understands 

Re: [-empyre-] Wearables, against choreography

[Johannes Birringer]

ecific standardized sensory anatomies 
that are the conditions of possibility for the imaginaries enacted in those 
media.  (see also del Val, "Undoing Anatomies," a version of his MIT talk was 
published in GRAMMA and is available online: 
http://my.enl.auth.gr/gramma/gramma09/val.pdf).

I think just as some of you here in the discussion pointed out,  a discussion 
which i found quite helpful even if it seemed low on energy or direction, of 
course in artistic and in design/craft experimentations, the effort might go 
towards undoing or retooling the global choreographies, if that is possible on 
the local and specific levels at which you engage your virtuoso gestures (as 
Paolo Virno calls them), the poses and posing (or wearing certain shoes and not 
others, i hope you liked my photos of the pointy Mexican fashion shoes for 
cowboys I sent yesterday evening?) or express affect or experience the 
capitalism of affects (marketing strategies aimed directly at the production of 
affects and desires in consumers), the subjectivizations..fixed and 
unfixed?  

IN some of the discussions, the spectacular or the spectacle effect was 
mentioned and criticized.  Again, from theatre we know that the position of the 
spectator towards spectacle is fixed, and secured in its exteriority. In a 
world entirely
mediated by communication technologies, by ubiquitous screens and cameras, then 
there hardly would be  any chance for experience to have a life of its own 
outside the framings of the spectacular,  i think this is why Jaime del Val 
uses the camera as his wearable to point to it explicitly and to queer it.  
Participatory paradigms of web 2.0, celebrated by some who are engaged in the 
so-called social networks,  are de facto  disseminating the framings of 
spectacular action in unprecedented manners, whereby participation is always 
already framed within mechanisms of certain productions  of subjectivity and 
power that leave little or no room for emergence amidst the restless 
impingement of never-ending simulation. Here we could address the role of the 
airport scanner again, regarding our rights as  “citizens”, but those rights 
vare tested all the time, in public squares and inside building and public 
transportation systems and all money transaction systems etc,  a  permanently 
reenacted set of gestures in  surveillance and control, precisely through 
re-enacting the conditions of cultural intelligibility of interpretation which 
has at its basis a precise sensory
anatomy.

When I said queering, i refer to Jaime's performance in the nude with his many 
surveillance cameras attached to his body that wears them and moves with them, 
private skin turned public, abjected and/or enjoyed.. . and also arrested on 
the street, or some streets.  Sensory anatomies account for the formation of 
the social body and for the enactment of power and violence, Jaime would argue, 
 it is only through the establishment of an exterior fixed perspective that 
both the subject and the material objective world are constituted, thus opening 
the ground for the measuring, fragmentation, territorialization of reality. It 
is through the establishment of an external fixed perspective that it is 
possible to recognize patterns and forms. 

As you saw in Guillermo Gómez-Peña's description too, for contemporary 
mechanisms of violence and power to operate and materialize, it is necessary to 
reproduce the anatomical frameworks - and the werables made to fit them or 
fitted to them, that render reality measurable  and "intelligible", and 
exterior to the performing subject. Normative categories of gender, sexuality, 
intimacy, race, class, age, bodily form or disability, require the mapping of 
bodies according to recognizable patterns. Most evident is the case of 
sexuality and gender, whereby biological sex (substrate for a viable or abject 
subjectivity) is constructed through arbitrary mapping of the body in genital 
anatomies and their measurement with regard to functional heterosexual 
reproduction criteria.   It would be easy now to extrapolate and move into the 
area of textiles and fashion, whether couture or high street, but also into a 
wide range of product design areas and
the gadgetry, beloved, that we wear around.

The question that all this posed for me (when i watched Jaime perform, and then 
when he gave me his camera costume to wear) was whether the wearing is always 
necessarily connected up with the anatomies, and whether a body without organs 
or an unintelligible body schema/image is creatable, an immanently diffused and 
morphosic body wearing and unwearing iitself? I don't know, hmm. don't think 
so. 

regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab
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Re: [-empyre-] Fwd: Call for e-action | Venice Biennale |Manifesto

[Johannes Birringer]

Not sure what there is,  so lovable, 
about the rhetorical manifesto (Stateless1 Pavillion Biennale.jpg) of futile 
gestures,
and the proposal to squat between the fascist monuments (german and italian
pavilions) in the Giardini, if one were to travel to Italy, 
that would require a passport, no?  and a Biennale ticket?
when I became a stateless citizen of the State in Time (NSK
issued the virtual passports in the mid 90s), i tried to enter
the U.S. with it but no such luck.
anyway, to those on the ground there, the pirates,
my best wishes 

regards
Johannes



>>>
I absolutely love this!
xl



On Jun 8, 2011, at 8:37 AM, Ricardo Dominguez wrote:

I will let the group that developed this gesture speak for itself (also a short 
manifesto as .jpg attached):

On 5/27/11 3:35 AM, 
statelessimmigrantspavil...@riseup.net
 wrote:

We, the Anonymous Stateless Immigrants, will construct a “Stateless
Immigrant’s Pavilion” by occupying the Giardini during the Venice
Biennale (June 5-15), pirate style, and we need your help!

This is a call for participation to claim space for stateless
immigrants in between the erected pavilions of all the nations for a
sit-in with tents, bbq, music, dancing, etc. In solidarity with the
Spanish Revolution and other emancipatory movements, our actions are
closely aligned with our brothers and sisters all over the world who
are struggling against the suffocating encroachment of capitalism in
all its manifestations and forms. Advocating nomad-ism, autonomy and
anonymity as alternatives to the representational border politics
inherent within the structure of the biennale itself, this is a call
for artists, activists and local people of Venice to join us!

You could do so by replying to this email for further organizational
support or forward it to relevant people in your network. More
information about our statement can be found attached, but please do
not hesitate to contact us directly for more info etc!

statelessimmigrantspavilion[at]riseup.net

Ps: This is not a mass email! our and your anonymity is important for us!

I did not attend VB and have only considered the event via this gesture
and this union strike:

"Italian unions certainly know how to get a point across. At the last Venice 
Bienale, in 2009, workers at the international exhibition went on 
strike,
 protesting the degeneration of working conditions and picketing the Giardini 
in August. This time around it was the vaporetto operators who called the 
“manifestazione,” meaning that service on the affordable water buses had been 
shut down for 24 hours in protest of labor conditions. This being Venice, where 
private water taxis run a cool €60, and where the only other alternative to 
vaporetti is walking miles of twisty, staircase-ridden calli (narrow streets), 
there were a lot of blisters and missed art at the Biennale today. Chalk one up 
for the vaporetto union. (Some of the tonier exhibitions fought back, however — 
the Prada Foundation and François Pinault both supplied water transport to 
ferry press and VIPs to their shows.)?

But I do think the questions you asking about the performative matrix playing 
out at VB in terms of routing around
the question of the "Global Citizen" and transborder_bodies in terms of 
presence - even as a frame of a question is
definitely out of the question for the state-driven definition of art that 
state's internal crisis (as in the case of the tactic
that you mention for Mexico etc.,) - but perhaps this has always been the case 
for VB specifically (since Hitler came by and
probably before) and the problem for most most Biennales in general.

But to be clear this is all from a distance.

Best,
Ricardo

On 6/8/11 7:58 AM, Timothy Murray wrote:

Thanks, Ricardo, for letting us know about this action.


 I'm wondering if you would mind saying a bit
more about the context of the action : "In order
to maximize impact and attempt to gain
visibility for
nameless, anonymous, stateless, non-represented
global citizens at theVenice Biennal."  In
thinking about this month's discussion topic,
Renate and I were hoping that the list would
address precisely this kind of disparity between
the (non)-representation of "global citizens" at
the Venice Biennale and those endorsed by
state-sponsored representation.  It's also
interesting to note that some national pavilions
seem this year to be engaging in an end run
around this thorny issue (i.e. Mexico) by
featuring non-national artists in national
pavilions.


Best,

Tim







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[-empyre-] laws, outlaws & pirates

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

Davin's post from Sunday made me think a lot, it seemed to shift the 
discussion, 
and I notice that Marc already responded...

Jussi's elaborate post added to the bleak picture. 

>>
The question becomes, how is piracy inherent already in the imposition of 
certain modes of governing through regimes of copyright, tapping into 
creativity, creating such categories as piracy, and criminalisation of an 
increasing amount of practices that are, more or less, what we could call still 
“normal”. How are we being pirated by such regimes of control and power? >>


I'm not sure how one can respond to Davin, as his concern with social relations 
(contra individualism/private property, the notion of rights)
would seem to encompass so much more, re: "the crisis of being," if you think 
of the "regimes of control and power" also including the domains of health and 
insurance,
care giving, the medical sector and the industries attached to natural and 
synthetic/chemical food production, energy, transport, etc. 

David writes:
>>But may be this crisis of being (of which ubiquitous piracy is a symptom) is
clearing away the dross of consumer culture, pruning back a particular
enlightenment tendency (radical individualism) that we might fully
explore the critical role that community plays in the formation of
being.   And property rights and the prices for goods and services can
be re-aligned with basic questions of justice and equity, where they
belong.>>

Could you say more about what critical role you see in community or in shifting 
to the notion of community/social relations in the 
discussion context of piracy / vandalism?  How do you redefine rights (say, the 
right to live, the right to die) if the subject were
to shift slightly to the edges of being (dying, dementia, loss or diminishment 
of agency, social pathology, social autism)?  On german public television last 
night a group of
doctors and nurses discussed neuroscientific and preventive medical care 
theories regarding alzheimer and dementia, and at some
point the question of community was raised, regarding the right of 
unimpeachable human dignity. no one answered it, then the discussion moved back
to the individual brain, and when does one (science multitudes and families) 
recognize its ending or its extendability

are the (basic) questions of justice and equity answerable at all in the 
neoliberal/capitalist pirate context that you have sketched,
which still operates according to laws and yet laws that also are pirated all 
the time, non-transcendable by communities except in
chaos situations (revolutions) that historically are hardly successful as 
romance (but involve "behaviours, ...in its raw sense, of killing, robbing, 
pillaging 
etc" ) and what forms of vandalism would fight what forms of vandalism?


with regards
Johannes Birringer

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Re: [-empyre-] pirates and clapping

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

well, it seems we have moved beyond the metaphors of (artistic) pirates,
and some of the recent postings (thanks for your response, Davin) help us
perhaps to think further on the question of community politics or
autonomy (versus individualism and futile gestures) and the pragmatism
of small steps; in an international perspective, there are so many issues
and differences to consider, daunting issues, so that one might become
worried, but I also think that creativity has shown itself so clearly this
year at many fronts.  as to anthropologists or artists, indeed one
is reminded of dire straits:
>>
There are many in working environments where they have to compromise 
their beliefs and ethics, in order to survive>> (Marc writes)

and thus the question of economic survival is tied to the political, intensely,
and Marc raised the topic of jobs and joblessness, but also implied, in
this discussion, are alternative motions, ways of moving. 

Magnus suggests:
> I wonder if this implies individuals
responding to subjugating external pressures or acting in a more
self-determined way, positively claiming creativity and responsibility"...>>

and this probably gets done differently in different situations.

I wonder if you were following the "silent" protests that are happening
in Belarus:

>BELARUSIAN authorities arrested about 400 people in the latest countrywide 
>opposition 
protests against President Alexander Lukashenkos regime, rights group Vyasna 
said today. 
The protests went ahead on Wednesday evening in several cities in response to a 
call on 
internet group "Revolution through the Social Network", the sixth such rally in 
a month.
 At least 180 people were arrested in Minsk and 220 in other regional centres, 
Vyasna said in a statement. 
As in previous demonstrations, protesters did not chant slogans or brandish 
banners but merely stood in silence, 
clapping their hands. 
[http://newsfeedresearcher.com/data/articles_w28/people-protests-belarus.html]
>>


i have been watching this and find myself amazed at such a form of communal 
protest,
which differs from the rebellions and revolutions that happened in the Arabic 
countries,
and they also differ from, say, the democratic massification of protests that 
happened
over man months in Stuttgart (the Stuttgart 21 movement) which represents a 
civilian
protest action against a politically engineered building site/destruction site 
in the centre of the town.
Ai Wei Wei was released recently, and was forced apparently to admit he 
committed tax
evasion crime, it was interesting in that case to see the reactions/actions or 
non actions
of the art world when someone gets imprisoned, and the question of compromising 
one's ethics
are encountered all the time by Iranian filmmakers, for example, and Asghar 
Farhadi just
spoke about this when he commented on the interruptions during filming (his was 
asked
to stop the "Nader and Simin" production by a call from the censor bureau)...  
filmmakers
like Farhadi indeed, to paraphrase Magnus, must respond to subjugating external 
pressures, acting in a more
self-determined way, positively claiming creativity and responsibility, yet 
also condone, admit, negotiate, draw back,
etc., and here the compromises – vis à vis the regimes of corporate power – 
become confusing, if you
reflect on the latest maneuver by Google, which was just disclosed, namely 
their million dollar donation for
the formation of a research Institute on "Internet and Society" (Humboldt 
Universität Berlin) - 
a new think tank sponsored by Google for anthropologists and digital 
researchers in academia, is that not
a sweet idea? 

At the inauguration ceremony, the Google representative said that the company 
is looking forward to
the research outcomes, and that "they are glad to anticipate the outcomes, 
which will help us to
make better products."  

we are the products of Google, not clients, nor "pirates."

I hope folks were clapping frequently during the Google speech. 


with regards
Johannes Birringer

 

 
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[-empyre-] After the facts, and from a distance

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all


from a distance (and an island), the discussions and postings this month, from 
many of you having traveled to ISEA or the Biennial in Istanbul,  have been 
nothing but 
interestingly strange, at times intriguing, stimulating, unnerving, and 
disappointing, at times bizarre,  as content seemed to evaporate or be 
crystallized into impressions of visitors/tourists to a city
and to an academic conference in a building.  zones of contact were promised, 
dialogues and exchanges with Turkish artists (the "locals" that were referred 
to many times) announced, and again,
from my angle or the perspective of those who did not go to this ISEA, I was 
trying to imagine what motivated you to have this public discussion?

having said this, I also read the posts (from the beginning tweets) as a kind 
of strangely odd diary, here were all these people traveling to Istanbul and 
expressing astonishment at this city, at security checks (?),
at transport systems, at taxi drivers, at public space, at cramped space in 
panels, at demonstrations,  at art, at exhibitions and at patrons of such 
exhibitions, at friendly citizens, at parks I guess one could place a 
question mark at all these common places and occurrences, and then wonder how, 
and at what point, the soft–skinned postings became more self reflective and 
self critical or aware of what was contacted and shared with readers on this 
list not there on location.   As an attempt to stage a debate this month on 
site or from (a) location,  it is most interesting and certainly eye-opening;   
i wonder whether some of the other participants on this list (not having been 
supported by institutions to go to such a high priced academic gathering) feel 
they were "let in" in some form or manner?Will the discussion change now 
that the "locale" is left behind?   how does this coming in and then leaving 
behind affect the theme of zones of contact?

with regards
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
London  
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Re: [-empyre-] October Forum: "E/motion frequency deceleration"

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

thanks to Renate Ferro for inviting me to moderate this month's  empyre's 
soft-skinned space discussion,
and I would like to get us under way with a brief introduction of our topic.


The theme is adapted; it  had inspired the third International Choreolab in 
Austria, held on the campus of Donau Universität Krems in late August/early 
September.
What interested me about extending its research and its experiential base, and 
involving you all if you are concerned with the subject matter, is the fact 
that it was (largely) 
a physical workshop, attended by many dancers and performers, as well as master 
teachers such as Amos Hetz, Henrietta Horn, and Ohno Yoshito (the latter now 
considered
the oldest living butoh dancer of the first generation).  

We invite you to participate in a forum discussion that, I imagine, could 
involve various kinds of movement, and particular curves and stillnesses that 
can be articulated and expressed, even or especially in a virtual 
space where thought can travel and connect us, and where we might give careful 
attention to body-mind, our senses in dialogue, and our reflections and 
projections on time, and on this time
we might spend together, here, amongst us.

The "choreolab" is a workhop, then.. .  "E/motion frequency deceleration"

Following the second lab titled “MEMBRANE motion_phonotope” in 2010, wherein 
the International ChoreoLab Austria  discussed the theory and practice of the 
choreo-sonar discourse, in 2011 it again deals with a current topic in the 
context of science and the performative arts: the desire for deceleration in 
the complex interface of motion and emotion.

Stress, breathlessness, exhaustion – these are the symptoms of our modern 
life-style pursued by most people around us. Our life is determined by the 
ticking of the clock or the enslavement imposed by electronic 'tags'... One 
thing is clear: those who do not surrender to the increasing speed of everyday 
life will very likely end up with the short end of the stick. It almost seems 
as if the unstoppable disengagement of life from natural and traditional 
rhythms simply can not be stopped.

Sociologist Fritz Reheis offers the alternative concept of a 'creativity of 
slowness'. He advocates not to succumb to the duress of constant acceleration 
but to discover instead the antithesis of a decelerated and self-determined 
society that promotes the intrinsic time and rhythm of people, culture and 
nature as its standards of reference. However, this is anything but a return to 
an idyllic state. Therefore, science and art have to forge a privileged 
partnership in the process of deceleration.

In the course of our workshop – and this virtual forum –  we want to convey 
that there is a great conjunction between motion and emotion, action and 
inaction, which ultimately brings out who we really are, with full illumination 
that can be grasped at the conscious level.  Thus, the power of compassion and 
deep understanding becomes senior to all else, including motion/inaction, 
intent/action, sound/silence, and so forth. How to take this paradigm to 
practicality will be the focus of our interdisciplinary dialalogues. 

The "choreolab"(1)  will map out new outlooks on performative frameworks, 
applying interdisciplinary eclectic perspectives, as the feedback from a wide 
range of practical experiences results in findings which often proof to 
exemplify harsh contrasts to ever new theories. Expanded social choreographies 
and performance processes, and some basic existential questions will be 
addressed in this autumn time,  raising the issue of how substantial changes in 
dealing with time can be achieved in the sense of deceleration, and what the 
roles of the performative arts in addition to science will be. 

The discussion forum might  begin with a reflection on butoh dance.

In my next post i shall begin to introduce our guests. We have a lively and 
diverse ensemble of practitioners and thinkers, which I am very anxious to 
welcome!

with regards
Johannes Birringer


(1) The 2011 CHOREOLAB at Krems, Austria, was envisioned and organized by 
Sebastian Prantl and the Tanzatelier. 
http://www.tanzatelierwien.at/en/international-choreolab-austria-modul3.php


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Re: [-empyre-] October Forum guests: "E/motion frequency deceleration"^

[Johannes Birringer]

Dear all

I trust we shall be getting under way with a series if brief reflections, on a 
physical and intellectual workshop, branching out some of the questions we 
raised, posikg new ones, and inviting a larger set of practitioners to
extend the theme and take us, possibly, also elsewhere even as we may return to 
butoh dance and questions of space (in time) in the last week.  

In the FIRST WEEK, I would like to welcome some of the master teachers, 
performers and ethnographers who participated in the Choreolab. 

I am aware that there are conventions of introducing a guest, i try to follow 
at times, and at times not, I'd like to keep our ensemble work informal.

The first round of reflections might begin with Michael Weiss's mediations on 
the Choreolab, which he sent to me today before going off into the field,  an 
off-line territory. I shall post tomorrow.
This week discussion will be moved by:

^   Michael  Weiss
(Michael Weiss studied social and cultural anthropology (University of Vienna) 
and physical theatre (Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium - Odin Teatret). He recently 
completed his participative PhD research on dynamics of ritual and grief in the 
transmission of Japanese butô dance by Ohno Yoshito)

^ Sebastian Prantl
(Choreographer/dancer, artistic director of TAW and ICLA; Sebastian (b. Vienna) 
 received his performing arts education in New York from 1978 to 1984 where he 
studied at the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Martha Graham School, the Juilliard 
School of the Performing Arts, etc. During this period he created his first 
solo choreographies also at the Whitney Independent Studio Program (supervised 
by Yvonne Rainer). In 1988 Sebastian Prantl founded together with the pianist 
Cecilia Li the Tanz Atelier Wien. Projects, productions, symposia, concerts and 
art gatherings were produced regularly - thus new audiences for dance related 
agendas were accumulated. His orientation towards art related themes and live 
music has given him a distinct label in the growing Austrian Dance milieu. His 
choreographic work has taken him all over the world i.e. India, China, Taiwan, 
Canada, USA, Europe etc., and he became a key figure for independent dance 
enterprises in Austria- involving himself in cultural politics striving for 
general support and a centre for contemporary dance and choreography 
(Tanzquartier Wien).)

^ Amos Hetz 
(Amos Hetz is a movement teacher with many years of experience. His interests, 
background, history and vision as a body-philosopher bring him to focus on the 
origins of movement, creativity, and the ability to learn. His teachings have 
been significant for actors, dancers, singers, physical therapists, 
Feldenkrais®, Sensory Awareness® or other movement practitioners, teachers, 
anybody working with children or otherwise professionally involved with 
movement. He has been a professor at Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.)

^ Elisita Smailus 
(Elisita is a movement practitioners, and has a Diploma in Social Economy 
(1987), as Social Dance Therapist (1990), and Certified Movement Analyst 
(1997), and a Diploma of Advanced Studies TanzKultur (2008); She recently 
completed  a Master of Advanced Studies TanzKultur (2011), at University Bern 
(CH). She ahs been working freelance in Southern Switzerland, co-conducting a 
module based intensive basic training of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis.)

^ Fabrizio Manco
(Fabrizio's varied artistic practice includes performance and live art, 
choreography, drawing, installation and video, cutting across artistic forms 
and sensory modalities, working with different sites, landscapes, architectural 
and cultural spaces. His writing and artistic work is versatile in nature, 
exploring embodied hearing, the listening and the vulnerable body, in relation 
and in a democratising relationship with visual, physical performance and 
writing practice. He has lived in London since 1991 and has trained in Art & 
Design, Fine Art, both in Italy and London (Parabita Art Institute, City Lit, 
UCL-Slade School of Fine Art, BA/MA). He studied Arts & Humanities at the 
University of Salento, Italy, and has trained in Butoh and in performance in 
Italy, England and Japan. He has shown and performed work, nationally and 
internationally, (including Italy, Singapore, India, Canada, Finland, Germany, 
Croatia, Spain). Fabrizio is currently a PhD candidate at Roehampton University 
with a research entitled Ear Bodies: Acoustic Folds and Ecologies in 
Site-Contingent Performance, where he also weaves together his previous 
practice and research on Carmelo Bene and the Baroque (1998-2000), on Tarantism 
and Butoh (1998-2007) and tinnitus/hyperacusis (1998-to present).)



thank you

regards
Johannes Birringer
director, DAP-Lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap


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Re: [-empyre-] : "E/motion frequency deceleration" (M Weiss) prolog

[Johannes Birringer]

[1] First reflection, Prolog from Michael Weiss.

- - - 

"Creating and Performing Existential Fields of Knowledge"  (Reflections on a 
Choreolab)


  A person wanted to learn dancing and went to a teacher of 
dance, asking:
 “What is dance?“ The teacher answered by saying: “Who are you?“


- - -  

This story, leading from (outer) definitions to (inner) essences, touches―as I
believe―upon qualities and possibilities of a choreolab as an experimental
laboratory dedicated to research, thereby posing further questions: 
How do dancers develop their art of performing in order to realize foundational 
dimensions of
knowledge of their bodies ‑and‑ minds and of those who experience their dance? 

How do dancers get in contact with existential grounds (by means of entirely 
immersing themselves in/with the wholeness of who they are) 
of their (un)consciousness in regard to the own psycho-physical personality in 
its multilayered contexts 
while also focussing on the interwoven dynamics of subjective and collective 
fields involved?

What ought to be initiated to enter such processes? What then is movement, from
whom and from where does it derive? What then is body-and-mind and the very
presence coming into manifestation thereby? Which questions ought to be
asked/danced/lived to create knowledge of body-and-mind with regard to social,
cultural, political, and environmental contexts in which dance is situated? How 
could
deformations within these dimensions be questioned by dance, how could
transformations within these dimensions be initiated by dance?

- - -  

I was a participant of an international group of twenty-three people―many of
them dancers with different backgrounds (e.g. ballet, DanceAbility,(1) 
contemporary),
some graduate students in humanities and social sciences, coming from Asia,
Australia, and Europe, furthermore creating a cross-generational community; we
were accompanied and inspired by an international group of thirteen experts 
alike
(Europe, Japan, Middle East) from various artistic and scientific fields 
(architecture,
choreography, dance [butō [2], contemporary―in its specific developments of each
of the dancers/choreographers], film directing/producing, film studies, light 
art,
media choreography, media theory, movement studies, musicology, philosophy,
piano solo, political theory, sociology, transcultural literary and media 
studies),
being supported by a dedicated team in charge of the many practical and
organizational issues involved. We gathered at the campus of Danube University
Krems for nine days within the context of a choreolab situation (III.
International ChoreoLab Austria, organized by Tanz Atelier Vienna and Danube
University Krems under the title (E)MOTION FREQUENCY_deceleration: 
Seminar on the theory and practice of celerity, duration & space 
from August 27 till September 4, 2011.

_ _ _


When leaving the choreolab, some of the aforementioned questions circulated
intensely within me as they have been substantial during these days. They were
based on a process of withdrawal from the normative and unquestioned to be drawn
into performing and discussing the non-normative and questionable. Given the 
wide
scale of the initial questions―posed by each generation of dancers anew―, they 
will
continue to circle unanswered throughout these postings; but they shall be
anchorages to which we can return. In this sense, this rehearsal is no more 
than a brief
sketch of some considerations, all of them pointing towards their further 
elaboration.
This said, the following intends to be an interplay of inviting readers to take 
the
ball of reflection, thereby playing it further according to their creative, 
reflective and
critical modes of filling and completing the gaps left here.

Having been invited to write about these days from a participant’s perception, 
I like to base the following posts on three reflections: 

The first part is an invitation to readers into my personal experience as a 
social anthropologist with a background in physical theatre 
during the International ChoreoLab . Along with this description, I will 
outline some first thoughts as to how the personal experience 
might be seen in a larger context with regard to a further development of the 
choreolab as being embedded in a university/research context. 

In the second reflection we return to the questions set out in the beginning of 
this essay, asking about specific qualities of the choreolab 
as a creation of fields of knowledge. Against the background of having been 
part of the Choreolab as well as my personal training, 
the third and final part will be an attempt in reflecting about some relations 
between choreolab as/and science 
(the latter understood as a most generally cognitive-based endeavour to 
research);(3) furthermore this shall lead us into considering 
a future development of the "choreolab" as arts-based research (4) within 
academia, or, to put it differently:

Re: [-empyre-] : "E/motion frequency deceleration" (M Weiss) Movement 1

[Johannes Birringer]

Rely on everyone

One organism
One womb
Attention and awareness
Cleaning process
Let the atmosphere lead
Going into the unknown
Spreading creation through our bodies

- - -

As a reflection on the manyfold aspects mentioned therein would lead far beyond 
the
scope of this essay, I like to highlight that it became clear that this event 
moved
almost everybody from the group rather deeply―within the specific subjective
realms of each one’s experience. As such a process points towards different 
issues
involved, I want to briefly outline some thoughts within the aforementioned
dynamic of congruence towards being in relation with oneself and being related 
to each other.
 I felt this process at the very beginning of the choreolab to be a most 
profound event and
common network of relating to oneself and each other in a psycho--physical way 
beyond
technique, structure and reflection. It personally helped me to transcend rigid 
frameworks―
leading away from bewaring a status quo towards an opening into experiencing a 
self – and group – transformatory process.

The qualities I met within this experience coincide with those mentioned before.
According to my understanding, empathy, trust, openness, and silence are some of
the existential qualities to be developed to research in a most fruitful way as
described by Helena Oikarinen--‐‑Jabai, a cultural anthropologist and 
developmental
psychologist: “Researching, similar to mothering and parenting, needs space for
reflection, fruitful otherness, where you can spread your roots and receive the 
breath
of the Other. Ideally, research opens up the voice, softens the spinal cord, 
warms the
arms, and makes one vulnerable.”16 It is my belief that the choreolab carries 
these
most fundamental research qualities within its process by focussing on 
subjective
and collective levels of experience. This can enhance research posing its 
questions out
of multilayered approaches while integrating body-and-mind not only within the 
framework of being
some-body but due to a process of being every-body, thereby containing 
possibilities as e.g. to
creatively transcend disciplinary boundaries
(given the idea of a further development of the choreolab into the academic 
field).


- - -

Experts as Participants  — Participants as Experts


I already mentioned to have found that Li and  Prantl created a very
meaningful process with regard to the methatheme of Choreolab by inviting 
various
artists and scientists to refer to the topic of deceleration from their 
specific angles.
From the arts, namely dance/choreography, it were Amos Hetz (body
thinker/movement studies), and―already introduced―Henrietta Horn, Ohno
Yoshito and Sebastian Prantl; furthermore Victoria Coeln (light art) and Cecila 
Li
(piano solo); from science it were Renate Hammer (architecture), Fritz Reheis
(sociology/philosophy/political theory) and Eva Maria StoÅNckler (musicology); 
and
from interdisciplinary fields of art-and-science Johannes Birringer (media
choreography/new media), Hannes Rauchberger (film studies/film 
directing/producing),
Gerhard Trimmel (film studies) and Soenke Zehle (media
theory/transcultural literary and media studies). To keep within reasonable
boundaries with regard to the many impulses received from these various 
experts, I
for now would like to stress one aspect: I came to know the choreolab as being a
non--hierarchical forum.

- - -

Because of this, I perceived experts turning into participants and
participants into experts. (I therefore prefer from now on to speak of 
participant--‐‑
experts and expert--‐‑participants.) First and foremost I felt this has been 
particularly
enhanced due to the endeavours of Cecila Li and Sebastian Prantl to empower the
group in the already mentioned ways of creating an atmosphere of empathy, trust,
openness, and silence. I realized these very dimensions as to hold the 
contributions
of each of the members of our group in high esteem, thus honoring the expertise 
of
everyone. Furthermore, Li and  Prantl (as they informed me) tried to
invite the expert-participants to stay at Choreolab for a period of time as 
long as they could
afford in order to also participate. Although it only worked out partially
because of their schedules, I found it to be enough a strongly contributing 
factor as to
level out tendencies of imbalances between those who only teach and those who 
are
just taught.

- - -

Inspiring, challenging, and genuinely creative atmospheres do live from a 
climate
of equalness between all people involved, enabling everybody to contribute out 
of
one’s full potential. In my belief, there lies a chance for an implementation 
of the
choreolab into an academic framework which is as essential for hierarchically
organized institutions to learn from as it could be dangerous for a choreolab 
to exist
within institutional codexes of rather rigidly dividing between ranks along 
their
social, disciplinary and institutional powers. Contrary to systems with 
st

Re: [-empyre-] : "E/motion frequency deceleration" (M Weiss) Movement 1

[Johannes Birringer]

[1] First reflection, Mov.1 (last part),  from Michael Weiss.

- - -
Research  with / through / of  Body & Mind


At the very day the Choreolab ended, I went on to an interdisciplinary seminar 
of
four days which happened to be a scientific forum, consisting of so--‐‑called 
΄senior
fellows΄ from natural sciences and one artist as well as a group which was named
΄junior fellows΄ (students and post-docs) from various disciplines. 

Interestingly enough with regard to the topic of the choreolab (deceleration), 
its core theme dealt
also with time. Although it was inspiring in its own right, I would like to 
critically
highlight the following: Coming from the intense experience of Choreolab, the 
shift to
this forum was a revealing experience as to compare it with the nature of the
lab: The scientific seminar’s focus rested entirely on cognitive abilities,
furthermore the culturally encoded systems of body restriction and movement 
(while
sitting) were striking for me, not to mention the formations of hierarchical 
zones (e.g.
senior fellows sitting amongst themselves at the seminar and eating apart from 
junior
fellows during the meals; only the former was changed at the end of the seminar 
due
to comments from the junior fellows’ side to the organizers). This is―as already
mentioned―not to say that there weren’t many inspirations during this seminar;
they definitely existed. But the level of dissociations, e.g. between body/mind,
thought/feeling or cognition/intuition―to name but these few―, was as 
fascinating
for me in its intransigence deriving from a socio-cultural and academic history 
told
therein as it was saddening.


In comparison, the Choreolab offered a sophisticated interplay and interchange
between body – and – mind, thought – and – feeling as well as cognition – and – 
intuition.
Therefore, every day of the Choreolab―according to my perception―happened to be
lived – ‑danced – ‑felt – thought – moved by entering the full potentials of 
research in their
entirety rather than trying to pursue them in their partiality. 


- - - 

Due to its small scale, however, this essay cannot be the forum to present and 
discuss the many arts-based
research methods which were utilized during Choreolab.

With regard to the metatheme,  I became keenly aware of how
deceleration in its motion and emotion, sound and silence, action and inaction 
is a
most powerful and transformative process to be grounded within one’s body – and 
– 
mind personality by reaching out to fundamental socio‑political as well as
philosophical questions. That is why I consider the format of a choreolab to be 
a most
essential contribution to questions we continuously should be asking in order to
grow as individuals and collectively towards unfolding the creative potential 
of an
inherent stillness to be found in deceleration which is―to my 
understanding―illuminating, 
transforming, and healing, personally as well as it could be collectively.

- - -


Michael Weiss
Vienna



(relayed by moderator)



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Re: [-empyre-] : butoh

[Johannes Birringer]

There is a scene in Peter Sempel’s cult film from the early 90s, "Just Visiting 
this Planet," which took my breath away when I first saw it in a run-down 
cultural arts center in Dresden, 
not too long after the Wall had come down and traveling to the former communist 
East of Germany reopened some windows into the historical past, 
allowing also rediscovery of an early phase of modern dance and art practically 
forgotten and buried in the ruins of a long and
devastated 20th century. In this scene, a white horse is seen galloping down 
Broadway Avenue (New York City),
surely an apparition and yet, repeatedly, associated with the equally ghostly 
appearance of 
Ohno Kazuo dancing a fragile impression of his mother or the spirit of another 
influential woman in his life, La Argentina. It appeared that Ohno, 
one of the pioneers of butoh, who passed away in 
2010 aged 103 years, was improvising on 
some rooftop (or was it a side walk?), 
dressed in a loose white shift 
and floating above 
the street where 
the horse 
was seen,

a rose delicately held in his hand and the other hand drawing invisible lines 
into night sky. Now he bends, his head lowering down and the long arms are 
stretched out, he dances 
becoming a flower, he blossoms in the night. As the scene of this apparitional 
dance lingers in the imagination, the filmmaker cuts to a scene
where we see Blixa Bargeld, the lead singer of the experimental band 
Einstürzende Neubauten, sing a capella a harrowing 
Schubert song from "Die Winterreise," a lyrical composition that evokes a 
darkly desolate emotional landscape,
and time, as if frozen cold and yet galloping
along, with drops of melodic lines
irregular phrasings, crippled
rhythms. 


After this musical entr’acte, the film returns to Ohno, showing a sequence of 
close ups in which attention is drawn to the dancer’s feet, as he floats on a 
side walk, in the night.


cut


Krems 2011, September 1..

Ohno Yoshito, the son 
of the late Ohno Kazuo, enters the studio space 
and announces he will dance a brief prayer, before opening his workshop 
demonstration and his recollections of the long history of butoh, from the 
beginnings with Hijikata.
When he begins the dance of prayer, and slowly moves in a circular motion, he 
now wears a rabbit costume, or rather, a small white 
embroidered cape and a headband with (children's) plush rabbit ears.  For a few 
moments, I think he is dancing becoming rabbit, but it cannot be, there is too 
much irony for me.
But the irony slows down, and over the the course of the next hour, two hours, 
I listen to the movement and the stories that Ohno tells, and the next day, in 
the studio, I will be given a rose.
I have to start again, from a place that can leave irony behind or pathos, and 
even as I resist regression, and child-like wondering at the world and at being 
alive moving with a beautiful synthetic rose,
I move there with the others, being inside even as I imagine not belonging to 
such space. In the workshop, we change rhythms, and we probably become aware of 
our emotions, through movement above all, not
sound, or memory. But movement is also memory, and motion is like a wave or a 
compression of many (different) waves.  Ohno after the rabbit shows us a print 
of Hokusai's Fugaku sanjurokkei: Kanagawaoki namiura
(The Great Wave off Kanagawa), and points to its contrasts: the drawing shows 
the vast power of nature (the waves appear larger than Mount Fuji) and relative 
smallness of humans  (the heads of a boat crew are are as small as speckles of 
the foam).  The sea is splashing into a chaotic light foam to be dispersed by 
the wind.



regards
Johannes Birringer




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Re: [-empyre-] "E/motion frequency deceleration" [Amos Hetz]

[Johannes Birringer]

[relayed]:


Dear Johannes, dear friends,

Before writing some notes for our topics, I feel the need to add some sentences 
to my bio. I am an artist, a dancer who compose his dances through using the 
Eshkol-Wachman Movement-Notaion (EWMN) an israeli invention (1958). This system 
describes the human motion within geometric method. As such one can analyze the 
humans movement expression, and animals behavior as well. EWMN is giving us the 
possibility to see dance as part of the wonderful vast movement phenomena.

My experience with the EWMN brought me to establish a movement department in 
the Jerusalem academy for music and dance. Since 1972 I am working with 
"Tnu'ot" dance ensemble, preforming my written dances. At 1989 I started the 
Room Dances Festival - a chamber dance festival, to forward dances created 
through notations or any kind of scores, the whole scope from composed to the 
open improvisation. Few years later I started a new form of dance, when I 
design the score and each dancer is composing his/her own part, and creating a 
dance composed by the performers. Along the last ten years I introduced it with 
dancers/creatures in Israel and in Europe.

Slowing down is part of an early thought in the modern western movement  
culture. It was introduced already in the 19th. century, known as the 
Fechner-Weber law, claiming that the smaller the stimulation the bigger is the 
sensation.  One of the first to apply it was  Elsa Gindler (1885-1961) the 
german movement educator reformer. At the mid of the 20th. Century, Moshe 
Feldenkrais (1904-1984) applied it in his teachings , as well as  more systems 
included slowing down with different accents: Mable Todd (1880-1956) Bonnie 
Bainbridge Cohen and others. Yet the connection to the art of movement – dance, 
is not yet integrated.  From Isadora Duncen (1877-1927) attempts has been done 
to get dance connected to the basics of the human movement, but to these days a 
lot of dance education is done in an old fashion way. Not real 'education' but 
just conditioning, very much like training animals in the circus. It is still 
surprising that it can happen hundred years after Freud (1856-1939) discovered 
the importance of the unconscious in the  human being behavior. Ignoring the 
individual body-mind, and with printing the body movement language, fixing also 
the aesthetic views and not letting the individual to find a personal way to 
the movement world. 

Although already Laban (1879-1958) offer a new ways for dance education, and 
insisted on the need for a written language, and created a dance notation where 
one could record dance, and as such express the gestures in different speeds. 
The American dancer Erich Hawkins (1909-1994) applied the Meble Todd method in 
his dances, teaching his dancers way to include the knowledge of anatomy while 
learning his dances, he  claimed that using the images of the human skeleton 
improve the execution of each dancer and helping the process of integrating it 
to his/her own body-mind reactions. Watching his group dances one could see 
that the dancers archived a common language yet without loosing their 
individuality. In the middle of the fifties we find the wonderful contribution 
to the somatic dance education through the contact improvisation. A development 
of the American dancer Steve Paxton. Paxton stressed the power the gravity and 
the momentum playing when two moving bodies are moving while touching each 
other, shifting the weight, acting and reacting and learning their movement by 
trail and error, exploring and expending their movement world.

I am claiming here that learning to move we need to respect human being as a 
unique individual. Exploring our gestures, new and old we  need to preform it  
different speeds, from regular-habitual  to slow it down to the point of only 
vibration an inner movement. Or accelerating the gesture to wide speed range as 
well. Listen that each speed the body-mind is organized and perceived the 
movement differently, different feelings, recognizing the new experience. 

Last word goes to the art of movement - DANCE as well as movement GAMES are 
based on unspoken contract between the PERFORMER and the AUDIENCE. The two 
agree to stay alert, to be consciously active during the whole performance. One 
is active PREFORMING, the other WATCHING actively. (This ideal is far from the 
reality neither in the theater hall, nor at the  dance schools.  In both cases 
less attention is given to the act of active observation. Both groups 
performers and audience need to accept consciously the terms of the contract, 
otherwise slowing down will be only a self indulging act (which happens so 
often while improvising in public).

Amos Hetz

++



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Re: [-empyre-] Listening, at times

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:




i paused to return to this posting where Amos reports on his long short 
struggle to scribble words on our theme of (Sebastian reminds me of the correct 
scripture) "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration" ,
and then wonders what is the right procedure.   Yes, what is the right 
procedure? 

I take this to be a very positive sign, for our month's forum, namely that as 
participants passed/past and present, or awaiting to join the ensemble, we will 
become experts, as Michael implored us to think, or we might move into a more 
empathetic mode of contact improvisation of this can be done over the network 
and i think it can.
the participating is listening, as all of you have so poignantly pointed out, 
in your remarkable and thoughtful writings,  bodies or bodyminds tuned to 
others which are moving in the group and discovering moments of speed or 
stillness, as Fabrizio suggests. what then do you explore or find (as knowledge 
might be created) in these moments?   

Michael's reflections, and Sebastian's questions  (expanded on by Elisita and 
Amos) which will continue as night falls, are addressing, next to existential 
and philosophical or ethical matters, also the inroads, the ensounding movement 
of physical creativity, into academies, or centers/institutions of learning and 
knowledge, sciences and discourses, scribbles. This is a serious matter, which 
i had not pondered all too much before, i naturally assumed dance or movement 
art was belittled by academies and sciences, and so that's that. And I am 
personally also less interested in issues of intuition or creativity  [ and the 
self-indulgences Amos warns against] being posed up and against other method 
actings (in hard sciences or discourse-intensified art forms or also, not to 
forget, the popular and mass cultures, huge participatory spaces and networks). 

Last night i listened to an australian performer speak about her work in 
performance and vlogging (multiple selves generated and sustained on YouTube 
over a long period of time). As i watched her acting on camera, i was reminded 
of the questions that also came up when we (in the Choreolab) moved about, in 
that privileged peaceful setting, as Sebastian admits, when we were listening 
moving, and moved in the group outside on the grassy plots, or inside the dance 
studio.  There was something remarkable and rich, in also realizing how our 
senses of course are active in particular ways moving (the walking body)  - i 
think anthropologist Tim Ingold has worked on this subject, using the phrase 
“hearing in” when he addresses such perception,  the experience of sound in 
movement, experienced, like breath or like the wind, as a movement of coming 
and going, inspiration and expiration, looking at the sky as we would when we 
take in our impressions of weather, being, as Ingold implies, connected 
metereologicially and, i gather, irregularly. 

I quote from Ingold: 

"To follow sound, that is to listen, is to wander the same paths. Attentive 
listening, as opposed to passive hearing, surely entails the very opposite of 
emplacement. We may, in practice, be anchored to the ground, but it is not 
sound that provides the anchor. Again the analogy with flying a kite is 
apposite. Though the flyer’s feet may be firmly planted on the spot, it is not 
the wind that keeps them there. Likewise, the sweep of sound continually 
endeavours to tear listeners away, causing them to surrender to its movement. 
It requires an effort to stay in place. And this effort pulls against sound 
rather than harmonising with it. Place confinement, in short, is a form of 
deafness." [1]


thank you all for everything so far, and may we ask others to join in, please?


Johannes Birringer


references
[1]  Tim Ingold,  “Against Soundscape,” in Angus Carlyle (ed.), Autumn. Leaves: 
Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice (Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), 
pp. 10-13. See also his “The eye of the storm: visual perception and the 
weather,” Visual Studies 20:2 (2005),  97-104.

---


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Re: [-empyre-] listening, at times

[Johannes Birringer]

... thought was not complete-d, 

when I suggested an issue came up listening moving during the choreolab, and 
that was when the film cameras were used at some point, and were considered an 
intrusion. Not by everyone, but probably by some, and we wondered whether we 
move differently when we know the cameras are pointed.
Yet I brought them to the lab thinking that cameras are part of how we move in 
this world.

Johannes





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Re: [-empyre-] : "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration" (M Weiss) Movement 2

[Johannes Birringer]

[2] Second reflection, Mov.2,  from Michael Weiss.


Choreolab as a Creation of Fields of Knowledge 


 In the course of our study we want to convey that there is a great 
conjunction between motion and emotion, action and inaction, 
 which ultimately strives for full illumination that can be grasped at the 
(sub)conscious level. Thus, the power of compassion and 
 deep understanding becomes senior to all else []  How to take this 
paradigm to practicality will be the focus of our interdisciplinary seminar.  
 [...] Can we finally transcend our (e)motional frequencies for a deeper 
independency of feeling, thought, mind and consciousness? 
 What is this ’final’ state of being- the essence of consciousness?   
(Sebastian Prantl)
- - -


These reflections of Sebastian Prantl lead immediately into the Choreolab’s 
intention as a creation of fields of knowledge. A choreolab, as understood 
here, forms an endeavour for research by means of inter- (or: 
trans)disciplinarity in its essential meaning: In order for this to happen, I 
believe a base and understanding are required by which persons can fully 
immerse and dedicate themselves to research from within and without their and 
other’s bodies-and-minds. Reading Prantl’s reflection in such way, I prefer to 
not interpret it any further (1) for its complexity involved, and (2) because 
the Choreolab was the very process by which such reflections were translated 
into practice-and-research (needless to say―given the enormous scale of these 
questions―this is a lifetime’s adventure of embodied research).

Out of the many ways of trying to convey a more immediate impression for 
readers with regard to the atmosphere deriving from such a creation of fields 
of knowledge of practice-and-research during the Choreolab, I would like to 
continue with a method of representation used in qualitative research called 
poetic representation. 

The following text is based on fragments of what the participant-experts of our 
group said on the last day of the Choreolab. We sat together for breakfast at a 
long table on the university campus at a sunny Saturday morning. In a final 
reflection, everybody talked about her or his personal experience. I wrote down 
some of it, thereby collecting a mosaic of feelings and contemplations. They 
are now condensed in the following text, containing either parts of transcribed 
sentences or whole ones as said by the participant-experts. They are 
deliberately woven together by me hoping to offer a most direct insight into an 
existential experience on subjective and collective levels of researching for a 
creation of fields of knowledge:


How do I perceive myself in dance
Listen
I felt always connection
I didn’t need to talk 
Just being here without effort
I feel lighter

Sometimes I was overwhelmed
Found new questions for myself
―wonderful places―
It is a huge luggage but it is light
Learn from movements

I am less concerned with myself now
Where is the focus

Look at deceleration
Normally there is a goal
Lean back, see bodies

Enter into my body
The doors are so important
The quality of open doors
The quality of a ritual
To live in space and in connection

I felt not good sometimes because old things came out
I could be the little girl
Why dance in such a little age group if dance is my life?

Openness
Compassion
Wholeness
Not single stories―one net 
Connectedness 
Spreading
I had a big crisis
Holy life
Without making sense
I will be at home
It is the frame in which flowers can grow
For me this is the base of dance

Imagine 
To be an artist in society
The place is called ΄dancing ground΄―
there they do discussions, politics, creativity
As artists we have a responsibility

The importance of dance as the connector
I feel blessed to have formed relationships
Very slowly passing on the message of how 
to connect the inner and outer world

We need to change ourselves first
Go inside first, then meet others
Feel the present time: us, sun, colors, everything 

- - -

This representation might offer a bridge for readers into a transformative 
process, thereby recalling the very questions initially asked in this essay, 
referring to subjective and collective levels of pursuing embodied research. I 
therefore would like to invite readers to again contemplate on these questions, 
if welcome in a mood of deceleration, by asking them anew in light of the 
reflections we just heard: 

How do dancers develop their art of performing in order to realize foundational 
dimensions of knowledge of their bodies-and-minds and of those who experience 
their dance? 

How do dancers get in contact with existential grounds of their 
(un)consciousness in regard to the own psycho-physical personality in its 
multilayered contexts while also focussing on the interwoven dynamics of 
subjective and collective fields involved? 

What ought to be initiated to enter such processes? 

What then is movement, from whom and from where does it derive?

Re: [-empyre-] : "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration" (M Weiss) Movement 3

[Johannes Birringer]

[3] Third  reflection, Mov.3,  from Michael Weiss.



Choreolab as / and Science & Arts-Based Research

 
 Art-based  research [1] and advanced scientific 
thinking share a fundamental commitment to allowing 
 the phenomena being studied to speak for 
themselves. If we stay closely attuned to the images and processes of 
 creative expression, they will suggest new 
frontiers of understanding.   (Shaun McNiff)[2]

- - -


The vision laid out here by arts-based researcher and creative arts therapist 
Shaun McNiff relates to the idea of further developing the Choreolab with its 
already elaborated research qualities into (possibly) the university field. 
Shaun McNiff portrays a most ideal conjunction of art and science by reaching 
out towards a phenomenological base which can unite them. Speaking with 
philosopher Martin Heidegger, such a project is grounded on trying to reveal a 
phenomenon from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.[3] 
 Being apart from prejudice and immersed into pre-reflectivity, such a 
phenomenological endeavour of an ever deepening awareness is well prepared to 
search within “new frontiers of understanding”. According to my experience, 
this is a core fundament of the research process within the Choreolab.

As already reflected upon critically, I experience the scientific endeavour 
within many of its disciplinary epistemologies―at times in danger of forming 
rigid systems of unquestioned beliefs and presumptions―as an often linear, 
dualistic and primarily cognitive-based project to pursue research. If we 
consider the scientific project’s anchoring within its institutional frameworks 
at large, then, not least of all, due to their frequent regulative, normative 
and abstract principles (possibly directed towards unconsciously conditioning 
behavior), their legal set of rules, representational power hierarchies with 
issues of status prestige involved, furthermore due to inherent sanctions 
directed towards social control, institutionalized socio-academic structures 
are at great risk of restricting and/or losing the non-conformative, 
spontaneous, liminal and creative potential urgently needed to practice 
research innovatively.

This is not to underestimate the many possibilities existing within such 
frameworks; the point I like to highlight is the threat of losing qualities 
described in this essay that I could experience so intensely within a research 
laboratory –  the Choreolab –  which I believe to be an existential ground to 
nourish fruitful research: Empathy, trust, openness and the courage to support 
processes in silence stand against certain traditions of more or less 
subconsciously, or unacknowledged mechanistically driven capitalist-like 
demands for producing (artistic/scientific) outcomes; furthermore, the 
qualities of the Choreolab, as I came to know it, are based on an encounter 
from person to person beyond judgement, fields of being in relation with 
oneself and being related to each other as congruently as possible, thereby 
transcending hierarchical structures of persons towards student-experts and 
expert-students, thus being fully aware of the intrinsic potential of each 
person; and finally all this to be in an environment dance can offer 
particularly: existential research with/through/of body-and-mind. 

- - - 

The Choreolab contains a distinguished methodology of arts-based research as a 
systematic experimentation through body-and-mind, thereby forming a way of 
knowing. As anthropologist Soyini Madison puts it appropriately: ”Art helps us 
see and realize the unrealized”.[4]  I believe this to be the very nature of 
the Choreolab by transdisciplinarily uniting art and science. Yet, each of the 
aspects viewed upon critically before, challenges the process of a further 
development of the Choreolab as to not only uphold these values possibly 
leading to innovative research (questions) but to constantly unfolding 
them―proposing a different zeitgeist. 

Paul Spencer, social anthropologist specializing in dance studies, notes: ”In a 
very important sense, society creates the dance, and it is to society that we 
must turn to understand it.” [5] Viewed in light of this interdependency, there 
lies immense research potential for a further development of the Choreolab as 
being a conjunction of art and science by fully integrating body-and-mind. Such 
a research process, to my understanding, is well suited to continue the age-old 
inquiry into what it means to be a human phenomena in its complexity amongst 
all other phenomena. It is a research through a thinking, feeling and sensing 
body, an inquiry into dance by using the full scale of arts-based, qualitative 
methods to create pathways of an ever deepening understanding. Referring to 
Stephanie Springgay, Rita L. Irwin and Sylvia Wilson Kind, it would be 
“research that breathes”  and “rese

Re: [-empyre-] : "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration"

[Johannes Birringer]

thank you all for this focussed and careful week -  we envisioned it, here on 
soft_skinned space, as a workshop dwelling in movement awarenesses
and questions  – addressed to the existential ways in which we live, experience 
and create – coming or flowing out of movements and stillnesses,
and already the framework has widened considerably (thank you Elisita for going 
back to speak more comprehensively about ontogenetic filogenetic development,
connectivity patterns and organizational progression

I see these dimensions and concepts (as you address them in biological, 
psychological and neurological context) as unavoidably vital for a further 
discussion of time,
motion / emotion, and frequencies/rhythms in social or cultural areas, and 
artistic practices, which may soon be brought to the workshop.

I was not entirely sure, when we began, whether a movement workshop or 
Choreolab –  and movement practices as such –  could be the starting point for 
this philosophical
discussion on transformation and on awareness of how knowledges are created or 
valued  - but I feel it was an ideal setting for raising the issue of 
integrating body and mind,

and, if you were to ask around, what practices are people engaging to center 
themselves or to transform themselves or to heal themselves? to connect? 

[thanks Simon for some cross-lateral production work, distraction is always 
good, and the song ("Superman You're Crying, Superman You Need a Rest") in its 
blue screen studio
creation is just fabulous]

Elisita mentions that she is going off to "a workshop on ritual body postures 
and ecstatic trance"...

This made me wonder, after pondering Michael's posts all week, and the insights 
that were offered by Amos, Sebastian and Fabrizio,  what physical
practices we choose and why?  and to what extent, say in the performing arts  
(Phillip Zarrilli and his co-authors in the book "Theatre Histories" tend to 
refer to cultural
or performance "specialists" when they discuss people who enact particular 
forms, whether oral traditions or shamanic practices or, for example,  Noh and 
Kathakali or method acting or Suzuki technique) , 
the emphasis on particular "methods"  has always been so strong;  we have so 
many "techniques", don't we?  But how do they extend the ontogenetic 
development and at what point to they stop being
vital for existential transformation -" integrating body-and-mind not only 
within the framework of being some-body but due to a process of being 
every-body, thereby containing possibilities as e.g. 
to creatively transcend disciplinary boundaries..." (MW)  – or even for 
creative transformations in the art of performance ?   (I was watching the 
so-called "stamping" practice in Suzuki training last night
and asked myself whether what the performers say about the technique makes 
sense to me?). 

I think I am asking whether the physical and spiritual dimensions, variably 
addressed by practitioners who
practice a method, are recognizable valid shareable and culturally effective 
dimensions, today,  and how and where do you experience them?


regards
Johannes Birringer





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Re: [-empyre-] : "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration" / second week, introducing our guests

[Johannes Birringer]

a painter, with 12 solo exhibitions to her credit, Gordana has more 
than twenty years’ experience of developing and exhibiting large-scale 
time-based media projects. Her artistic practice and theoretical work that 
intersects art, science and advanced digital technologies has formed five 
Cycles: “Parallel Worlds,” “The Shirt of a Happy Man,” “Infonoise” and “Fugue.” 
A constant mark of her work throughout her experiments with new technologies 
has been her distinctive method of creating an effective cross-disciplinary 
framework for the emergence of synergy through collaboration. Gordana exhibited 
and lectured at leading interdisciplinary festivals and symposia, and artistic 
and scientific conferences; such as ISEA, Towards a Science of Consciousness 
and Mutamorphosis most recently. Alongside her artistic practice, in the last 
five years Gordana has been artist-in-residence at Computer Science Department, 
University College London, where she has founded and convenes the Tesla Art and 
Science Group. She has received a number of international and British academic 
awards.


^  Olu.Taiwo

Olu Taiwo graduated from the Laban Centre with an MA in Choreography and wrote 
his PhD on Performance philosophy. He teaches dance, visual development and 
performance in a combination of real and virtual formats and has a background 
in Fine Art. He is an actor, dancer and drummer performing in national and 
international contexts. His main interests are to propagate 21st century issues 
concerning the interaction between body, identity, audience and technology. 
This includes research based on both his concepts of the Return beat (West 
African rhythmic sensibility), and the Physical journal (Embodied knowledge and 
memory). He performed a lead role in Suna No Onna iand UKIYO [Moveable Worlds], 
and developed Harmonious Interruptions. a new piece with Ace Dance co based in 
Newbury, and a new solo work, Interfacing. He is particularly interested, at 
the moment, in redefining the nature of Practice and being as a goal and state 
of becoming. This is to say, Practice as methodology and Alaafia (Yoruba) or 
Eudiamenia (Greek) as outcome with the development of techniques as research 
data.


with many regards

Johannes Birringer



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Re: [-empyre-] : "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration" / second week, introducing our guests

[Johannes Birringer]

ainter, with 12 solo exhibitions to her credit, Gordana has more 
than twenty years’ experience of developing and exhibiting large-scale 
time-based media projects. Her artistic practice and theoretical work that 
intersects art, science and advanced digital technologies has formed five 
Cycles: “Parallel Worlds,” “The Shirt of a Happy Man,” “Infonoise” and “Fugue.” 
A constant mark of her work throughout her experiments with new technologies 
has been her distinctive method of creating an effective cross-disciplinary 
framework for the emergence of synergy through collaboration. Gordana exhibited 
and lectured at leading interdisciplinary festivals and symposia, and artistic 
and scientific conferences; such as ISEA, Towards a Science of Consciousness 
and Mutamorphosis most recently. Alongside her artistic practice, in the last 
five years Gordana has been artist-in-residence at Computer Science Department, 
University College London, where she has founded and convenes the Tesla Art and 
Science Group. She has received a number of international and British academic 
awards.


^  Olu.Taiwo

Olu Taiwo graduated from the Laban Centre with an MA in Choreography and wrote 
his PhD on Performance philosophy. He teaches dance, visual development and 
performance in a combination of real and virtual formats and has a background 
in Fine Art. He is an actor, dancer and drummer performing in national and 
international contexts. His main interests are to propagate 21st century issues 
concerning the interaction between body, identity, audience and technology. 
This includes research based on both his concepts of the Return beat (West 
African rhythmic sensibility), and the Physical journal (Embodied knowledge and 
memory). He performed a lead role in Suna No Onna iand UKIYO [Moveable Worlds], 
and developed Harmonious Interruptions. a new piece with Ace Dance co based in 
Newbury, and a new solo work, Interfacing. He is particularly interested, at 
the moment, in redefining the nature of Practice and being as a goal and state 
of becoming. This is to say, Practice as methodology and Alaafia (Yoruba) or 
Eudiamenia (Greek) as outcome with the development of techniques as research 
data.


with many regards

Johannes Birringer



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Re: [-empyre-] condensacion/extrusión

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all
oh, David, no need to worry, anyone can join in at any point,  when you feel 
urged to write.
one could have introduced the whole ensemble of actors at beginning of october, 
but we tried to start actually with the physical workshop, then with the 
choreodancers, and gradually we're expanding, and we hope to hear also from the 
empyre resonant community how these thought movements here are received, some 
of you have already entered, welcome to you all. 

/ and I appreciate that Jack and Fabrizio went ahead on Sunday to try and 
condensate the thematic cores, 
and that Jack, Gordana, Claudia and Niliufer have opened a new round of 
discussion with such fascinating statements about their work and their 
research. 

Johannes




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Re: [-empyre-] condensación/extrusión 2

[Johannes Birringer]

thanks to all of you for this provocative and fascinating opening of round two 
of our workshop.
how to condense? and find the various phase states?  it is becoming more and 
more complex now, and this is owed to the rich and diversified perspectives of 
our
discussants, and also, i feel, their willingness to draw from life and from 
their immediate or past experience, their ailments. 

let's open the floor for more movement..

- - -  
just a couple of questions:

Jack, you began by thinking aloud that choreography (of movement) may be 
space-over time (which one could debate, i think it also the other way round), 
and
then later mention Sananguargarq --  which you translate as ‘making little 
models of how the world works’ (technologies of the hand).  I was so intrigued 
by this translation. now if this implies craft
and skill and creativities of adoption and transformation, how do these 
durational activities relate to "fatemap" (is this a deterministic concept, or 
a processual
notion (mapping?) related to growth or evolution/development?  an unfortunate 
name or a paradoxical name not yet able to tell us about "life force” or what 
shapes
various survival methods (back to method acting)?  How did you become attracted 
to embryology?


When Claudia evokes her work, and the way you, Claudia,  just replied and 
mentioned adopting 
>different mental states during the performance, (a kind of trance) ...   
>the point for me now is how I can achieve that, in order that the audience 
>perceives that type of experience too… how can I, as an artist, push the 
>audience to experience, their own bodies and the environment during such a 
>performance  >>

... I was reminded of your ‘INsideOUT’ performance/installation, and when I 
first saw it, your stillness, your 'just' sitting there (with the 
electrodes).. -  I could not connect all of my experience in my mind or 
through my body, as it seemed so non-performative (anti-performative),  and the 
relationship/connection to projected images, influenced by your brain waves, 
was not clear to me...  (how were these images "fatemapped"?, can one say 
this, Jack?)


Much later, i rediscovered Alvin Lucier's piece from 1964 -   "Music for Solo 
Performer"  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uuYNKVQNMU), and it made me now 
think of your comments and some of the wonderful passages in Olu's,  Nilüfer's 
and Jennifer's postings, as well as Elisita's response today.

Now,  I would ask Gordana,  looking at Lucier's [non]performance or 
participatory performance for a moment,  and seeing it as meditative 
stillness-movement for neural empathy? neuro-sonic empathy [?] , how would you 
think of this installation, in regard to what you wrote or seem to plan doing 
with your new artaudian project..INTERACTIVE ART being process AND complex 
AND interdependant... ?
if i thought along the lines of Artaud's metaphysics of incantatory vibrations 
and "sonorous streaming naked realizations" - would this sound from within the 
bodymind make me shiver and would it "intensify" me (speed my up) or would it 
massage me, like Artaud's snake?  would it traumatize me?this has been 
hinted at (by Nilüfer) but not addressed yet, the problematic side of 
stillness-movement and deceleration, when time seems to fade slowly, as fear 
makes us nearly frozen, gripping us, not letting us go/breathe * [1]


Claudia, i found an image from your INsideOUT on "surveillant_architectures"  
(nice concept):http://blog.khm.de/surveillant_architectures/?p=353

how would you speak about the notion of "real-time", in comparison with Olu's 
philosophical thoughts on "duration time" (not measurable time)?


best wishes
Johannes Birringer


Reference
[1] I try to address this by looking at Artaud's 1947 recording of "Pour en 
finir avec le jugement de dieu,"  and the distinction – and convergence – 
between experience of pain and performance of pain, and beccoming-mad and 
traumatized or traumatizing performance (and I have seen a few decelerated ones 
that made my blood curl).   A much more gripping article in the same book, just 
published, on the matter of traumatized performance, is by Per Roar, "An 
unfinished story: on ghostly matters and a mission impossible," and there is 
also Fabrizio's tantalizing essay in Tarantism and butoh.   See 
Birringer/Fenger (eds), "Tanz und WahnSinn  / Dance and ChoreoMania", Leipzig 
2011. website: http://www.choreomania.org



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Re: [-empyre-] daimon: Lucier's performance

[Johannes Birringer]

oh,  how is it possible to re/create Lucier's brain wave /mediational 
performance - it was not scored, was it?  how could it be scored?

or is this a work that can be created again by others (thus participatory in 
the Cagean sense) being / performing in the same
configuration or arrangement, mise en scène and allowing your own waves to 
weave and be, in these moments, in this weather?

You are working with a particular mode of approach here, and giving us much to 
think about.

[the artist Janine Antoni, i believe, created an installation work called 
"Slumber [1993], which featured her working, with her hands  on the loom – 
making little models of the world – , and what she weaves
are the "recorded traces" of her dreams [REM via electroencephalograph machine] 
that were recorded the previous night and printed out on a long strip of 
paper...  then over the course of many days of the
duration of the installation, she weaves these abstracted records of her dreams 
into cloth, a blanket, or clothes for the audiences, who could, if one did so, 
Gordana,  "wear" Janine's rewoven dreams]


I wonder how Jennifer would see the wired performer in relationship to 
work-study science?
how come our Postfordist managers have not come up with ways to measure our 
brainwaves at work?  


>Economy and profligacy" (David Hughes suggested, working on paradoxes, 
>contracted expansions and accelerated decelerations to which we shall return 
>in Week 4 when physicist Akram Khan from the CERN project will join us and 
>talk about the origins and fatemaps of the universe, in dialogue with 
>architects I have invited).

i wonder indeed how motion and emotion are talked about in economics and by the 
critical clinicians of finance/banking, as after all our economy and our work 
situations/pattern are quite fundamental,
existential for most of us and surely,  as some have hinted at (Nilufer and 
Michèle),  cause or determine our rhythms to some extent, and fate us. 


we are ailing.  


art or dance as sublimatory/compensatory re-associative or palliative 
(meditational therapy, body-mind centering, yoga, zumba anyone?) processional?


Olu's philosophical take stunned me and inspired me. Therefore I wonder how 
others read him, when he shifted our theme to a widened cultural / 
collectivized level:

>>
Consequently, having reflected on the discussion thus far, I am struck by our 
mind's resistance to change as a result of this rotational motion; how we are 
drawn towards dominance patterns of thinking. Cognitive activity seeks to 
distinguish and describe the problems of perceiving what is required when real 
cultural deceleration in a material sense is seriously entertained. Action 
however, requires a whole other faculty! 

Personally working reflectively and more importantly reflexively to decelerate 
my actions and the actions of others through teaching workshops for the purpose 
of eudaimonia is one thing, but to do this as a cultural and trans-cultural 
collective practice is the challenge that I am particularly interested. I feel 
strongly that 'practice' and 'meditation' are important ingrediences. I would 
like to offer and propose the idea of dreaming a construction of new 
trans-national and trans-cultural space/ building/zone/institute (what ever 
shape this might take) for 'intercultural meditation' to facilitate the 
pegagogy of Cultural deceleration.>


Olu,  what is a trans-cultural eudaiminia?

method-actings and actions towards the generation of  well-being (eu) of our 
spirits  (daimon)  – a greater Flourishing of Life, 
and including/embracing all the spirits  beyond the "lateral ground" (earth), 
as Ohno Kazuo would say,  the dead and our ancestors?


I did imagine Ohno Kazuo to be a Romantic, when he said:  “Even on taking leave 
of my flesh and bones, I want to continue dancing as a ghost.”
 


regards
Johannes

PS.  Did you know there exists a Society for Existential Analysis?   
www.existentialanalysis.co.uk

An an Institute for Unnecessary Research?




  Claudia Robles schreibt

for now...  I would like to share with all a video excerpt about the
Lucier's piece :  ''Music for a solo performance''  I performed 2 months
ago during a Festival in Cologne...   I tried to follow exactly the
original Lucier's score...

http://icemserv.folkwang-hochschule.de/~robles/works_media/Lucier_Robles/Lucier_Robles_excerpt960.mov

I must go
best,
Claudia



--
--




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Re: [-empyre-] condensación/extrusión 3

[Johannes Birringer]

Gordana's longer and invigorating post, "Artaud, ritual, spectacle, 
alchemy...and a pinch of science"  really invites a final
round of comments and feedbacks from this week's workshop discussants, and I am 
already tantalized by what our speakers from next week
will have to say as some of the issues raised by Gordana fall directly into 
their research and practice areas

It seems, Gordana, that you have opened our minds to reflect further on a trope 
that Jack had introduced, at the beginning of the week, "Somatechnics",
but i would like to look at this intrinsic interconnection now through your 
notions of spectacularity and ritual  -- and yet
ask Jack again whether, from his experience of living with the Inuit  a n d  
living in the"south", there are not very different kinds of "somatechnics"?

and thus, effectively, different kinds of ritual technics and tech-spectacles 
and the kind of immersive engaging interactional enviroments Gordana prefers, 
and then the meditative ones, and the religious
ones (and the sports rituals, in Dortmund when 80.000 go to the stadium, they 
go to "mass" in a Catholic sense of transubstantiation), the agitational ones, 
and the 'campy' ones (i am thinking here of Hélio Oiticica's tropicamp, and his 
passion for installations that put you at ease and yet affect you directly,  
which is perhaps what he meant by "cre-leisure"  (or creative leisure)?

but cre-leisure is more: I think Oiticica's hope for heightened multi-sensory 
experience (the "suprasensorial" ) is a metaphysical vision, close to Artaud's?

Johannes
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