----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
dear all
>An Archival Event: Who is –empyre?>
what a good question, and thanks to Renate, Tim, Simon and Patrick for raising
it; also Melinda Rackham's
look back to the origins of this list made me think about how such a discussion
forum or workshop with curated
themes builds itself up and grows or sustains itself over the years. 2002 -
2013 seems a long time, and when I compare
empyre with other lists, I must say I always enjoyed the wide ranging,
fascinating and passionate debates here, especially
when they are subject oriented and thus not informational or promotional. The
relationship of the active participants (which
in a given month can range from a very small subject-matter group to larger, 40
or 50 debaters?) to lurkers was never quite
clear to me (if indeed the subscribers number around 1600) , but Renate,
Melinda and Christina McPhee addressed it, I believe, with Melinda suggesting
that
>>
The rest of –empyre- are silently lurking… which is an interesting form of
participation. Recently I overheard someone on the list who had never posted,
discussing a list topic in an offline context, and I realised that a mailing
list’s influence is far beyond what happens publicly online, it reverberates -
becomes interactive in the wider community. People contribute by reading,
nothing is passive..
<<
and I'd love to hear more comments on this and the role an empyre "archive"
could play, has played or has not played, how do we ascertain this?
We're asked this month to introduce ourselves as part of a living archive,
which is a fabulous and odd idea (as we are not debating but promoting, or
narrating our lives?).
It's also perhaps as good a moment as any to offer an apology to all, for
having sometimes probably come across as unnecessarily involving myself with
questions
or interruptions, or with interrogations that may at times have reflected
impatience or unwarranted irony when I sensed that a circle of debate was
shrinking rather than opening out.
I am sorry for that. Encouraging is Simon Biggs's point that the days of such
a listserv may not be numbered ('What's interesting is that lists like empyre,
Netbehaviour and others
not only survive but remain vibrant communities. Five years ago I thought the
listserv was destined to become an historical medium..."). I joined empyre in
late 2005, having been
introduced to it by Christina McPhee, and I thank her for it: over the years
this community, in all its crazy/unpredictable diversity, has been
inspirational.
So thanks to all, and I enjoy reading about your work. (thx Gita Hashemi for
your 'poetic/political' introductions....).
regards
Johannes Birringer
+++
Bio
Johannes Birringer is a choreographer and artistic director of AlienNation Co
(www.aliennationcompany.com), an independent arts ensemble based in Houston,
Texas. He is also co-founder of a telematic performance collective (ADaPT) and
has explored telepresence in performances with partners in different places in
the early part of the 2000s, at a time when he was teaching at Ohio State in
the dance department, developing a new MFA in dance & technology; already since
the mid-90s he had involved himself actively in the international dance and
technology movement and taught workshops on the integration of dance and new
media. He has directed numerous multimedia theatre, dance, and digital
performances in Europe, the Americas, Japan, and China; collaborated on
site-specific installations, and exhibited work at film and video festivals. He
now resides in Houston and London.
He's author of Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (1989), Media and Performance
(1998), Performance on the Edge (2000), Performance, Technology and Science
(2008) and co-edited two books on dance research (regarding neuroscience, and
choreomania). In 2003 he founded the Interaktionslabor
(http://interaktionslabor.de) - an interactive media lab in a former coal mine
in southwest Germany which has met every summer since 2003 (more below). Since
2004 Johannes has been developing a research group in England with Michèle
Danjoux, co-directing the Design-and-Performance Lab ( DAP-Lab) at Brunel
University where he teaches Performance Technologies & heads the Center for
Contemporary and Digital Performance. The DAP-Lab is an ensemble of artists and
researchers (http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap), and the lab also has a performing
company that operates either as the LAB or as a label, dans sans joux, for
performances, exhibitions and new collections (http://www.danssansjoux.org).
Practice
Over the past 15 years, the work has moved a bit away from the stage and into
laboratories, but it keeps coming back to performance venues and exhibitions
(such as the noisy KINETICA art fair recently), but an important dimension of
the practice is the workshop, and continuous collaboration with others
exploring cultural and generational differences. The formation of the
Interaktionslabor (as an autonomous site) in 2003 was an experiment that I am
particularly interested in, as the DAP-Lab, which began shortly thereafter, is
affiliated with a university context and tries to sustain its own form of
autonomy amongst rising research pressures and constraints, as well as a
corporatized political/economic environment, that affect collaboration. The
Interaktionslabor has been housed in a disused coal mine in the Saarland
region, and an agency was set up (now defunct) commissioning projects for
regional infrastructure development and the struggle against unemployment and
precarity. For some reason, our lab was presumed to create jobs or innovations
that could be marketed or become impactful, and with a small group of
volunteers I have tried to reshape our research experimentations to be able to
keep explaining why we exist and whether artistic work has to have impact and
what kind. Some years ago it seemed inevitable that digital culture and new
media arts would be based on interactivity and the paradigm changes implied by
participatory play/ creativity and networking. The promise of a new aesthetics
of interaction made me think that technically derived interface performances
could adopt the digital into social processes that also taught us new
techniques of behavior, new “acting” techniques. So over the past few years,
the peripheral lab in the border Saarland has been trying to publish a
manifesto on “interaction” (http://interaktionslabor.de/manifesto.htm), it
remains incompleted. As we tried, we also became more disillusioned.
This summer, we want to finish off the manifesto, examine why interactivity
(the technical kind) is not working so much for us. And why the growth of
virtual reality, gaming environments and second lives does not answer any
social questions about how to care to act, how to give and how to receive.
Meanwhile, the DAP-Lab, having devoted itself to conducting research into
sensor choreography, wearable computing/wearables/garments and soft
technologies, has entered its retro-futurist phase and looks backwards at all
kinds of analog stuff, at nature, birds, zaum, radio transmissions, sound
ecologies, sustainable energy. DAP's new production "for the time being"
(Victory over the Sun) is inspired by the 1913 futurist opera and russian
constructivism; it was first performed in London in 2012, and an expanded
version will appear in the winter of 2013-14 (http:youtu.be/WeAIYCnsDe4).
regards
Johannes Birringer
Contact: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
http://www.digitalcultures.org
http://www.danssansjoux.org
@DAP_lab
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