----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Dear empyre ees .
apologies for being invisible in these last days - weeks, moving between
different places and states of connectivity .
as garth has been providing some interesting research, on the
particularities of the questions that were framed within WISP - Workshop
of Interactive Systems in Performance, - a UWS Industry Partnership with Dance
Research centre in Sydney - Critical Path, and MacQuarie University ... a
comparative study of three forms of interactive works, were experienced -
played with, then analysed so we might find ways to articulate how
interactive systems in performance bring with them complexities and fluidity
of subjectivity, new forms of agency experienced by the performer, perhaps
too transmitted to the audience. Two of these ' systems' used real time bio
data generated through wireless sensors - one for a project developed with
Garth for performance work - Darker Edge of Night. perhaps inherent to in
the title was poetically as always - what is it that our entwined state of
connectivity give and take from us - in performance this agency brings with
it capacity to, enliven performers presence, minutia of attentiveness to
time passing from and through transformed synaesthically engender new forms
of virtuosity - I remember in previous post I think in the last two weeks the
word of alchemy surfaced the transformation of matter from one state to
another this might be word i become re interested in.
The way i have been able to 'clock' the difference is through my own sense of
subjective porousity - embodied (ethnography) in ' systems' which have
dissolved borders between my physical and virtual state of being - distributed
over networks - local to remote. - in this last system ( previous ones-
telematic - motion sensing(( to avoid the word capture ((( for what is it
that you are capturing when you capture me?))) i describe my body as
cellulardata without a space between these words.. i recognise that i ' have
swallowed the system - the system is inside me and i am in the system - for
i can taste the nuances of its difference perceptually - choreographically,
politically, culturally, this is an expansive field of interaction = and
one which requires a counter balancing act .. by going even deeper into somatic
energetic flows of our unplugged sensory self, in readiness to equate the
capacity of the potential and responsibility of our borderless state ..
which to embody them still is to stay art fully within the question. if
this makes any sense.
" i feel the future present, passing through me, faster than the speed of
light my fleshy data flows connecting systems, states of mindfulness, awake to
the speed of thought processed cellularly, blue toothed wirelessly, up loaded
downstream through the media networks of our global mind"
hellen cite paris for some amount of time still
,
\
On 18/07/2014, at 1:51 AM, Garth Paine wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi Sue et al (resending to the correct thread....)
>
> I thought it might be useful to respond with some writing around the nature
> of experience and embodiment - I understand your frame for virtuality, but I
> am constantly trying to really understand what that is from a kind of direct
> experience and how it changes based on my conditioning and on the
> socially/communally understood reference - I am asking myself all the time,
> to what extent is the accepted paradigm valid - what does it miss, what does
> it establish through aspiration rather than existent phenomena.
>
> So here is part of a framework (edited down here) developed by myself and
> several others at WISP2010 which I organised at Critical Path in Sydney in
> 2010/201. This section pertains specifically and only to notions of
> Experience and Embodiment in interactive works and makes a distinction with
> pre-existing paradigms of performance
>
> Experience and Embodiment contains three subdimensions:
> Porosity, Perception, and Presence.
>
> a) Porosity. The content of the work, or the work itself (the artefact,
> musical work, play, dance work etc), may be more or less porous or responsive
> to real-time influence and, correspondingly, more or less sealed. Likewise,
> the embodied movements of the performer or performers may be (and may be
> experienced as) more or less open to influence in real time. For instance, in
> standard mainstream performance a soliloquy in Shakespeare is, to some
> approximation, a fixed artefact. The words must remain unchanged.
>
> b) Perception. In many forms of interactive performance, the perceptual
> attention and experience of both performers and audience is more diffuse and
> multisensory or multimodal. Rather than restriction to sight and sound,
> embodied interactive performance often draws on and taps in to rich
> kinesthetic or movement awareness, often aligning or confronting the
> proprioceptive and motor systems of performers and audience members by way of
> unusual, collaborative, mediated, or hybrid movement forms. Communication is
> thus not solely the transmission and perception of explicit content, but taps
> more implicit, habitual, and embodied forms of sensory-affective memory and
> experience. The openness or porosity of the work may be more or less
> available to performer and/or audience, and the evaluation of intention will
> not be entirely conscious and explicit. The experience and perception of
> commitment, of flow and focus, is a multisensory engagement with the work.
>
> c) Presence. Performer/s and audience may be more or less immersed or
> absorbed in the momentary experience of the work, or correspondingly more or
> less experientially distant or detached. Presence or distance respectively
> can occur at a number of levels which need not always coincide, and can be
> more or less free from presupposition and morality. For performers,
> paradoxically, a heightened sense of presence can sometimes emerge alongside
> a feeling of detachment, when there is no longer a need for heavy conscious
> monitoring and direct control of the minutiae of embodied activity, such that
> the sequences and interactions that arise in real time seem to erupt from
> outside the conscious self.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Garth Paine
> [email protected]
>
>
>
> On Jul 16, 2014, at 6:23 AM, Sue Hawksley <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Dear Garth
>>
>> Thanks for the questions you raise about the fluidity of 'self' and the
>> different layers of awareness of lived-experience.
>>
>> On 15 Jul 2014, at 14:48, Garth Paine <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> I wonder how we situate our thinking when it is sooo complex to become
>>> aware of the point of reference we establish. I wonder this because I want
>>> to find where the virtual begins?
>>>
>>> recently a friend shared with me a small experiment probably known to all
>>> of you: Please silently read the following several times - "I can hear the
>>> voice in my head reading this sentence"
>>>
>>> Which made me think about how virtuality is inbuilt - there appears to be
>>> several of me: me reading, me listening, me observing the listener and
>>> critiquing the experiment, me in physical form seemingly hosting all of
>>> these facets of the self etc - and they all seem distinct and material in
>>> some way - so there appears to be at least 4 of me and therefore I am
>>> confused perhaps about which is what - ie. where the no-virtual and the
>>> virtual transition and which me is embodied and how?
>>
>> I have been thinking more about the virtual in terms of potential, and from
>> a performance and theatrical perspective, in terms of play. This might be a
>> play of or on the imagination, sensation, affect, cognitive processes,
>> neural pathways etc. and playing on the confusion of selves and bodies, the
>> plasticity of the brain. Research into mirror neurons reveals that what you
>> see done by another is as important to the brain as what you do yourself.
>> The tactile-vision substitution system (TVSS) developed by Paul Bach-y-Rita
>> reveals that what you feel done is as important as what you see (as Sophia's
>> research is examining). Electromagnetic stimluation, or damage to, the
>> temporoparietal junction can create hallucinations or out-of-body
>> experiences or the effect of something being as if it were other - something
>> or somewhere or someone else etc. But if we can already 'be' many bodies,
>> where is 'out-of'body'? or is it just another body, always potentially
>> available, revealed by what
>> ever medium facilitates it coming to attention?
>>
>> Story can also capture the imagination and generate individual or group
>> illusions, or mass delusions. After the Fox sisters heard ghostly rapping
>> noises in their farmhouse in the 1840s, they approached Phineas T Barnum,
>> and came up with a format for a show which enabled masses of people to 'see'
>> and 'hear' the dead. Playing on grief and fear and hope, the spiritualist
>> seance seems to me to be an example of a shared virtual space, and a form of
>> distributed cognition. The technologies used by mediums to create
>> apparitions were lower-tech than VR systems (candles and cheesecloth
>> secreted in bodily orifices, brought to 'life' by some clever manoeuvres)
>> but it seems to me there is a lot in common in the quest to create surrogate
>> bodies or experiences.
>>
>> best, Sue
>>
>>
>>
>> SUE HAWKSLEY
>> independent dance artist
>> [email protected]
>> http://www.articulateanimal.org.uk
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> [email protected]
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> [email protected]
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Hellen Sky
digital choreographer, performer, director/teacher/writer/researcher
Hellen Sky & Collaborators
E- [email protected]
Mob +614 03 218 673
Skype - hellenskype1
U.tube - hellenskyable
www.hellensky.com
artist in residence BRIGHTSPACE
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
[email protected]
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
