----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
sorry, didn't mean to push send yet - winding up below
On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 9:06 AM, sally jane norman <
normansallyj...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi Johannes, all
>
> We were using the notion of tessellation in the computer graphics sense,
> to see how we might implement and shape mixed reality boundaries to convey
> compelling corporeal experience. The example/ experiment we were engaged in
> was work on Blast Theory's "Desert Rain" piece, which actually started out
> using a physical water curtain as a boundary for an actor / spectator/
> "spectactor" to proceed from one type of space to another. It both
> symbolised and instantiated a kind of switching mechanism between two
> distinct spaces that were part of the installation/ performance set-up.
> Ultimately the water curtain/ screen (on which there were projections) was
> replaced by a more standard projection surface (i.e. we got rid of the
> "wetware", which was pretty cumbersome!), but for exploring boundaries per
> se, and approaches to proxemics - encroachment, traversal, reach etc - it
> was experimentally productive.
>
> A comparable recent experiment might be Kirk Woolford's creation for a
> Brighton "White Nights" festival a couple of years back. Kirk motion
> captured dancers executing brief movement sequences in urban Brighton
> locations featuring salient landmarks (e.g. graffiti-cum-mural images),
> then created an i-phone app to use real-time, in situ mapping of the
> landmarks to convoke the motion captured dancer onto the screen of the
> handheld device. There's something uncanny and magically intimate about
> calling up these ghostly figures onto one's screen, whilst physically
> stationed in bustling streets. They generate another quality of space.
> Insofar as tessellation (though I'm not particularly hung up on that word,
> or any others for that matter - they're pointers for things I'm trying
> always inadequately to express) might designate ways of rendering novel
> experience by combining different, usually non-miscible kinds of space,
> then perhaps this is what we were hinting at with the earlier text and work
> on boundaries. Heterotopias defined as ways of juxtaposing supposedly
> incompatible sites, and thereby eliciting novel affordances/ experiences,
> also offer a productive image for what I'm trying to get at.
>
Similar work is being done in sound, with its propensity for juxtapositions
of distinctive if not "incompatible" spaces. A project by Wes Goatley,
Sussex post-grad who might be following empyre (please jump in Wes)
exemplifies this: Wes devised a way to map ISP bandwidth allocations of a
number of key providers to generate sound in the headset worn by someone
"walking in the city" (pace de Certeau), such that the sonic realm evolved
(pleasurably - no mean feat!) with the bleed of one bandwidth segment into
another, providing a layer of quasi-realism (i.e. genuine market segment
information), albeit manipulated in order to be thus "sounded out". A track
for one's tracks...
on that note, I'd better push send for real this time
all best
sj
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 10:00 PM, Johannes Birringer <
> johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> dear all
>>
>> John asked about the scope of interactive systems, as we generally refer
>> to such when we build them for a performance or an installation, and yes to
>> that extent
>> the scope is limited to artistic /social interactional ventures of the
>> kind that some of us have discussed here or that Simon just reported on
>> earlier (ADT's 'Multiverse'), or the workshops that Tamara had mentioned,
>> or the
>> MotionComposer workshop I had written about yesterday.
>>
>>
>> >>I do feel, though, words like 'interaction' and 'virtual' hardly have
>> any intelligible relation to the nature of any shared reality, given their
>> social
>> usage within the techno-sphere, even in the art/new media scene. [John]>>
>>
>> Not sure I understand the way you are going, John, as obviously the
>> workshop with an interactive system (generating / affording manipulation by
>> human gesture in a room) that I refered to, held at La
>> Encendida in Madrid last Monday through Wednesday (
>> www.lacasaencendida.es/) did have an intelligible relation to a small
>> shared reality, and even though I may have reservations, it did afford
>> the kind of kinetic empathy that Simon felt was lacking for the
>> spectators of a dance concert (with 3D glasses handed out) in Australia;
>> perhaps I should subject the affordances to a closer scrutiny
>> and think about why the "virtual" is compromised differently for people
>> (with different dis/abilities) involved..... for us there, at that place,
>> not "everything was affected by interaction with everything else."
>>
>> Now I read Sally Jane, and she comes back to the discussion we had in the
>> first week about assemblages and dispositifs, and I had tried to be clear
>> why I used the terms with caution, but also stated that I do not
>> necessarily believe that the system is us, or, worse (picking up on
>> current debates on big data, algorithmic machines, and amongst
>> neuroscientist on the neural dispositif and absconds gestural
>> responsiblity) that the dispositifs operate by their own account without
>> that our actions or self insertions (say, playing with MotionComposer, or
>> watching Australian Dance Theatre's "Multiverse") matter much or make a
>> difference -- and the term you used, Sally Jane,
>> namely agency, needs as much unpacking, perhaps, as the notion of a
>> heterotopic virtual embodiment. Unless of course we agree, first of all,
>> that gestures are human made (or animal made) and involve some sort
>> of social, political or psychological awareness of why one engages a
>> dispositif that is not us but may invite us (as - in the arts - it is
>> programmed, such as MotionComposer, by a collaborative effort between
>> engineers,
>> composers, and choreographers who had a plan of why they constructed the
>> limited-scope interactional environment, for particular purpose).
>>
>> Sally Jane, you mention "tessellated mixed reality" environments ("akin
>> to Foucault's heterotopia") - please could you give an example? And Karen
>> Barad's intra-actions (she is a physicist? and what on earth is
>> "posthumanist performativity," what gestures do we get here and by whom?,
>> what are "“quantum entanglements and hauntological relations" if remember
>> some of Barad's publications correctly ?....) , how are they different
>> from interactions?
>>
>> As to heterotopias, I think cemeteries are included by Foucault, no? I
>> am gong to a funeral on Friday, in the ancestral village in Germany, so
>> shall look out for the space and how it is changed, and who attends and how
>> our behaviors and alignments are legible.
>>
>>
>> respectfully
>>
>> Johannes Birringer
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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>>
>
>
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