Uncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior:
Part 2: the Wringing (Part 1 repeated below):
Laban, in Modern Educational Dance, distinguishes ``eight basic efforts'':
Wring, Press, Glide, Float, Flick, Slash, Punch, Dab. ``Each of these efforts
contains three of the six movement elements: strong, light, sustained, quick,
direct, flexible.'' Four of the group are strong: Slash, Wring, Press, and
Punch. Wring and Press reconfigure the avatar; Press preserves both topology
and topography, but Wring transforms at least the latter.
Wringing slides one against another, in combination with pressure: Wringing
distorts the body. With physical bodies, wringing breaks connections (slashing
can also break connections).
The wrung body, the hobbled body. Wringing occurs when the body is
simultaneously twisted and restrained.
Gravity restrains and locates the body. With mocap, gravity may be 'eliminated'
through the use of harnesses, or through edge phenomena that carry the body
elsewhere.
The heaped or pressed body: the body as thing, as material: the body of the
slave (wrung from and within capital, wrung from the socius).
>From the viewpoint of capital, of war, the dehistoricized body - the body
becoming element or token, demarcation of nothing but position, mined for its
materiality.
The finality of the dancing body, the dance of death - the heaps of Rwanda,
Auschwitz, Abu Gharayb.
Similarity, in the world of the simulacrum, the disappearing body: Argentina,
U.S. prisons.
Not similarity: the world of the (natural) catastrophe, the disaster: the
heaped body, but the body (perhaps) recuperated for/within history.
One might think through all of this as the historiography of the body. Where do
we go from here?
Uncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior:
[for Epoetry 2011]
motion-captured/motion-transformed/behavior-modification:
poetics of movement: vocabulary of movement:
{range of human actions, Laban A} >T> {unlimited range of actions B}
A bound by skeletal connectivity, Jordan surfaces; B bound by skeletal
connectivity, twisted/tangled surfaces
in other words the links in B can bend in any direction;
the links in A are confined by human skeletal potentials + topology
(topological embedding in four dimensions):
think of this as a tensor calculus of human movement
think of this as a topography of flesh and sinew
Ruptures in the calculus:
the tortured or wounded body
the body convulsed in pain
the catatonic body
the terrorized body
the broken or 'defective' body
Ruptures through the imaginary:
the nightmare
the orgasm
hysteria/ boundaries of laughing and crying
the confined body/ body of s/m
the forgotten or abandoned body
the hyper-sexualized body transmitters/ receivers
hallucinations and other phenomena (Dendy's Philosophy of Mystery)
Ruptures of the body invaded by capital:
prosthetics
X-scopic surgeries
rfid implants
Ruptures of the body invaded by the imaginary:
(capital of the imaginary, imaginary capital)
psycho-tropics/overdetermined associations/disassociations
Ruptures of the body by an augmented real:
sports, steroids, body-building, and so forth
Invasions of the imaginary, invasions of capital, of the augmented real,
invasions through the imaginary: invasions or invaginations,
incorporations or intensifications? These terms entangle and return to:
Either the proper body, or the body as heap;
the articulated body, or the dismembered and reassembled body;
the body characterized by a real, or the body chararacterized
by an imaginary;
either the fundamental topography of the body,
or the fundamental topology of the body - invasions, dissolutions,
ruptures.
Ruptures as returns of the repressed: What lexicons are at work? What
economies?
What is it that motion capture captures? What is snared, what abandoned?
What is the vocabulary of behavioral dynamics voluntary, autonomic,
involuntary, intrinsic or involuntary, anomalous and axiomatic,
extrinsic?
In other words: What's going on with us, within and without the world?
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