Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear all, Jacky, can you tell us more about your video and what you actually mean by vector video -- watching your Impression of Bimhuis Dance music improv Lab (http://vimeo.com/99429183), your camera work looks like mine and I don;t know whaty vector video is. I also was not sure what (in that video) was the camera's observation point of view as it seemed straightforwardly focussed on the dancer and the dance gestures. Before I make an attempt to answer Johannes' question I want to acknowledge where I get my inspiration from. Dr. Laura Marks her writing on enfolding and unfolding; as well Michael Schumacher's ideas around instant composition and dance improvisation, and the concepts around, outrospection (the emphatic camera) and Japanese Calligraphy the line as a reflection of the soul and euclidian vectors. When I get into the reflection stage, I can be more precise about what , how, why, these references, maybe if I decide to do a PHd on this topic. Until now , I am creating and observing the response to the videos. The risk with all creations is that is stays with as a novel idea, dissolves in tin air, ethereal, flakey, and edges on SO WHAT. But it is this edge I am interested in, aware I might fall of. A difficult and good question, and thank you Johannes for asking this question. My apologies for this fragmented answer. This exploration into so called vector video, started as a hunch, an intuition, and motivated by the need to imagine what a different intent of video can be. I found the HD video quality stifled me, and the expense _monetary as well as computational_frightened me; it was so corporate ,closed, and optic. And to be honest I also don't know what a vector video is. The question I started of with: A vector has a beginning, end and magnitude; it has movement, direction, intention. How can this be translated into a video. In the years I working with dancers and seeing them use the camera,, I have noticed the awareness of their bodies and the space around them, made for camera work which wasn't necessary an extension of the eye (default mode), instead an extension of (diverse) qualities of embodiment. I see in this quality of awareness a possible resistance to how the HD video quality makes representation. I have also noticed that the years of dance and sports training I have done has the same effect on my camera work. So in this context, Johannes your comment 'your camera works looks like mine' , makes sense, as your background is dance. It makes me SMILE!! A video vector departs from the camera being an extension of this diverse qualities embodiment. The topic is listened too with all the senses, not only the eye. When filming, I touch the person or the situation with the camera, which is used like a pencil, other than a tool for capturing, giving the resulting footage the feel of a handwritten document or a drawing. Johannes, your observation is very true the Bimhuis video seems straight forward, though as it was improvisation, it required from me an awareness of the dancers in the space, in relationship to the camera vocabularies. My intentions were, with the camera I am part of the piece, so also improvising, only I am restricted to my seat, and the results only visible later, as video. I provide for a virtual time and space which is not abstract, but embodied. I am not trying to capture the performance, thus the results follow, as you observed, the dancers and less so frames them. Since a year I have made a series of these video vectors. The viewers response has been so far they engage with the topic not with the video, and often on a haptic, visceral level; they seem to forget the filmmaker who becomes transparent, as Michael Schumacher said. Now the level of transparency varies per video,for example when I feel too vulnerable, the filmmaker becomes visible. If you are interested the recent vector videos are here https://vimeo.com/album/2562895 and my favorite https://vimeo.com/71007444 So here are some initial thoughts. I hope it makes some sense and it is not some rambling. I hope my response is not being inconvenient as this topic is dragging into the next month. Johannes , I love your reflections on the radio, and observation on the increase of popularity in audio books. Do you maybe think that listing more so than looking brings one back into the body? regards, Jacky On 2014-07-31, at 8:08 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all, last day of July has come, and, thanks to Jacky, we are suddenly on to sports and a quite fascinating subject regarding the current era of technological reproducibility of the aura of high performance, or as you argue the extreme embodiment of their sports discipline, though along side there is a
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Johannes, dear all. On 31 Jul 2014, at 07:12, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: you may recall that Sue Hawksley mentioned her work on physical practices, her choreographic explorations with dancer Freya Jeffs, and she also mentioned that a filmmaker was involved, Roddy Simpson, but Roddy's impact is not discussed. Roddy's contribution is only briefly addressed in this short article, which was angled to meet the focii of the Peripatetic Studio blog http://theperipateticstudio.wordpress.com (which might be of interest to other empyreans? - it is dedicated to the spaces we work in and how they impact on the creative work we produce. It’s a blog about place, process and product. It’s an archive of personal experience, discussion and debate. The posts are personal accounts written by creative practitioners from a variety of different disciplines. TPS is curated by two.5, a collaboration between writer and researcher Viccy Adams and photographic media artist Samantha Silver). I chose to share this article because I though people might be interested in the shaping of ideas of and by the spaces, including how Roddy's filming and editing create a 'window' through which we view the subtle presence of places that inhabit the dancer’s presence as she reinhabits them. For me, it is very significant that Roddy chose to situate the figure in the film on a plain black background, extracting her from any specific place and time. In Traces of Places we seek to bring to attention and evoke the embodied presence of place. Perhaps in some ways, the kinaesthetic patterns of the there-and-then reveal the presence of ghost gestures that haunt the here-and-now, wherever that may be. There are some cross-overs to Moments in Place. Of course, in the bodily practices and the devising of the film, we seek to bring to attention and evoke presence, place etc., but I'd never claim to know what is found, nor presume to know what the other will see or feel, as per John Hopkins' meditation on hypostasis. I would like to share two little pieces of feedback from participants in the R D for another dancework I made, which was to be received by touch. One said It’s really strange! You did something like this, and I felt, I thought, I’m Sue!, I’m actually Sue!”, while another said I just felt some strokes, just meaningless strokes. Of course these are sound-bites, extracted from their extended comments , but to me they hint at the the interstitial chasm John described. all the best, Sue SUE HAWKSLEY independent dance artist s...@articulateanimal.org.uk http://www.articulateanimal.org.uk ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear Johannes, Thank you, it would be great if we could continue the discussion. I got thinking about my World cup soccer piece 'Intimate Irrelevant Moments' jackysawatzky.net/single_cappuccino/ and the relationship it has to this topic. None, was my initial thoughts; however, as I got typing these thoughts came up. In my work I was interested in the mediation of the viewers experience, and effect HD camera technology had on the representation of the players and the game. I conclude that High Definition images leave less space for the imagination and have the potential to give an assumption that what the viewer see broadcasted is not really virtual. What do the viewers need to do to get back their imagination? Herein I saw an important roll for the space and place wherein the World Cup was watched. Harun Farocki made a work about World Cup Soccer, http://www.farocki-film.de/deepeg.htm also from 2006, the same year I did mine. He looks at the various ways the game is contextualized. On one of the 12 screens on display there is an abstraction of the game, dots representing the players and lines their connection, as well as the data derived from this a computer analyzes of the game. Thinking about his work, top sports has through the onset of digital technology an interesting relationship with embodiment and the virtual. As each athlete presents an extreme embodiment of their sports discipline, though along side there is a virtual body , data _video, statistics, motion capture data_ collected through all kinds of tracking technology. This virtual body is there to assist in elevating the athlete slightly above their physical 'limitations'. In the moment of performance, the virtual embodiment needs to be translated back , taken ownership off by the actual the athlete. She or he needs take ownership of their virtual representation to come to a top performance. Any thoughts , experience with this, work that touch on this? In a next post I will reply to your question in regard to the camera and embodiment, as I saw Sue Hawksley recents response and want to take some time to read her new posts and look at the links, and reflect. Thank you for listing. Regards, Jacky Sawatzky Artist Models of Observation http://jackysawatzky.net https://vimeo.com/videovectors The convergence of media, which is an inherited quality of the computer, has become unappealing. It reminds me of processed food where if I eat alfredo sauce or tandoori chicken mix, I always feel like my taste buds are confined within the limits of the chemicals used to preserve the food, by the conventions of an mass-produced taste of tandoori chicken or alfredo sauce. I came to the conclusion that the normalization of the senses is the commonality between processed food and the computer screen. Screencozies On 2014-07-30, at 11:42 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all: [Kirk schreibt] I’m sorry I’ve not been able to participate in real-time, but I have found inspiration in many of the comments several days after they were written. understandably, and as pointed out at the end of the June discussion (sonic pathways) here, not everyone is able to write/respond instantly, I almost feel such discussions, if they feel worthwhile, as Jackie also just pointed out in her post on/from models observation (and I really enjoyed getting a glimpse of the videos on https://vimeo.com/videovectors, and also found your comments on camera style/mediation on past old World Cups [1974] and more recent ones quite illuminating), ought perhaps to continue, for a while longer, and spill over, or continue to resonate and draw in more of you, if needs be, slowly. Kirk's response to some questions were much appreciated, I had no idea, Kirk, that you are in fact working on alternative modeling archiving -- also, the debate now between John and Simon is truly breathtaking, as far as the beyond is concerned (John's philosophical commentary on dislocating and separating memory from individual embodied memory, as well as the earlier comments on maintenance of archive, collective and individual) and thus seems to bear on heritage work and what Kirk refers to as issues surrounding embodiment and bodily practices to inform our understanding of past cultures. In short, we attempted to look at landscapes and archeological records not as sculptures or illustrative records, but to place embodied researchers in human-scale (re)constructions. It then seems also quite relevant (as you mention a certain kind of documentation made for academic research contexts) to really ponder the question (Simon Taylor's) of sliding scales amongst the factitioner, the quantic surveyor, the data-garnerer, and also then the facebook players (must agree here,
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all, last day of July has come, and, thanks to Jacky, we are suddenly on to sports and a quite fascinating subject regarding the current era of technological reproducibility of the aura of high performance, or as you argue the extreme embodiment of their sports discipline, though along side there is a virtual body , data _video, statistics, motion capture data_ collected through all kinds of tracking technology. This virtual body is there to assist in elevating the athlete slightly above their physical 'limitations'. This is interesting on many counts --- thanks also to Sue for expanding on her work and the choreographic or performative embodied presence of place (Sue schreibt: the kinaesthetic patterns of the there-and-then reveal the presence of ghost gestures that haunt the here-and-now, wherever that may be. There are some cross-overs to Moments in Place). The feedback you quoted, Sue, is of course also fascinating as I was imagining myself, not having experienced this haptic-dance project, what it would be like to feel a dance but not see the dancer. This is perhaps analogous to radio. And what it leaves to the imagination, Jacky. You remembered (and made your 'Intimate Irrelevant Moments') about the 1974 final world cup game (Germany-Netherlands), which I remember having watched. On the other hand, before our time, there was a final (a few years after the war, and a defeated and humiliated germany was allowed to participate again), in 1954, in Switzerland, when Germany won 3:2 against Hungary and there was no television, only radio, and yet the final minutes of this game have had mythical proportions in German culture and yet the action was only ever experienced aurally by the listeners to the radio broadcast, the voice of the broadcast commentator, by the time I grew up, had become a collective reverberant, a series of vocal gestures perhaps indeed comparable to a monument in Kirk's sense of an intangible heritage, and something that could perhaps be re-constructed via archaeology... ...and an audio archaeology (of virtual embodiments of sound and music, as well as instruments) seems to be at the heart of a current exhibit at the Science Museum in London which I believe drew from the archives of the BBC and also featured a female inventor and sound artist probably not many have heard of -- Daphne Oram. The wall texts of the exhibit say that the museum unveils lost gem of electronic music, the Oramics Machine, a unique synthesizer - invented in the1960s by Daphne Oram who established the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The synthesizer machine (see: http://www.nervoussquirrel.com/oramics.html) is rather amazing as it seems to have been an early synthesiser that has audio parameters controlled and sequenced by drawing on strips of clear film (!). Oram drew Michaux-like sinuous curves, shapes, graphic signs, figures and gestures onto film strips. The film is wound across a horizontal bed, with the graphical elements interpreted by light sensors. The sound was early electronic sine waves, oscillations and noises etc (as rock musicians then also started to use them when the Moog Synthesizer became available); well now, Jacky, can you tell us more about your video and what you actually mean by vector video -- watching your Impression of Bimhuis Dance music improv Lab (http://vimeo.com/99429183), your camera work looks like mine and I don;t know whaty vector video is. I also was not sure what (in that video) was the camera's observation point of view as it seemed straightforwardly focussed on the dancer and the dance gestures. Sue's work on inhabiting places (then and there and here and now), or Kirk's experimental archaeology with digital means thus gains an interesting contradictory dimension: if we cannot see the place or experience it with our own body, but only through virtual means (and an other body becoming virtual, yes?), how d o we know or sense (mentioning Harun Farocki, whose critical images surely would interest Simon Taylor, reminds of what Brecht said about photography: namely that a photograph of the Krupp Steel Works does not tell us anything about the Krupp Steel Works), through amplification or other definition (HD , 3D or other wise), what is the matter? (radio, by the way, is back, and thus our work of imagination. I read the other day that audio books are becoming more and more popular, folks like to listen to literature, I find this rather wonderful, as I enjoy imagining places and characters). regards Johannes Birringer dap-lab http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all something in that probably they are interested dQ14 Dancing in SPACE http://www.unistra.fr/index.php?id=19773tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=14651tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=9311cHash=d2c7212c525a015d20eed874cafb2596 http://www.xanela-rede.net/xnl-laboratorio/dq14-dancing-in-space/ Regads Vivi www.seuil-lab.com https://sites.google.com/site/vivianfritzroa/ Le Jeudi 31 Juillet 2014 20:08 CEST, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk a écrit: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all, last day of July has come, and, thanks to Jacky, we are suddenly on to sports and a quite fascinating subject regarding the current era of technological reproducibility of the aura of high performance, or as you argue the extreme embodiment of their sports discipline, though along side there is a virtual body , data _video, statistics, motion capture data_ collected through all kinds of tracking technology. This virtual body is there to assist in elevating the athlete slightly above their physical 'limitations'. This is interesting on many counts --- thanks also to Sue for expanding on her work and the choreographic or performative embodied presence of place (Sue schreibt: the kinaesthetic patterns of the there-and-then reveal the presence of ghost gestures that haunt the here-and-now, wherever that may be. There are some cross-overs to Moments in Place). The feedback you quoted, Sue, is of course also fascinating as I was imagining myself, not having experienced this haptic-dance project, what it would be like to feel a dance but not see the dancer. This is perhaps analogous to radio. And what it leaves to the imagination, Jacky. You remembered (and made your 'Intimate Irrelevant Moments') about the 1974 final world cup game (Germany-Netherlands), which I remember having watched. On the other hand, before our time, there was a final (a few years after the war, and a defeated and humiliated germany was allowed to participate again), in 1954, in Switzerland, when Germany won 3:2 against Hungary and there was no television, only radio, and yet the final minutes of this game have had mythical proportions in German culture and yet the action was only ever experienced aurally by the listeners to the radio broadcast, the voice of the broadcast commentator, by the time I grew up, had become a collective reverberant, a series of vocal gestures perhaps indeed comparable to a monument in Kirk's sense of an intangible heritage, and something that could perhaps be re-constructed via archaeology... ...and an audio archaeology (of virtual embodiments of sound and music, as well as instruments) seems to be at the heart of a current exhibit at the Science Museum in London which I believe drew from the archives of the BBC and also featured a female inventor and sound artist probably not many have heard of -- Daphne Oram. The wall texts of the exhibit say that the museum unveils lost gem of electronic music, the Oramics Machine, a unique synthesizer - invented in the1960s by Daphne Oram who established the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The synthesizer machine (see: http://www.nervoussquirrel.com/oramics.html) is rather amazing as it seems to have been an early synthesiser that has audio parameters controlled and sequenced by drawing on strips of clear film (!). Oram drew Michaux-like sinuous curves, shapes, graphic signs, figures and gestures onto film strips. The film is wound across a horizontal bed, with the graphical elements interpreted by light sensors. The sound was early electronic sine waves, oscillations and noises etc (as rock musicians then also started to use them when the Moog Synthesizer became available); well now, Jacky, can you tell us more about your video and what you actually mean by vector video -- watching your Impression of Bimhuis Dance music improv Lab (http://vimeo.com/99429183), your camera work looks like mine and I don;t know whaty vector video is. I also was not sure what (in that video) was the camera's observation point of view as it seemed straightforwardly focussed on the dancer and the dance gestures. Sue's work on inhabiting places (then and there and here and now), or Kirk's experimental archaeology with digital means thus gains an interesting contradictory dimension: if we cannot see the place or experience it with our own body, but only through virtual means (and an other body becoming virtual, yes?), how d o we know or sense (mentioning Harun Farocki, whose critical images surely would interest Simon Taylor, reminds of what Brecht said about photography: namely that a photograph of the Krupp Steel Works does not tell us anything about the Krupp Steel Works), through amplification or other definition (HD , 3D or other wise), what is the matter?
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Johannes, et. al, Thanks for your response. You’ve picked up on one of the issues I’ve been wrestling with the past few years as a creative practitioner (artist?) functioning within traditional research-led universities. The Moments in Place documentation you saw on Vimeo was created as a REF submission and attempts to demonstrate the links between the underlying Arts and Humanities Research and the Creative Practice.. In trying to address both, I don’t believe I’ve addressed either sufficiently, and am in the process of writing new documentation for both. The archaeological or heritage work we addressed through the Motion in Place Platform (MiPP) attempts to use debates surrounding embodiment and bodily practices to inform our understanding of past cultures. In short, we attempted to look at landscapes and archeological records not a sculptures or illustrative records, but to place embodied researchers in human-scale (re)constructions. We had no desire, or interest, to “virtualise” existing experiences or practices. Rather, we explored methods of (re)constructing places which no longer exist. We did this both through “virtual” (re)constructions using interactive technologies as well as through “physical” (re)constructions in collaboration with the experimental archaeologists at Butser Ancient Farm. I’ve adopted Stuart Dunn’s use of the term “(re)construction” to hilight the fact that we constructed several models from the archeological evidence using timber, thatching, projectors and inertial capture suits. If you’d like an overview of the work, may I recommend: the JOCCH article at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2532632 The EVA article at: http://ewic.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/46121 or these book chapters: Woolford K, Dunn S., (2014) Micro-Mobilities and Affordances of Past Places, Past Mobilities: Archaeological Approaches to Movement and Mobility, Ashgate Publishing: Farhnam, pp. 113-128. Dunn, S, Woolford, K., (2013) “Reconfiguring experimental archaeology using 3D reconstruction”, Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture, Springer Verlag, pp 277-291. It’s very interesting that your start your response with memories of a funeral. I hope you won’t think of me as being insensitive in making a comparison between your experience and what we’ve attempted to address through the MiPP projects. On 25 Jul 2014, at 23:24, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all [Kirk schreibt] it’s interesting to look at it from the perspective of Simon’s question, “does virtual embodiment depend on, augment or replace bodily practices?”. Of course we can claim this piece augments current bodily practices by allowing offsets between the performance and perception thereof. However, more happens through pieces such as this. I used different techniques to render the performers as semi-tangible, semi-present or even semi-embodied, because I wanted to evoke notions of ghosts and hauntings. These performers aren’t in the place at the time they are observed, but they were. The experience of the live performance was very different from the performance of the mediated or “virtual” performance. As you can see from the documentation, when we captured a “live” performance in a busy shopping street on a Saturday in Brighton, there was a lot of unintentional interaction from shoppers. When you go back to (re)create the performance at the same site, it’s never the same. Either shoppers walk straight at you making it difficult to observe the performance, or you’re in a quiet, empty space where the movements of the dancer makes less sense. The mediated performance is re-created or created anew each time it’s observed. I'd like to thank Sally Jane, Wesley and Kirk, for inviting us to visit Brighton (via vimeo and play.google.com/store/apps). Also, Kirk reopened a question posed at the beginning of the month by Sue and Simon (see in quote) – “does virtual embodiment depend on, augment or replace bodily practices?”. I wondered whether others went to have a look/listen? These work examples are really helpful, and inspiring thought (Wireless Fidelity / Moments in Place), and I am grappling to find a good response, as they deserve so. Having just come home from the funeral that I had mentioned, my mind is adrift. The funeral was a funeral, and I have not attended many recently, not in the ancestral village, and I was not entirely prepared for the affect it had on me, in the presence of so many people from the village, as we attended the church service, then walked up the hill to the cemetery, then followed the precise ritual of attending to the last farewell to the deceased member of family and community, each action seemed scripted and yet natural,
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all: [Kirk schreibt] I’m sorry I’ve not been able to participate in real-time, but I have found inspiration in many of the comments several days after they were written. understandably, and as pointed out at the end of the June discussion (sonic pathways) here, not everyone is able to write/respond instantly, I almost feel such discussions, if they feel worthwhile, as Jackie also just pointed out in her post on/from models observation (and I really enjoyed getting a glimpse of the videos on https://vimeo.com/videovectors, and also found your comments on camera style/mediation on past old World Cups [1974] and more recent ones quite illuminating), ought perhaps to continue, for a while longer, and spill over, or continue to resonate and draw in more of you, if needs be, slowly. Kirk's response to some questions were much appreciated, I had no idea, Kirk, that you are in fact working on alternative modeling archiving -- also, the debate now between John and Simon is truly breathtaking, as far as the beyond is concerned (John's philosophical commentary on dislocating and separating memory from individual embodied memory, as well as the earlier comments on maintenance of archive, collective and individual) and thus seems to bear on heritage work and what Kirk refers to as issues surrounding embodiment and bodily practices to inform our understanding of past cultures. In short, we attempted to look at landscapes and archeological records not as sculptures or illustrative records, but to place embodied researchers in human-scale (re)constructions. It then seems also quite relevant (as you mention a certain kind of documentation made for academic research contexts) to really ponder the question (Simon Taylor's) of sliding scales amongst the factitioner, the quantic surveyor, the data-garnerer, and also then the facebook players (must agree here, very well then, if the younger folks think facebook a game or a joke, that's nice), and in your case the experimental archaeologists and (re)constructeurs testing digital reconstruction technologies for evocations (an ethnographic term used by Latin American artists who came to Houston to work with us on a project in 1997 [see my archiving of Después de la Etnometodología at http://www.digitalcultures.org/research12.html // http://www.digitalcultures.org/Library/transart.html]) of intangible heritage. It would occur to me that a conversation between all of you only just started, and perhaps, Jackie, as you mention your concern with how cameras (observing and filming) impose themselves on different qualities of embodiment and movement vocabulary (are you suggesting the camera always already manipulates the user embodiment and viewer's perception of such?) you may recall that Sue Hawksley mentioned her work on physical practices, her choreographic explorations with dancer Freya Jeffs, and she also mentioned that a filmmaker was involved, Roddy Simpson, but Roddy's impact is not discussed. http://theperipateticstudio.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/sue-hawksley-traces-of-places/ Sue does mention that Roddy helped out with documenting the process through video and photos. Documentation of dance is something I always find problematic, especially as I am not a filmmaker; my own efforts generally reflect this lack, while professionally produced material reflects the presence, perspective and creative input of the person behind the camera. To address this concern I wanted for some time to make a piece specifically for camera but I could not find a video of Traces of Places and thus cannot comment on how cameras can capture or move internal pressure, internal inhabiting remembered space, trauma, memory. The repression of pain (to use a Freudian term) would not really be dissociative, individually or collectively, would it? How could pain of guilt be ever thoroughly dislocated, separated? (growing up in Germany, those questions, addressed to our parent generation, always cut quite close to the skin). Today, incidentally, Poles and Germans remember the uprising and massacre in the Warsaw ghetto in 1944, and the german president remarked that it is sheer unbelievable [ein Wunder] that the two countries have friendly relations today. Kirk, one would need time to read the articles on your practice and gain a better understanding; Simon's brilliant post certainly invites responses and I am re-reading slowly what you say, Simon, thus not able to answer yet, it's exceedingly complex and sometimes I feel, now encouraged in my feeling after you speak of your Minus theatre company as using a number of (playful) second languages, that you are stepping out of our systems. This idea, that we are scarcely bound and tethered by our dispositifs - especially when they are not a fundamentally ordered system – but that we can treat them as costumes, was
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Johannes and all, I am always happy for the work to be questioned, I find the most exciting new perspectives can be often be synthesised from the process. Wireless-Fidelity is really grappling with a popular relational distance to network technology, which I'm referring to experimentally with a version of the term 'Virtualising'. Here I'm trying to push at the complex forces that surround the mainstream relationship to/attitudes towards both the internet and the power structures underlying it. I find 'virtualising' a useful term here in the context made in my previous post, as those popular sources have had a huge impact on many subsequent representations of technology and communication in popular culture (specifically the internet). All tended towards a portrayal of 'the network' and the many forms it takes in these fictions as something beyond understanding or access to any but a mystical 'expert', sphinx-like in their guardianship of occult knowledge, beyond the ken of the passive masses. These powerful and popular representations all established themselves just as the internet was becoming an everyday feature of home life for a huge amount of people, and I feel that these fictions have helped to allow the exploitation of privacy and personal data that the majority of internet users are subject to today. Terms like 'virtual reality' and 'cyberspace' were suddenly the topic du jour of multiple hugely popular fictional realities (still built on today by endless online fanfics), no doubt fired on by the digital utopianism prevalent at the end of the last century. Out of view, misunderstood, imagined as a non-real space with non-real consequences...these are all common to those 'virtual reality' fictions before broadband and smartphones changed the playing field, and drawing attention to this illustrated relationship to technology/power (that certainly has a huge historical foundation existing long before the invention of the computer) with use of the term 'virtual' is a useful way of setting a broader context for the discussions the work is trying to open up. The perception of the network as a technology that's only noticed when it malfunctions or fails; of Facebook and Google etc as 'free' (the great quote being that when something online is free, you're not the customer, you're the product); of 'the cloud' as being ethereal, rather than manifest as hugely consumptive data centers surrounded by armed guards; of the internet existing outside of factional politics (a privileged and erroneous perspective difficult to hold outside of the west) - these popular ideas all create distance between the user and the technology around us. Foregrounding the corporate bodies in the network is one small gesture in trying to broaden the perception of the network as being fundamentally politically and ideologically operated (this can easily be taken literally through examining ownership of the submarine data cables http://submarine-cable-map-2013.telegeography.com/). The most cursory background exploration of an internet service provider will start throwing up info on what sites they choose to block, who owns them, who they sell user data to etc. - this is all generally listed on their wikipedia page. These elements are open to change and shift with other political and technological forces, so Wireless-Fidelity hopes to create a tool with lasting use by inviting the listener to an explicit awareness of the density and presence of corporate bodies, opening the door to further exploration and discussion with this knowledge. We have no biological sensory receptors for this data present in the network signal without technological mediation - the sonification deployed here uses a varied textural palette to involve the listener's body through sound in the perception of the data rather than viewed through a removed screen as this dataset is commonly perceived. The low bass drone in headphones resonates particularly dominantly, reflecting BTs long-standing market share - there is no volume control for the listener other than to move closer or further away to the signal, elements lost in the limited involvement the video alone can create. I'm currently building multiple copies of the device to be loaned out to gallery visitors during the upcoming Brighton Digital Festival - allowing them to experience a new sensory experience of well-trodden streets. The installation the devices will be based in will specifically explore the ramifications of the data that the device highlights, and I'm eager to incorporate these ideas into a wider realm of discussion. Wesley P.S. Thank you for sharing the ritual with us in this way Johannes - I felt that you extended the collectivity all the way here. On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 11:24 PM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks Wes, Personally I find your small gesture resonant in a number of ways, but this is (also) largely a question of sensibilities. The sensible, perceptible, crafting of otherwise hidden data to bring it into my sensorium feels eminently in line with this virtual embodiment theme that is so subject to individual interpretations, thus so provocative as a point of dialogue. In Simon Taylor's words, to seek a taste of the different leaks through the interface is perhaps a valid goal - principles of embodiment in figural painting (especially with an artist like Bacon!) indeed remain as problematic as in more recent expressive media. I find I have to keep honing awareness of this wider media legacy to try and gauge the specificities of emerging means. And the embodiment of walking, instantiated through Wes's and Kirk's pieces, is one I particularly enjoy. Having a song in my head or through my headset, or an image in my mind's eye that's not in the street, or that's on a hand-held, these are multiple layerings of experiences identifiable as more or less virtual and always already necessarily embodied. Again I'm overstating the all too obvious that therefore sometimes needs to be overstated. For want of something better to say. Play it again, Sam. best sj On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 12:05 PM, Wesley Goatley wesleygoat...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Johannes and all, I am always happy for the work to be questioned, I find the most exciting new perspectives can be often be synthesised from the process. Wireless-Fidelity is really grappling with a popular relational distance to network technology, which I'm referring to experimentally with a version of the term 'Virtualising'. Here I'm trying to push at the complex forces that surround the mainstream relationship to/attitudes towards both the internet and the power structures underlying it. I find 'virtualising' a useful term here in the context made in my previous post, as those popular sources have had a huge impact on many subsequent representations of technology and communication in popular culture (specifically the internet). All tended towards a portrayal of 'the network' and the many forms it takes in these fictions as something beyond understanding or access to any but a mystical 'expert', sphinx-like in their guardianship of occult knowledge, beyond the ken of the passive masses. These powerful and popular representations all established themselves just as the internet was becoming an everyday feature of home life for a huge amount of people, and I feel that these fictions have helped to allow the exploitation of privacy and personal data that the majority of internet users are subject to today. Terms like 'virtual reality' and 'cyberspace' were suddenly the topic du jour of multiple hugely popular fictional realities (still built on today by endless online fanfics), no doubt fired on by the digital utopianism prevalent at the end of the last century. Out of view, misunderstood, imagined as a non-real space with non-real consequences...these are all common to those 'virtual reality' fictions before broadband and smartphones changed the playing field, and drawing attention to this illustrated relationship to technology/power (that certainly has a huge historical foundation existing long before the invention of the computer) with use of the term 'virtual' is a useful way of setting a broader context for the discussions the work is trying to open up. The perception of the network as a technology that's only noticed when it malfunctions or fails; of Facebook and Google etc as 'free' (the great quote being that when something online is free, you're not the customer, you're the product); of 'the cloud' as being ethereal, rather than manifest as hugely consumptive data centers surrounded by armed guards; of the internet existing outside of factional politics (a privileged and erroneous perspective difficult to hold outside of the west) - these popular ideas all create distance between the user and the technology around us. Foregrounding the corporate bodies in the network is one small gesture in trying to broaden the perception of the network as being fundamentally politically and ideologically operated (this can easily be taken literally through examining ownership of the submarine data cables http://submarine-cable-map-2013.telegeography.com/). The most cursory background exploration of an internet service provider will start throwing up info on what sites they choose to block, who owns them, who they sell user data to etc. - this is all generally listed on their wikipedia page. These elements are open to change and shift with other political and technological forces, so Wireless-Fidelity hopes to create a tool with lasting use by inviting the listener to an explicit awareness of
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all [Kirk schreibt] it’s interesting to look at it from the perspective of Simon’s question, “does virtual embodiment depend on, augment or replace bodily practices?”. Of course we can claim this piece augments current bodily practices by allowing offsets between the performance and perception thereof. However, more happens through pieces such as this. I used different techniques to render the performers as semi-tangible, semi-present or even semi-embodied, because I wanted to evoke notions of ghosts and hauntings. These performers aren’t in the place at the time they are observed, but they were. The experience of the live performance was very different from the performance of the mediated or “virtual” performance. As you can see from the documentation, when we captured a “live” performance in a busy shopping street on a Saturday in Brighton, there was a lot of unintentional interaction from shoppers. When you go back to (re)create the performance at the same site, it’s never the same. Either shoppers walk straight at you making it difficult to observe the performance, or you’re in a quiet, empty space where the movements of the dancer makes less sense. The mediated performance is re-created or created anew each time it’s observed. I'd like to thank Sally Jane, Wesley and Kirk, for inviting us to visit Brighton (via vimeo and play.google.com/store/apps). Also, Kirk reopened a question posed at the beginning of the month by Sue and Simon (see in quote) – “does virtual embodiment depend on, augment or replace bodily practices?”. I wondered whether others went to have a look/listen? These work examples are really helpful, and inspiring thought (Wireless Fidelity / Moments in Place), and I am grappling to find a good response, as they deserve so. Having just come home from the funeral that I had mentioned, my mind is adrift. The funeral was a funeral, and I have not attended many recently, not in the ancestral village, and I was not entirely prepared for the affect it had on me, in the presence of so many people from the village, as we attended the church service, then walked up the hill to the cemetery, then followed the precise ritual of attending to the last farewell to the deceased member of family and community, each action seemed scripted and yet natural, inevitable and communal, clear, somber and quiet, in place or in a distinct relationship to this location, the occasion of gathering, and the place binding (here i quote Kirk's reference to Tim Ingold whose writing on being ensounded and moving in sound i always admired (e.g. Against Soundscape/Autumn Leaves). The last ceremony was in silence, no sound heard except the rustling of leaves and the wind of an on-coming storm that did not arrive, the clouds drifting away slowly as we gathered later on some empty plots inside the cemetery, then folks walked slowly over to other older graves of departed ones, some recent, some longer ago, and then near the exist, slowly in low voice we shook hands and greeted one another, i knew some but most were unfamiliar to me, they also groped for my name and then they remembered, not always me, but my father or mother or brother, then we chatted, and slowly made our way out of the heterotopic, as the sky had cleared and became all blue again, evening setting in. The village was at peace, and we could feel it. I was grateful to those moments, unfathomable as they may be, undeserved as they may be; but so they should be, one should be able to bury one's loved ones in peace and in the present real. Then I wondered whether a place can be virtualized or whether (I pick up Sally Jane) an opaque ownership/ hidden ideologies of physical network structure .. can be artistically foregrounded, as in [Wes's]...use of sound or, as Wesley himself suggests, de-virtualized? Can one really, as Wesley writes, de-virtualise (to clarify, used here in the sense of bringing the substance of data into the physical - embedded in popular culture heavily by Lawnmower Man/Matrix/90s hacker films etc.) the opaque ownership/hidden ideologies of the physical network infrastructure, and through sound create a distinct bodily/sensorial relationship to it I admit that after listening [https://vimeo.com/94572853] and watching [http://vimeo.com/80370446] I have doubts, but I also thank, as I said earlier, the artists for sharing their work. I would want to invite others too, here, to respond to the question of augmentation. As to my response, I did not quite find it quite possible to walk with Wesley (via vimeo) and listen to Low Bass drones, Granular Pianos, Female Vocal Samples, High Frequency Distortion Drones, Piano Loops, and Shoreline Recording of waves, and then imagine a, or any possible, relationship to BT's or Sky's market share. I looked at the streets, houses, and listened to the sound, but could not
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks Wes for picking up on the prompt! I think your reflection on opaque ownership/ hidden ideologies of physical network structure that can be artistically foregrounded, as in your use of sound, offers the beginnings of an answer to Johannes's question re virtual embodiment (as) a parochial media arts concern or academic research area. We're all caught up in anthropophagic dependence on the technozoosemiotic (Louis Bec) systems we've devised as our extensions, and creative work revealing the extent of this entanglement strikes me as being more necessary than ever. Like Harwood's Coal-fired computers. I don't see this as cozily separate terrain to the horror of drones in war zones, but as integral to much-needed reflection on our new nature (can I call it that?). Eaten away with worry about the machinations on which we and others depend, including to express our concerns to fora like this one. To return to earlier comments, replacing a rain curtain by a conventional projection surface is perhaps prosaic but that somehow misses the point/s: 1) developing an installation piece that can't be shown anywhere is a problem (revealed by sophisticated infrastructure issues during the early years of VR, where reference works could be experienced in half a dozen sites in the world at best...), 2) the luxury of exploring the real rain curtain prompted different ways of creatively thinking about that surface, and 3) our goal wasn't realism - while there's a case to be made for site-specific work, we sought rather to study real-world affordances like water, to see how we might translate them into and symbolise them by another medium. An artistic project, in short. sorry for brevity, am enjoying the exchanges but still caught up in too much parallel stuff to respond more decently... best sj On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 9:39 AM, Wesley Goatley wesleygoat...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all, I've been following the fascinating discussion this month with much interest - as Sally Jane pointed out it is quite relevant to my recent work. The piece she mentioned is called Wireless-Fidelity (and can be seen in action here: https://vimeo.com/94572853), and along with what has already been mentioned it also attempts to de-virtualise (to clarify, used here in the sense of bringing the substance of data into the physical - embedded in popular culture heavily by Lawnmower Man/Matrix/90s hacker films etc.) the opaque ownership/hidden ideologies of the physical network infrastructure, and through sound create a distinct bodily/sensorial relationship to it. These forces of corporate influence embedded in the network are in themselves virtualised to increase their opacity, the ramifications buried in on-screen user agreements affecting our off-screen rights. Wesley On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 9:22 AM, sally jane norman normansallyj...@googlemail.com wrote: --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
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello all, Please accept my apologies for not being able to join this discussion from the beginning of the month. I’ve only been able to follow this week, spurned on by Sally Jane, very graciously forwarding what she’s written about my recent work. The piece she mentions is called “Moments in Place”. Information about the project, documentation, and links to the “Augmented Reality” app are available here: http://www.bhaptic.net/moments/ http://vimeo.com/80370446 The project grew out of the Motions in Place Platform (MiPP) research exploring relationships between movement and place. We’ve written a number of articles and book chapters exploring Tim Ingold’s wayfaring where human existence is not fundamentally place-bound, but place-binding, Juhani Pallasmaa's links between bodies and their “domicile in space”, and Gibson’s affordances where bodies and environments form inseparable pairs. The Moments in Place performances are an attempt to leave a performance in a place and allow audiences to come-and-go around them. My intention was to alert the audience to the fact that they were “embodied” in this location and the location the was effecting(affecting) them as much as it had guided the original performer. As with most site-specific work, more people have now viewed the documentation than experienced the piece in-situ, so don’t know how successful we can call the project. However, it’s interesting to look at it from the perspective of Simon’s question, “does virtual embodiment depend on, augment or replace bodily practices?”. Of course we can claim this piece augments current bodily practices by allowing offsets between the performance and perception thereof. However, more happens through pieces such as this. I used different techniques to render the performers as semi-tangible, semi-present or even semi-embodied, because I wanted to evoke notions of ghosts and hauntings. These performers aren’t in the place at the time they are observed, but they were. The experience of the live performance was very different from the performance of the mediated or “virtual” performance. As you can see from the documentation, when we captured a “live” performance in a busy shopping street on a Saturday in Brighton, there was a lot of unintentional interaction from shoppers. When you go back to (re)create the performance at the same site, it’s never the same. Either shoppers walk straight at you making it difficult to observe the performance, or you’re in a quiet, empty space where the movements of the dancer makes less sense. The mediated performance is re-created or created anew each time it’s observed. The piece definitely augments traditional bodily practises, but it depends on them as well. It doesn’t replace them. best regards, -k On 22 Jul 2014, at 09:06, sally jane norman normansallyj...@googlemail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- 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. Perhaps a comparable more 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 specific urban Brighton locations featuring salient landmarks (e.g. graffiti-cum-mural images), then developed 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 thoroughly 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 wa used to describe the organization of information needed to render to give the appearance of the surfaces of realistic
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, I've been following the fascinating discussion this month with much interest - as Sally Jane pointed out it is quite relevant to my recent work. The piece she mentioned is called Wireless-Fidelity (and can be seen in action here: https://vimeo.com/94572853), and along with what has already been mentioned it also attempts to de-virtualise (to clarify, used here in the sense of bringing the substance of data into the physical - embedded in popular culture heavily by Lawnmower Man/Matrix/90s hacker films etc.) the opaque ownership/hidden ideologies of the physical network infrastructure, and through sound create a distinct bodily/sensorial relationship to it. These forces of corporate influence embedded in the network are in themselves virtualised to increase their opacity, the ramifications buried in on-screen user agreements affecting our off-screen rights. Wesley On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 9:22 AM, sally jane norman normansallyj...@googlemail.com wrote: --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
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space--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. Perhaps a comparable more 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 specific urban Brighton locations featuring salient landmarks (e.g. graffiti-cum-mural images), then developed 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 thoroughly 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 wa used to describe the organization of information needed to render http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_%28computer_graphics%29 to give the appearance of the surfaces of realistic three-dimensional objects. 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
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--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
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all, Hellen, Sally Jane thanks for these responses -- and I hope others will join in and partake --- probably I need to say here, Hellen, that of course I have the utmost respect for your work and long time pioneering performances across spaces and networked places, and what you call your embodied ethnography and your experiences/perceptions/listenings to the many systems you performed in ever since, what, the late 80s and early 90s..? Surely someone like yourself who has worked with motion sensing and capture and biosensor systems would be well attentive and knowing of nuances and differences, and perhaps in such cases of long term practice the notion of an embodied knowledge of other spaces is well earned. You also mentioned the poetry of/in such performance experiences, and of course you spoke of the kinesthetic or synasthetic affects, the physics, the somatic knowing you learnt... so let me take back the word snake oil, I think that was meant in regard to the illusion effect, the belief in what Foucault (in that lecture on Of Other Space, Heterotopias, in 1967) refered to as sanctified space, the assumptions (sadly in slapstick though most of us are no Buster Keatons) that our extensions generate, and can mark what is substituted, that (as Sally Jane implies in her Brighton example) they produce lovely ghosts: 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, [Sally Jane] May I ask what this other quality of space is (the virtual)? compellingly switched? (the rain curtain replaced by screen in Desert Rain, how odd and disappointing). And is not Foucault's lecture charmingly inconclusive and romantic? The airplane, the ship, our heterotopia (dystopia?)? I should not have spoken so lightly of the cemetery, in light of the world we live in, not would I ever want to attend a funeral as an ethnographer. I will attend, and meet relatives i have not seen in many years, some of them I don't even know. But Hellen last week mention the cultural, perhaps, using the term swallowing, implied even cultural anthropopagy -- and this of course interests me...: for i can taste the nuances of its difference perceptually - choreographically, politically, culturally, this is an expansive field of interaction .. [Hellen] Foucault lectures that from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an 'illness.' The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself. If that is a cultural critique, I guess Foucault misses some facts though I have seen cemeteries in Texas that are outside the town boundaries and seemingly forgotten; but in my ancestral village the cemetery remains central, on a hill, in walking distance from the church, the graves tenderly cared for by the relatives and families, like a garden, the ritual occasions of saying farewell an established cultural tradition (nothing too heterotopic) integrated into the rhythms of life and necessarily so. As in Mexican culture, the dead are not incompatible (Foucault) with the living, not relegated to dark hiding places. In terms of a colonial history, or recent eras of decolonization, I wonder what ethnographies of technovirtual systems might tell us. regards Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all thanks to these discussions over the past week.. I was in Madrid at the METABODY workshop, a European collaborative performance project, and could not quite participate due to our work- schedule but read the postings by Sophia (I liked the term you used, in-fleshment), Samantha, John, Sue and then Garth, Tamara, and Hellen.. Garth - your notion of porosity of content, I was not sure how to understand this. How is a soliloqy or monologue unfixed, and how would it change in an interactive performance? and as to interactive performance, how is 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 interesting to you regarding to the question of content? What rich kinesthetic or movement awareness have you discerned in what I often (perhaps disappointedly) would consider slapstick? How do we really interpret what we see (just think of the less than really encouraging observations that Tamara describes after her workshops with the children holding their iPads (and their fixation on big screen images: children were captivated by their digital representation and enjoyed moving with their avatar, who on the large screen, was much larger than them ) I would not mind debating the 'slapstick audience action in many interactive installations (whatever the virtual embodiment factor is or might be): I think we need to be more critical of the so-called fake embodiment our interface protocols induce (and John would probably agree here?). The same (sorry if I tread upon the somatics aspects here) holds true for performers performing virtual embodiments. To shift, ever slightly, I wondered after last week's workshops directed in Madrid by Robert Wechsler (formerly director of Palindrome, now offering interactive workshops in sounding movement with his software MotionComposer to people with disabilities) - and perhaps this would be directed as a question to Hellen's alchemy --- 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 --- I wondered whether we are fooling ourselves or whether there is something like the metaphysics Hellen points to? I tried my best to be skeptical about metaphysics (or out of body experiences and religious rapture) n my last post of the first week, but sadly nobody responded, so I will ask again: Hellen - what do you mean when you write -embodied (ethnography) in ' systems' which have dissolved borders between my physical and virtual state of being - distributed over networks are you distributed? I have not been distrbuted , so I am curious? Porosity? Jaime del Val, also at Madrid, tried very hard to make me think so too (in his Metaformance – Microsexes, Disalignments, Microdeviations on the rooftop of his studio), my body mingled with his, and my perception becoming destabilized and confused by amorphous bodylandscapes generated by the camera tracking his and my skin, well, it did not work for me, I knew my body and his camera and could see what the camera created. Thus, virtual is a convenient delusion or artistic polemic, no? For the people with physical or cognitive disabilities in Robert's workshop [http://www.motioncomposer.com/en/welcome/], however potent it was, I could not tell whether the participants actually believed (wished they surely did) their movement gestures made the music we heard. (The software did). And thus increasingly one could sense a feeling of snake oil magic, the participants may imagine to compose music but they surely do not swallow the system and it is not their/our system. Borders did not dissolve. Most likely I cannot speak for the participants, although I also tried the system (MotionComposer has 6 environments of different sounds that can be triggered) and failed to enjoy it; the participants with disabilities laughed and cheered it, so they must have felt their movements mattered . yet I was worried that it didn't (and perhaps Sue has some experience on this?). respectfully Johannes Birringer DAP-Lab ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- What is the scope or meaning of 'interaction' when Quantum suggests that any 'change' anywhere affects all 'things' everywhere simultaneously? jh -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space--What's are 'things' when everything is affected by interaction with everything else? Quantum Physics renders meaning, and things (and therefore relations), fugitive. best Simon On 21 Jul 2014, at 08:01, John Hopkins jhopk...@neoscenes.net wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- What is the scope or meaning of 'interaction' when Quantum suggests that any 'change' anywhere affects all 'things' everywhere simultaneously? jh -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk | @_simonbiggs_ http://www.littlepig.org.uk | http://amazon.com/author/simonbiggs simon.bi...@unisa.edu.au | Professor of Art, University of South Australia http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/staff/homepage.asp?name=simon.biggs s.bi...@ed.ac.uk | Honorary Professor, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/edinburgh-college-art/school-of-art/staff/staff?person_id=182cw_xml=profile.php ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space--that's not what quantum mechanics says. On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 6:31 PM, John Hopkins jhopk...@neoscenes.net wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- What is the scope or meaning of 'interaction' when Quantum suggests that any 'change' anywhere affects all 'things' everywhere simultaneously? jh -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- *=* *directory http://www.alansondheim.org http://www.alansondheim.org tel 347-383-8552* *music/sound http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ * *email sondheim ut panix.com http://panix.com, sondheim ut gmail.com http://gmail.com=* ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
