[-empyre-] commodity genres / dance

[Johannes Birringer]

hello all
interesting shifts indeed, during the last days/week, 
from environments (the ecological) and real bodies/fluids to ambient plasma screenvideos and Second Life.

<<but I was a bit surprised that the discussion took the turn that it did, although
Simon's analysis seemed right on point as to why that
may have been the case.  Let's hope that wiredness
does indeed "weird itself out enough to challenge the
complacency that it fosters."  That strikes me as
a direct and important political challenge.>.

Simon's analysis was indeed very sharp, and now, after reading Stephanie's reference to Jill Magid's exploration ot body - environment, i felt it was a good opportunity to refer to bodies and embodiment again, to exploratory and sensory/sensual relationships to environments and the information provided by environments,  I'd be more interested in sustainabilities of our senses and sense perceptions in our sensorial world experience (and daily habitats, including commodity spheres and built commercial environments with its projections and messages).  

One such continuing exploration is done in dance / improvisation, and while this discussion here is happening, we had a discussion on how moving bodies/perceptions interact with environments on the dance-tech maillist, where a video interview [in the "Embodied
Techne Series"] was set up.

It showed Lisa Nelson, a dance improvisation artist and researcher on
improvisation and perception ('Tunning Scores'), talking about her practice and her teaching with such an understanding of how environments instruct us 
or make us sense/feel and process information through sensory perceptions and enactments, through movement.  Lisa takes us across her experiences with dance, movement
studies, psychology of perception [e.g. J.J. Gibson] and her experience  with video as well. Her perspective adds to  current and  recent discussions on real-time
composition and embodiment in this same month of April (http://www.freelists.org/archives/dance-tech/04-2008/)...

 and after reading the postings by Patricia Zimmerman and Stephanie Rothenberg on "environmental sensualities" , i feel a bit confused by the promotional fervor of the Environmental Sensualities program (http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/welcome/)  -- was this a festival title? a program? something programmatic?  I think the website is a highly rhetorical text  (the four different strands --camouflage, counterpoint, games, and gastronomica--. it would appear, all offering differing engagements? or same engagement on a festival?  how leveling and camouflaging itself is the notion of the ambient  video / digital environment / screen media environment?

I suppose i wanted to ask what it means to say: <<Environmental Sensualities undergird all discussions of wired
sustainability>> ?

regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab
London
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap



> Jill Magid "Lobby 7"
> http://www.jillmagid.net/Lobby7.php
> "Lobby 7 was performed in the main lobby of the Massachusetts
> Institute of Technology. I hijacked the lobby's informational
> monitor, interrupting its daily broadcast with a transmission of my
> own. This transmission was a real-time exploration of my body and the
> surrounding architecture as seen through the natural openings of my
> clothes, via a lipstick surveillance camera that I held in my hand.
> The performance took one half hour- the time needed to capture every
> part of myself I that I could reach." Jill's intention is "to seek
> intimate relationships with impersonal structures". She has been
> coined the seductress of surveillance. In many of her works these
> systems of control become subverted as she gets to know the workers
> behind the curtain.
>
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