[-empyre-] welcome Li Zhenhua

Fri May 15 03:08:06 EST 2009

Hi, all, I apologize for posting this exhibition announcement ( 
-empyre- policy is to free the list of exhibition announcements and 
calls for paper, etc),  which I too hastily assumed was related to 
today's earlier post from Deborah.  Li Zhenhau, by the way, 
participated in our January feature on "Digital Futures" and is 
China's leading curator of new media art.

Hello, Li, we're very happy that you're following this month's 
discussion of "Critical Motion Practice."  We'd be very happy to hear 
about work in this area in China or, most especially, to hear your 
thoughts on the theme since you've curated so much work that combines 
movement and digital art.

Best,

Tim

>http://www.bjartlab.com/read.php?123
>join this with me and Yang Fudong
>
>  Li zhenhua |
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>Shiyuan Dongyuan, Shunyi District
>Beijing 101300, China
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>http://www.msgproduction.com
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>mustardseedgall at yahoo.com
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>
>----- Original Message ----
>From: Ashley Ferro-Murray <aferromurray at gmail.com>
>To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>Sent: Friday, May 15, 2009 12:09:18 AM
>Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Agreement within difference
>
>Hi Nora,
>
>The fact that "alignment" comes from the working practices of the
>company is incredibly interesting to me. In practice, alignments and
>"sync-ups" in particular are important to choreographic direction,
>keeping time among dancers and creating a structure within a larger
>piece. I think this relates directly to my earlier comments on
>repetition, multiplicity and layering within choreography, programming
>and philosophical argument. Although alignments give us a practical
>architecture, I am curious what we lose philosophically when we direct
>our attention toward the alignment.
>
>OFTr is infinitely fragmented and broken down into segments, breaths,
>phrases, stretches etc. What I find as I watch the visualization,
>though, is that I begin to miss a nuance that lies in between
>alignment. What connects alignments seems to stand as the heart of the
>piece. Luckily, the user is given several ways to visualize or mark
>OFTr. Each one could give us a different visualization and a different
>way to consider what comes around the alignment. This gestures toward
>the possibility that in each moment and even in between each moment
>lies a different potentiality not only for movement, but also for
>alignment, whether intentional or not.
>
>I am curious what happens in a piece without alignment? Or, is it
>possible to have one? What about a specific rupture in aligned
>structure? Perhaps this is simply marked differently. Each time,
>though, we loose site of what happens around what is marked.
>Practically speaking, though, this is how we watch a piece. My eye is
>drawn toward something and I follow it. Then I zoom back out until
>something else catches my attention. Each time I focus on one
>particular aspect of a piece my potential experience increases.
>Interestingly, this seems to be the beauty of the project. As Stamatia
>suggested last week, the piece is infinitely divisible. I am curious
>how you decided what would be marked in the visualizations and what
>would not. How did you philosophize what is lost in visualization?
>
>Ashley
>
>On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Norah Zuniga Shaw <zuniga.11 at osu.edu> wrote:
>>  Our choreographic resource for our work is One Flat Thing, reproduced
>>  (OFTr), an ensemble dance that examines and reconfigures classical
>>  choreographic principles of counterpoint. In OFTr counterpoint is defined as
>>
>>  "a field of action in which the intermittent and irregular coincidence of
>>  attributes between organizational elements produces an ordered interplay."
>>
>>  Three structural systems interact to create the counterpoint of the dance:
>>  movement material, cueing, and alignments. These systems are detailed in our
>>  introductory essays on the site. I'd like to share more about alignments
>  > here because they are fundamental to how we conceive of, enact, 
>and theorize
>>  counterpoint. The visual languages we created really do express this stuff
>>  best but here are a few experts from the words we use as
>>  anchors/frames/coordinates. Bill and I evolved this vocabulary together over
>>  a few years in intensive writing sessions and in our working practices with
>>  the team at OSU in creating the visualizations. Alignments are short
>>  instances of synchronization between dancers in which their actions share
>>  some, but not necessarily all, attributes. Manifested as analogous shapes,
>>  related timings, or corresponding directional flows, alignments occur in
>>  every moment of the OFTr and are constantly shifting throughout the group.
>>  The term alignment emerges from the working practices of the Forsythe
>>  Company. Other words the company uses to describe this phenomenon include
>>  hook-ups, agreements, and isometries. Within the thousands of alignments in
>>  the choreography, approximately 200 can be understood as a subset called
>>  sync-ups. These are moments in the choreography when a dancer's task is to
>>  briefly join with another individual or group. Alignments are a concrete
>>  phenomenon in the dance and also a construct that I'm finding useful in
>>  thinking about understanding complex relationships in many arenas and
>>  specifically in interdisciplinary collaboration.
>>
>>  A great tool for interactively exploring how we think about counterpoint and
>>  alignments is the Counterpoint Tool on the site:
>>
>>  http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/tools/counterpointTool.html
>>
>>  Thoughts?
>>  N
>>
>>
>>  _______________________________________________
>>  empyre forum
>>  empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>  http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
>
>
>--
>Ashley Ferro-Murray
>MA/PhD Student
>Dept. Theater, Dance & Performance Studies
>University of California, Berkeley
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>
>
>      
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-- 
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853