[-empyre-] critical motion nowhere and everywhere at some time

[Johannes Birringer]

hello all

it was almost involuntarily seductive to not hear from a participant due to non-access to the soft_skinned_space, and 
wonder what the guest might have said about the articulation of 2 degrees or 3 degrees of freedom (of joints)
and/or ideas of critical making  (Norah's term) or research-creation (Erin's term).


>>Movatar was an inverse motion-capture system where an avatar, imbued 
with genetic algorithms, whose behavior varies during the performance, 
actuated the two arms using a pneumatically powered upper body 
exoskeleton. The body becomes  a prosthesis enabling the motion of an 
avatar in the real world. >>

presumably the movatar/avatar was the performer, or rather the "system"  --- and it would interest me
to hear more about whether system design in this case designs various kinds of possible, not possible
 involuntary and inadequate  (?- regarding what adequacy?) actuations or operations......


I have now read up on the discussion that has evolved this month, and i want to thank everyone,  it is a very
breathtaking and heady space to enter,  

most recently Sally Jane's remembering of 'Forsythe's "execution" of 
Bacon's Retranslation/ Final Unfinished Portrait'  was indeed haunting me as much as Christina's comments
(via the French philosopher who has been involuntarily nourishing the debate) on Bacon's graphs/paintings, and 
then i then spent a while learning the "tank man tango"  

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLFmet0pbvw)

I tried to figure out what forget2forget is (and what their politics might be).... and i found :
>>Tank Man Tango is an artwork by Deborah Kelly featuring Teik Kim Pok dancing choreography by Jane McKernan in a video made by Sven Simulacrum>>
This is quite straightforward.  

the roundabout (others joining in on June 4 to commemorate [and not forget) idea is less clear,  how when where for whom?  to webcams?   YOUTUBEr ?
the space of forgetting/remembering now "our" internet social networkspace. pliable and moveable (ukiyo-e)?



If there is any opportunity, given the complexity of the last two week's discussion   -    can one go back to ask the first week's guests how philosophy  as a "conceptual operator
 to highlight the reciprocal relation between human movement and digital technology"  [Stamatia] was harnessed  (what assumptions about this system were brought to the making
of dance, the discourse of citations and ideas, or the movement of movement), and why this particular framework, and not another (non-Western, say, or transrational)?


early on, Ricardo mentioned the Lepecki book (Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of
Movement ), and its referential systems (including Sloterdijk's "Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of Self-Intensification" & comments on political kinetics; and European Konzepr Tanz --   has anyone seen Jérôme Bel's "The Spectator" -  hmmm, it was a bit exhausting and uninteresting, indeed, I felt)......


[ clip ]   [clip] 

and Alan took us onto a somewhat different track with his reference to Second Life and body art
>> I've always been interested in the psychoanalytics of dance/performance,
beginning with Acconci's and Anderson's early work years ago. With Sl/
live performance, we've been able to explore these things - particularly
issues of abjection and discomfort, sexuality/body/language - directly >>>


[[clip]]  [[clip]]

thanks to Ashley for her wonderful description of her experience inside Kentridge's installation 
"7 Fragments for Georges Méliès & Journey to the Moon'"   ---  I gather this is K's homage to creativity
manifested in his particular fusion of performance, drawing, animation, film.......    Méliès and Mybridge
haunt these pages here, as does Schlemmer (thanks Sally Jane) and - i hope - as does manga and anime.


later, i am very grateful to Norah for her reflection on what "critical making" might be (I am not sure i understand yet).

And how would you compare Tank Man Tango to, say, Movatar or your huge collaborative production at OSU's Computing Centre
" making visual objects for choreographic ideas, writing within the visual space of these objects" .....(creating an interlaced
system of online dataobjects [OFTr] including notation/description, animation, graphs and visualizations as analyses-tools for re-viewing
certain -- i.e. Forsythe's -- choreographic principles?)  

were these choreographic objects created for reproductions of a very particular dance, understanding its particular principles [or Forsythe's system of imporvisation technologies and vocabularies?], or reproductiions of dancing?

addressed to dancers, readers,    and users as we were asked to join in, with Tank Man? 
Historically, how has OSU's collaboration on such research evolved from, say, Labanotation software and DVDs offered for dance reconstruction [preservation] and videodance to the online Synchronic Objects?

1989 [ clip ]      2001  [clip]      2009  [clip]

Tim's last remark on indifference  and "choreographic intervention" also struck a note with me, if indeed (in a larger political and global world beyond concert dance
and arthouse installations and interdisciplinary university research centers)  indifference can be a principle of terror, as it is of the Sublime
(are we reminded here of Stockhausen's comment on 9/11?) 

Question (to Norah), why was One Flat Thing chosen, and not, say, "Three Atmospheric Studies" or the equally disturbing "Decreation"?

regards
Johannes Birringer

>>> Tim wrote>>

Also interesting is your suggestion that, within 
the scope of the network, which encompasses both 
the daily activities of -empyre- and the 
technological interfaces of choreography,  "the 
body becomes both a possessed and  performing 
body, simultaneously actuated and improvising. 
The body not as a single, intentional agency, but 
as a host for an artificial entity."  This would 
certainly entail what you call an "indifference," 
and, here, indifference would envelope 
traditional attitudes of performance and 
theatrical perspective that are organized around 
the centrality of "the subject" as organizing 
principle, not merely as interactive host.

I might have mentioned on -empyre- once before 
that Jean-François Lyotard used to tell me that 
indifference is the most effective form of 
terrorism.  Here terror could involve a 
choreographic intervention that foregrounds the 
prominence of the unsettling prosthesis in an age 
of otherwise willed alignment.

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