[-empyre-] thinking images and social choreography

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

this has been another fascinating week of discussion, thanks to you all.

may I ask Kriss about the notion of "thinking images" and whether this was meant to be
in reference to Raul Ruiz?  (You wrote...:  "for him cinema is something that thinks (it is poetic), and, if I 
understand him correctly, not ideological"). 

As a brief reply, and Simon has also picked this up, this idea of `"thinking images" was so new to me when it was first mentioned to me; 
back then i began to understand it more in an interactional sense when the conversations I had with computer
scientists and programmers moved on; the case we discussed  -  and this is published in a recent book under
the chapter title "Artificial Intelligence / Thinking Images" [*] - was a dance performance by Trisha Brown company with Paul
Kaiser and Marc Downie,  where the projected visual images/graphics were composed with an artificial intelligence engine/motion sensing
environment that allowed the "images" to respond to the movement/choreographic pattern danced on stage and unfold
or emerge according to the parameters and the generative algorithms programmed for the environment.  In this
sense, I gathered, the "images" were able to make up their mind and behave, as "creatures" in a simulated
graphic field that also resembled a kind of movement world  (mostly abstract figurations of course, not representations of the dancers).

Interestingly, this kind of machinic or digital "thinking" is thus emergent also only in response to the machining
architecture or interactional/relational setting. The images have to be programmed to think, and Marc Downie
mentioned to me that they have a bird brain. 


and may I also ask James Leach about his interest in "the design of technological objects and choreography"
and how this relates back to the many interesting thoughts you posted on Papua New Guinea and "everyday
reality  (gardening, animal husbandry, processes of production, kinship, hunting , subsistence horticulture and 'ritual' forms of planting, etc),
especially the ethics of responsibility that you mentioned.   Would you entertain a notion of "social choreography"
in this case, as a creativine machining architecture  (pattern based?) of the social,  yet with the crucial difference
that there is no software involved and no algorithms in computational terms, but a modus or gestus of
social patterning based on a specific cosmology?  

Would then such patterning, creative and autopoietic at same time, be considered a naturalized, interactional/social relational
"program" of communal mediation? and to question Simon's search for non human agency  ("individuals [in a community] recognizing
they can enhance their capacity to act, to bring themselves and the world into being, through collective action"), would such a search
not contradict all anthropological evidence, unless you interpret swarm behavior, for example, as expressive of a behavior to enhance
the common good?    Why have swarms become such a hot item, or have they?  as metaphor? 

>> James wrote:
>>There was never any intention in my mind to define a human against objects or technologies, but rather point out that what is and isn't counted as human in particular worlds shapes the way people make themselves appear to themselves: and where creativity lies is an element in this wider complex>>


The notion of choreography in dance is historically committed to (human) intentions and structuring composition of movement in time and space,
it is a human activity and expresses creative decisions or particular cultural knowledges [kinesthetic,musical rhythmic] learnt through physical training
and formal codes and particular methods of improvisation, so to apply it to the machining architecture (I am taking this term from the architect
Lars Spuybroek) or something indefined "between"  (say, between movers or social agents and an environment which may also move
or be considered unstable, changing, evolving, responsive and impacting or even intelligent in the sense in which architects may now build augmented physical structures),
tends to make the term social choreography unspecific and vague, no? where lies the responsibility?  is it always shared, as in contact improvisation?
A movement behavior in an urban situation, involving contact,  can also be acts of violence, swarms
can create havoc, etc, competition and exclusion reign? 

Then what model of social choreography do you study now, James, in a non-shamanic and non-Amazonian context?


with regards
Johannes Birringer
Interaktionslabor
http://interaktionslabor.de

*  reference to J.Birringer, Performance, Technology & Science (NY: PAJ Publications, 2008), pp. 261-86.
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