[-empyre-] Yan: empyre Digest, Vol 83, Issue 9

[nilufer ovalioglu]

Dear List:
Here's some thoughts:
  
On the practical side:
Deceleration …The element of shock and trauma … Thinking about deceleration, I’ve been hunted by the images from an Angelopoulos film, Landscape in the mist. A road movie about two children trying to get to their father in Germany… The 12 year old girl runs away from home with her little brother. They encounter a truck driver who agrees to take them with. After traveling for a while, the truck driver stops by the side of a highway reserved for trucks to rest and goes to sleep on his seat. He wakes up, gets out of the truck, opens the door of the girl, drags her to the back of the truck and they get in. We now look/face the scene of rape: The back of the truck covered by a thick cloth, the side of the cloth waving from the two entering the back and we watch/face this for about 3 minutes…Then the man gets out and after a while we see the girl get out and sit on the back of the truck…blood on her fingers, devastated, she slowly wipes her fingers
 on the inner wall of the truck.
We don’t see the rape (filmed and shown in actual length of time that the rape would take place in real life), we feel it…
The spectator traumatized… 
Trauma created by empathy may be the best way of decelerating the mind. My experience of the scene was feeling/thinking nothing, yet, I feel my scull benumb slowly.
Silence…
 
On the academic side:
Nietzsche’s view on grammar is an inspiration: As long as we have grammar, we will be hunted by the belief of God. Here God represents an authority that controls our inner thoughts, put to sentences by way of grammar. In meditation, we aim to not think or think nothing; is there a way of thinking nothing without expressing what we think?
When does the thinking stop, can we loose the grammar of the inner thought?
 
Perhaps, then, deceleration is the loss of grammar. Losing the meaning of any movement or form is impossible as long as we can express it. How to we decelerate the perception of meaning? By slowing down the offering of the grammar? Butoh?
Could there be a choreography where there is no grammar? 
 
 
I ask.
 
 
Nilüfer


________________________________
Kimden: "empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au" <empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Kime: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Gönderildiği Tarih: 11 Ekim 2011 4:00 Salı
Konu: empyre Digest, Vol 83, Issue 9

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Today's Topics:

  1. soft_skinned_space (Jack Butler)
  2. open-ended (Fabrizio Manco)
  3. Re: : "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration" / second week,
      introducing our guests (Johannes Birringer)
  4. Re: : "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration" / second week,
      introducing our guests (Johannes Birringer)
  5. The second phase (David Hughes 19)
  6. speed addiction, interactive technologies,    some notes on
      science (Gordana Novakovic)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2011 14:19:31 -0400
From: "Jack Butler" <fatemaps at interlog.com>
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] soft_skinned_space
Message-ID: <000301cc86af$fe37f2a0$faa7d7e0$@interlog.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Dear Soft Skinned Ones

As a visual artist (I draw), I think I would like to enter this soft skin
space tentatively, just putting my toes into, what I understand to date to
be, a turbulent, enticing, pool of philosophies-of-choreography, or
space-over-time.

I've been reading the soft skin entries late in the evening and then, at
first light in the morning ,walking fast but thinking slow, slower, slowest,
on the West Toronto Railpath, witnessed only by the huge stands of goldenrod
and purple vetch, I let the ideas from last night's blog tumble about in my
imagination. And out of this fast-walking-slow-thinking meditation four
ideas, or tropes have begun to take shape: Fatemaps; Somatechnics;
Technologies-of-the-hand; and the Inuit concept, Sananguargarq. Embedded at
the core of each is the problematic of time.

Fatemap is a concept from embryology, central to current understanding of
epigenetic development. In its narrowest application, a fatemap is literally
the spatial mapping over time of the position of a 'mother' cell from the
earliest blastocyst  ( a berry like disc of as few as a thousand cells) and
her daughter cells as they move into their final position in the mature
fetus.

In my work as an artist who uses the means and methods of visual art to
produce medical research, on one hand, and research based installation art
on the other, I have broadened my applications of the concept  - fatemap,
pragmatically and poetically, to give concrete form to development over time
in the construction of amenable objects; models, drawings, animations,
installations and performances.

Somatechnics: the body always and already technologised. Technology always
and already embodied. 

Technologies of the hand: I am more interested in the continuities between
embodied technologies and the digital/electronic, than in their rupture.
Having lived and worked with Inuit artists in Northern Canada over many
years, a people whose traditional culture was made entirely by hand, I find
that the integration of time (the time it takes to make ., the time together
., the time to play ., time to make mistakes .), answers a deep need for me
when I find the courage to take the time to live in Inuit time.

Sananguargarq: the translation in Inuktitut of what we non-Inuit call 'Art'.
But, what I have come to realize, after many years engagement with Inuit
artists from the community of Qamanittuaq, would, to my thinking, be more
accurately translated - 'making little models of how the world works'. The
category, Sananguargarq, includes dolls heads, maps, painting on kayaks,
scrimshaw, scratched or smeared marks-made-with-intention of almost any
kind. Surely a postmodern category, and the basis, now, for how I think
about my own working process.

To be continued.I hope.

Jack Butler

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Message: 2
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:28:43 +0100 (BST)
From: Fabrizio Manco <terragumo at yahoo.co.uk>
To: "empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au" <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] open-ended
Message-ID:
    <1318246123.77057.YahooMailNeo at web29610.mail.ird.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Dear forum, 
At this moment I can?t help but being quite open-ended. How can I make sense? Hopefully, this opens me up?
From an increasingly slowing down of my domestic week-end time, I take and write this experience, which is, once again, one of dwelling more and more into my ageing ailing body. Indeed, Paul Klee used to say that the child is born old, well, also I would add, physically-wise, for autopoiesis to emerging ontogenetic processes, non-linear biological time spread from and into me. Into this existence and art practice, biological life processes as well as of ?un-being?, beyond a crypto-nihilistic Being. I am intrigued by the enquiry into our existential ground. Alas, the word existential conjures up in me an existentialist way of experiencing grounded in (a) being. This is an often perilous ground, hiding an essentialist and dualistic constitution. From Brian Massumi I read: ?it is not enough for process concepts of this kind to be ontological. They must be ontogenetic: they must be equal to emergence?. [Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation by Brian Massumi, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002, p.8]. And again: ?The home, however, is less a container than a membrane: a filter of exteriorities continually entering and traversing it? [ibid p.85]. 
The body-home, the body-mind, the bodymind, the body-and-mind. Bounded beyond a duality without monism or dualism but, I also consider, beyond holism (surely another form of totalizing monism).
So now, my practice is a search and quest for remaining grounded in a physical and spatial ordinary sense, open into the simultaneous unfolding of site, space and place, with their interconnected specificities and histories. 
I can now find, into this writing a feeling of constructive dialogue, from a forum asking questions which, somehow I find difficult to answer (?). I have spent my week/week-end pondering on these, and on my relationship to my body as an open echoing environment through its boundaries, and one which becomes and at the same time differs from its ailments. This gives me the chance to stop once more, dotting my life with moments of stilling in thought and di-stilling motion (once, and once again). So, I have no chance but to welcome the alterity of a ?passing? ailment, which bounds me, more than ever into this infinitely spacious corporeality, thanks to those boundaries. 
I take your input Johannes and I ask the same question to myself, but unfortunately I cannot find an answer, perhaps, in thinking of value and knowledge/s ?how knowledges are created or valued??
I assume, my and our knowledge/s are always embodied ones ? although I might fall and risk the reductionism I am trying to avoid ? I say that we are always steeped in a chiasmic corporeal knowledge. This knowledge is not of an anthropocentric type, of course, as only through an awareness ? which we realize through entrancing, breathing, moving, sitting, stopping, speeding, decelerating and dancing practices ? we are always immanently and fortunately in a friendship with gravity. Therefore we are always? embodied, and indubitably I deem that there is no need to create an embodied experience, as one is already what one is, or is not (even in illusory terms, I suppose). My question is how then do we realize this? In the (fore)words of Sergio Manghi to Gregory Bateson?s Mind and Nature he states: ?it is the necessity to take care of our responsiveness to the pattern which connects [?]? and then that this is a way ?that is self-reflective
and participatory, a way that can reveal to us ? by continually placing it in wider perspective ? the extraordinary story of what we already know, what we already are, for good as well as for evil, in all its inexhaustible, surprising novelty? [Sergio Manghi, Forewords to Gregory Bateson?s Mind and Nature, A Necessary Unity, Hampton Press Inc. Cresskill, New Jersey, 2001]. 
?
Phew! Now I am exhausted; I need to stop (and to look under my feet).
?
Best wishes,
Fabrizio
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Message: 3
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:56:43 +0100
From: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] : "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration" / second
    week, introducing our guests
Message-ID:
    <DF657B70CB20304DB745D84933F94B1E01AD4F6DD4 at v-exmb01.academic.windsor>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1254"


dear all, 
we are starting the second week of our workshop-forum, 
and after Michael's careful and considerate post, in which he tried to summarize and interweave some of the thoughts that were moved forward last week,
my role as moderator is made so much easier........ I wish to thank our discussants from last week for having provided fresh ground for our theme, and planted some seeds.  I had invited a gardener from the east-midlands to speak to ask about gardening, but he preferred not to and suggested he was not keeping up with matters academic. I insisted our forum was not academic, but he was unmoved.


Well, it is completely open to our other discussants, and you our resonant soft-skinned studio, to continue the thought-movement.
it's a great pleasure to introduce our guests for this week:

WEEK 2 
^ Claudia Robles

Claudia Robles was born in Bogot? (Colombia). Currently, she lives in Cologne (Germany). She finished studies in Fine Arts (1990)  in Bogot?  (Colombia). She pursued postgraduate studies such as: Film Animation (1992-1993) in Milan (Italy), MA in Visual Arts (1993- 1995) in Geneva (Switzerland) and Sound Design and Electronic Composition in Essen (Germany) She was artist in residence (2004-2006) at the ZKM Center in  Karslruhe. Her most relevant work presented there was the piece ?Seed/Tree? (audiovisual Installation/Butoh performance with live electronics). Her currently theoretical and practical research is about the use of bio-data in real-time multimedia performances.


^ Nil?fer Oval?o?lu

Nil?fer received her bachelor?s degree in sculpture specializing in stone carving at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, ?stanbul in 2001. She was then awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study her MFA at State University in New York at Stony Brook where she prepared a series of video and performance work. She trained in physical theatre at London International School of Performing Arts from 2006-08. Physical Theatre has been the master of all her expression. Since 2002, her practice transformed from digital performance to drama sketches that unveil the grotesque, researching the bizarre corners of being human. Her work expands grotesque musical sketch, cabaret, physical theatre and comical absurd worlds. Her past work consists of elements of these in video and digital performance. Sh has recently finished her practice based PhD at Brunel University?s Drama Department, entitled ?The Female Bouffon?, and is now a lecturer at Istanbul Ayd?n University?s Drama
 Department.


^ Jack Butler
Jack responded to the invitation by writing: It is so very nice to hear from you. When I read the words, 'the desire for deceleration', I felt my breathing slow, my blood pressure shift down and my eyes tear over. I think I would like to join your soft list. Although I have given material form to 'time', experienced as epigenesis, modeling human embryological development over many years of trans-disciplinary visual art/medicine research, and experienced time in sensuous play through daily life with my Inuit art-making collaborators in the Canadian Arctic, I have never approached my desire for deceleration (directly or indirectly), with the written word. I would love to know more about your overarching empyre project and would be please to accept your invitation to join the October forum. Please let me know how to proceed and I hope to continue our conversation started on that bench outside the Art Centre at U of Toronto.*

[Jack is one of the authors/co-editors, with Ruby Arngna'naaq, Sheila Butler, Patrick Mahon and William Noah, of the amazing book Art and Cold Cash (YYZBOOKS, 2009), which stages the encounter between ?southern? artists and Inuit artists examining the discourses around money, the complicit and at times awkward relationship between southern market forces and the changing cultural climate of the North.]


^ Jennifer McColl

Jennifer is a Chilean dancer, performance theorist, and visual artist currently based in England. She has finished her MPhil in Performing Art Research at Brunel University, London, and now resides in Spain.  Her work as a performer and theorist has deepened on topics related with dance and technology. She has presented lectures in South America and Europe, and published books and articles in different countries. Her actual research focuses on the development of science of work in relation with the integration of technology for dance and performance in different historical contexts. Her artistic practice is based on the relationship between body and technology, exploring different media and disciplines for the generation of body-image compositions. Her actual work presents a collaborative methodology, focusing on the creation of multimedia installations that compose architectural environments from where to present the relationship between body and space.


^  Gordana Novakovic ; 

Originally a painter, with 12 solo exhibitions to her credit, Gordana has more than twenty years? experience of developing and exhibiting large-scale time-based media projects. Her artistic practice and theoretical work that intersects art, science and advanced digital technologies has formed five Cycles: ?Parallel Worlds,? ?The Shirt of a Happy Man,? ?Infonoise? and ?Fugue.? A constant mark of her work throughout her experiments with new technologies has been her distinctive method of creating an effective cross-disciplinary framework for the emergence of synergy through collaboration. Gordana exhibited and lectured at leading interdisciplinary festivals and symposia, and artistic and scientific conferences; such as ISEA, Towards a Science of Consciousness and Mutamorphosis most recently. Alongside her artistic practice, in the last five years Gordana has been artist-in-residence at Computer Science Department, University College London, where she has
 founded and convenes th
e Tesla Art and Science Group. She has received a number of international and British academic awards.


^  Olu.Taiwo

Olu Taiwo graduated from the Laban Centre with an MA in Choreography and wrote his PhD on Performance philosophy. He teaches dance, visual development and performance in a combination of real and virtual formats and has a background in Fine Art. He is an actor, dancer and drummer performing in national and international contexts. His main interests are to propagate 21st century issues concerning the interaction between body, identity, audience and technology. This includes research based on both his concepts of the Return beat (West African rhythmic sensibility), and the Physical journal (Embodied knowledge and memory). He performed a lead role in Suna No Onna iand UKIYO [Moveable Worlds], and developed Harmonious Interruptions. a new piece with Ace Dance co based in Newbury, and a new solo work, Interfacing. He is particularly interested, at the moment, in redefining the nature of Practice and being as a goal and state of becoming. This is to say,
 Practice as methodology and
  Alaafia (Yoruba) or Eudiamenia (Greek) as outcome with the development of techniques as research data.


with many regards

Johannes Birringer



To subscribe via  the World Wide Web, visit
      http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre

Send your own posting to: 
      empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au




------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:27:58 +0100
From: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] : "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration" / second
    week, introducing our guests
Message-ID:
    <DF657B70CB20304DB745D84933F94B1E01AD4F6DE3 at v-exmb01.academic.windsor>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1254"



dear all,
we are starting the second week of our workshop-forum,
and after Michael's careful and considerate post, in which he tried to summarize and interweave some of the thoughts that were moved forward last week,
my role as moderator is made so much easier........ I wish to thank our discussants from last week for having provided fresh ground for our theme, and planted some seeds.  I had invited a gardener from the east-midlands to speak to ask about gardening, but he preferred not to and suggested he was not keeping up with matters academic. I insisted our forum was not academic, but he was unmoved.


Well, it is completely open to our other discussants, and you our resonant soft-skinned studio, to continue the thought-movement.
it's a great pleasure to introduce our guests for this week:

WEEK 2
^ Claudia Robles

Claudia Robles was born in Bogot? (Colombia). Currently, she lives in Cologne (Germany). She finished studies in Fine Arts (1990)  in Bogot?  (Colombia). She pursued postgraduate studies such as: Film Animation (1992-1993) in Milan (Italy), MA in Visual Arts (1993- 1995) in Geneva (Switzerland) and Sound Design and Electronic Composition in Essen (Germany) She was artist in residence (2004-2006) at the ZKM Center in  Karslruhe. Her most relevant work presented there was the piece ?Seed/Tree? (audiovisual Installation/Butoh performance with live electronics). Her currently theoretical and practical research is about the use of bio-data in real-time multimedia performances.


^ Nil?fer Oval?o?lu

Nil?fer received her bachelor?s degree in sculpture specializing in stone carving at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, ?stanbul in 2001. She was then awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study her MFA at State University in New York at Stony Brook where she prepared a series of video and performance work. She trained in physical theatre at London International School of Performing Arts from 2006-08. Physical Theatre has been the master of all her expression. Since 2002, her practice transformed from digital performance to drama sketches that unveil the grotesque, researching the bizarre corners of being human. Her work expands grotesque musical sketch, cabaret, physical theatre and comical absurd worlds. Her past work consists of elements of these in video and digital performance. Sh has recently finished her practice based PhD at Brunel University?s Drama Department, entitled ?The Female Bouffon?, and is now a lecturer at Istanbul Ayd?n University?s Drama
 Department.


^ Jack Butler
Jack responded to the invitation by writing: It is so very nice to hear from you. When I read the words, 'the desire for deceleration', I felt my breathing slow, my blood pressure shift down and my eyes tear over. I think I would like to join your soft list. Although I have given material form to 'time', experienced as epigenesis, modeling human embryological development over many years of trans-disciplinary visual art/medicine research, and experienced time in sensuous play through daily life with my Inuit art-making collaborators in the Canadian Arctic, I have never approached my desire for deceleration (directly or indirectly), with the written word. I would love to know more about your overarching empyre project and would be please to accept your invitation to join the October forum. Please let me know how to proceed and I hope to continue our conversation started on that bench outside the Art Centre at U of Toronto.*

[Jack is one of the authors/co-editors, with Ruby Arngna'naaq, Sheila Butler, Patrick Mahon and William Noah, of the amazing book Art and Cold Cash (YYZBOOKS, 2009), which stages the encounter between ?southern? artists and Inuit artists examining the discourses around money, the complicit and at times awkward relationship between southern market forces and the changing cultural climate of the North.]


^ Jennifer McColl

Jennifer is a Chilean dancer, performance theorist, and visual artist currently based in England. She has finished her MPhil in Performing Art Research at Brunel University, London, and now resides in Spain.  Her work as a performer and theorist has deepened on topics related with dance and technology. She has presented lectures in South America and Europe, and published books and articles in different countries. Her actual research focuses on the development of science of work in relation with the integration of technology for dance and performance in different historical contexts. Her artistic practice is based on the relationship between body and technology, exploring different media and disciplines for the generation of body-image compositions. Her actual work presents a collaborative methodology, focusing on the creation of multimedia installations that compose architectural environments from where to present the relationship between body and space.


^  Gordana Novakovic ;

Originally a painter, with 12 solo exhibitions to her credit, Gordana has more than twenty years? experience of developing and exhibiting large-scale time-based media projects. Her artistic practice and theoretical work that intersects art, science and advanced digital technologies has formed five Cycles: ?Parallel Worlds,? ?The Shirt of a Happy Man,? ?Infonoise? and ?Fugue.? A constant mark of her work throughout her experiments with new technologies has been her distinctive method of creating an effective cross-disciplinary framework for the emergence of synergy through collaboration. Gordana exhibited and lectured at leading interdisciplinary festivals and symposia, and artistic and scientific conferences; such as ISEA, Towards a Science of Consciousness and Mutamorphosis most recently. Alongside her artistic practice, in the last five years Gordana has been artist-in-residence at Computer Science Department, University College London, where she has
 founded and convenes th
e Tesla Art and Science Group. She has received a number of international and British academic awards.


^  Olu.Taiwo

Olu Taiwo graduated from the Laban Centre with an MA in Choreography and wrote his PhD on Performance philosophy. He teaches dance, visual development and performance in a combination of real and virtual formats and has a background in Fine Art. He is an actor, dancer and drummer performing in national and international contexts. His main interests are to propagate 21st century issues concerning the interaction between body, identity, audience and technology. This includes research based on both his concepts of the Return beat (West African rhythmic sensibility), and the Physical journal (Embodied knowledge and memory). He performed a lead role in Suna No Onna iand UKIYO [Moveable Worlds], and developed Harmonious Interruptions. a new piece with Ace Dance co based in Newbury, and a new solo work, Interfacing. He is particularly interested, at the moment, in redefining the nature of Practice and being as a goal and state of becoming. This is to say,
 Practice as methodology and
  Alaafia (Yoruba) or Eudiamenia (Greek) as outcome with the development of techniques as research data.


with many regards

Johannes Birringer



To subscribe via  the World Wide Web, visit
      http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre

Send your own posting to:
      empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au




------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:42:52 +0100
From: "David Hughes 19" <davidhughes19 at btinternet.com>
To: <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] The second phase
Message-ID: <000f01cc8763$464b16e0$d2e144a0$@btinternet.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Then the universe started to decelerate and expand more slowly.

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Message: 6
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:08:48 +0100
From: Gordana Novakovic <gordana.novakovic at gmail.com>
To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: [-empyre-] speed addiction, interactive technologies,    some
    notes on science
Message-ID:
    <CANTmkAM9kT5AaYXorW=rMJrLfbDxVnMX=O6DdiKAvSQ7veJ6cg at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252

Hello and good evening.

Thank you, Johannes, for your very kind introduction. Coming from a
bit different background, I am quite ignorant about lots of theories
and practices that you are fluent in and it?s been quite a lot of
fast-forward learning for me which I most appreciate. I will start
with some kind of brief introduction and hopefully through the
evolution of the discussion I will be more clear where my thoughts and
experience might contribute to the overall topic ? probably by adding
more unanswered questions. I?d like to apologise for what might appear
as a bit dry tone, but ? at the moment, I am working on a grant
applications ? not the only one obviously, trying to articulate my
ideas into a language that scientists can relate to, and than funding
bodies. It feels a bit schizophrenic ? these streams of thoughts
running in parallel through my mind, so please bear with me.

I have been reading your posts with delight and great interest, and
reflected on stillness, silence, rhythm; stillness through movement
particularly resonant...and how all of that relates to the digital
technology saturated contemporary urban environment and art forms that
exploit digital technologies.  Speed pollution. The name that comes
first to my mind is Paul Virilio and his ideas about how speed and
acceleration mark and shape technology enabled world, and his
reflections on dromposphere in relation to war, media and technology
and contemporary society. Are people becoming addicted to speed? How
and why?

I will start with some notes on interactive art. I believe that
interactive art can be defined exclusively if addressed as a process,
more specifically: a complex system of interdependent processes. The
clear boundaries of an installation cannot be defined in the same way
as we cannot define the clear boundaries of a participant's body. Our
bodies, transparent for environmental influences, within interactive
environment become dissolved. As opposed to fine art artefacts,
interactive installation is not a passive reflective object. It
creates a dynamic feedback process between human body and the system.
It is the participant that sets interaction in motion and induces the
process of interaction that depends upon her presence and activity. On
the other hand, interactive installation is active, emissive,
overpowers the human body; through interaction, body becomes an
absorbing receiver. There should be no question about it: the
installation navigates our perception rather than we make sense of the
perceptual situation. Compared to cinematographic forms and fine art
objects, the level of mediation in this perceptual situation puts the
participant in the position to replace perception of the object with
an openness in observing the perception itself.

The perceptual hypotheses offered by the participant will depend on
the complex sum of cultural habits and lived experience. But equally
important is the current state of the body and its receptiveness to
specific sensory stimuli which depends on inter-relationship between
such factors as minor or major organ misbalance, hydration, time of
the day, emotional state. Depending on the way that sensory stimuli
are orchestrated, experiencing an installation can sharpen attention
and provide profound kinaesthetic experience in a unique way. In
situations of sensory overload it can disperse attention and cause
different negative side effects manifested as minor nuisances such as
headache, eye or ear irritation. Occasionally it can cause more
serious disturbances such as nausea, vertigo or even epileptic
seizure. But what happens within our bodies when there are no such
dramatic manifestations?

My long time commitment have been to design installations that engage
participants in a spontaneous non-verbal communication between two
entities. The unanticipated responses from the audiences inspired my
search for understanding the nature of interactive interfaces and how
do they affect my potential participants-to-be. And I started looking
for the answers. Now, after years of research, I have more questions,
but hopefully more focused and articulate.

For the last few years, from the field of phenomenology (in particular
Maurice Merleau-Ponty) and consciousness studies my interests have
shifted to cognitive sciences and psychoneurology and
neurophenomenology, firmly rooted in the Mearleau-Ponty?s
philosophical concepts (Alva No? among others advancing action in
perception has already been brought into discussion.). Another
prominent philosopher from the field that I think might be quite
useful and hopefully relevant to our discussion is Shaun Gallagher
(also expert on meditation) with his theory about body schema and body
image that explains how our movements are ?decided? before we become
conscious of our intentions as a part of natural coupling between the
human and the environment and how the interaction with the world
shapes our body/mind.

Probably the strongest scientific paradigm that bridges the famous
body/mind gap and provides empirical evidences for philosophical
concepts of phenomenology and embodied mind is the field of brain
plasticity (pioneered by the late Paul Bach-y-Rita, followed by
Michael Merzenich, and others). It shows that the brain is not fixed
and closed, but very open to the influences from the environment, that
it changes constantly through interaction with it and through the
processes of learning. It turned out that the brain is especially
susceptible to digital technologies.

This scientific paradigm can particularly be useful in understanding
the nature of addictions. It tells us that the origin of addictions
resides in the brain?s chemistry. If we are engaged in some activity
that triggers secretion of so called ?hormones of pleasure?, or
?happiness? such as the neurotransmitters dopamine, endorphin and
serotonin, we soon develop a craving for this particular stimulus, and
we want more of it for pretty much obvious reason. In case of, for
example, shoot-them-up computer games, according to some research, it
seems that the speed of actions/editing (the rhythm?) is the major
player in producing the feeling of pleasure rather than it?s content
(which cannot be disregarded, of course). However, we soon become, so
to speak, resistant to certain stimuli and need stronger sensations in
order to get desired bran?s response. All neat and jolly, but how can
we get proper scientific investigation that will analyse
psycho-neurological basis for real life experiences?

Here we are faced with the limitations of the current scientific
methodologies and technologies available to empirically study these
phenomena because most of them are designed to analyse motionless
individuals in non-natural laboratory environments, often ?buried? in
the sarcophaguses of various brain scanners. What do these experiments
tell us about the lived experience? I had lots of delight reading
No??s latest iconoclastic book with a very provocative title Out of
our Heads (No?, 2009) where he bitterly criticises these technologies
and seeing brain as the only key for understanding perception,
emotion, consciousness. He says: ?Our culture is obsessed with the
brain - how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our
intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It?s widely
believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and
philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after
decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us
conscious?how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and
subjectivity?has emerged unchallenged: we don?t have a clue.?

It will be interesting to see whether and how No??s approach, and the
broader field of brain plasticity in neuroscience, will affect our
understanding of the visual and multimedia experiences that occur in
response to digitally mediated data and artworks in the future. One
thing is certain: the current focus on the technologies themselves is
misguided, since what can and will be perceived is determined as much
by the internal nature of the perceiver as by the external
manipulations of the objects of perception.

One of the problems in understanding the true nature of interactive
art I believe comes from the theory that links these art forms to
plastic arts, video or cinematography. When I conceived my first
interactive piece in 1994-6, I was immediately struck by the positive
response and interest for the piece - by the experimental theatre
community. Since then, I have been looking at (and for) theatrical
elements in interactive installation. That led me to explore Artaud
and ritual and ask the question: is interactive installation a new
theatrical form? Might it actually be a form of Aratud?s Total Theatre
(of cruelty)? And if so ? is it leading us back to the origins of
theatre: ritual? Does it have the capacity to be developed into a
contemporary, digital technology enabled ritual? Can it provide us
with complex experiences that ritual enables?

Recently, again chance played its role in directing my work. When I
exhibited my ongoing piece, based on the computational model of the
function of the human immune system designed to induce meditative,
contemplative experience, to my surprise, I was approached by a few
butoh dancers who wanted to collaborate with me on the piece. My
knowledge about butoh was very vague, but I learned a bit, and my
intuition was strongly in favour of it. But what, how...? And than in
April this year - the 1st Artaud Forum, yet another Johannes? brain
child. Two physical workshops with Biyo Kikuchi and Olu Taiwo.
Complete tectonic shift. It was this physical experience guided by the
real masters that woke up my poor untrained (not to mention aging)
body to bring me clarity of mind. I knew what I wanted to do/make. It
was a magic moment of understanding, or anticipating, the reflection
and expended consciousness through movement. Now comes the hard bit of
materialising the vision. And I?ll stop here, where the grant
application starts (or I might agree ?it is gardening that makes more
sense by the end - probably true, go out first thing in the morning,
and join our young upstairs neighbour who has been planting some
bamboos at the back of our garden).

just a couple of references, but if anybody is interested in some
particular one, I would be of course happy to oblige:

No?, Alva., (2009). Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and
Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. Hill and Wang.

Gallagher, Shaun., (2006). How the Body Shapes the Mind.  Clarendon
Press; New Ed edition (12 Oct 2006)

With best regards,

Gordana

www.gordananovakovic.net


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