[-empyre-] "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration: time/space prospection, vacant lots

Thu Oct 27 17:58:52 EST 2011

Dear all
my apologies for entering the discussion out of sync - it has all been so
beautifully orchestrated by Johannes and I have been following the
interweavings of different threads. My father-in-law died last week and I
have been absent for a while. I was struck by Sondra's reference a while
back to Ohno saying: "I carry all the dead with me when I dance", and
earlier references to becoming aware through movement (Johannes) and the
question of how to change people's rhythms (Claudia). I am interested in how
the ways we use energy in moving are derived from what is going on around us
(like the pace of walking increasing - I think this has been shown to be
happening across the world) and at the same time can resist those dominant
'economies' of energy.
Dancing in a way that carries the dead, and indeed 'dancing as a ghost' as
Johannnes told us that Ohno wanted to do, strikes me as not only romantic
but also as highly resistant to the rhythms of 'predatory late capitallism'
- paradoxically, a wake-up call to the living to experience time in a
different way
This also has implications for how we live in our material environment and
how it structures our relation to time  . . .
best  wishes
Dee

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 10:27 PM, Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

>
> dear all
>
> something struck me in Sérgio's post, and i think want to bring up the
> particular passage on "prospecting" here, also hoping that Sonja will
> perhaps continue her fascinating thread from last week, which she ended by
> suggesting
> "Imagine (e)motional deceleration as a notion of urbanity".......... and
> she will be joined by Branden Hookway and his perspectives on time,
> architecture and predatory late capitalism....
>
> I think it is quite possible (and there is nothing mystifying about it) to
> link physics, philosophy, dance and architecture, and in fact Jaime del Val
> has given us some powerful conceptual tools in his manifesto on
> disorientation (s/he favors non-linear time, and dis-affection from
> cartesian binaries and postivist science).   I shall also quote from Michael
> Bell's book "Slow Space" at the bottom*, but here is the passage from
> Sérgio's urban intervention.
>
>
> >> Sérgio writes
>
> A lot of changes are going on the city here, because of all
> the money that's going on in Brazil. As result of the devastating
> power of money interests, architectural and urban memories are just
> being destroyed, regardless of the meaning of those places and spaces
> and people's life and history related. Myself, I presented two simple
> works: a poem dealing with the question of commodities  (and ourselves
> as commodities); and a work I've done with my wife, taking advantage
> of a 4mts deep small hole which the engeneering company has made to
> test the ground -- since they will raise a building there. So we've
> put there a reel which people had to roll, and by the end of the line
> a small acrylic piece brough two short sentences: "art is something
> deep", and "art is prospection". People were interested, they played
> it and they laughed. It was really nice. And some really nice
> performance works of young  collectives also took place there in the
> weekend.
> >>
>
>
> I wondered about it just as i marveled at Biyo Kikuchi's butoh performance
> on the street (i sent the picture the other day), "From Listening,"  and
> what struck me was the sense of poetic futility. (I had tried to describe
> this at an earlier point, a few years ago, when i heard about Francis Alÿs
>  and his performance in Peru,  "Cuando la fe mueve montañas" (2002-3).  He
> called the work a "social allegory,"  i would think of it as an immensely
> futile gesture.
>
> Jaime del Val is currently here with us in London, having arrived from
> Dublin where he attended an event called "TRANSFORMING HUMAN NATURE In
> Science, Technology and the Arts" (http://www.transformingthehuman.org/),
> and he mentioned some hard-core transhuman utopianists working in their labs
> on various enhancements. Jaime performed a workshop on
> "microsexes/microdances" which put in action some of the concepts posted
> here, and it was heartening to experience;  and yet, metaformance is also a
> part of fluid complex social choreographies that it seeks to affect (and is
> affected by), it can be absorbed or it can be marginalized, vacated,
> vacuumed, it will wonder the vacant lots,  but here I may be too
> pessimistic, just like Scott Taylor was last week having given up on ethics
> and morality, and culture as such........
>
> Jaime tells us of the occupation movement in Madrid, and today visited the
> occupiers in London at St Paul's.
> Sérgio, art is prospection?  unable to occupy but to make people laugh?
>  are you sure?  or of course you are ironic (like Alÿs).
>
> What, then, to do with/against the "devastating power of money interests,
> architectural and urban memories are just being destroyed, regardless of the
> meaning of those places and spaces and people's life and history related"?
>
>
> with regards
> Johannes Birringer
>
>
> *"Slow Space (edited by Michael Bell) was formed in and by abandoned spaces
> - the vacancies that, by having become the unintended archetype of
> contemporary urbanism, coerce an evolution of conventional visuality and
> inhabitation. The comprehension of an urban condition rendered through
> processes - machinic, regulatory, managerial - thus resides in the temporal.
> These durations, imbricated with the variable flows of the metropolis, form
> the medium for the twenty-three essays and projects that make up "Slow
> Space."  [This book represents an attempt to make time material, and an
> effort to find an architecture and a practice that engages and catalytically
> reconfigures the spaces and processes of the contemporary city.]
>
> It would be great to hear Michael reflecting on Slow Space, some years
> after he wrote/edited the book in 1997-98.
>
>
> **  Footnote to Akram's work at CERN and the accelerator.
>
> IT was just announced that we not got:  "Prix Ars Electronica Collide at CERN"
> – the new international competition for digital artists to win a residency
> at CERN the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva. It is the
> first prize to be announced as part of the new Collide at CERN artists
> residency programme initiated by the laboratory. This new prize marks a 3
> year science/arts cultural partnership and creative collaboration between
> CERN and Ars Electronica – which began with CERN’s cooperation with Origin –
> the Ars Electronica Festival in 2011. The aim of the Prix Ars Electronica
> Collide at CERN prize is to take digital creativity to new dimensions by
> colliding the minds of scientists with the imaginations of artists. In this
> way, we seek to accelerate innovation across culture in the 21st century –
> creating new dimensions in digital arts, inspired by the ideas, engineering
> and science generated at CERN, and produced by the winning artist in
> collaboration with the transdisciplinary expertise of the FutureLab team at
> Ars Electronica.
>
>
> ***  CERN was indeed featured this year at ars electronica, in a small
> exhibition, part of the larger theme ORIGIN (
> http://www.aec.at/origin/en/about/).
>
>
>
>
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-- 

Dee Reynolds

Dee.Reynolds at manchester.ac.uk
http://www.watchingdance.org/
http://watchingdance.ning.com/

School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures
University of Manchester
M13 9PL
UK
tel: +44(0)161 275 3212
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