[-empyre-] into what midst?

[Brian Massumi]

There was another "midst" in play that generated a lot of discussion during the lead-up to the event (in the extended sense that Charlotte's post talked about). This is the in-between of the registers of bodily experience. The great majority of projects shown in the SAT's immersive dome are shows that still the audience in the way Toni discussed, contenting themselves with putting the usual spectator/spectacle division in the round. The system can, however, be interactive, and in preparation for our event we attended demos of a number of interactive projects developed for the SATosphere. Most of the projects created a virtual space (in the nonphilosophical sense of a simulated space) that either attempted to represent "real" space with maximum accuracy to create an en-domed double of it, or to create an imaginary space. The imaginary spaces sometimes played with conventions of spatial representation, for example by multiplying perspective lines, refusing to supply a horizon, or fractalizing the scene. But they remained highly ordered geometrically. This made the navigation of the stimulated space a basically linear extension of the conventional hand-eye coordination used to manipulate the controls, very much the way video games do. One of our goals was to try to experiment with ways of activating the different registers of experience in ways that did not simply reproduce or extend the cross-modal hand-eye coordination underpinning our instrumental, everyday navigations in the world as well as most simulated spaces. We felt that the key was to activate proprioception differently through vision to create kinesthetic effects suggesting other, less instrumental and more expressive, alliances between sense registers. The idea was that if we succeeded in doing this, the role of the interior of the dome as a monadic doubling of an outside space might also be troubled, and that this might become a vector for reexperiencing the relation between the inside of the dome and its urban surrounds (another meaning of the "midst"). Our experimentation with various forms of image-making, often in tandem with movement practices as Charlotte described, but also through such nonstandard devices as Nathaniel Stern's method of using free-range flatbed scanners (attached to a battery pack to become mobile) to capture images from the surrounds, were guided by these concerns. Whether we succeeded in recomposing the senses in the way we had hoped, or in recomposing the relation between the dome and its outside, is questionable. But actively posing the question and experimentally pursuing it was a speculative gesture that made for an intense collective experience, and made the endeavor well worth the while.

Brian

Le 2013-04-09 à 19:19, Charlotte Farrell <charlottefarrell at gmail.com> a écrit :

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear all,
> 
> I would like to briefly take up Johannes' comment "the actual event". This term particularly struck a chord with me in relation to the Dome event (and Generating the Impossible, though I'll stick to the former for purposes of specificity). 
> 
> Connotations associated with 'an actual event' usually relate to boundaries of measured time. In the first instance it strikes me as referring to something somewhat 'staged' which an event very well may be. However, something of crucial interest to 'Into the Midst'  - both before being located in and around the SAT Dome and during the measured time spent there - was a complication of such a concept of 'the actual event' in processual art practice; or, rather, art practice as process. Events such as those processually enacted by/with the SenseLab, rather, foreground a notion of event that is radically empirical. Simply, they are collective happenings that foregrounds the 'thisness' of experience, rather than the 'thatness' of form.  There are 'enabling constraints' as Erin Manning and Brian Massumi discuss in their paper, Exploding the Gallery, yet the event is what is enabled by the constraints in which a series of 'somethings' germinate and sometimes flower. It is not the object that results from our experimentation as such, but an event in the making with an indeterminate end point. 
> 
> Perhaps we'd like to discuss here in more detail the relationship between notions of the actual, virtual and the event as we played with them in Into the Midst.
> 
> I've also been thinking that something that was particularly generative about this event (though some people may deem its downfall) was the ways in which as the residency unfolded, people trailed off in various directions or areas of focus working with particular materials. Clusters formed. Andrew Goodman, for instance, was experimenting with sound which engaged various people at different times while also engaging in a more solo practice in other instances. Thinking about this the last few days, I've been comparing it to Generating the Impossible, where people weren't able to work so specifically in their area of specialty with particular materials (because we were in the woods for a week!!!) with limited access to technology and resources. This considerable difference in access to materials made the Dome event much more individual at times, but it also brought in a cross-pollination of art making materialities. For instance, Zila Muniz spent some time directing Hannah Buck's filming of a groups choreographic propositions, while at others times Hannah would bring an idea to the movement group. This cross-pollination in creative making was something that opened a space for peoples individual contributions while creating tranversal potentials of exchange. In this material intermingling, surprising things would, could and did happen...
> 
> I'd be interested to hear other peoples experience of this challenge of collective creative practice in relation to 1) the conditions of the space and 2) people's area of 'speciality'.
> Charlotte
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 1:07 AM, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> dear all
> 
> having read the two introductions to the SenseLab project (Generating the Impossible? Into the Midst?), it was of
> course fascinating to ponder the questions that Erin Manning raised when describing the plan to "explode
> the gallery" – here meaning the SAT dome in Montréal ? a gallery?  – especially when economic issues surfaced (about renting
> the dome space and making money) or, alongside, issues of the Lab itself as having become its own institution or institutional-affiliate
> not experimental, collaborative, collective enough? what notion of collective do you use?).
> 
> The actual event that Erin described seemed to have been site specific, in the Parc, adjacent to that SAT space, and
> it involved two kinds of participatory activities (food, and the crocheted web). Could you please elaborate
> how this now constitutes a 'choreographic object" based on 'new media techniques" exploding anything? (which space?)
> 
> I think I merely wondered what you were planning inside the neighborhood, on the one hand (how was the project
> communicated to the audience or the par dwellers or visitors), and where the "midst" now is located, urban space?
> or adjacent space (non institutional) and how did the action-environment you recounted made for next steps -
>  "providing us with a diagram for entering the space the next day? ? which is the second space?
> 
> with regards
> 
> Johannes Birringer
> Dap-Lab
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre



__________________
Brian Massumi
Faculté des arts et des sciences
Département de communication
Université de Montréal
C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-Ville
Montréal, QC H3C 3J7 Canada






-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20130410/4d99f7a9/attachment.htm>