[-empyre-] whose "our systems"

[Johannes Birringer]

dear soft_skinned space members

we were hoping to have many more of you becoming involved in the forum; I see the month as a very open debate platform, where perhaps some, or many of us, might even wonder
what "virtual embodiment" would necessarily mean or indicate to us now, as a subject, and whether indeed it arouses interest and suspicion, or not.

Susan Kozel and I both would appreciate more of you to come in here, and partake..


Last night, rereading my casual reference to Roy Ascott and Paul Sermon, I went back to Susan Kozel's book, "Closer: Performance,Technologies, Phenomenology" (2007), which was probably written ten years ago,
and I again felt full of admiration about the ways in which Susan describes her work, her practices with early motion capture, networking/telematics, interactive and sensory technologies, wearables,  affective computing, and "social computing" _ and I know Susan has done very exciting work recently with mobile media -- this was a comprehensive analytic and philosophical effort, and as I went & reopened the book, I noted my underlinings and question marks in the chapter on "Space-making" (Virtuality and Materiality), and lest it be forgotten, my sceptical view of love in the telematic embrace was already probably contradicted by your own experience another 10 years earlier (mid-1990s), it was you, was it not, who originally lingered on the (virtual and real) bed in Paul Sermon's well known installation Telematic Dreaming"?  Why did Paul not lie on the bed himself? 
why did he ask you or a (female) dancer/choreographer?   Are choreographers better dreamers? Have better extension?


PS
last night  I also felt, re: "embodiment" that we need to become much much more specific:  which embodiment?  which body?  abled? young or older, south east asian, nigerian, female afro-brasilian from Río, working class from Wrocław? male european academic embodied?  have you heard laid-off factory workers talk about embodiment, of "our system" (dispositif)? or would the young migrant worker from eastern europe who just chatted with me at the café care about extended bodies? Maybe yes, I don't know, he is on Facebook he mentioned as there he keeps up with his friends. 
last night I was reading through Ananya Chatterjea's article on the "value of mistranslations and contaminations" (Dance Research Journal  volume 45:1  / 2013 / pp 7-21) in which she critiques the flattening (flat embodiment?) offered  by the circuits of globalization, and she looks at Asian dance practices and how "traditional" is faced off against northern euro-american "standards" of the contemporary choreographic/ing body. the one that regulates the extensions of what counts as choreographic (versus the traditional, local, and rural?). 

Thanks for your comment Simon, and yes, I tried at one point (see my blog from 2010: http://empaclivemediaperformancelab.blogspot.com/   : "The behavior of technical beings")  to translate "dispositif" from the french into a conceptual framework for a  workshop series of tests we were making with the behavior of folks that wonder into an interactive, networked/computational environment, visitors (including our selves) attending to a "virtual" space of potential engagement.....  It was truly interesting and curious to read you say:

<<embodiment offers another means by which we can address, interrogate and unpack how we become what we are as a dispositif - as a convergence of all our elements, including our attendant (symbolic and material) systems.>>

are you saying "we" are / become the dispositif?  

I always assumed I was merely attendant to the technical assemblages, and then, as I attend, yes, then i possibly (not for sure) contaminate, I become compromised, convoluted, i take on characteristics of the machining, my whole life of course already a series of trainings and coachings and at best, I commit or avoid blunders, retrain my body-mind frequently, mind my new techniques, then (naturally) try to save face (when techniques fail and I am not match fit), then mistranslate again, and again, trying to fail better. My dispositif, a shambles. 

regards
Johannes Birringer