[-empyre-] whose "our systems" & body weather

[Johannes Birringer]

[cont]


the question of whether the dispositif is us, admittedly, now confuses me,  as I had probably been thinking still in terms of the (artistic framework) interactive environments we had set up during a live media/performance workshop at the EMPAC in upstate New York a few years back, mentioning the "dispositif"  and maybe it well could be compared to the corporate but I had not gone that far, Alan.

Refering to my curiosity about no-tech practices of virtual embodiment, reading Sue and her fine description  of 

>bringing attention to the physicality of the breathing, the pressure and resonance of the activity, regardless of whether we are trying to be attentionally 'here' or somewhere else. It also seems to dissolve the boundary between 'real' and 'virtual' in bodily terms>  

made me aware that there are different ways of approaching "embodiment" of course, and I am reminded of the need to complicate matters, as John also points out when he proposes:

> For me virtuality is therefore a question of degree  rather than of the tired real/virtual dichotomy. And this degree relates to  atomic, molecular, cellular, organismic, social, and cosmic processes (another  words, scale independent)>


The complicating I currently work with relates to "gestures"  (this is a project I am involved in called METABODY: TÉKHNES MEDIALES CORPÓREAS Y PUENTES DE DIVERSIDAD)( http://metabody.eu/) and what they are or can be, who reads them, and how are they read, and whether I can find some or create some that maybe don't conform to legible repertoires or normative patterns and perceptions  -- thus, thinking here about what Susan Kozel had briefly mentioned - affect. We are interested in illegible affects.

The complicating of gesture is quite exciting (just received a book called "Migrations of Gesture" by Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness), as obviously bridges would have to be made between positions that privilege the biological body, subjectvity, and subjective memory, and somatic experience on one hand, and discourses that follow a deconstructive critique of embodiment (say, Judith Butler's gender trouble; Ananya Chatterjea's "value of mistranslations and contaminations, etc) as a staging of the body through structures of signification that are not "our" own or the body's own, on the other.


So, Alan, how to answer your point about the corporate. Not sure.

What I remember when reflecting on dispositif  – and I am sure those of you working in media arts have similar experiences –  was practical:  I had to deal first of all with the architecture of the studio, the building, then the technical infrastructure and set up (my collaborator Mark Coniglio had already had a camera put up at the ceiling grid to give us a "bird's eye" view for the software patching), the tools, the projectors (also on the grid, able to project downward to the floor, that already created a strangely limiting parameter), lights, sound systems, cables, laptops, sensors, and so on and so, forth, then we assembled the group, each  worker arriving possibly with a similar but different agenda, then programming started, physical workshops, film workshops and a whole lot of things, but eventually I became interested in asking how we behave (and expect visitors and audiences) to behave or to move or experience the environment, how we become aware of the (programmed) apparatus as a (programmed for responses) apparatus (yes, also of attenuating some, amplifying others),  and then how to reflect on that apparatus that includes us into the programming and the experience of its effects.

So yes, we become entangled.
The notion of the "apparatus" was probably closer to older Brechtian and Marxist thinking. "Dispositif" became the prefered term for "arrangement" in French cinema theory. 

Is not the historical cinematic dispositif  a precursor of today’s interactive operationality? And of the contortionist aesthetics of much inter or intra-active work? The dispostif is based on rules and perceptional alignments that link instrumental constellations with various material stagings of processual activation – framing (spatio-temporal limitations) and parameters, with the cause-and-effect technical elements of the user interface (microphone, sensors, cameras, keyboard, mouse, joystick, buttons, sliders, projectors, screens, loudspeakers, etc) that control input and output media. But who would have thought that the rules of the game are so clear, that recipients intuitively want to “master” the functionality of the system and offer their labor? 

Perhaps in discussion to come, we could clarify both the notion of the dispositif and the question of what controls whom/who controls what. As suggested, film theory since the 1970s, following Jean-Louis Baudry, has prefered the term dispositif, the French word meaning “disposition” or “arrangement”. Philosophers of media and social/political theory became interested in the notion of the dispositif already in the 1970s and 1980s, utilizing it as a conceptual category for examining environments (material, technological, medial) or regulating, strategic frameworks that are configured in certain ways making it possible for certain types of phenomena to occur (Foucault tended to emphasize the regulatory and panoptic formations that produce power, knowledge, and subjectivity); 

now Simon, if we were to say "we are it", how do you now address the kind of questions about memory/subjectivity that I felt are driving the kind of movement workshops Sue detailed? How would you
recognize a singular or modulated gesture that had not been "maintained" already beforehand?


regards
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab