[-empyre-] whose "our systems"

[sally jane norman]

Dear Johannes, Susan, all

Discussion threads are exciting; we're in the midst of a symposium on "Live
Coding and the Body" organised by Thor Magnusson, Alex McLean et al (
https://twitter.com/hashtag/lcatb?src=hash), so please accept my apologies
for not contributing more to steadily growing exchange... looking forward
to diving in a little later this month

best wishes
Sally Jane




On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 2:18 PM, Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20140706/66f1fb1e/attachment.htm>