[-empyre-] whose "our systems"

[Garth Paine]

Hi Sue et al

I thought it might be useful to respond with some writing around the nature of experience and embodiment - I understand your frame for virtuality, but I am constantly trying to really understand what that is from a kind of direct experience and how it changes based on my conditioning and on the socially/communally understood reference - I am asking myself all the time, to what extent is the accepted paradigm valid - what does it miss, what does it establish through aspiration rather than existent phenomena.

So here is part of a framework (edited down here) developed by myself and several others at WISP2010 which I organised at Critical Path in Sydney in 2010/201.  This section pertains specifically and only to notions of Experience and Embodiment in interactive works and makes a distinction with pre-existing paradigms of performance

Experience and Embodiment contains three subdimensions: 
Porosity, Perception, and Presence.

a) Porosity. The content of the work, or the work itself (the artefact, musical work, play, dance work etc), may be more or less porous or responsive to real-time influence and, correspondingly, more or less sealed. Likewise, the embodied movements of the performer or performers may be (and may be experienced as) more or less open to influence in real time. For instance, in standard mainstream performance a soliloquy in Shakespeare is, to some approximation, a fixed artefact. The words must remain unchanged.

b) Perception. In many forms of interactive performance, the perceptual attention and experience of both performers and audience is more diffuse and multisensory or multimodal. Rather than restriction to sight and sound, embodied interactive performance often draws on and taps in to rich kinesthetic or movement awareness, often aligning or confronting the proprioceptive and motor systems of performers and audience members by way of unusual, collaborative, mediated, or hybrid movement forms. Communication is thus not solely the transmission and perception of explicit content, but taps more implicit, habitual, and embodied forms of sensory-affective memory and experience. The openness or porosity of the work may be more or less available to performer and/or audience, and the evaluation of intention will not be entirely conscious and explicit. The experience and perception of commitment, of flow and focus, is a multisensory engagement with the work.

c) Presence. Performer/s and audience may be more or less immersed or absorbed in the momentary experience of the work, or correspondingly more or less experientially distant or detached. Presence or distance respectively can occur at a number of levels which need not always coincide, and can be more or less free from presupposition and morality. For performers, paradoxically, a heightened sense of presence can sometimes emerge alongside a feeling of detachment, when there is no longer a need for heavy conscious monitoring and direct control of the minutiae of embodied activity, such that the sequences and interactions that arise in real time seem to erupt from outside the conscious self.


Cheers,
Garth Paine
garth at activatedspace.com



On Jul 8, 2014, at 12:54 AM, Sue Hawksley <sue at articulateanimal.org.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear John, Johannes and all
> 
> To John - 
> On 7 Jul 2014, at 13:06, John Hopkins <jhopkins at neoscenes.net> wrote: 
> 
>> I suspect that you perhaps have explored some of the aspects of breathing modeled by yogic teachings  -- as some of the play you describe here are moving somewhat in that direction -- patterning, awareness, presence, pacing, not-knowing, and even fear -- these are, of course, broad principles of embodied energy flow... (Richard Freeman's teachings on 'pranayama' are quite profound in their lucid descriptions of how to fully integrate the breath into embodied and energized presence)
>> 
>  Yes, absolutely, the design of the breath experiment drew on yoga practices. I am not aware of Richard Freeman's writings but have read and practiced a fair bit within similar traditions and will look up his work. THanks for that. 
> 
> To Johannes - 
> On 7 Jul 2014, at 23:13, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> How do you know what the others felt or feared?  how to you share (reflect? articulate) awareness after the presence/present and virtual moments  (and Simon must then not understand your work at all, does he?)?
> 
> 
> Of course I don't know anything about others or my own experience;  just make the best attempt at approaching an understanding, using my practice and that wonderful technology of language. Phenomenological methodologies are useful and Don Ihde's proposals of the post-phenomenological make sense to me. I think the processes and outcomes of collaborative and interdisciplinary practices are also means whereby we sharing our knowing / not-knowing through doing.
> 
> all the best, Sue
> 
> 
> SUE HAWKSLEY
> independent dance artist
> sue at articulateanimal.org.uk
> http://www.articulateanimal.org.uk
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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