[-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose "our systems"

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

thanks to these discussions over the past week......
I was in Madrid at the METABODY workshop, a European  collaborative performance project, and could not quite participate due to our work-
schedule but read the postings by Sophia (I liked the term you used, "in-fleshment"), Samantha, John, Sue and then Garth, Tamara, and Hellen......

Garth -  your notion of porosity of content, I was not sure how to understand this. How is a soliloqy or monologue unfixed, and how would it
change in an interactive performance?  and as to "interactive performance,"  how is "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"  interesting to you regarding to the question of content? 
What rich  kinesthetic or movement awareness have you discerned in what I often (perhaps disappointedly) would consider "slapstick"? How do we really interpret what we see (just think of the less than really encouraging observations that Tamara describes after her workshops with the children holding their iPads (and their fixation on big screen  images:
>children were captivated by their digital representation and enjoyed moving with their avatar, who on the large screen, was much larger than them ....>)

I would not mind debating the 'slapstick" audience action in many interactive installations (whatever the virtual embodiment factor is or might be):     I think we need to be more critical of the so-called fake embodiment our interface protocols induce (and John would probably agree here?). The same (sorry if I tread upon the somatics aspects here) holds true for performers performing "virtual embodiments."

To shift, ever slightly,  I wondered after last week's workshops directed in Madrid by Robert Wechsler (formerly director of Palindrome, now offering interactive workshops in sounding movement with his software "MotionComposer" to people with disabilities)  -  and perhaps this would be directed as a question to Hellen's "alchemy"  --- >>in performance  this agency brings with it  capacity to,  enliven performers presence,  minutia of attentiveness  to time passing  from  and through   transformed synaesthically engender new forms of virtuosity - I remember in previous post I think in the last two weeks  the word of alchemy....> --- I wondered whether we are fooling ourselves or whether there is something like the metaphysics Hellen points to?  I tried my best to be skeptical about metaphysics (or out of body experiences and religious rapture) n my last post of the first week, but sadly nobody responded, so I will ask  again:

Hellen - what do you mean when you write >-embodied (ethnography) in ' systems'  which have dissolved borders between my physical and virtual state of being - distributed over networks >    are  you distributed?  I have not been distrbuted , so I am curious?   

Porosity?  Jaime del Val, also at Madrid, tried very hard to make me think so too  (in his "Metaformance – Microsexes, Disalignments, Microdeviations" on the rooftop of his studio),  my body mingled with his, and my perception becoming destabilized and confused by amorphous bodylandscapes generated by the camera tracking his and my skin, well, it did not work for me, I knew my body and his camera and could see what the camera created.....

Thus, "virtual" is a convenient delusion or artistic polemic, no?  

For the people with physical or cognitive disabilities in Robert's workshop [http://www.motioncomposer.com/en/welcome/], however potent it was, I could not tell whether the participants actually believed (wished they surely did) their movement gestures "made" the music we heard. (The software did). And thus increasingly one could sense a feeling of snake oil magic, the participants may imagine to "compose" music but they surely do not "swallow the system" and it is not their/our system. Borders did not dissolve. 

Most likely I cannot speak for the participants, although I also tried the system (MotionComposer has 6 environments of different sounds that can be triggered) and failed to enjoy it; the participants with disabilities laughed and cheered it, so they must have felt their movements mattered ..... yet I was worried that it didn't  (and perhaps Sue has some experience on this?).

respectfully
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab