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

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

John asked about the scope of interactive systems, as we generally refer to such when we build them for a performance or an installation, and yes to that extent
the scope is limited to artistic /social interactional ventures of the kind that some of us have discussed here or that Simon just reported on earlier (ADT's 'Multiverse'), or the workshops that Tamara had mentioned, or the
MotionComposer workshop I had written about yesterday.


>>I do feel, though, words like 'interaction' and 'virtual' hardly have any  intelligible relation to the nature of any shared reality, given their social 
usage within the techno-sphere, even in the art/new media scene. [John]>>

Not sure I understand the way you are going, John, as obviously the workshop with an interactive system (generating / affording manipulation by human gesture in a room) that I refered to, held at La 
Encendida in Madrid last Monday through Wednesday (www.lacasaencendida.es/) did have an intelligible relation to a small shared reality, and even though I may have reservations, it did afford
the kind of kinetic empathy that Simon felt was lacking for the spectators of a dance concert (with 3D glasses handed out) in Australia; perhaps I should subject the affordances to a closer scrutiny
and think about why the "virtual" is compromised differently for people (with different dis/abilities) involved..... for us there, at that place, not "everything was affected by interaction with everything else."

Now I read Sally Jane, and she comes back to the discussion we had in the first week about assemblages and dispositifs, and I had tried to be clear why I used the terms with caution, but also stated that I do not
necessarily believe that the system is us, or, worse (picking up on current debates on big data, algorithmic machines, and amongst neuroscientist on the neural dispositif and absconds gestural responsiblity) that the dispositifs operate by their own account without that our actions or self insertions (say, playing with MotionComposer, or watching Australian Dance Theatre's "Multiverse") matter much or make a difference -- and the term you used, Sally Jane, 
namely agency, needs as much unpacking, perhaps, as the notion of a heterotopic virtual embodiment.  Unless of course we agree, first of all, that gestures are human made (or animal made) and involve some sort
of social, political or psychological awareness of why one engages a dispositif that is not us but may invite us (as - in the arts - it is programmed, such as MotionComposer, by a collaborative effort between engineers,
composers, and choreographers who had a plan of why they constructed the limited-scope interactional environment, for particular purpose). 

Sally Jane, you mention "tessellated mixed reality" environments ("akin to Foucault's heterotopia") - please could you give an example?  And Karen Barad's intra-actions (she is a physicist? and what on earth is "posthumanist performativity," what gestures do we get here and by whom?, what are "“quantum entanglements and hauntological relations" if remember some of Barad's publications correctly ?....) , how are they different  from interactions?

As to heterotopias, I think cemeteries are included by Foucault, no?  I am gong to a funeral on Friday, in the ancestral village in Germany, so shall look out for the space and how it is changed, and who attends and how our behaviors and alignments are legible. 


respectfully

Johannes Birringer
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