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

sally jane norman normansallyjane at googlemail.com
Tue Jul 22 18:06:31 EST 2014


Hi Johannes, all

We were using the notion of tessellation in the computer graphics sense, to
see how we might implement and shape mixed reality boundaries to convey
compelling corporeal experience. The example/ experiment we were engaged in
was work on Blast Theory's "Desert Rain" piece, which actually started out
using a physical water curtain as a boundary for an actor / spectator/
"spectactor" to proceed from one type of space to another. It both
symbolised and instantiated a kind of switching mechanism between two
distinct spaces that were part of the installation/ performance set-up.
Ultimately the water curtain/ screen (on which there were projections) was
replaced by a more standard projection surface (i.e. we got rid of the
"wetware", which was pretty cumbersome!), but for exploring boundaries per
se, and approaches to proxemics - encroachment, traversal, reach etc - it
was experimentally productive.

Perhaps a comparable more recent experiment might be Kirk Woolford's
creation for a Brighton "White Nights" festival a couple of years back.
Kirk motion captured dancers executing brief movement sequences in specific
urban Brighton locations featuring salient landmarks (e.g.
graffiti-cum-mural images), then developed an i-phone app to use real-time,
in situ mapping of the landmarks to convoke the motion captured dancer onto
the screen of the handheld device. There's something uncanny and magically
intimate about calling up these ghostly figures onto one's screen, whilst
thoroughly physically stationed in bustling streets. They generate another
quality of space. Insofar as tessellation (though I'm not particularly hung
up on that word, or any others for that matter - they're pointers for
things I'm trying always inadequately to express) might designate wa



used to describe the organization of information needed to render
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_%28computer_graphics%29> to give
the appearance of the surfaces of realistic three-dimensional objects.


On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 10:00 PM, Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
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