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

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all,  Hellen, Sally Jane

thanks for these responses --  and I hope others will join in and partake ---
probably I need to say here, Hellen, that of course I have the utmost respect for your work
and long time pioneering performances across spaces and networked places, and what you
call your "embodied ethnography" and your experiences/perceptions/listenings to the many
systems you performed in ever since, what, the late 80s and early 90s..?  Surely someone
like yourself who has worked with motion sensing and capture and biosensor systems would
be well attentive and knowing of nuances and differences, and perhaps in such cases of
long term practice the notion of an embodied knowledge of "other spaces" is well earned.

You also mentioned the poetry of/in such performance experiences, and of course you
spoke of the kinesthetic or synasthetic affects, the physics, the somatic "knowing" you learnt...
so let me take back the word snake oil, I think that was meant in regard to the illusion effect,
the belief in what Foucault (in that lecture on "Of Other Space, Heterotopias," in 1967) refered
to as "sanctified space," the assumptions (sadly in slapstick though most of us are no Buster Keatons)
that our extensions generate, and can mark what is substituted, that (as Sally Jane implies in her
Brighton example) they produce lovely ghosts:

>>
ghostly figures onto one's screen, whilst 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 ways of rendering novel
experience by combining different, usually non-miscible kinds of space,
then perhaps this is what we were hinting at with the earlier text and work
on boundaries. Heterotopias defined as ways of juxtaposing supposedly
incompatible sites, and thereby eliciting novel affordances/ experiences,
>> [Sally Jane]

May I ask what this other quality of space is (the virtual)? compellingly switched? (the rain curtain
replaced by screen in "Desert Rain", how odd and disappointing). And is not Foucault's lecture
charmingly inconclusive and romantic?  The airplane, the ship, our heterotopia (dystopia?)?

I should not have spoken so lightly of the cemetery, in light of the world we live in, not would I
ever want to attend a funeral as an ethnographer. I will attend, and meet relatives i have not seen
in many years, some of them I don't even know. 

But Hellen last week mention the "cultural", perhaps, using the term swallowing, implied even
cultural anthropopagy -- and this of course interests me...:

>>for i can taste the nuances of its difference perceptually  -  choreographically, politically, culturally,  
this  is an expansive  field of interaction .. >> [Hellen]

Foucault lectures that "from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an 'illness.' The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself."

If that is a cultural critique, I guess Foucault misses some facts though I have seen cemeteries in Texas that are outside the town boundaries and seemingly forgotten; but  in my ancestral village the cemetery remains central, on a hill, 
in walking distance from the church, the graves tenderly cared for by the relatives and families, like a garden, the ritual occasions of saying
farewell an established cultural tradition (nothing too heterotopic) integrated into the rhythms of life and necessarily so. As in Mexican culture, the dead are
not "incompatible" (Foucault) with the living, not relegated to dark hiding places.

In terms of a colonial history, or recent eras of decolonization, I wonder what ethnographies of technovirtual systems might tell us.

regards

Johannes Birringer