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

Wed Jul 23 18:39:53 EST 2014

Hi all,

I've been following the fascinating discussion this month with much
interest - as Sally Jane pointed out it is quite relevant to my recent
work.  The piece she mentioned is called Wireless-Fidelity (and can be seen
in action here: https://vimeo.com/94572853), and along with what has
already been mentioned it also attempts to de-virtualise (to clarify, used
here in the sense of bringing the substance of data into the physical -
embedded in popular culture heavily by Lawnmower Man/Matrix/90s hacker
films etc.) the opaque ownership/hidden ideologies of the physical network
infrastructure, and through sound create a distinct bodily/sensorial
relationship to it.  These forces of corporate influence embedded in the
network are in themselves virtualised to increase their opacity, the
ramifications buried in on-screen user agreements affecting our off-screen
rights.

Wesley

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 9:22 AM, sally jane norman <
normansallyjane at googlemail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> sorry, didn't mean to push send yet - winding up below
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 9:06 AM, sally jane norman <
> normansallyjane at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>> A comparable 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 urban Brighton
>> locations featuring salient landmarks (e.g. graffiti-cum-mural images),
>> then created 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 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,
>> also offer a productive image for what I'm trying to get at.
>>
>
> Similar work is being done in sound, with its propensity for
> juxtapositions of distinctive if not "incompatible" spaces. A project by
> Wes Goatley, Sussex post-grad who might be following empyre (please jump in
> Wes) exemplifies this: Wes devised a way to map ISP bandwidth allocations
> of a number of key providers to generate sound in the headset worn by
> someone "walking in the city" (pace de Certeau), such that the sonic realm
> evolved (pleasurably - no mean feat!) with the bleed of one bandwidth
> segment into another, providing a layer of quasi-realism (i.e. genuine
> market segment information), albeit manipulated in order to be thus
> "sounded out". A track for one's tracks...
>
> on that note, I'd better push send for real this time
> all best
> sj
>
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 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
>>>
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
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>

-- 
-----------------------------------
www.wesleygoatley.com
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