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

Thu Jul 24 18:16:05 EST 2014

Thanks Wes for picking up on the prompt!  I think your reflection on opaque
ownership/ hidden ideologies of physical network structure that can be
artistically foregrounded, as in your use of sound, offers the beginnings
of an answer to Johannes's question re "virtual embodiment (as) a parochial
media arts concern or academic research area".  We're all caught up in
"anthropophagic" dependence on the technozoosemiotic (Louis Bec) systems
we've devised as our extensions, and creative work revealing the extent of
this entanglement strikes me as being more necessary than ever. Like
Harwood's Coal-fired computers. I don't see this as cozily separate terrain
to the horror of drones in war zones, but as integral to much-needed
reflection on our new "nature" (can I call it that?). Eaten away with worry
about the machinations on which we and others depend, including to express
our concerns to fora like this one.

To return to earlier comments, replacing a rain curtain by a conventional
projection surface is perhaps prosaic but that somehow misses the point/s:
1) developing an installation piece that can't be shown anywhere is a
problem (revealed by sophisticated infrastructure issues during the early
years of VR, where "reference" works could be experienced in half a dozen
sites in the world at best...), 2) the luxury of exploring the real rain
curtain prompted different ways of creatively thinking about that surface,
and 3) our goal wasn't realism - while there's a case to be made for
site-specific work, we sought rather to study real-world affordances like
water, to see how we might "translate" them into and symbolise them by
another medium. An artistic project, in short.

sorry for brevity, am enjoying the exchanges but still caught up in too
much parallel stuff to respond more decently...

best
sj

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 9:39 AM, Wesley Goatley <wesleygoatley at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
>
>
> --
> -----------------------------------
> www.wesleygoatley.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20140724/df170426/attachment.htm>