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

[k.woolford at surrey.ac.uk]

Hello all, 

Please accept my apologies for not being able to join this discussion from the beginning of the month. I’ve only been able to follow this week, spurned on by Sally Jane, very graciously forwarding what she’s written about my recent work. The piece she mentions is called “Moments in Place”. Information about the project, documentation, and links to the “Augmented Reality” app are available here: 

http://www.bhaptic.net/moments/

http://vimeo.com/80370446

The project grew out of the Motions in Place Platform (MiPP) research exploring relationships between movement and place. We’ve written a number of articles and book chapters exploring Tim Ingold’s wayfaring where human existence is not fundamentally place-bound, but "place-binding", Juhani Pallasmaa's links between bodies and their “domicile in space”, and Gibson’s affordances where bodies and environments form inseparable pairs. The Moments in Place performances are an attempt to leave a performance in a place and allow audiences to come-and-go around them. My intention was to alert the audience to the fact that they were “embodied” in this location and the location the was effecting(affecting) them as much as it had guided the original performer. As with most site-specific work, more people have now viewed the documentation than experienced the piece in-situ, so don’t know how successful we can call the project. 

However, it’s interesting to look at it from the perspective of Simon’s question, “does virtual embodiment depend on, augment or replace bodily practices?”. Of course we can claim this piece augments current bodily practices by allowing offsets between the performance and perception thereof. However, more happens through pieces such as this. I used different techniques to render the performers as semi-tangible, semi-present or even semi-embodied, because I wanted to evoke notions of ghosts and hauntings. These performers aren’t in the place at the time they are observed, but they were. The experience of the live performance was very different from the performance of the mediated or “virtual” performance. As you can see from the documentation, when we captured a “live” performance in a busy shopping street on a Saturday in Brighton, there was a lot of unintentional interaction from shoppers. When you go back to (re)create the performance at the same site, it’s never the same. Either shoppers walk straight at you making it difficult to observe the performance, or you’re in a quiet, empty space where the movements of the dancer makes less sense. The mediated performance is re-created or created anew each time it’s observed. 

The piece definitely augments traditional bodily practises, but it depends on them as well. It doesn’t replace them.  

best regards, 
-k







On 22 Jul 2014, at 09:06, sally jane norman <normansallyjane at googlemail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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 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
> ‎
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Kirk Woolford 	School of Arts
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