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

Sat Jul 26 21:05:53 EST 2014

Hi Johannes and all,

I am always happy for the work to be questioned, I find the most exciting
new perspectives can be often be synthesised from the process.

Wireless-Fidelity is really grappling with a popular relational distance to
network technology, which I'm referring to experimentally with a version of
the term 'Virtualising'.  Here I'm trying to push at the complex forces
that surround the mainstream relationship to/attitudes towards both the
internet and the power structures underlying it.  I find 'virtualising' a
useful term here in the context made in my previous post, as those popular
sources have had a huge impact on many subsequent representations of
technology and communication in popular culture (specifically the
internet).  All tended towards a portrayal of 'the network' and the many
forms it takes in these fictions as something beyond understanding or
access to any but a mystical 'expert', sphinx-like in their guardianship of
occult knowledge, beyond the ken of the passive masses.  These powerful and
popular representations all established themselves just as the internet was
becoming an everyday feature of home life for a huge amount of people, and
I feel that these fictions have helped to allow the exploitation of privacy
and personal data that the majority of internet users are subject to today.
 Terms like 'virtual reality' and 'cyberspace' were suddenly the topic du
jour of multiple hugely popular fictional realities (still built on today
by endless online fanfics), no doubt fired on by the digital utopianism
prevalent at the end of the last century.  Out of view, misunderstood,
imagined as a non-real space with non-real consequences...these are all
common to those 'virtual reality' fictions before broadband and smartphones
changed the playing field, and drawing attention to this illustrated
relationship to technology/power (that certainly has a huge historical
foundation existing long before the invention of the computer) with use of
the term 'virtual' is a useful way of setting a broader context for the
discussions the work is trying to open up.  The perception of the network
as a technology that's only noticed when it malfunctions or fails; of
Facebook and Google etc as 'free' (the great quote being that when
something online is free, you're not the customer, you're the product); of
'the cloud' as being ethereal, rather than manifest as hugely consumptive
data centers surrounded by armed guards; of the internet existing outside
of factional politics (a privileged and erroneous perspective difficult to
hold outside of the west) - these popular ideas all create distance between
the user and the technology around us.

Foregrounding the corporate bodies in the network is one small gesture in
trying to broaden the perception of the network as being fundamentally
politically and ideologically operated (this can easily be taken literally
through examining ownership of the submarine data cables
http://submarine-cable-map-2013.telegeography.com/).  The most cursory
background exploration of an internet service provider will start throwing
up info on what sites they choose to block, who owns them, who they sell
user data to etc. - this is all generally listed on their wikipedia page.
 These elements are open to change and shift with other political and
technological forces, so Wireless-Fidelity hopes to create a tool with
lasting use by inviting the listener to an explicit awareness of the
density and presence of corporate bodies, opening the door to further
exploration and discussion with this knowledge.

We have no biological sensory receptors for this data present in the
network signal without technological mediation - the sonification deployed
here uses a varied textural palette to involve the listener's body through
sound in the perception of the data rather than viewed through a removed
screen as this dataset is commonly perceived.  The low bass drone in
headphones resonates particularly dominantly, reflecting BTs long-standing
market share - there is no volume control for the listener other than to
move closer or further away to the signal, elements lost in the limited
involvement the video alone can create.

I'm currently building multiple copies of the device to be loaned out to
gallery visitors during the upcoming Brighton Digital Festival - allowing
them to experience a new sensory experience of well-trodden streets.  The
installation the devices will be based in will specifically explore the
ramifications of the data that the device highlights, and I'm eager to
incorporate these ideas into a wider realm of discussion.

Wesley

P.S. Thank you for sharing the ritual with us in this way Johannes - I felt
that you extended the collectivity all the way here.

On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 11:24 PM, Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> dear all
>
> [Kirk schreibt]
>
> >>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.>>
>
>
> I'd like to thank Sally Jane, Wesley and Kirk, for inviting us to visit
> Brighton (via vimeo and play.google.com/store/apps). Also, Kirk reopened
> a question posed at the beginning of the month by Sue and Simon (see in
> quote) – “does virtual embodiment depend on, augment or replace bodily
> practices?”.
>
> I wondered whether others went to have a look/listen?
>
> These work examples are really helpful, and inspiring thought (Wireless
> Fidelity / Moments in Place), and I am grappling to find a good response,
> as they deserve so.
>
> Having just come home from the funeral that I had mentioned, my mind is
> adrift. The funeral was a funeral, and I have not attended many recently,
> not in the ancestral village, and I was not entirely prepared for the
> affect it had on me, in the presence of so many people from the village, as
> we attended the church service, then walked up the hill to the cemetery,
> then followed the precise ritual of attending to the last farewell to the
> deceased member of family and community, each action seemed scripted and
> yet natural, inevitable and communal, clear, somber and quiet, in place or
> in a distinct relationship to this location, the occasion of gathering, and
> the "place binding" (here i quote Kirk's reference to Tim Ingold whose
> writing on being ensounded and moving in sound i always admired (e.g.
> "Against Soundscape/Autumn Leaves"). The last ceremony was in silence, no
> sound heard except the rustling of leaves and the wind of an on-coming
> storm that did not arrive, the clouds drifting away slowly as we gathered
> later on some empty plots inside the cemetery, then folks walked slowly
> over to other older graves of departed ones, some recent, some longer ago,
> and then near the exist, slowly in low voice we shook hands and greeted one
> another, i knew some but most were unfamiliar to me, they also groped for
> my name and then they remembered, not always me, but my father or mother or
> brother, then we chatted, and slowly made our way out of the heterotopic,
> as the sky had cleared and became all blue again, evening setting in. The
> village was at peace, and we could feel it. I was grateful to those
> moments, unfathomable as they may be, undeserved as they may be; but so
> they should be, one should be able to bury one's loved ones in peace and in
> the present real.
>
> Then I wondered whether a place can be virtualized or whether  (I pick up
> Sally Jane) "an opaque ownership/ hidden ideologies of physical network
> structure .. can be artistically foregrounded, as in [Wes's]...use of
> sound"  or, as Wesley himself suggests, "de-virtualized"?  Can one really,
> as Wesley writes, <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>>
>
> I admit that after listening [https://vimeo.com/94572853] and watching [
> http://vimeo.com/80370446]  I have doubts, but I also thank, as I said
> earlier, the artists for sharing their work. I would want to invite others
> too, here, to respond to the question of augmentation. As to my response, I
> did not quite find it quite possible to walk with Wesley (via vimeo) and
> listen to Low Bass drones,  Granular Pianos, Female Vocal Samples, High
> Frequency Distortion Drones, Piano Loops, and Shoreline Recording of waves,
> and then imagine a, or any possible, relationship to BT's or Sky's market
> share. I looked at the streets, houses, and listened to the sound, but
> could not discern a "substance of data" or physical connection to anything,
> please help me. How would the walker extrapolate marketshares from ocean
> waves? And what good would it do?
>
> In the case of 'Moments in Place,'  I was intrigued by the issue of site
> specificity and performances in an urban space captured (dancers were
> there, I gather, to move in these places) to be "rendered"  live [via hand
> held iPads/phones pointed at the place]  "in 3D allowing the audience to
> walk around and explore the relationship between the performance and
> location" ..."exploring movemenrt histories and echoes of place" ... in a
> kind of " virtual heritage" performance!
>
> The notion of a "virtual heritage" performance is mind-boggling, as I
> think I am aware of historical reconstructions (re-performances) of, say,
> medieval plays, in their original locations supported by the English
> Heritage Foundation...... – a theatre colleague of mine is engaged in such
> enterprise (e.g. the AHRC-funded ‘Staging and Representing the Scottish
> Renaissance Court’ project, led by Greg Walker, Thomas Betteridge, and
>  Eleanor Rycroft in collaboration with Historic Scotland...In June 2013,
> the project was responsible for the staging in Linlithgow of the first
> full-length professional production of 'The Three Estates' since the
> original performances in 1552 and 1554, and for the recreation of Lyndsay’s
> 1540 Interlude in Linlithgow Palace and Stirling Castle, etc).  These
> reconstructions are usually done in situ and with real people attending a
> real performance becoming aware of the historical sedimentations of the
> place...
>
> The "virtual embodiment", watching Kirk's Vimeo documentation, was unclear
> to me regarding intent and embodied meaning (shared ritual collectivity, as
> in the funeral described earlier), perception (most passers by did not seem
> to look at the performer), and address (who is holding the iPad, and knows
> about where to hold/point it? and draw from the experience of the avatars
> that pop up? and making a connection to place or accidental street art?),
> and thus, coming back to Wesley, what are the socio-political questions
> here, regarding the "mapping", and what is "mapping", really {regarding
> embodiment)?  What ghosts? What is augmented?
>
> I do not mean to question the art works, I am trying to figure out what
> "embodiment" you address.
>
>
> respectfully
> Johannes Birringer
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
-----------------------------------
www.wesleygoatley.com
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