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

[k.woolford at surrey.ac.uk]

Dear Johannes, et. al, 

Thanks for your response. You’ve picked up on one of the issues I’ve been wrestling with the past few years as a creative practitioner (artist?) functioning within traditional research-led universities. The Moments in Place documentation you saw on Vimeo was created as a REF submission and attempts to demonstrate the links between the underlying Arts and Humanities Research and the Creative Practice.. In trying to address both, I don’t believe I’ve addressed either sufficiently, and am in the process of writing new documentation for both. 

The archaeological or heritage work we addressed through the Motion in Place Platform (MiPP) attempts to use debates surrounding embodiment and bodily practices to inform our understanding of past cultures. In short, we attempted to look at landscapes and archeological records not a sculptures or illustrative records, but to place embodied researchers in human-scale (re)constructions. We had no desire, or interest, to “virtualise” existing experiences or practices. Rather, we explored methods of (re)constructing places which no longer exist. We did this both through “virtual” (re)constructions using interactive technologies as well as through “physical” (re)constructions in collaboration with the experimental archaeologists at Butser Ancient Farm. I’ve adopted Stuart Dunn’s use of the term “(re)construction” to hilight the fact that we constructed several models from the archeological evidence using timber, thatching, projectors and inertial capture suits. If you’d like an overview of the work, may I recommend:

the JOCCH article at:  http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2532632 
The EVA article at: http://ewic.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/46121  

or these book chapters:

Woolford K, Dunn S., (2014) "Micro-Mobilities and Affordances of Past Places", Past Mobilities: Archaeological Approaches to Movement and Mobility, Ashgate Publishing: Farhnam, pp. 113-128.

Dunn, S, Woolford, K., (2013) “Reconfiguring experimental archaeology using 3D reconstruction”, Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture, Springer Verlag, pp 277-291.










It’s very interesting that your start your response with memories of a funeral. I hope you won’t think of me as being insensitive in making a comparison between your experience and what we’ve attempted to address through the MiPP projects. 




On 25 Jul 2014, at 23:24, 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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Kirk Woolford 	School of Arts
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