Blogs

So happy to serve as a guide during this two-week process at the Lake Studios Berlin, as we attempt to reconsider media and performance, to name the potentials and pitfalls as we seek to see our practice anew.

Digital Body Workshop Journal: Day 1 - Abandoning Preconceived Notions: What are our expectations about performance and media? What are the prejudices and stereotypes we carry inside, our points of excitement and our irritations? We spent several hours exploring these questions during the first day of the workshop. It is our attempt to see the digital materials with fresh eyes so we might put them to use in new and unexpected ways.

Digital Body Workshop Journal: Days 2 + 3: What is an Image? The word slips easily from the tongue, but what do we really mean? We dug in to that topic as Benjamin Krieg shared from his vast body of work with groups like She She Pop and others, as Marlon Barrios Solano pushed us inward and outward with several poetic provocations, and Armando Menicacci led us through a rigorous, analytic examination of the structural implications of the word itself. We responded to all of this by having each participant create and share rapidly improvised scenarios comprised only of a projector connected to a video camera in relation to the performer and audience – each of which led to long, rich discussions of the implications and possible meanings they portrayed. When thinking about performance, what does the word image conjure for you?

Foto: Benjamin Krie

Digital Body Workshop Journal, Week 1 – "What is it?": For the last six days, we have attempted to (re)encounter the image: to imagine it, to read it, to wrangle the hardware and software required to record and render it. We did this within the frame of our overarching goal: to abandon preconceived notions and see these materials in a new way. As we start week 2, I ask myself, "how did we do?"

In the end, it is impossible to ignore or deny thousands of years of seeing and making images, from cave paintings to virtual reality. It's in our bones. Yet, we managed to keep ourselves in a constant state of questioning. As Bebe Miller wisely advised us to do last night, we kept stepping back and asking ourself one question, over, and over, and over again.

"What is it?"

For me, embracing that question was the great success of this first week. Now we will see if we can do the same with "data."

Foto: Benjamin Krieg

Digital Body Workshop Journal, Days 7 & 8– Big Data: As we did with the word "technology" in the first week, we started the second week by asking "what is data?" This question could be debated ad infinitum, but here I will mention three crucial points: "data is interpretation and representation", "data is a reduction", and perhaps most importantly "data has value". But how does this apply to using data, from a performer or from the world, in a performance?

Our guest speakers Ruth Gibson + Bruno Martelli (https://gibsonmartelli.com), and Bebe Miller (https://bebemillercompany.org) helped us dig in to those points with presentations that touched on technologies ranging from virtual reality to motion capture, though they continuously kept their focus on aesthetics and expression.

With this in mind, we began to navigate "the gear": this is a sensor, this is the kind of data it measures and represents, this is how we get it into the computer, and this is what we can do with it – practical realities that can often seem at odds with the artistry.

To assimilate and balance the theory, the "how to", and the desire to express and share our artistic vision, remains the goal of this second week.

Benjamin Krieg

Digital Body No. 1 Journal - Day 9 - Data Invasion: Today's pictures feature only the participants of the lab, because we spent nearly two hours today vigorously responding to the works presented by our guest speaker Christopher Kondek. (https://doubleluckyproductions.org)

I cannot reproduce the incredibly well articulated points that so many of our intrepid explorers offered in a Facebook post. Suffice to say, thanks to Chris' presentation and the ensuing discussion, we could no longer pretend that data was just a stream of numbers captured from a performer's body. Losing control of your data, especially for those who live under authoritarian regimes, is not a game. It is a matter of life and death – a notion that will weigh strong on our minds as we continue through this week.

The Paris based interdisciplinary artist  and sustainability specialist Jeanne Bloch was awarded the dance-tech AIR Berlin for the month of FEBRUARY 2014.

Congratulations!

This is her page  in dance-tech.net

http://www.dance-tech.net/profile/JeanneBloch

During her residency she will work at the beautiful  Lake Studios Berlin next February she will work on her project Augmented Dance by light: A research on e-textile and dance

During her Dance-Tech/Lake Studio Residency, she will continue her research on e-textile and dance with the help of Pauline Vierne,http://www.dance-tech.net/profile/PAULINEVIERNE.

By using different techniques to light the body space, she creates a material that is neither light neither movement but can exist only by the combination of both.

"Work at the Lake Studios will help me create a vocabulary based on movement and light. As an outcome of this work, I will design a framework for a 4D dance/light class!!".

This research is part of TAFO#2 - The Temple Had Oblique Window. A dance performance that discuss today's role of climate change discourse.

http://jeannebloch.com/work-in-progress

Jeanne Bloch is an interdisciplinary artist using her mixed background as a choreographer-artist and sustainability specialist. Jeanne worked on issues such as fair trade, child labor, sustainable consumption and global warming…Issues that drive her artistic work as well.

In December 2009, she started at the occasion of the Copenhagen Summit an ongoing artistic project: “The Man with a Dove” and was also a member of the Climate Sustainability Platform at COP15. In the same time, she initiated Twice Out of Paradise, a research program integrating ecological experimentation and choreographic creation, which benefited from a residency “d’essai” at the Paris based cultural center,104. In 2012, she organized in collaboration with the artist Prue Lang a workshop on ecological experimentation in dance performance hosted by Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.  In 2013, she was selected to present her approach at FASTE#1 professional day on Arts and Sciences @ La Faïencerie, Théâtre de Creil.

She was an invited artist to Imagine 2020 (Art & Climate Change) Summer Lab #2 in Portugal.  Jeanne isIRCASE (International Research Chair in Art and Sustainable Enterprise) associate artist and a member of the AACORN Art & Business Network. She enjoyed being a student at Stanford Practice Based Research in the Arts MOOC/course from Leslie Hill, Associate Professor, Performance Making and Helen Paris, Associate Professor, Performance Making.

Jeanne lives in Paris and worked in Europe, the United States, South Korea, Republic of the Congo, Israel and El Salvador.