The XBox Kinect has become an essential tool for artists who want the movement of the human body to influence digital media in real time. During this year’s Live-I Workshop, Troika Ranch Co-Directors Mark Coniglio and Dawn Stoppiello will focus on using the Kinect as a tool to create interactive performances that are both compelling and dramaturgically sound.
During the first two days of the workshop, participants will learn how to use open source tools to gather movement data from the Kinect, and how to use that information to impose real-time control over video, sound and light via the software Isadora. The remainder of the workshop will be spent working individually and as a group to create scenarios where that information can be used artistically. As a group, we want to consider three key questions: what am I tracking, why am I tracking, and why is it important dramaturgically. The last word of that sentence is key. In the end, any technology one uses in a performance must be there to support the piece, and the ideas behind it. This workshop will ask those questions in relation to motion tracking and the the capabilities offered by the XBox Kinect.
Troika Ranch will have ten Kinects on hand. So you needn’t purchase one to take this workshop. In addition, students will receive a six-month license for Isadora, the user-friendly, real-time media manipulation tool created by Mark Coniglio. So, aside from your laptop computer, we will provide everything you need to get started.
APPLICATION PROCESS
Include one paragraph explaining why you are interested in attending the workshop and one paragraph describing the kind of work that you make. Briefly tell us about your level of expertise with computers. Please include your name, address, telephone number and email address. Applicants must have a basic understanding of using a computer, i.e., opening and saving files, copying and pasting information, basic navigational skills, etc. Applicants must also have gone through the Isadora tutorials 1-6 before the workshop begins. Send applications to info [at] troikaranch [dot] org
A note about the selection process: please know that, beyond your application information, an important factor in choosing the participants is how the group fits together as a whole. When the skills of those participating vary too widely, it means that someone participants will be overwhelmed while others will be waiting for the others to catch up. So please understand that if you are not chosen it is not a reflection on your abilities or your skills as an artist.
The workshop fee is due no later than the first day of the workshop. Payment can be made by check, bank transfer or PayPal.
REQUIRED EQUIPMENT
Computers: We require that you bring your own Mac or PC laptop.
Macintosh Requirements: Intel based computer with a bus speed of 2.0 Ghz and 2.0 GB of RAM (4GB Preferred); Mac OS X 10.6.8 or greater; latest version of Apple’s QuickTime.
Windows Requirements: Intel based computer with a bus speed of 2.0 Ghz and 2.0 GB of RAM (4GB Preferred); Windows 8, 7, Vista or XP, latest version of Apple’sQuickTime. (If running Windows XP, you must be sure that the drivers for your graphics card are v2.0 or better.)
Video & Audio Inputs – Read Carefully!
Some means of capturing live video and audio is required. Click this link for detailed information that will help you ensure you have both live video and live audio feeds into your computer.
OPTIONAL EQUIPMENT
Sensory Systems: Users may also bring additional sensory systems if they have prior skill in connecting and using those systems with their computer. Isadora can receive input from OSC (Open Sound Control), MIDI, Serial devices and via TCP/IP. Isadora can also receive video from other program via Syphon (MacOS) and Spout (Windows).
Stina Nyberg, Halla Ólafsdóttir, Petra Sabisch, Manon Santkin and Mårten Spångberg.
The event is open and free for professionals after sign up.
The Practice Symposium gathers practitioners in the field of choreography and performance to share practices with each other and the public. Set up as an encounter of different practices, the Practice Symposium uses the academic framework of a symposium in a different way by proposing practices instead of papers.
In the recent years the notion of practice has frequently occured within the field of choreography, especially when insisting on a development achieved through continuity, a specific form of producing work and sharing experiences as much as a way of challenging knowledge. A practice addresses a particular idea or problem through a process of repetition. Emerging from specific defining parameters, sometimes in view of method, practices produce a know-how that cannot be separated from the particularity of the practice. This particularity arises from its being implicated into a specific materiality: there is no idea without a material expression, as much as there is no knowledge unless it is practiced. Engaging in these experience-based and usage-oriented practices allows for a cooperative knowledge production, where learning, doing and thinking intertwine.
With the guiding idea that each practice produces an intrinsic knowledge by being practically involved in its doing, this symposium of practices invites practitioners in the field of choreography and performance to share their practices.
The two-day Practice Symposium (29-30 September 2012) will take place in the studios at Konstnärsnämnden in Stockholm and consists of two parallel panels of practices. Based on the idea that a practice is done repeatedly, the second day of the symposium will consist of the exact same panels as the previous. Thus, during the symposium, you can either choose to partake in all practices or to do some of them twice.
We invite everyone interested to take part in the Practice Symposium. It is favourable to join the whole weekend but also possible to take part in specific panels.A more detailed program will be published on the website soon.
In order to participate, please sign up by sending an e-mail to anna.efraimsson@konstnarsnamnden.se including name and a short statement of interest. Please wait for a confirmation.
The Practice Symposium is hosted by Stina Nyberg, Zoë Poluch, Petra Sabisch and Uri Turkenich in collaboration with The International Dance Programme at The Swedish Arts Grants Committee (Konstnärsnämnden).
In 1994, I looked out at the sparse Dance on Camera Festival audience at Anthology Film Archives and asked anyone whether they had any suggestions for building the festival. Margaret Williams, the brilliant British director of OUTSIDE IN, came out of the dark from the back of the house, to shake my hand but within that handshake was the affirmation that DOCF indeed needed help.
It was my first year to take on the volunteer job of running the festival, then in its 21st edition. Susan Braun, the founder of DFA, was still stalwartly taking the tickets at the door, but she was beginning to show her 70 plus years. At that time, DOCF only got a listing in the NY Times, never a review, nor a photo. It was known as the dance world's best kept secret.
Help came in the very next year when I moved the Festival uptown to The Lighthouse, a corporate but elegant rental space down the street from Bloomingdales. Much to our amazement, Joanna Ney, then the Special Events producer for the Film Society of Lincoln Center (FSLC), came to the festival and invited us to bring the festival over to Lincoln Center. Susan Braun died soon after that. Victor Lipari, DFA's executive director at the time, working part-time and, unbeknownst to us - dying, secured the first contract. Pale and wan, he came to the Walter Reade for the first screening there to cheer us on, but he passed soon after as well.
Rescued after the two decades of self-producing, DFA's Festival began to hit its stride. The innovations of the Internet, also new at that time, turned around all the efforts of arts administrators. Dance film festivals were popping up all over Europe, Australia and Canada for the first time. Unthinkable how much work Susan Braun had to do to keep DFA going without computers, without e-mail!
That first year at the Walter Reade Theatre, DOCF 1996 had only one program that repeated once Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The FSLC was definitely unsure that DOCF was a wise investment. Ten years later, we were begging the Film Society to limit the festival to 3 weekends! This year, we have brought the festival down to 20 programs over 5 days in three venues - Walter Reade Theatre, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, and the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery in the Walter Reade Theatre.
And already 40 theatres have signed up for the 2012 simulcast of Bob Hercules: JOFFREY: MAVERICKS OF AMERICAN DANCE on January 28, courtesy of Emerging Pictures. Quite a bounce from the 200 seats in Anthology DOCF played to in 1994!
Thank you Joanna! and the FSLC for the steadfast, ever growing support of Dance on Camera Festival. Thank you Susan for your pioneer spirit! Thank you dance filmmakers for making the art we love to celebrate! And thank you Jon Reiss for forging the connection to Emerging Pictures.
It was my first year to take on the volunteer job of running the festival, then in its 21st edition. Susan Braun, the founder of DFA, was still stalwartly taking the tickets at the door, but she was beginning to show her 70 plus years. At that time, DOCF only get a listing in the NY Times, never a review, nor a photo. It was known as the dance world's best kept secret.
Help came in the very next year when I moved the Festival uptown to The Lighthouse, a corporate but elegant rental space down the street from Bloomingdales. Much to our amazement, Joanna Ney, then the Special Events producer for the Film Society of Lincoln Center (FSLC), came to the festival and invited us to bring the festival over to Lincoln Center. Susan Braun died soon after that. Victor Lipari, DFA's executive director at the time, working part-time and, unbeknownst to us - dying, secured the first contract. Pale and wan, he came to the Walter Reade for the first screening there to cheer us on, but he passed soon after as well.
Rescued after the two decades of self-producing, DFA's Festival began to hit its stride. The innovations of the Internet, also new at that time, turned around all the efforts of arts administrators. Dance film festivals were popping up all over Europe, Australia and Canada for the first time. Unthinkable how much work Susan Braun had to do to keep DFA going without computers, without e-mail!
That first year at the Walter Reade Theatre, DOCF 1996 had only one program that repeated once Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The FSLC was definitely unsure that DOCF was a wise investment. Ten years later, we were begging the Film Society to limit the festival to 3 weekends! This year, we have brought the festival down to 20 programs over 5 days in three venues - Walter Reade Theatre, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, and the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery in the Walter Reade Theatre.
And already 40 theatres have signed up for the 2012 simulcast of Bob Hercules: JOFFREY: MAVERICKS OF AMERICAN DANCE on January 28, courtesy of Emerging Pictures. Quite a bounce from the 200 seats in Anthology DOCF played to in 1994!
Thank you Joanna! and the FSLC for the steadfast, ever growing support of Dance on Camera Festival. Thank you Susan for your pioneer spirit! Thank you dance filmmakers for making the art we love to celebrate! And thank you Jon Reiss for forging the connection to Emerging Pictures.
Photo from Adriano Cirulli's FALLING to be shown Dance on Camera Festival 2012, Jan 27-31.
In recent years, technological innovations have given rise to a new field, dance technology. Populated by artist-practitioners, technologists, and theorists, this new area encompasses performance, research and development of video game technologies, motion capture experimentation, and dance for the camera. For some time, work in dance technologies has advanced without a recognizable critical dialogue in the United States.
This began to change in October 2009, when the World Performance Project at Yale, in collaboration with SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology in residence at MIT, convened an international cohort of artists and scholars for a one-day meeting at Yale. That event, “Emergent Global Corporealities: Dance Technologies and Circulations of the Social,” brought artistic creation, comparative media theory, and emergent technologies together with considerations of the social and corporeal.
This group reconvenes at MIT in April with additional participants for Version 2.0. “Dance Technologies and Circulations of the Social @ MIT” brings a dozen researchers to MIT to present their original media-focused research. The two-day symposium includes readings, demonstrations, and some small-scale performances, culminating in an anthology of writings to be edited by the conference convenors.
The symposium convenors are Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor, Music and Theater Arts at MIT and Harmony Bench, Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University.
Confirmed Participants Include: Johannes Birringer, Chair in Performance Technologies, Brunel University Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer in Dance and Film Studies, University of Surrey Maaike Bleeker, Chair, Performance Studies, University of Utrecht Ian Condry, Associate Professor, MIT Scott deLahunta, Independent Artist, Berlin Simon Ellis, Independent Artist, London Jason Farman, Assistant Professor, Washington State University Susan Kozel, Professor, University of Malmo Petra Kuppers, Associate Professor, University of Michigan Nick Monfort, Associate Professor MIT Chris Salter, Associate Professor, Concordia University Marlon Barrios Solano, researcher/on-line producer/dance-tech.net (New York/Geneva) Jaime del Val, Independent Artist, Barcelona Maria X (Maria Chatzichristodoulou), Lecturer, University of Hull
Dear all I heard the cancellation of festival De Tuin der Lusten,
theatre, dance, visual en edible art op private estates in Overijssel, the Netherlands
festival De Tuin der Lusten stops
Dear all,
The association of the festival De Tuin der Lusten decided to cancel the festival De Tuin der Lusten. The regional government no longer supports the festival. We are grateful that we could organise 9 beautiful events on 9 beautiful private estates. It was great to combine seemingly incompatible energies and to halt the moving artists for a moment in front of our extremely diverse audiences. A huge `thank you` to our team, the board, the landowners, the artists, the sponsors and the audiences. In behalve of all the beautycausers Casper de Vries
thanks to the organizers , Casper De Vries and Léonie Dijkema , I hopethisfestivalwillcontinue
“My Private Bio-politics” performance by Saša Asentić was from the beginning conceived as an open research within the field of dance and performance in Eastern-European transitional context. It arose as a part of a perennial research and artistic project called „Indigo Dance“ in which a number of associates of different profiles were included – performer and culture worker Saša Asentić, ballerina, dancer, and choreographer Olivera Kovačević – Crnjanski, performing arts and culture theoretician and dramaturge Ana Vujanović, as well as others – and is realized through different work formats: in addition to the performance, there are also a CD presentation “Bal-Can-Can Susie Dance” and historical archive/video installation “Tiger’s Leap into the Past” and “Recycle Bin” as its addition.
Author and performer: Saša Asentić Assistance: Olivera Kovačević-Crnjanski Theoretical support and dramaturgy: Ana Vujanović
Duration: 55 minutes
Premiere date: 11th February 2007
Place of premiere: Serbian National Theatre – Novi Sad, Serbia
Supported by: Performance is made in co-production with Centre national de la danse – Paris, research in residency (Theorem Dance residencies), and is prepared within interdisciplinary dramaturgical trainings of THe FaMa in Belgrade and Dubrovnik. Performance is supported by DanceWEB (with the support of the Cultural Programme 2000 of the European Union within the frame of danceWEB Europe).
Concept: This work tries to deal with its own macro and micro conditions in which it appears.
For the beginning, to make them visible because of specification of mechanisms and procedures of the production of dance on Serbian scene. Then, to intervene. However, this led to a series of questions which were left without final answers. Finally, these questions, in their complexity, became the main intervention which this work is going to try to carry out.
The questions spring from the problem of positioning within relations of global and local bio-powers and bio-politics of dance in Serbia today. How to locate “one’s own (private and public) specificity”? And what is to be done with it bearing in mind the tensions between local ideologies and global expectations related to these ideologies: evacuate it from the work in order to achieve successful communication (or coquetting) with the global, that is, Western, trends, in which this specificity is not included; or to base the work on it even at the cost of failure, i.e. exclusion from conceptual-programmatic map of the international scene? Furthermore, does the former strategy gives us “a right to discourse” or is this decided at a completely different place and by means of completely different procedures?
Which ”bodies” are imprinted in the body that is dancing today on the Serbian scene? For example, which bodies (coming from this specific context) are projected, through expectations of a hypothetical “Western curator, and by this a spectator as well, almost as a genetically determined feature/difference from the “Western one”? Where the particularity of that context is, in its contemporaneity, very gloomy – that context is not a part of the First World, it is not EU, it is still called the East (even though the West is not called “West” any more), it is post-socialist in the capitalist world, and it is terribly transitional, without a single bit of “flexibility and nomadism” which would make it exotic. Which are, on the local dance scene, the bodies that hover dancing in the air here, over an “indigo paper” (carbon copy), without being “grounded” in such a context, and which are moved by a wish to be contemporary, maybe even resistant? And then again, which are the other bodies that would carry the local specificity, for which, in fact, neither we ourselves want to know? Nevertheless, if we construct and show them, although we would rather not… which bio-politics are we executing? Isn’t it not already a contribution to some other bio-power? Local? Or…? Where, in this (inter)space are this work and the politics of the body that will perform it in a public space, which we share and in which we continue to live?
Saša Asentić has interest in re-thinking and experiencing (performer’s) state of “I am…” through differentiation and understanding of actual reality (current situation in transitional society and performing arts scene) through artistic / social / political (re)actions. He has experience as author, co-author and performer in different performative forms in diverse contexts (since 1998). Individually or together with his colleagues, he has initiated several international and collaborative performing arts projects: workshops, seminars, festivals, etc (since 2000). His work was presented in different festivals and art centers in USA, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Lithania, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, etc. (since 2000). Asentić has autodidactic informal education in the field of performing arts (since 1995), he is initiator of the artistic organization Per.Art (2005) and author and leader of program „Art and Inclusion“ for mentally disabled people (since 1999). He took part in ex.e.r.ce 2008 program in Centre choregraphique national Montpellier and in 6m1L extenssion project in 2009 in PAF (France) and IN-presentable festival (Spain). He collaborates with Ana Vujanović, Xavier Le Roy, Eszter Salamon, Bojana Cvejić, Olivera Kovačević Crnjanski and others. Asentić studied Agriculture and Pedagogy at University in Novi Sad, Serbia.
…A Bosnian who lives in Serbia, Asentić decided on lecture-performance format not because he, as he noticed self-ironically, “wouldn’t be able to produce a dance piece,” but first of all, to raise the issues dealing the way of functioning and codes of dance concern. In “My Private Biopolitics” the performer is toying with quotes of Western-European role-models like Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy, and opposes clichés of “exotic,” “awkward” and “old-fashioned”, with which an Eastern-European artist has to fight against, if they wish to endure on an international market. tanznetz.de (Berlin, Germany) Reviews –Shows – Burning questions Tanz im August Festival 2007
…Productions like Sasa Asentic΄'s which do not hold the terrified and terrifying mask of contemporaneity up to their audiences' face, fare better. Sasa Asentic΄ plays around with the trauma in a humorous and funny way, keeping his ironical distance to the mask without denying both the artistic and economic necessity to deal with it. Balkan Dance Platform 2007 Journal (Athens, Greece) The Fear of Representation, or Reifying the Weosft eCronn Itmemagpeo raneity Gerald Siegmun
...In this critical look at the Serbian dance scene, Mr. Asentic also explores larger issues in the world of contemporary dance. His observations, through text and movement, delve into questions of marketability and what constitutes authentic Eastern European dance...
...There are many levels to “My private bio-politics” — a good thing — yet its message is simple: Always break the rules.
The New York Times (New York, USA)
...Serbian artist Sasa Asentic directly addresses the question of the creative distribution system, deconstructing the absurd processes, expectations, and outcomes it produces. He uses linguistic tricks borrowed from theorists, picking apart their practical quandaries, all the while constructing his argument and, by extension, this particular performance...
...Critical and self-reflexive, Asentic exposes and exploits the absurd conditions that exist within our cultural systems, laughing but aware of the consequences that come when those at the margins are brought into the center.
What's particularly enticing about the artist's implicit thesis is that by participating as audience members at his debut US performance - that is, in purchasing his performance product through the distribution modes of the West - we become part of the dialectic in the immediate moment of the performance as it happens.
It's hard to make ontological pluralism or theory of any kind entertaining, but Asentic succeeds spectacularly.
Gay City News (New York, USA)
Modes Of Production
Brian McCormick
…At first site, “My Private Biopolitics” is mainly a text, a conceptual piece, bordering with lecture-performance genre.And then again, as this short council unfolds, it becomes more obvious howAsentićarranged this small piece with quotations and repeated parts, an astonishing shifts of perspective and subtle shifts of context, as well as alternations of closed and complex sequences of movement.
Every sentence, every reminiscence and gesture flows back into discourse on contemporary dance and its conditions in different context. Of course, as a performative practice which Asentić, with such an ease,managed to interweave in a formally completed étude that made it more tangible, and in the same time more convincing, for it lacks any kind of artificial or didactic stance.
Dance is, similarly to music, by its tradition some sort of 'pure' art. Pure, because it realizes the aesthetical effect more directly and primarily than the language does. In other words: dance is attractive because it is mute. A body, being the main organ of dance articulation, is mute. Furthermore, when talking about contemporary dance, which has given the body additional theatre expressive devices, we can talk about aesthetics all of which are, again, in connection with the way the choreographer wants a body to be handled with, ie with his attitude towards the body. Jérôme Bel, for example, brings to his memory bodies in dialogue with mass culture discourse, while, on the other side, while watching bodies closed in precise organic-mimetic minimalism, we think about Xavier Le Roy.
Saša Asentić puts in front of us comment dance. In his case, the body speaks and while speaking, it talks about itself. Instead of a body in front of discourse (presence in front of a language), he offers us a body in discourse. We could say that it is all about performance-lecture, but this statement would not be precise enough. The essence is in dance, the one that is present in its absence, with Asentić’s witty remarks.
The question that arises is: what kind of show an East-European artist (dancer) should make to draw attention? It goes without saying that being noticed means the same as staying alive. It represents a source of income and a chance to organize on other locations already active shows, as well as a chance to create new ones. In other words: to be noticed, you do not have to be an artist. This truth mostly bothers an artist, on the field of his creativity freedom. The problem that occurs in Asentić's correspondence reading, quoting, and representation of materials for his projects is present to the same degree as in subordinated-stereotypical perspective of West and East which is being kept alive by coordination of an international net of critics and theoreticians about art historization and contemporary aesthetic trends, and also like in inertion of Eastern (in Asentić's context Balkanian) scene that came to his dream like an elephant trained to respond to it by rhetoric, while the elephant itself moves with great difficulties. He asks himself, with ironic sharpness, whether the destiny of dance in Eastern Europe is to continually sink into oblivion, on one hand doomed to its local context and exoticity, and, on the other hand, to refusal of Western aesthetics.
In conclusion, Asentić offers us dance that consists of caricatured choreographies of well-known names of modern dance (among them important places are taken by the above mentioned Jérôme Bel and Xavier Leroy) and a video clip (made from the ground floor) without a comment that in the end he satisfies Western aesthetic standards to apply for a festival, which opens him the door to the world.
The joke is delicately brutal and the message brings us directly down to earth: freedom in art is relative and territorially conditioned. Geopolitically colored dance valuation forces dancers to develop a strategy of aesthetic manipulation with their own bodies, which is, at the same time, their surviving strategy – their own biopolitics.
Frankfurt. It is a short journey between East and West. But then again, entire worlds lie between the two theatre spheres, which Saša Asentićin “My Private Biopolitics” started to measure over while talking, contemplating mainly in a choreographic-theoretic, therefore practical way. On the left, there appears dance scene as the core abstract frame, as a discourse platform of conceptual strategies with video, sketches and stacks of texts while the right side presents stylized mine field, on which there’s barely anything, except for an icon and, serving as its mirror, a graphics showing a dancer like Loie Fuller or Mary Wigman, with a shiny golden frame.
The space between is basically the one thing that entire Asentić’s performance moves around. This is the performance with which the artist from Bosnia, living in Novi Sad, presented himself for the first time in Frankfurt Mousonturm. Because, the essence of this extraordinary light, and at the same time highly concentrated and continually, pleasantly comic work, is nothing short than contemporary dance itself. And, as far as this subject is concerned, the answers to all those questions asked to someone living in Serbia, who happens to be a dancer there, a socialized artist, he is trying to find in the West. Should he thematize the political context, to give way to traditional dance, or even folklore, so that he, as an outsider, could present himself as refreshingly interesting? Or is he contemplating on Avant-garde from Jérôme Bel to Xavier Leroy, so that he himself could become a part of an international discourse? But, how can that function, to refer to great masters without making a simple “ornament” out of them? How to find your own language and choreographies, without becoming corrupt? At first site, “My Private Biopolitics” is mainly a text, a conceptual piece, bordering with lecture-performance genre.
And then again, as this short council unfolds, it becomes more obvious howAsentićarranged this small piece with quotations and repeated parts, an astonishing shifts of perspective and subtle shifts of context, as well as alternations of closed and complex sequences of movement.
Every sentence, every reminiscence and gesture flows back into discourse on contemporary dance and its conditions in different context. Of course, as a performative practice which Asentić, with such an ease,managed to interweave in a formally completed étude that made it more tangible, and in the same time more convincing, for it lacks any kind of artificial or didactic stance.
As “work in regress” (the way that artist characterized his work in the meantime), “My Private Biopolitics” does not show itself simply as a dilemma in form of performance, but in the same time as a way to overcome it through dance, completely in the sense of what Boris Groy said: The basic difference between the Eastern and the Western art is, as performer quoted, the fact that Eastern art always comes from the East. Asentićprobably doesn’t believe in that. But he is working on it.
The Y+30 Meetup is designed as an authentic forum for discussing what the world might look like in +30 years. We ask which trends and technologies are emerging today that will have formative effects on the not too distant future.http://www.meetup.com/BLKNY30/
In the past, activism meant taking to the streets in protest, holding up a sign and showing solidarity through sit-ins and slogans chanted. As we've seen the developments in Egypt unfold, people have still taken to the streets, yet now it's supplemented by hashtag chatter, citizen journalism, photoblogging, and livestreaming. As new technologies emerge, activism and outreach efforts morph and expand. There have been paradigmatic shifts in philanthropy towards micro-giving and recently, micro-volunteerism. Platforms like Causes and sms-based giving have made it easy to donate in one click, and some say DDoS attacks are the new sit-in and charity tweetups and flashmobs are the new form of protest. What will the future hold? Please join us for a panel on the future of activism that will focus on future trends and innovation forecasts for Y+30: What will activism look like in 30 years?
Our esteemed panelists include Frank Cohn, Founder and Executive Director of Globalhood; Jacob Colker, Co-founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries/Sparked.com; Emily Jacobi Co-founder/Co-Director of Digital Democracy; and Marlon Barrios Solano, Founder and Executive Director of Dance-tech Interactive. As a special treat, we will also be joined by Jean Ulysse, a Haitian teen activist from the Global Potential program -- who better to envision the future of activism than a teen whose future it will be?
Frank Cohn, Jean Ulysse and Emily Jacobi will be joining us in person, while Jacob Colker and Marlon Barrios Solano will be joining us via videoconference. We'll be livestreaming it, so if you can't make it there, you can watch it live or later at http://www.livestream.com/y30futurist
Tickets for this event are $10 and are available through the 92Y Box Office.
Want to tweet about it? Use Twitter hashtag: #y30
Panelist and Moderator Bios:
Frank Cohn, Founder and Executive Director of Globalhood. Since 2007, Frank Cohn has run Global Potential, an innovative flagship program taking youth from inner-city neighborhoods on transformative journeys abroad to do community service and cultural exchange in rural villages in the developing world, then returning home and creating change in their own communities. He also works part-time as the Associate Director of Bushwick IMPACT, a family resource center for low-income immigrant mothers in Brooklyn. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, he has worked with youth, women's, and community groups in over 50 rural villages and 10 cities in 13 countries. His previous work includes a post as Field Director for an NGO in Central America, and with the United Nations in Social Policy and Development. In 2010, Frank won the Emerging Social Worker Award from the National Association of Social Workers - NYC Chapter, and was also designated a "Robin Hood Lionheart". In 2008 he was selected as a We Are All Brooklyn Fellow and is currently on their steering committee, and in 2005 he was the Founding President of the Columbia University Partnership for International Development (CUPID). Frank brings 12 years of managerial and supervisory experience with designing, running, and evaluating community service and development programs. He has lectured at Columbia and New School Universities, and conducts trainings on Non-Profit Start-up and Management, Social Entrepreneurship, Evaluation, Communication, Stress Management, and Team Building. Frank holds his Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University, specializing in International Social Development and Social Enterprise Administration, and speaks fluent French, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, and is functional in Hindi, Haitian Creole, and Italian. * One of the teen activists from the Global Potential program will be joining us! http://www.global-potential.org Twitter: @globalpotential
Jacob Colker, Co-founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries/Sparked.com. Jacob Colker is a recognized leader in political activism and issue advocacy, and a leading voice in the use of technology for community engagement. Jacob has managed political campaigns in California, Illinois, and Maryland, and he was one of the first field directors in the country to leverage Facebook in a major political campaign to win a statewide election. Jacob has also managed issue advocacy campaigns for The International Campaign for Tibet, The 1Sky Campaign, and other non-governmental organizations, both in the U.S. and around the world. Fun Fact - Jacob *loves* playing in rock bands and debating politics. http://sparked.com Twitter: @jacobcolker
Josephine Dorado (moderator), Professor at the New School/Founder of Kidz Connect. Josephine Dorado is a social entrepreneur, educator, artist, interactive events producer and skydiver. She was a Fulbright scholarship recipient and initiated the Kidz Connect program, which connects youth internationally via creative collaboration and theatrical performance in virtual worlds. Josephine also received a MacArthur Foundation award to co-found Fractor.org, which matches news with opportunities for activism. She currently teaches at the New School and is the live events producer for This Spartan Life, a talk show inside the video game Halo. Upcoming ventures include reACTor, a location-based mobile gaming app that connects news with social action, as well as ongoing projects in mixed reality and networked performance. http://funksoup.com Twitter: @funksoup
Emily Jacobi, Co-founder/Co-Director of Digital Democracy. Emily Jacobi has worked on media, youth development and research projects in Latin America, West Africa, Southeast Asia and the US. Emily began her career as a youth journalist working to highlight young people’s voices in professional media. At the age of 13, she reported from Havana, Cuba on the lives of young Cubans during the Troubled Period. She previously worked for Internews Network, AllAfrica.com and as Assistant Bureau Director for Y-Press. Since January 2007 her work has focused on researching and supporting the capacity of local organizations in closed and transitioning societies. At Digital Democracy Emily manages staff, oversees strategic planning and development and works directly with grassroots partners on program design for human rights and community engagement. http://digital-democracy.org Twitter: @emjacobi
Marlon Barrios Solano, Founder and Executive Director of Dance-tech Interactive. Marlon Barrios Solano is a Venezuelan professional nomad, Vlogger, on-line experimental producer, consultant, researcher and international lecturer/workshop leader based in Geneva, Switzerland and New York, USA. He is a lecturer for the Masters on Performance Practices and Visual Cultures for the Universidad de Alcala (Spain) and is the advisor on collaborative technologies for the South American Network of Dance and the Gilles Jobin Company (Switzerland). Marlon is also associate producer for DanceDigital (UK). He is the executive director of Dance-tech Interactive and creator/producer of dance-tech.net, a social networking site, dance-techTV, a collaborative internet video channel, and of dance-tech@, a series of online video interviews exploring innovation and interdisciplinary investigations on the performance of movement. He has also developed several projects on collaborative journalism and the arts. With a hybrid background in dance, new media technologies and cognitive science, he continues to investigate the intersection of the performance of motion with new media technologies, real-time composition (improvisation and interactive technology), embodied cognition while experimenting with on-line platforms for the development of sustainable models of knowledge production-distribution among trans-local communities and contexts. As a professional dancer in New York City, he performed nationally and internationally with Susan Marshal and Dancers (1997-2000), Lynn Shapiro Dance Company (1995-1998), and with the choreographers Merian Soto, Dean Moos, Bill Young, among others. He also performed with the musicians John Zorn, Philip Glass and Eric Friedlander. Under Unstablelandscape (2003-07), he performed and researched improvisational performances within digital real-time environments performing in the US and Europe. http://www.dance-tech.net Twitter: @dancetechnet
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As you might know is currently the Edinburgh Festival on and so Dancebase put together an eclectic and exciting selection of performing artists and companies.More info of the upcoming shows can be found onhttp://www.dancebase.co.uk/and-then-some/View-all-products.htmlThe first show I went to see was Appel by Decalage. The performers Mickael Marso Riviere and Navala Chaudhari showed a sensual and exotic mix of bboying and capoeira accompanied by live music by Jason Kalidas using Bansuri and Tabla. As a viewer you feel like you are in a dessert with the sun rising revealing Chaudhari in an elegant contortionist position before she starts gently moving like a snake across the sand. Then Riviere comes in with a powerful solo of break dancing moves before both performers break into a well-tuned duet.More about Decalage can be found onhttp://www.companydecalage.co.uk/and excerpt of the piece:http://www.dance-tech.net/video/company-decalage-appel-atMore than a year ago I produced the 3 minutes video TRENCH with Company Chameleon while they were still in development of their final piece Rites. Thus, it was very exciting to see the full 42 minutes performance of the complete piece Rites of which Trench is a section. Rites is a breath taking dance work that demands everything from its performers Anthony Missen and Kevin Turner. Drawn from personal experiences of what it means to be a man through showing the different stages that shape us: family, friends, happy moments and extreme situations. Company Chameleon really gives the audience something they can relate to and to take away with them.More about Company Chameleon onhttp://www.companychameleon.com/and excerpt of the piecehttp://www.dance-tech.net/video/rites-introduction-by-companyThe third piece I would like to mention is The Simplicity of Grasping Air by Lindsay John. A large floor and back wall projection of slowed down water footage by Jane McInally reminds of a moving Van Gogh's painting and works well with John's Butoh movements. The notes I took along the piece say that it is too slow for my awareness which I mean in a positive way because I feel I am there in every single bit of the moment. My mind is not rushing anywhere...it is just here. I have to really look how things evolve...Another article about Lindsay John's The Simplicity of Grasping Air can be found onhttp://www.theskinny.co.uk/article/46527-the-simplicity-of-grasping-air
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Posted by Mike Baker on February 15, 2009 at 5:30am
At the end of 2008 I had the abstract for the following paper accepted for presentation at the intercreate.orgSCANZ Symposium, New Plymouth, NZ Aotearoa 7-8 February 2009.SCANZ is now an annual fixture on the international map of practitioners in the Arts, Sciences and Literature, so I presented this paper to a diverse audience from Holland, Brazil, France, Germany, the UK, the USA, Australia and NZ Aotearoa. My presentation was comprised of my reading to the symposium audience at the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth, my avatar, Rollo Kohime simultaneously (one sound channel for both venues) reading to an audience in my Second Life Wellington Railway Station (my SL avatar is now voice-enabled and the station was projected onto the main wall of the conference room, approx 10mx5m) and a secondary screen showing selected videos of my dance practice - the first was referenced specifically in my paper.Abstract Title:Negotiating the Parameters of Missed Conversations in Urban SpacesAbstract:This paper represents a research strand of my AUT Masters in Art and Design project (majoring in dance and video), ‘In the Company of Strangers'. Indeterminacy as a force, responsible for sustaining in us the dynamic of the stranger, is explored in encounters between people in urban spaces. Concepts centering on disjunct-conversations and departure are being investigated through my research-practice which, as a scrutinizing lens, attests to the contemporary theories which reside in the states of 'becoming' evidenced in selected writings of Henri Bergson and Brian Massumi.This project posits the formation of a new Urban Myth: Experienced through the vehicle of the roaming body, our engagements, meetings and encounters in urban spaces frequently manifest as disjunct, ‘missed conversations’. I am asserting that this is due to the inevitability in our existence of indeterminacy occurring as a significant mediator of our behaviour. Indeterminacy implies motion and emerges, as Massumi so ably asserts, through ‘… an unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary …’. We, all of us, are constantly being drawn away – always either approaching or embracing involuntarily, a state of ‘Leaving’ which co-mingles with and unerringly erodes our efforts to engage with another in the here and now........................................................................................................................................
This paper begins with the notion of the Stranger identity and 'Belonging' in contemporary urban environments and closes with the event of ‘Leaving’. Between these manifestations lies a gulf of uneasy indeterminacy, evident in the ways in which our choices are made, our actions which appear to prevail, the spaces and times which we occupy and displace and our interactions with one another. The idea of belonging is central to our existence and to our understanding of how we and others give meaning to our lives. Our sense of identity is founded upon social interactions that indicate our allegiance to particular communities or groups, through shared beliefs, values or practices. Yet over the generations, has our pursuit of personal autonomy robbed us of that cherished sense of belonging and is there still a more subtle, insidious force acting upon us? In my research practice I am positing a new Urban Myth. My contention is that all our exchanges, whether they be either apparently resolved engagements, casual encounters or missed conversations with people and places, are governed by the agency of indeterminacy evident through a continual Leaving of these exchanges. That is Leaving with a capital ''L'. I am suggesting that ‘Leaving’, as a point of separation is a phenomenon. Leaving is not merely a point of departure, but an ingredient central to that process we call change. For us, as creatures of change, movement away seems to be inevitable and this ensures that there are constantly present, small, overlooked dramas with their attendant poignancies expressed within the simplest, most mundane, everyday dynamics between people and places. I am suggesting that this behaviour is involuntary, informs and mediates our respective realities, knows no cultural boundaries and occurs everywhere, all the time, although I am concerned with its manifestation in urban spaces. I do not consider this notion to be negative or depressing. Rather, I find it compelling, capable of propelling us into re-evaluations of who we are and how, as sentient beings, we conduct our lives through a perceptual reality composite, caught up, despite ourselves in a perpetual state of change which is centred ultimately, in this universal movement away.
In the text, Negotiating difference or being with strangers, John Allen (2000) informs us that, ‘In his classic essay on “The Stranger” published in 1908, Simmel tried to convey through this figure, a range of ambivalences which have come to haunt us in the practices of negotiating difference’. Allen is alluding to the paradoxes attendant within those perceptions when we try to position ourselves as social familiars, leaving unknowns outside our circle, as Strangers and therefore, 'Other'. In my sphere of enquiry, Simmel`s words are provocative, not so much for how society functions, but more specifically,for how those individuals within spatial/societal structures function and relate to one another. In defining or ‘negotiating difference’, Simmel adopted a 'host' figure as our familiar self. The figure of the ‘Stranger’ captures the paradoxical experience of what it means to interact with someone who is both, perhaps nearby in a spatial sense, yet remote and therefore ‘strange’ to us in a social sense, while the converse of this may also be true. The Stranger, then, is someone who is involved with us, yet removed, in a sense virtual, spatially and socially as an accepted member of our group or situation. Personna who we label within our host-field as both familiars and strangers, constantly come and go. However, as I will endeavour to discuss, we are all susceptible to Leaving as a given which brings in its wake, its own estrangement. Yet, Simmel`s 'host/stranger' binary definition begs that all-important third dimension, which I maintain can be defined through the state of indeterminacy. As indeterminants we all of us depart despite ourselves, from every engagement we make, fleeting or involved.A definition of the term, 'Indeterminacy'.The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which is founded in quantum mechanics, asserts that both the position and momentum of a given particle cannot be determined simultaneously.'The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant and vice versa'. (Heisenberg,1927)In other words it could be said that one is unable to record scientifically, evidence of a given body that is both static and moving at the same time. If one cannot measure something, does this make the non-finding absolute? Is this definition simply a finite, modernist Truism or an opportunity for a poststructuralist Truant? Is the definition deconstructable? Given that we register the activity, is it possible perhaps to measure empirically, through the senses, this activity in one body taking place in two situations at once? Despite the scientific, physical non-finding, does this mean that one`s 'attention' cannot be in two places at once? Or one`s desires, intent, perception? I suspect that this is not the case. I am suggesting that through acknowledging and assuming in ourselves a state of 'the being-in-change', it is possible to transfer ones presence in the form of intent, from 'here' to 'there' simultaneously and that there is physical, visible evidence for this in scenarios involving engagement between people in the street.My personna/presence here, now, is divided between this space and this Second Life space. To the people behind their avatars in my Second Life Wellington Railway Station, who can hear my voice and see my avatar moving, the collective personna constituted by myself and this audience I suggest, is actually virtual and in that extension of this reality, my avatar-self in Second Life, is real. So at this point in time, we have an equivalency as analogues in two places at once - the constituents of a blended-reality.To illustrate dual presence through an indeterminate intent - in this instance, in departure; in the first video clip shown here, the couple in the spotlight conduct an animated conversation in the street. Without being privy to their dialogue, we have no way of knowing what they are discussing. We could speculate, but I am fascinated by their body language, their neutral proximity to one another, the signals they unconsciously transmit about the way they are feeling with regard to their engagement with one another and how this evolves through the duration of the meeting. If I apply a non-judgmental appraisal to their situation, in the last minute prior to their separating, although the woman eventually says goodbye, physically walks away and leaves the engagement, the man appears to have already departed from the conversation. He shuffles, he checks his cell phone, he hides behind his hands, he waves his arms uncertainly and looks around. He checks his watch. Eye contact decreases. No longer is he fully present.When she does finally leave, his reaction is marginally interested – because his roaming self has already left. His ‘Leaving’ has crept into and hijacked the meeting, while ostensibly, they were still engaged. It would be easy for us to say, 'But he has simply switched off'. I am not disputing this. I am asking, 'Why?' I am suggesting the whole story is more interesting. Indeterminacy is embedded here. The only difference between this and other engagements is that in this case, the slip in the present (now past) is visible. Can this constitute evidence of a simultaneity of presence? Here, yet not here? Both people left. Movement away occurred in both parties, even though ironically, one of them left first by staying behind. Is this occurrence actual or merely a point of perception? (Is a point of perception no less actual?)In a second definition of indeterminacy, Brian Massumi, (2002) in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, tells us that a body in motion is held within an ever-changing process of movement relative to its own already non-static position in space, ('... its own non-present potential to vary ...'). Massumi, (in a vein which is similar to Henri Bergson`s sense of 'becoming') maintains that the only 'real' relation is that of a body to its own indeterminacy, (... its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise that it is, in any here and now.') Does Massumi`s interpretation and my demonstration here, refute the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, despite the difficulty in being able to measure two presences (or one divided presence) simultaneously? In contrast, although not entirely, William Wordsworth, articulating indeterminacy as an aesthetic, made room in any insubstantial meaning or questionable reliablility of an event, by replacing it with imagination deferring to a potential for interpretation. He called it, ‘Something evermore about to be’.Indeterminacy and the roaming body – in the contexts of this phrase, perhaps we have no way of forecasting how our connections will be determined when we meet someone in the street. Will we even engage? What might comprise the least element of a meeting between two people in the street? Somehow though, either sooner or later, (or, in the light of what we have just seen - sooner and later), without always recognizing it we are always leaving. Allowing for the variables within which we carry out our departure, the only non-variable is that we will actually depart from meetings which resemble islands in the stream - places of temporary purchase within change.In my videoed dance work, I am concerned with the investigation of what I will call the spaces 'between recognized content’ in our lived experience. In exploring what may comprise engagement and conversation on the street, I am not so much interested by what is being communicated, as what is being left out, due to what I identify as interpersonal terrain dominated by indeterminacy. I am interested how this uncertainty located within movement/change may influence or to a significant extent, govern the nature of dialogue in urban contexts. The videos playing here are expressions of small-conversations, sometimes missed, between the dancers and between the dancers and members of the public. The dance-work is supposed to be mildly interventionist in terms of how it affects the flow of commuters and catalyses a response – creating for the people walking past, a private tableau made public between two people, a virtual, half-witnessed-half-remembered-later moment, representative of the myriad of disjunct dialogues and discreet micro-dramas within scenes of departure which may occur, in these kinds of public spaces. Responses are curious, concerned, mystified, guarded, warm and cold but above all, removed from us as strangers - as we are removed from them.The anthropologist Marc Augé (2004), offers us another perspective on belonging and what I shall describe as the results of a societal, collective maturation of autonomy. In his definitive text, ‘non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity’, Augé succinctly documents the profound dysfunctional changes (relative to the fracturing of identities within community and the dislocation of community itself) to our westernized societies. These dischordant developments were precipitated not so much by the nature of our thinking about architecture, but by the architecture of our thinking about our behaviours in our habitats. Augé rigorously interrogates the substance and resultant implications of our living spaces and environments and ultimately, finds them wanting. His commentary questions the extent to which we are still in possession of spaces which we might define as 'places' - whether we still belong in those spaces that we frequent the most, or whether they have become, in his words, 'non-lieux' or non-places: airports, railway stations, hypermarkets, filling-station forecourts, Ferry terminals ... or Ferrys.Contrary to Augé`s assertion that places like airports are situated at the fore-front of non-lieux locales, John Di Stefano (Senior Lecturer at Massey University in Wellington) proposes a very different view in the description and categorizing of the airport as a socio-geographic space: In his acclaimed video, ‘Hub’ he suggests an alternative definition for the term 'belonging' - that the idea of ‘home’ and belonging is today perhaps more ideally expressed as ‘… a sense of being between places.’ (Di Stefano, quoted in Video Data Bank, 2001). Hub proposes that we consider the airport as a home-away-from-home and also a place of ‘dis-Appearance’ – a place of opportunity which entails a transformative process rather than simply vanishing. So rather than being a non-place, the inference here is that the airport becomes, ‘… a rich and complex respository of interlacing personal and political histories – a new space of belonging.’ di Stefano (2001) Clearly then, one persons sense of non-place is another`s place. But, is it not our search for personal and professional independence and the systems which provide for a more efficiently autonomous management of that independence that has for some, created a world of 'non-lieux' or non-places? It is interesting to note, too, that all these systems on a larger-than-life scale are orientated around the movement of populations, essentially articulating and perpetuating within arrivals, climates of departure. Leaving. Why not Arriving? Does not indeterminacy bring us to our arrivals just as surely as our departures? I am sure that it does. Arrival suggests a governance of some significance; a quiet triumph of navigation to a secure location, yet each arrival holds the seeds of the next departure, creating for us a pause, a sense of temporary settling; seen through this current contextual vision, arrival is itself only momentarily grasped and subsequently lost as a place in time and space which punctuates change, from which ultimately, we move away.Within the parameters of this urban myth, the manifestation of indeterminacy suggests that ‘Leaving’ is a universal state over which we have no conscious control. Departure is that paradoxical frame of reference for us as humans which both, frees us from the constraints of our previous engagement while instilling perhaps, trace echoes of what has been left behind. For me, this creates poignancy - a pathos evident in the most mundane of departures, humanity-wide. Whether it be recognizably profound and measurably life-altering, or apparently occurring within the humdrum of the everyday, departures and the act of ‘leaving’ people and places of significance constantly colour our lives. Could it be that this unconscious facility that we unknowingly possess; Leaving as an ongoing, involuntary occurrence, is responsible for our departures, regardless of our own diagnostic sensing within a meeting or engagement with someone? Perhaps departure itself is the indeterminant driving factor here. A condition which affects us all, impinging upon and mediating our behaviour while for the most part, we remain in ignorance of its existence.In 1927, Henri Bergson, who had previously been hailed as both, ‘the greatest thinker in the world’ and ‘the most dangerous man in the world’ (Mullarkey, 1999b) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been a major influence on the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze. Bergson is perhaps most widely known for his treatises on the concepts of time and becoming. His stance as a ‘process philosopher’ on ‘lived’ and ‘experienced’ time and space is particularly relevant for me: He was concerned with the actions which bridge or give rise to the manifestation of content. He pursued these intangible qualities binding content, concentrating on the unfolding process of the event itself.But significantly, for this paper, Bergson`s thinking recognizes and traverses the territory occupied by indeterminacy and in so doing, transforms ‘being’ into ‘becoming’: If we take it that ‘Being’ can be defined as the descriptor typically given to those essential qualites of a thing that endure despite all temporary changes in appearance, reality can then be defined ontologically, by enquiry into the particular kind of “being” that a given entity has or expresses. ‘Becoming’ however, for Bergson, was and remains quite a different way of defining reality. The word describes an action rather than a static quality. It refers to a view of the world which is defined through motion which is continuous. So the only reality is constant change, flux, transformation – becoming. The things we perceive as ‘real’ and constant, reliable and set are outcomes relative to our respective perceptions. To quote Bergson,‘ … the qualities of matter are so many stable views that we take of its instability’. Bergson puts this very succinctly another way: '… rather than there being things which change', more accurately speaking, there is, '…change provisionally grasped as a thing'. Bergson (2005) This realignment of perspective may allow us to witness indeterminacy in-the-making, made visible in meetings between people on the street, governed in their actions by the phenomenon of departure.In his 1939 Essay, Movement as Language, Len Lye stated:Movement is the result of a feeling in one thing of strong difference from other things. Movement is always one thing moving away from other things—not toward. And the result of movement is to be distinct from other things: the result of movement is form. The history of any definite form is the movement of which the form is the result. When we look at something and see the particular shape of it we are looking at its after-life. Its real life is the movement by which it got to be that shape.In Lye`s description of the world this observation shares similar territory to Bergson`s, maintaining that we live 'change' in a constant process of becoming and that we can only grasp and isolate moments provisionally within change itself.Brian Massumi (2002) echoes this point of view:When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition ... In motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary. That relation, to borrow a phrase from Deleuze, is real but abstract … This is an abstractness pertaining to the transitional immediacy of a real relation – that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise that it is, in any here and now).When I began my Masters study two years ago, my commencement point for research was to take and investigate the basic premise that the 'real' is influenced by the virtual, all the time and everywhere; that we experience moments which could be described as 'virtual' every day. I began to work in both Real Life and initially, quite cynically in Second Life and very quickly found out that the residents in Second Life who I interviewed, indignantly regarded the whole construct as very real. To these people (now myself included) Second Life is another facet of the Real. This notion is supported in Massumi`s exploration of the ‘‘indeterminacy’ of the body – the realities facing the body which are incomplete without the recognition of another, constantly simultaneously-generated virtual description of ‘now’.’12 Massumi posits that ‘this body’ is here, but also, ‘this presence and essentially when in motion, they are no longer with us, here, but ‘over there’, now ...' 13 My work focusses upon the nature of movement itself, which is inevitably coloured and controlled by what could be said to be a force outside almost everything, but which equally, is integral to all: Time.Massumi suggests that the body in movement means accepting the body in its occupation of space and time, as a paradox: that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body itself. Of it, but not it. Indeterminate, coincident, but real and material. Massumi calls this echo a, ‘Fellow-travelling dimension of the same reality’, 14 A legitimate interpretation of identifiable alterity? In this time-based context, it could be said that the body is present but within its indeterminacy, the time-based embodiment of ‘body’ has already moved on. This assertion as a concept is interesting to consider in the context of my ‘in-transit’ dominated practice and offers a framework for speculation about the reasons for what often, are the expressions of truncated, disjunct forms of communication in the street. In a sense, one could say that the environment or ‘stage’ for my work, rather than a commuter-busy passageway, or Wellington Railway Station at rush-hour, is more accurately, the moving body itself. The body`s potential to vary suggests an alignment which juxtaposes yet subordinates ‘being’ to becoming. Our ontological presence can be defined by the idea that we are in a continual state of being/becoming – a time-based positioning. In qualifying his argument, Massumi paraphrases Deleuze in saying that the problem with dominant modes of cultural and literary theory is not that they are too abstract to grasp the solidity or corporeal fabric of the real. The problem is that these modes are not abstract enough to grasp the real incorporeality of what we take to be real. Which leads me to the previously mentioned state of blended-reality.Mark Hansen, in Bodies in Code who sees the embodiment of function manifesting through the human body, acting as a kind of seismographic wand. Hansen maintains that: ‘… all reality is mixed reality’, Hansen quotes Brian Massumi who talks about the existence of the analogue as a transformative entity:Always on arrival a transformative feeling of the outside, a feeling of thought sensation is the being of the analog(sic). This is the analog(sic) in a sense close to the technical meaning, as a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualitatively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves. Or heat into pain, Or light waves into vision. Or vision into imagination. Or noise in the ear into music in the heart. Or outside coming in. Variable continuity across the qualitatively different: continuity of transformation.(Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 2002:135 in Hansen, 2006:5-6)Through our internal analogue therefore, we possess the innate capacity to transform continuously, the many real and virtual realities of which our existence is comprised. The blended-reality paradigm can shift the fields of 'orthodox' perceptions which have, in the past, established existing modes of seeing and understanding reality: Hansen maintains that the reason why so many of us now operate in so-called virtual, metaverse worlds with apparent ease, is because we have always done so - we encounter without comment, a myriad of moments which we could describe as virtual every day in our 'real life' existence. The shift for us as 'analogue' where the process within us as humans which brings metaverse technologies like Second Life.com together with our natural perceptions, supports a function which expands the scope of our natural perception and integrates real-world and virtual realities to arrive at a more homogeonous blended-reality.Rather than presenting the virtual as a completely technical simulacrum – a portal to a fully immersive, separate or fantasy world, the blended-reality paradigm regards it as just one more realm among others which can be accessed through our already embodied perception or our ability to enact - or, in the case of both Real and Second Life, to role-play. 'We are all in the same house, but using different rooms', Dharan Longley, a very good friend of mine said to me yesterday. So there is less emphasis here on the content and more emphasis on the ways in which we access that content.I am working in Second Life as well as Real Life, not because I am intrigued by their differences where I recognize a separate virtual and real world, but because under the auspices of the blended-reality that I inhabit, I can perhaps more easily explore the interplay between Real Life where Second Life becomes a facet of the Real. Here I can converse, witness and belong as analogue, while making critical commentary upon yet another field of departure.This section in brackets was not read at the conference due to time constraints:[Points of PurchaseTo contextualize my thinking, I need to continue with my case for 'belonging' before I can sensibly comment on its erosion. Over the last 200 years, Western Thought has created a dialectic which, I believe, impacts upon certain concepts concerned with the acquisition of autonomy within personal identity - that debate which seeks to synthesize the Self and the ‘other’; the implications of which may affect our ability to ‘belong’ in the here and now and consequently, to question a sense of lasting allegiance to any one place.Is it possible to exercise a conscious control over our facility to belong? At which point does an autonomous state stand so resolved, itself independent and immune from the need to be a part of something greater? On the one hand, that late 17C and 18C set of collective Western values emerging through The Enlightenment, called upon individuals to think for themselves. In embracing this, we have since held that independence and thus the capacity for reason (which apparently, enables one to successfully stand alone) were to be our exemplars. This in turn has necessitated that the individual be able to separate from all that is externally imposed on them in order to evaluate and consider rationally, their ongoing condition: that of a sentient being, with the capacity to act autonomously. Yet it can be seen that perhaps self-autonomy, is divided: Since Georg Hegel, (1770-1831) major psychological accounts of the self have placed its dependence on the ‘other’ at the centre of formation and maintenance of the self. For Hegel, one needs the ‘other’ to recognize one's status as a self-directing subject in order to create the conditions for the self-directing activity; one's self image is mediated through the ‘self-other’ relation, not only in terms of its substantive or evidential content but also in terms of the self in its base capacity. For Sigmund Freud, the ‘other’ is internalized to become a central organizing principle for one's desire, one's needs, driven by one's unconscious. Thus, on the one hand freedom and independence requires reason, which requires the ability to separate from the ‘other’, while at the same time, the self is ineluctably dependent on the other's interruptions and influence. If both of these traditions are broadly correct, it would seem that we are doomed to a lack of freedom through autonomy, because undivided autonomy is doubtful. Consequently, freedom through independence is defined as precisely that which we cannot attain.Linda Martin-Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy and currently the Director of Women`s Studies at Syracuse University in the USA, asserts in The Political Critique of Identity, '... in classical liberal political theory, the initial state of the self is conceptualized as an abstract individual without, or prior to, any group allegiance. It is from this "initial position" that the self engages in rational deliberation and thus achieves autonomy ...' through free choice. 'As (Immanuel) Kant developed this idea, a person who cannot gain critical distance from and thus objectify their cultural traditions cannot rationally assess them and thus cannot attain autonomy. In Kant's view, an abstract or disengaged self is for this reason necessary for full personhood. Moreover,the process of modernity, which was conceptualized as analogous on the societal level to the process of individual maturation, became defined as just this increased ability to distance oneself from one's cultural traditions. In this way this distancing ability also became a key part of the global, European-centered teleology of intellectual and moral development, defining the terms by which societies were to be labeled advanced or backward.’ Martin-Alcoff goes on to stress that, ‘… the norm of rational maturity, then, required a core self stripped of its identity …’One side of this theoretical and often prejudicially-lived debate, has sought to locate and resolve in us an independent state of self. We can now see that this state may be defined dichotomously, responsible not only for shaping but also for ignoring it seems, the collateral damage occurring to that other aspect of personal and collective identity - the issue of our ‘Belonging’. Could it be that this aspect of which Kant speaks, this process of maturation, the graduation to ‘… full personhood’ is a contributor to the erosion in our sense of belonging? Has the manifestation of this balanced autonomous identity so carefully harboured by us, comprised merely a veneer over that reality which now emerges as a lost locus?
Let us examine for a moment, verbal conversation as an adhesive which only partially binds us to the moment in this stream of change. Not only does speech aid our functioning effectively in social situations and locates us in time and given space, but more candidly, the ability to converse and to be heard affirms, empowers and expands the map of the human heart.In Tricks of the Mind, by Derren Brown, under the section on ‘Targeted Rapport’, Brown writes, ‘ Most people when they are getting on well, will be in a state of unconscious ‘rapport’. They will tend to mirror each other`s body language and so on without realizing it …’ At the same time, ‘… there is the odd sensation we have all experienced (though we never think to mention it) of knowing when the other person is about to get up and leave. Suddenly there is something in the air, a moment or a shift and then you know the other person is about to say they should ‘make a move’. And if they don`t you have that feeling that they are outstaying their welcome’. The level of unconscious rapport shared up to that moment, particularly if the conversation has lasted for some time, is responsible for the sharing of mutual thought and body patterns so that together you can sense when the time to leave has arrived. Speech comprises much of the articulation of this and that of our wider socio-contextual map - much, but not all. The hidden message which is about when and how to leave an engagement is articulated through speech-prompts but also through body language, an underlying empathetic cue to move on, with this decision coming from a place ‘of ‘ and in the body – a place from which, in a manner of speaking we have already departed.Brown maintains that studies carried out on rapport have shown an array of mirrored behaviours that are not merely body positioning but something far more subtle. It has been established that people in rapport with one another tend to breathe at the same rate, adopt similar facial expressions, blink at the same rate and use one another`s language. I would describe these responses as somatically based. In other words they are products of a non-spoken, internal discourse that the body carries out continually (using one another`s language is still instigated by a bodily response to a stimulus). A hidden dialogue beneath speech and vision through which we are more overtly governed. We have at our fingertips, so to speak, a very specific skillset which is available to us on a subliminal level during our interaction with another; a transponder of sorts, fashioned to assist us in the process of moving ourselves and a stranger identity to a place which may simply be less strange and designed almost as if to counteract the inexorability of our predilection for departure.‘Rudimentary engagements, communication at its most basic, the prototype of all human interaction …’ such are the descriptors for the term, ‘Protoconversation’ in Daniel Goleman`s, Social Intelligence, The New Science of Human Relationships. The term relates to the early neural signals which expand into methods for establishing a rapport that we experienced as babies, making our first communicative forays into the outside world through the medium of our mothers. Often a synchrony of rhythmic motion, touch, gaze, sound and breath, a coordination of hand movements and facial expressions will establish a mutual rapport between mother and child. Such conversations are moreoften than not very short in duration – even only seconds in length and they end when both parties arrive at matched states, typically, affectionate ones. Protoconversations have a certain elasticity in meaning and application. Not only does it refer to the very earliest development of our powers of communication (mostly non-verbal), but in adulthood, protoconversations remain as our most fundamental template for mapping, matching or missing in meetings with others.The template is tacit, a subtle awareness through feeling and the senses which allows us when we meet to quietly proceed, in step, with a stranger or acquaintance, friend or family member. Protoconversation is a silent dialogue – Goleman uses the term, ‘substrate’ upon which all encounters or engagements are built. Goleman assures us that it is, ‘… the hidden agenda in every interaction’. Goleman (2007) A silent go-between if you will, which underpins and as a mode of communicating, often outlasts the manifestation of speech. One could extend this to say that protoconversation is a silent, neurokinetic conversation supported by mutual empathy - assisting a curiosity about the path ahead. Attention, albeit one that fluctuates, is paid to the task of listening to one`s partner, in the moment, using certain tools: When ‘conversing’ or when in a dance duet, (particularly those dance modes which are based on the premise of improvisation) listening - paying attention through touch to the tone or tenor of the connection with the other person, the unspoken, fleetingly glimpsed under-dialogue of the-moment-in-change is not only paramount if the conversation/duet is to last, but it also allows us to gather information about what is occuring in front of us on Goleman`s ‘substrate’ level.So what occurs before the engagement closes? Why do people leave? What cues, like those just mentioned, are there to warn of impending closure?In Contact Improvisation Dance, (like the name suggests there is an absence of choreography in this shared movement mode - and more of an unbridled revelry in indeterminacy) as in a spoken conversation between two people where each must navigate uncharted waters as they go, whether they are strangers or not, sometimes one person leaves the conversation or duet; sometimes there is a tacit, unspoken moment when both parties recognise that a point of stasis has been reached and closure is imminent; Why? Are both parties simply - tired? Sometimes there may be the result of a mismatch in listening, a change in mood; Sometimes the narrative which has been self-sustaining, evolving, fluctuating through pauses (which are not in themselves necessarily inert) and bursts of intense movement, simply runs out of momentum and finds its own place to rest. The conversers or dancers are instigators of these pathways to departure, and simultaneously, witnesses to it. Rarely though, is departure itself recognized as the instigator of the act to leave. The act of 'Leaving' itself makes no demands upon us - we are swept on regardless, in a stream of change that we cannot stop. ‘Leaving’ is a descriptor of this state which forever accompanies us. Suffice it to say, I believe that to be at peace with ‘Leaving’ requires practice when there is a suspicion that conversations, meetings and engagements are those points of purchase in the stream which inevitably, cannot last. It can be seen that perhaps within the parameters of negotiating engagements in this paper, the slide toward departure may involve something more than two people reaching an energetic impasse.]To close with Bergson, in The Social Psychology of Experience: Studies in Remembering and Forgetting, the authors, David Middleton and Steven Brown suggest that Bergson`s view of the world is a process which embraces a, ‘fluid continuity of the real’, (2005). There is no doubt that for us time is at first identical with the continuity of our inner life. What is this continuity? That of a flow or passage, but a self-sufficient flow or passage, the flow not implying a thing that flows, and the passing not presupposing states through which we pass; the thing and the state are only artificially chosen snapshots of the transition, all that is naturally experienced is duration itself. (Bergson quoted in Middleton & Brown, 2005: p.61) I maintain then, that we are not 'beings' but time-based creatures, mediated by uncertainty through change. In this Urban Myth the interconnections which exist between indeterminacy manifesting through lived departures, ensures that there is no surcease for the roaming body in this blended continuity of the Real we call life. No secure position to be attained and held indefinitely. In this context we may find that we are interconnected through our mutual estrangement and that our engagements, conversations and connections will always be at hazard.I suspect from my observations that ultimately, as indeterminants, we are always ‘Leaving’ and that this is a true descriptor of our condition in that business of being human. There is real pathos to be found in a lifetime of leaving engagements and this state will keep us forever defined by some, if not ourselves, as strangers. My opening paragraph of this paper introduces the notion of ' ... a climate of indeterminacy governing our actions which appear to prevail ...' In the end, despite our acts and accomplishments which bear witness to signal points of purchase, perhaps the only actions which truly prevail are those which draw us away. Leaving.My last reference is a quotation from Buddha:What is the appropriate behaviour for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What`s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?(Buddha quoted in Human Givens Journal 2008)References:Allen, J. (2000). Negotiating difference or being with strangers. Thinking Space Crang and Thrift (eds). Routledge, Taylor and Francics Group, New York, (p:57)Augé, M. (2004). non-places; introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Verso, London. Translated by John Howe.Bergson, H. (2005). Visualizing Experience. Henri Bergson on memory in Middleton, D and Brown, S. D. 2005, (p. 61)Brown, D. (2007). Tricks of the Mind. Channel 4 Books, (p.186).Buddha. Human Givens. vol 14, (3) Human Givens Publishing Ltd, East Sussex, England, UK.Buddha. (2008). Human Givens. vol 14, (3) Human Givens Publishing Ltd, East Sussex, England, UKdi Stefano, J. (2001). HUB video quoted in Video Data Bank.Goleman, D. (2007) Social Intelligence, Recipe for Rapport, Bantam Dell, (p.30)Hansen, M. (2006). Bodies in Code. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, New York. (pp5-6).Lye, L. & Riding, L. (1935). Movement as Language, Movement as Medium in Epilogue. Deya Majorica and London, p.231-235.Martin-Alcoff, L. The Political Critique of Identity. The second chapter from Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self.Retrieved from: http://www.alcoff.com/content/chap2polcri.html 25.1.09Massumi, D. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation Duke University Press, Durham & London, (p.135).Middleton D and Brown S. (2005) (The Social Psychology of Experience: Studies in Remembering and Forgetting, (p.62).Retrieved from: Quantum Mechanics 1925-1927 THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLEhttp://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htmWordsworth, W. (1805) The Prelude. Cambridge and the Alps, (Vl 541-2)Mike Baker Nelson, NZ Aotearoa 6.2.09Read more…
