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I am republishing here a  process log kept by Marc Coniglio in Facebook during the "DIGITAL BODY" lab sessions that took place at Lake Studios Berlin started September 2nd 2021 with an amazing group of international artists.
Enjoy it!
Marlon
September 2 2021
Setup for "DIGITAL BODY " is ongoing at the Lake Studios Berlin and today was sensor day.
We have prepared a range of input devices so that once underway nothing would slow the creative juices flowing.
DIGITAL BODY no.1.
Performance & Technology Laboratory : IMAGE & DATA
Hosted by Mark Coniglio, Benjamin Krieg and Guests
02.09 – 14.09.2021

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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.

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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?

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Digital Body Workshop Journal: Days 4 + 5: The Barrier of Technology. After two full days of working only with the technology of a camera, a video projector, and a performer, we opened the door to more complex tools like Isadora itself, but also robotic cameras, green screens, a Rokoko motion capture suit, and more. Immediately upon doing so, the energy in the room changed from one of quiet experimentation and extensive reflection to one of excitement ("Wow!!!"), desire and curiosity ("I want to...." or "How can i...?") and at least some frustration ("Why can't I get this working?"). These tools and devices can offer fresh and compelling new modes of expression, but their complexity can also impede a free-flowing artistic process. Please join the conversation in the comments below by answering the question we'll be asking next: what does media/technology give us, but what also does it take away?
Foto: Benjamin Krie12249590893?profile=original
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
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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)
Each of the works dug into the topic of data in a different way – the stock market, our heart beats, lie detectors and more. But none did so more provocatively than "You Are Out There" – where audience members were asked to give their identification cards as a deposit for a set of headphones, not knowing that the faces and names on those personal documents would be projected, scanned, seemingly shredded (it was faked) and otherwise exposed to the entire audience in various ways.
This highly political work led to an intense discussion among us: could an art piece ethically draw attention to matters of data privacy by violating that privacy?
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.
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OUR DANCE - the living room edition

https://vimeo.com/576478142?fbclid=IwAR1ZsEsR9mwef_ZvG3cL97NzeJWcmc5LtBkURixz0DO5tpoin_aU9RHBxEw

The one-year project series “OUR DANCE – What is your dance?”, funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, since spring 2020 has been based on a setting that is concerned about our work and our constellations. In this setting we wanted to use the potentiality of the local to bring together different neighbors or non-neighbors and emerge from unlikely encounters with a shared or individual experience, with mixed or unambiguous feelings, energies, affects, anger and insight. We ask: How can a public space be curated through the collaboration of a group? How can different audiences be mixed through unexpected gatherings in this process?
Largely under the unexpected auspices of the pandemic caused by Covid-19, we have been searching for constellations of shared learning and unlearning for more than a year now. Instead of giving and taking, instead of outreach and receiving, we set up our work as an exchange of expertise of various kinds. This tangents to some, but not all. It opens to these, but not to those. Only in the overall view of the fluctuations and confusions did small tectonic shifts become apparent. Beyond a paternalistic ethos of gratification, which accompanies many activities in the intermediate area between art and cultural education, we asked what we ourselves want to know and what points of contact arise from this. How do we proceed, how does this world proceed through and as an embodiment of changeable structures? Therefore, seventeen months ago by now, we consciously started with a very simple question that is close to us, that takes the subjective extremely personally, but at the same time offers the possibility to be examined in its social, historical and cultural complexity. In this respect, the central question of OUR DANCE is: What is YOUR dance? And, even further, how do we then dance together?
The durational online event that concludes our project, “OUR DANCE - The living room edition”, inquires into biographical elements whilst exploring the hybridity of cultures and cultural techniques. It approaches embodiment as a shared memory space and offers connections to a biographical as well as socio-political and (inter)cultural exploration. Dancing is practiced here as a special case of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten describe in “The Undercommons” (2013): They conceive learning at all levels as a collective act of knowledge exchange and knowledge production. For them, this collective learning means a practice against general disinterest or the hyper-individualized interest of individuals. Un/learning is about an interest beyond the individual search for self-interest. It crosses identities and generates new communities.
Given the abundance of dance happening in and around Uferstudios, we want to conclude with “OUR DANCE - The living room edition” together with our guests with a program series that examines dance in its various forms, as a practice that is in each case its own – biographically determined, acquired, deformed or found – along the following questions:
* What is the history, what are the cultures, politics, structures and preconditions of YOUR dance?
* How is YOUR dance embedded in the politics of its history and origins, what are the collectivizing and what are the individualizing forces that can be found in it? How and what does it embody and how does it produce a particular knowledge that cannot be found anywhere else?
* What is YOUR dance at all, how does it work and how can I – the other – dance it?
Different strategies and methods of investigation apply to different types of dance – be it street dance, dance history(s), Madonna videos, Irish social dances, theoretical practices or workshops. Whether as affirmation, as critical embodiment, or as techniques of individualization or communization: the various researches and an international conference which have been realized within the framework of our series questioned 'their dance' with their own methods and by drawing on different inputs from experts in other fields. In each case, specific decisions were made about what kinds of collaborations and what kinds of openings were needed.

PSR is a collective of Berlin-based artists and cultural workers (Lea Martini, Sheena McGrandles, Modjgan Hashemian, Stefan Hölscher, Mila Pavićević, Juli Reinartz and Simone Willeit) who have been collaborating since the 25h event “Househeating” at the Heizhaus of Uferstudios in October 2019. Most of the PSR artists are also active as cultural workers, mentors and teachers in addition to their artistic projects.
Production management: Monica Ferrari and Francesca Spisto. Technical support: Hanna Kritten Tangsoo.
Graphic design: Matrose Mantober.

Funded by the Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa and the Bezirksamt Mitte. Supported by the Creative Europe Program of the EU, Life Long Burning and the Uferstudios.

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Recordings are available via dance-tech on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8476725

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Organized by the Fritz Thyssen project “Collective Realization – The Workshop as an Artistic-Political Format” (Institute for Theatre Studies, Ruhr University, Bochum) in collaboration with the ICI Berlin and the PSR project “Our Dance” (Heizhaus/Uferstudios GmbH) in Berlin. Funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa.

Concept and Organization: Kai van Eikels and Stefan Hölscher.

Speakers: Zahra Ali Baba, Julia Bee, Sabeth Buchmann, Alice Chauchat, Bojana Cvejić, Diedrich Diederichsen, Gerko Egert, Konstantina Georgelou, Aernout Mik, Wadzanai Motsi-Khatai, Mila Pavićević, Hanna Poddig, Yvonne Rainer, Juli Reinartz, Xavier Le Roy, Heike Roms, Anne Schuh, and Sebastian Voigt.

Workshops and artistic presentations by: Jeanne-Jens Eschert, Bella Hager, Anne Mahlow, Lea Martini, Nana Melling, Aernout Mik, Marta Popivoda, and Doris Uhlich.

Assistant: Miedya Mahmod.
Graphic Design: Zahra Rashid.

Facebook: fb.me/e/ctZHBnxrp

Recordings are available via dance-tech on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8476725

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Are you an artist and interested in the blockchain? Curious about the potential of the blockchain for socio-economic design and financial innovation for your communities of practice? Would you like to explore the NFTs and decentralized finances DeFi as a creative space? Are you interested in joining a group of artists researchers exploring these questions and tools? 

If you answer yes to any of these question or you are strongly curious about Crypto, we invite you to apply to participate  in a series of 4 Online workshops/labs for artists and makers offered by MotionDAO

These lab/workshop sessions will offer foundational concepts and tools to access the blockchain economic ecosystem and explore its potential for social and financial innovation. Creative explorations of the affordances of the blockchain will be  encouraged.

The four 90 minutes sessions will introduce the participants to the fundamentals concepts and practices of Web3: blockchain, smart contracts, crypto wallets, token economies, remittances, design and emergence of value, non-fungible tokens, DeFi and DAOs.

Each session will be divided in three parts: conceptual framework, a hands on practicum and a Q&A.

We will be using the  Near Protocol.

Six hours of online mentoring will be offered by appointment.

All levels of experience with crypto and the blockchain are welcome.

Lab will be facilitated in English by Marlon Barrios Solano

DATES:

September 19th and 26th

October 17h and 24th

1:00 PM EST

Important:

  • Limited to 10 participant. Leave a brief replay to this post stating your interest and motivation.
  • Participants must commit to attend all sessions.
  • Participants will receive 10 Near Token (NEAR protocol utility token) as incentive for attending and participation. Check current Near Token Value.
  • The last session culminates with the formal invitation to join the MotionDAO and to apply for the MotionDAO/Near Creative Grants 2022(TBA).

    The labs will use Zoom, dance-tech.net and Telegram messenger app as communication tools.

Interested?

  1. Join www.dance-tech.net if you are not member.
  2. Leave a brief replay to this post stating your interest and motivation.

Questions and more information: marlon(at)dance-tech.net

Ruth Cathlow’s definition of the artist role in her book Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain:
“Artists are good in mediating abstractions for our perceptions through play, open exploration and supposition. They can tolerate, even relish, extended encounters with difference, contradiction, muddle and slippage between symbolic and material possibilities without rushing to usefulness or simplicity. They have a kitbag of methods and processes for revealing the practical affordances and animal spirit of a subject, medium or technology. They know that a way to get to know something that does’n yet exist is to collaborate with its possibilities and to do something/anything with it or about it. And by doing so, they materialize and shape what it will be, allowing many other people to access, approach and reach out to it with different parts of themselves:”

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