Corporeal Computing: A Performative Archaeology of Digital Gesture

2 September 2013 - 3 September 2013

CALL FOR PAPERS / DEMONSTRATIONS / PERFORMANCES

Deadline: 3 May 2013

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS

  Paul Kaiser (OpenEnded Group), pioneer digital artist, whose collaborations with Merce Cunningham (Biped), Bill T Jones (Ghostcatching), and Wayne McGregor (Stairwell) have become landmarks of the digital dance field.

  Thomas W. Calvert, Professor Emeritus in Computer Science, Simon Fraser University (Canada), and CEO Credo Interactive. Credo are the team responsible for groundbreaking softwares like Lifeforms and Danceforms.

  Kirk Woolford, Senior Lecturer in Media and Film, University of Sussex (UK), software developer and digital artist.

Corporeality and computing come together in   the notion of the digital. If so, the digital could be described as a mix (borrowing loosely from Albert Lautman). For instance: a virtual object like a number mixes with the sense of a body (say, a finger). What you get is a digit, a mixture of concrete and virtual object, neither finger nor number but both. To digitise, according to this definition, is to point at virtual objects from the material and physical site of a body. What links these is the discreteness of both finger-digit and mathematical-digit. One could argue that there is no digital technology without some kind of bodiliness attached to it, or suggested by it. Digitality, carrying this argument further still, is inherently a site where bodies and disembodied technology mix.

The digital speaks of interfaces. So, for instance, the face of a user and the computer screen come into contact. In this context, the digital might also be a culture of gestures moving between humans and computers, a mixed-language of interfacing, where bodylang and codelang mix.

We particularly encourage participants to present practical demonstrations of novel interfaces, digital-choreographic objects, gestural gadgets, (post) digital artwork, and performances that exemplify this link between bodylang and codelang, and the indeterminacy of the space in-between.

Papers, demonstrations and performances are invited, but not limited to the following approaches/ areas, and key questions:

  Digital arts: how can data visualisation and computer vision be mobilised as a more physical, or a more gestural type of image-making process (e.g. photodynamic, non-photorealistic, volumetric)?

  Choreographic: what is ‘physical thinking’? How do bodies blend into the virtual via dance (trace-forms)?

  Historical: what can we learn from pre-electronic histories of embodied and mechanical digitality (e.g. Computus Manualis Digitalis in Bede, I Ching, The Leibniz Machine)? What are the lessons of the historical avant-gardes and their groundbreaking exploration of virtual embodiments (Moholy-Nagy, Schlemmer, the futurists)?

  Technological: how do bodies and technologies mix? Some examples might come from: communication technologies and gestural design (voice recognition, gesture recognition); motion capture and movement design (Kinect, mocap, Leap Motion); haptics (touch screen, sense of digital touch and digital sensation); choreographic software; AI in digital performance; digital embodiments (doubles, avatars, cyborgs, etc.)

  Philosophical: what are the ontological, phenomenological, materialist and other such considerations of digital embodiment and digital materiality?

  Linguistic: what are the connections between programming and body language, between mathematical languages and gesture, between ‘motricity and mentality’ (Llinás)?