"dance and tech" is a field of theft and non-authentic invention continued...

[Julie N. Cruse]

On the "genre" of dance and technology, a comment was made that the people who use the tools in dance and tech are just feeding off of the creativity of the person who invented the tool.

Comments?


I orginally posted the above statement in a blog which I shared with some friends on this network. The statement ilicited many provocative responses and a heated discussion began to take place within a few hours. So we moved the discussion to the forum where there would be more room for the vast responses on this topic. The first 3 posts below are the statements made in the blog, copied and pasted here so that the discussion may continue in the forum - which turned out to be a more appropriate home for such reflective responses and debates.

[Julie N. Cruse]

It wasn't my intention to protray the issue of control as "bad" or "good." I am simply questioning the premise of the term "control" itself. I think the very definition of it needs to be looked at that's all. And, yes, in order to obtain that definition, one must look at how "control" operates in various systems. I think control is entirely real - but not what we really mean, entirely. Because control is conditional. It can only be had when conditions are right:

muscles: must have rest, must have nutrition, must have capacity to adapt to given stress
computers: must have power, must have "rest", must have ram.

So the term control itself involves cooperation. The word control doesn't carry a cooperative tone. It seems to say control instead of cooperation.

So I'm not questioning the righteousness of control. I'm questioning the accuracy of the term itself.

But the discussion on how "control" is exercised is very interesting, but I'm not sure how to talk about that without first establishing clarity on the reality of the term itself.

[Johannes Birringer]

Hallo all.
Georg's stories are both great. i ws trying to envision you in that camp. glad there some folks there who use linux (when there is power). the report you give on the muscle stimulation and nerve control/decontrol is rather haunting,- glad Arthur responded as he's done quite a bit of work on this.

Stelarc, interestingly, uses these performances with extermal muscle stimulation systems (control is stimulation, and its electrical functionality has an additional erotic side, wouldn't one agree, Julie?, all completely or at least partially consensual and post-Foucauldian and all partly illusory and yet very real - nd changing its meanings in different contexts, that is very accurate to say..., y'all know the song by rammstein about the cannibal, it is great song "This is my part" ) to demonstrate why he refers to "the"body and not "his" body -- Georg, you noted it then, it wasn't your hand, and never was.

it would be nice to talk further on sensors / stimulators,

the earlier discussion about mathematics was intriguing, i just got a message from one of the dancers i work with in our new production Suna no Onna, and she was responding to a lenghty test rehearsal we had last week with sensor data and numbers that we needed to receive to (re) calibrate what the motion sensor would do for us (on the image environment)

--so indeed the dance or the gesture/movement action has / is not just a mediated/translated mathematics, and may not only be explainable, to some extent, through physics, anatomy, and action observation and mirror action (what we learn about the mind and motorsensory perception/cognition from neurophysiology) and calculation (computation of why the body moves in this way) the dancing body and its gestures also generate a mathematics. hmm, this doesn't sound right. it generates data which (in digital sense) are read and analysed as numbers. Our collaborator Paul Verity Smith has written a beautiful text on this stage of our flailing/fledgling "interactive ....choreography" - and i will ask him to see whether we can make it available as part of the new publishings we are doing on performance techniques and performer adaptations of/to new sensitive environments (control control).

My use of the term "control" is with respect to performance in interactive/reactive and responsive digital/virtual environments . i don't need it perhaps, have long resisted it 'cause of its power connotations and military and hierarchical presumptions. but we use it anyway, more often than not, to refer to the interface mechanisms, the relations to dancer to screen images/digital objects or sonic diffusions, and in a sensitive environment, the relationship is indeed a very synergetic one, and the working with multiple (cross-modal) activities of activating/enacting the microgestures with sensors has huge proprioceptive consequences, kinesthetic and kineaesonic repercussions for our experience. yes, there are instruments (human and electronic) in exercise...

But dance or performance with interactive or reponsive systems of course is also constructed and composed with presumption of functionalities in an interface (first level), and expressive dimensions (higher levels). After a lot of bad interactive art or uninteresting interactive performance installations, we have not quite given up. my prefered level of epxloration right now is narrative space (design, performance and the "wearable), i am interested in how we wear a space or imagine doing so, and what stories we tell when we think we have a direct interrelationship with the virtual and the projected.

the virtual, by the way, is something we should have good long talk about.


and here, parting, is an announcement for Marc Downie's lecture in Glasgow.... it appears to be on mathematics.

ciao.
Johannes

X=20.3, x(y()), x.y — And Other Choreographic Moves

Moves talk: Marc Downie (OpenEnded Group) and Martin Naef (GSA)
Date: 8 Dec Time: 3pm Cost: FREE bu

[Arthur Elsenaar]

Hi Johannes, I have found from my research into face space, that direct control over the facial muscles turns the face into a computational object. This control (I have no objections about that word whatsoever) exerts more precision and consistency than what the brain is able to do. The computational performative space has therefore been significantly augmented. (I like to use the word computational instead of mathematical as it's more accurate in this context.) In this case control is direct, accurate and predictable. Yes, my algorithmic pieces are dictatorial and I love it; total control is not a dream as someone suggested, it's a reality.

The body, the hand is an objectivation in line with De La Mettries' materialistic view of the body, which is an extension of Descartes earlier animal as automata.

As a last comment on the other message you sent, the digital art scene is going through an evolutionary period, not revolutionary as we concluded. I myself have been in evolutionary mode for quite a while and I can say it's quite rewarding. Never really understood the zapp artist, hopping from one unrelated project to another. It was fashionable at the time when I did art school, but it had the inherent problem of creating a very bleak artist profile. Another example of failing post-modernity, the post- that never really happened.(Virillio)

[Marlon Barrios Solano]

Neither this nor that...coupling of language, memory, environment...not information processing...at lest that we know...

[Johannes Birringer]

Hi all

thanks for good lesson, Tony.
i m trying to learn how to work in this forum/blog environment, and keep a good humored approach, and sometimes I aam even enjoying a bit or irony, and a less sytematic appraoch to answering trains of thoughts that might be swapping between different blogs here, and discussions there, and the theme of mathematics, or the comptational, as Arthur prefers, has been taken up by several discussants, and not always in reference to the very interesting paper by Claudia Carello and M.T. Turvey ("Rotational Invariants and Dynamic Touch").
I am not sure that the "feel" of movement depends on its physics since i can feel movement i am not carrying out, but then again, I am not a neuroscientist.

Tony, when you say;
>>it will be useful to address you directly since you seem to hold a good deal of control in how work and conversations are historicised. A difficult synthesis to perform. >> \
i am not sure what you mean by me having any control over anything on the web or in a bog environment, or anyone here controling how anything is historicized in a discouse, it would be interesting to ask what that means, when 8 or 24 people read such blogs and they disappear in a minute, as these countless videos on YouTube will disappear without to many traces.
I appreciate your concern for productice exchanges and for a focus that is needed in a good dialog. but i am not going to have time to go to every link that appears in the blog, and don;t expect anyone to go to links i might provide, that is a given.
regards, J

[Julie N. Cruse]

Johannes and Tony,

I think one of the biggest strengths of online discussions is also its biggest weakness. The medium lends itself to delayed feedback. We have time to think out our replies, but at the same time, if we've been misunderstood, sometimes it takes days to iron out a simple miscommunication. In this medium, I see why Tony says its important to be clear about what you mean. I also see how it can bring new things to a discussion to make playful references to previous threads, Joannes. So, I'm not terribly upset about that.

I generally appreciate the willingness of this community to examine multiple tangents as they come up so thoroughly. It brings the quality of the whole conversation up to new levels - where no stone goes unturned. Maybe we could create separte forums for these ideas? Mathematics? Control? Sensors? It seems they are all related, so I hesitate to break them up.

I think the scope, intelligence, and investment of participants in this discussion makes it reasonable to expect them to click the links, etcetera. I have made this network a top priority since the moment I joined. Dance and tech is what I do. This is my community. So it is important to me to keep up with the conversations and try to be involved in a way that best represents my ideas and responses to the group. I treat each response as a mini-research paper. I trust that the quality of the conversation and the regularity of the contributors is an indication that most of us feel the same. I am glad you are here Johannes, as your questions have brought up other interesting issues. I also hope that you feel the quality of our engagement is more reliable than those who circulate YouTube. I would hate for the established dynamic to be undermined by one comment that seems to say its okay to skip over details in responding to people's well-thought comments.

On mathematics - Tony never said that the feel of movement "depends on its physics." I think that would be a variable dependent on the sensitivity and calibration of each person's neuromuscular system. I really think he meant very simply what he said, that mathematical truths can be felt. I agree... I am a dancer, with background in physics.

[Julie N. Cruse]

Oh! I take it back... thanks for the correction. I've decided that this great topic - mathematics... should have its own forum. Agree??? So I started a new forum to make it easier to keep track of comments pertaining to it. Please look there and see if I got everyone correctly. I copied and pasted all the comments that were linked to Tony's point. Thanks! sorry for the confusion. I hope this helps. (3D Animation final has me all loopy today and yesterday so I don't really trust myself. if you contributed something to that discussion, please check to make sure i got it right, and if not, please copy and paste it in there somewhere, as you'll know best where to find the comment that may or may not be missing).

[Julie N. Cruse]

Here's the link to the new forum -

On Kinesthetics and Mathematics...

[Marlon Barrios Solano]

Hello all,
I have been reading this thread about mathematics and kinesthetics. I think that it is very relevant to relate the core and the focus of this thread to Arthur's question about dance and technology and its relationship with science.
I think that is is important for us as practitioners and researchers in this field that more and more main stream science (SCIENCE) is studying movement , animal and human motion in a combination of interdisciplinary projects that recently have also been included within cognitive science.
This is quite interesting also because movement artists (dance or dance and technology) have been reading, studying, getting inspiration from main stream science and some other rather fringie projects from long time.
It is easy to find traces of ecological psycology (JJ Gybson was very fringy by then) in Lisa Nelson's work on improvisational scores using the vision system (Tunning Scores), or the relation of the Scott Kelso and Turvey school of dynamics patterns for the study of movement, posture and the experience of movement with new approaches in kinesiology. The dynamics school are considering movement as cognition as alternative models in order to be able to reserach it with qualitative methods (now digital technologies are also allowing to measure changes in real-time).
There is a lot important research done in the University of Indiana by psychologist Esther Thellen et al (she is also a Feldenkrais practitioner). I would add to this group the influential embodied cognition approach (Varela, Marturana, Thompson) and the sub-sumption architecture from the MIT robotics lab (Rodnie Brooks), they facilitated all these research projects giving a new "world view" that went beyond the new computational/mathematical tools. The wold view stated that a cognitive system is not a computer, it is dynamical system. " It is not the brain, , inner and encapsulated: rather it is the whole system comprised of nervous system, body and environment (Gelder and Port in Mind as Motion from MIT press). There is also very cool reserach from VJ Ramachnadram about phantom limbs (that are felt and moved) and Andy Clark's Being There and Natural Born Cyborgs

My point is that, science had to develop and accept a "new "paradigm that changed the notion of cognition from the linguistic disembodied paradigm put forth by Marvin Minky and others and thanks to the influence and investments in robotics we started hearing about biological intelligence (not just about talking), non-linguistic approaches to intelligence: movement based approaches.
With this post, I just wanted to create bit of context for this discussion and to share a vision in which a dance specialists are collaborating actively in interdisciplinary teams with scientists and sharing the huge amount of knowhow and insights that have been an "of course" for many dancers: motion is a at the core of cognition.

So, I have not read this article that Tony quoted but I think that it is important to clean our epistemology understanding the dynamic relation of brain, body and environment and of course the complexity of the conscious experience. It is not sufficient to focus in the brain only just because the cool. This is not just mathematics, of physics, that are felt.
It is the relational, dynamic and intricate coupling between emergent processes that shapes the body that we have evolved with our embodied metaphorical mind and its affordances (how Gibson would say).

So, this dance and technologist of the future might be working in a robotics lab to help to understand composition in real time with very simple cues or trying to investigate the Improvisational model of Bill Forsythe with eye tracking systems in the audience members averaging the geometries that are "created" and fidn the correlation with the compositional intentions of the dancers. The core issue here is that premises about the relationship between, mind body and environment have already changed and we would ha

[Raphael Xavier]

I have to say whoever said that is an ignorant fooooool! Dance up until the 80's, which is hip hop of course, has been recycled and based on what came before and an individual with certain abilities created new standards to push the body and it continued again and again and again. so the tools we use in dance are no good if you can't use them in the first place. Dance for the most part should be created with raw material so when elements are brought in it takes the performance to the next level.

[Julie N. Cruse]

Hi Raphael. Thanks for this. I think you've made a really good point: that it depends on what the artist, or audience, values. You are expressing that your value is to start from raw material - what does that mean?

[Johannes Birringer]

actually, it would be interesting to ask questions about tools again (if we were still thinking of technologies or computational flows or other kits used in performance, say video projectors, cameras, etc), regarding the continuity of dance and dance forms over the past decade or two. i'd like to understand whether Raphael is implying that much dance, say, over the past decade or two, has not been remembered too well since it wasn't that memorable (and didn't push the body or performance skills to a next level) in its use of particular tools? which are the dance works that did use tools to push .... and are data also raw material?

the initial post that led to the discussion -- Julie i don;t even remember the context now. What tools were thought of? (particular softwares?)

if you think of the discussion, a short whole ago, about Chunky Move's choreography for a dancer and Kalpyso/real-time generated & projected digital graphic animations projected onto the dancer/floor, i don't remember anyone worrying about the choreographer or dancer working with Frieder Weiss's software program; the dance's "authenticity" had little to do with Frieder writing the software or inventing it, but the discussion of the dance did have to do (to some extent) with how the choreographer and the dancer showed the result of submitting the body to the tool. Or tooling the body to the projected environment, or creating the projective visual movement through the physical movement language, or melding the real-time reactive computer graphic environment into an expressive performance form (and a particular spatialized architecture). in retrospect, i don;t know what this forum was about, since surely theft or inauthenticity are rather uninteresting and irrelevant concepts here.