What is your intent with movement notation?
Notation have various intent;
- recording actual phenomena (more or less ephemeral),
- generating phenomena, notating possible phenomena to come (Dance notation as choreographer, a mnemonic tool, a time tool, a communication technique),
- generating phenomena as structural graphic system generative tool; the notation is not seen as representation of something anymore but first lifted from it representational link and manipulated say in graphical logic and then would be brought back to the domain it pertains and one would entertain the game of consequence. A relative randomised creative tool. Merce Cunningham for example and many artists in different field do that Alternatively you could bring it back to a different domain and say that these dance notation manipulations were now an architectural drawing, after all no drawing speak for itself (still you have to decide which view) and then play again the game of consequence this time as an architectural proposition. A lot architect do that too, and cheaply call it iconic architecture by smacking a whacky name on it. - the first artist recorded being Leonardo with stains. In philosophy, probably Plato done that a lot with thinking through weird analogy.
The last technique is very familiar to artists and some architects (the surrealist strand techniques going back in the past) to some other artist and architect this would be anathema.
Indeed Laban notation is a dance notation but as well a fascinating graphic system, while studying architecture I had a close look at it, but to what end? As an architect do you design people attitude down to the detail of their facial expression and finger, you might but your medium is not the body but stuff architecture and the void in between.
The functional or psychological fallacy would say that you could somehow reverse engineer that body/facial expression and be able to construct the architecture stuff/void that would produce the body/face expression - fortunately there are probably quite thousands of possibility for one person at one time and place the minute later it might not work anymore - this is then rather like a dead end design strategy. If you add few more people then how are you to know that they are excited in the same way and at the same time etc...
Engineer that builds a bridge could be interested in quantum physic but to build a bridge do you need to know down to every atom how they behave - indeed not and it would be pretty impossible for now and I am not sure that the scale bridge is an impossible one to overcome. Or may be the other way around scale fractality allow for not to bother.
What might be adequate to know for choreographer might not be for urban designer or architect. One is in control over the detail of few people for a very limited amount of time in a very specific setting, the other is more like a fuzzy space and time enabler. If people perform, does this mean they are playing performance for a paying audience in an event situation (a one off).
Analogy like inversion are interesting yet the working one are not the strait forward ones.
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Alain Chiaradia
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-----Original Message-----
From: Sheran Forbes [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 16 September 2004 17:45
To: Alain Chiaradia
Subject: Re: Movement Notation
Hi Alain
Thanks for the websites, they were very interesting and very helpful.
But I still can't find any info on why and how notation would be of interest to architects, public space planners/designer etc.
I want to look into developing this notation of people in space and you mentioned alot has been done in that area. I have begun my research in notation regarding dance, but have been unable to find notation within spatial configuration.
I've search Space Syntax high and low and can't find anything on movement notation. The very fact there is still more to do in this area is very exciting for me, but I would like to find out what has been done so far.
Can anyone help?
Regards
Sheran
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