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I think the line
"touch not vision, should be our model for perception"
is immensely powerful because our vision and understanding of what we see derives from the actual physical experience and knowledge.
Thank you, Jeannette for sharing, it has been very inspirational to my research and work!
Sabine
----------------------------------------
> Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 10:50:46 +0000
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Fw: Action, Reaction, and Phenomenon
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> *** This email has been sent from the MEDIA ARTS AND DANCE email forum. To respond to all subscribers email [log in to unmask] ***
>
> hi all,
>
> I would like to share some of my thoughts and ideas from Alva Noë's 'Action
> in Perception' (2004) and Steve Dixon's 'Digital Performance' (2007) that
> seem to relate to these postings (also see [dance-tech] postings).
> I agree with Yvon Bonenfant that we need to find a
> language of the body, experiential, not purely of the eye/mind and bring it
> back into the foreground as "its anatomical materiality is rarely described
> since this is far less important than the psychological, political, and
> cultural inscriptions and reconstitutions enforced upon it." (Dixon). A
> language that includes the neuroscientific, a "language of touch and
> hearing" in conjunction with a cartesian/ocularist discourse interests me as
> this could possibly start this re-invention.
>
> Up until now Dixon states that academic discourse by its very nature
> utilises a logical cartesian approach in its descriptions of the virtual
> body and disembodiment. It assumes to describe the experience of the body
> that the perceiving experience when becoming 'other' or transformed or
> disembodied. Dixon reminds us that the virtual body seen by the receiver's
> eye may be a transformative body but the actual body of the sender/viewer is
> not transformed and s/he is not disembodied and metamorphosed. "Bodies
> embody consciousness; to talk of disembodied consciousness is a
> contradiction in terms". (Dixon) The image seen is just that - "seen". It is
> this relationship that reinforces the mind/body split/duality we are all
> working so hard to dismantle.
>
> There is a need to reinforce the body's discourse but could/should include
> an ocularist perspective (?), as Noë argues that "perception and perceptual
> consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought....touch not
> vision, should be our model for perception (as) it is not a process in the
> brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our
> perceptual experience." We interact with the world and have "sensations that
> we understand". (Noë)
>
> Time permitting, I would love to share with a group, the experiential, the
> "sensation-emotion-action-reaction" and Yvon Bonenfant's idea of " the
> language of
> touch and hearing...the very fingertips and nerve endings to do the
> 'talking', the skin surfaces to do the listening, and still understand
> this as a form of rigour. I am particularly interested in
> emotion/psyche/enaction.
>
> Jeannette
>
> *************************************************
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Johannes Birringer"
> To:
> Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 6:44 PM
> Subject: Re: Action, Reaction, and Phenomenon
>
>
> hello all:
>
> not sure whether this review (below) was forwarded by Simon for us to
> discuss, but i now have had time to read it, and am very grateful to find
> out about this exhibition and the way (the writer says) it introduces or
> stages participatory experiences of embodiment, action/reaction patterns,
> sensorial experience of ourselves/the space or environment, etc .
>
> Embodiment, here applied to the interactional setting of the show, is a
> category of phemenological assumption now used so frequently and
> relentlessly that one must tell oneself that one ought to know what it is,
> and i am not always sure. Same goes for affect(s).
>
> i wonder whether others felt like commenting on what is written here, and
> how you read it or sense it ?
>
> regards
> Johannes Birringer
> Dap Lab
>
> ************************
>
>
> Action, Reaction, and Phenomenon
> By Nathaniel Stern on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 11:55 am.
>
>
> In his book, Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi calls for "movement,
> sensation, and qualities of experience" to be put back into our
> understandings of embodiment. He says that contemporary society comprehends
> bodies, and by extension the world, almost exclusively through linguistic
> and visual apprehension. They are defined by their images, their symbols,
> what they look like and how we write and talk about them. Massumi wants to
> instead "engage with continuity," to encourage a processual and active
> approach to embodied experience. In essence, Massumi proposes that our
> theories "feel" again. "Act/React," curator George Fifield's "dream
> exhibition" that opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum on October 4th, picks up
> on these phenomenologist principles. He and his selected artists invite
> viewer-participants to physically explore their embodied and continuous
> relationships to each other, the screen, space, biology, art history and
> perhaps more.
>
> Fifield is quick to point out that all the works on show are unhindered by
> traditional interface objects such as the mouse and keyboard. Most of them
> instead employ computer vision technologies, more commonly known as
> interactive video. Here, the combined use of digital video cameras and
> custom computer software allows each artwork to "see," and respond to,
> bodies, colors and/or motion in the space of the museum. The few works not
> using cameras in this fashion employ similar technologies towards the same
> end. While this homogeneity means that the works might at first seem too
> similar in their interactions, their one-to-one responsiveness, and their
> lack of other new media-specific explorations -- such as networked art or
> dynamic appropriation and re-mixing systems -- it also accomplishes
> something most museum-based "state of the digital art" shows don't. It uses
> just one avenue of interest by contemporary media artists in order to dig
> much deeper into what their practice means, and why it's important.
> "Act/React" encourages an extremely varied and nuanced investigation of our
> embodied experiences in our own surroundings. As the curator himself notes
> in the Museum's press release, "If in the last century the crisis of
> representation was resolved by new ways of seeing, then in the twenty-first
> century the challenge is for artists to suggest new ways of
> experiencing...This is contemporary art about contemporary existence." This
> exhibition, in other words, implores us to look at action and reaction, at
> our embodied relationships, as critical experience. It is a contemporary
> investigation of phenomenology.
>
> Near the entrance of the show, Scott Snibbe's Boundary Functions (1998)
> begins by literalizing the fine line between publicly constructed and
> personally constituted space, between "you (plural)" and "me." As his
> audience members cross the threshold onto the interactive platform, the work
> draws and projects a real-time Voronoi diagram around them. No matter how
> many people are present (and moving) in the installation, each gets a
> continual partitioning of exactly the same size: lines that separate them.
> Snibbe says his initial inspiration for the work came out of a desire to
> reveal how we relate to one another, how we define ourselves and the
> physical space of our bodies through, and with, those around us. When he
> turned it on, however, his revelation wound up changing that relationship
> itself: we immediately want to use our bodies to trap or destroy or trick
> the piece and what it re-presents. It was after seeing his own creation in
> action that Snibbe began referring to himself as a "social artist" -- given
> that he doesn't just reveal, but actually affects, social behavior.
>
> Further into the exhibition space, this is followed by Snibbe's Deep
> Walls(2003), where viewers' shadows are recorded and played back in a grid
> of sixteen cinematic squares. Participants dance and shake and explore with
> their shadows between the projection and screen, and every active
> performance snippet is stored as a silhouetted animation in one of its comic
> book-like boxes. Each video sequence replaces one that was there before.
> Here, we are creating embodied and dynamic signs within a greater,
> collaborative structure; we continuously find and make our own language and
> meaning with and through our bodies. We tell and re-tell and co-tell
> embodied stories, through movement.
>
> Echo Evolution (1999) is the next work on show, produced by Liz Phillips, an
> artist effectively working with interactivity for 40 some-odd years. It asks
> for viewers to navigate through a large dark room, and responds with
> real-time noise and neon lights. Where you move, how quickly you do so, and
> where others are in relation to you and the space, all direct the piece's
> output. Although potentially the richest piece in its complexity, the
> non-transparency of the interaction and its rules unfortunately made this
> work the weakest on the exhibition. Most viewers were trying to understand
> how it worked, rather than exploring their bodies in relation to that
> interaction. I've seen far better installations by Phillips, and think this
> one was an ineffectual choice in the context of the greater show.
>
> Brian Knep's premiering Healing Pool (2008) continues his explorations of
> biologically inspired generative algorithms. This room-sized petri dish
> features a floor that is covered in projected "cells" that active
> participants walk through/over, leaving tears and empty space in their wake.
> The installation then "heals" itself by growing new cells as seams and
> scars, never again to repeat any of its previous patterns. Knep's work
> pushes at the conceptual boundaries of how we understand growth, healing,
> organic structures and temporal inter-activity. It's a work that is mostly
> playful on its surface, and extremely subtle in its visual difference over
> time. So subtle, in fact, that it's very easy to miss its doubled gesture
> towards emergence theory: both how simple systems can create complexity, and
> how our embodied interactions, which seemingly change little, have lasting
> and forever-changing effects.
> Simon Fildes
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