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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" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
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