dear all
allow just a couple of brief footnotes on curating body/digital performance thinking after the comments we read from Liam and Danny.
I wondered about the notion of a "series" - a kind of performative sequencing allowing for so-called knowledge exchange with/between the practitioners and audiences or different constituencies over time, which, when localized as well (aside from an online networked presence) also implies a certain organic development, and development of framework (of reception) and dialectical engagement of the participating "bodies" (that includes the
venues or organizations involved, and also stretches to publication forum types, modes of dissemination, the latter something we talked about quite a bit after a recent Stitch, Bitch/Make/Perform
meeting of designers & digital artists that took place in London after the initial workshop arranged by Camille Baker at the Digital Weekender at Watermans Art Center (http://www.swotee.co.uk/events/155190/Networked-Bodies-Digital-Performance-Weekender), last November.
While in Houston over the end of the year I read about a MoMA performance series, "Value Talks," curated by Ralph Lemon which intrigued me a lot, has anyone experienced it? It apparently stretched over a year, bringing different practitioners into a "systematic" exchange or informal "system" (what Watermans curator Irini Papadimitriou called) of "Networked Bodies" interfacing with audiences (and some audience were by invitation only!), where the real and imagined presences were performed differently, and I was particularly impressed hearing about Kevin Beasley's "I want my spot back" and the discussion his sonic performance (and noise) generated also about black artists, about racism, racialization, about exclusivity, etiquette, and so forth. I came across the series in Claire Bishop's brief "The Year in Performance", December 2014, Artforum.
Second, a very quick reference to book that is about to come out, and which might interest you:
Chris Salter, Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015)
In Alien Agency, Chris Salter tells three stories of art in the making. Salter examines three works in which the materials of art--the “stuff of the world”--behave and perform in ways beyond the creator’s intent, becoming unknown, surprising, alien. Studying these works--all three deeply embroiled in and enabled by science and technology--allows him to focus on practice through the experiential and affective elements of creation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic observation and on his own experience as an artist, Salter investigates how researcher-creators organize the conditions for these experimental, performative assemblages--assemblages that sidestep dichotomies between subjects and objects, human and nonhuman, mind and body, knowing and experiencing. Salter reports on the sound artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (O+A) and their efforts to capture and then project unnoticed urban sounds; tracks the multi-year project TEMA (Tissue Engineered Muscle Actuators) at the art research lab SymbioticA and its construction of a hybrid “semi-living” machine from specially grown mouse muscle cells; and describes a research-creation project (which he himself initiated) that uses light, vibration, sound, smell, and other sensory stimuli to enable audiences to experience other cultures’ “ways of sensing.” Combining theory, diary, history and ethnography, Salter also explores a broader question: How do new things emerge into the world and what do they do?
[Chris Salter is an artist, Co-Director of the Hexagram network and University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses at Concordia University, Montreal.]
with regards
Johannes Birringer
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Thanks much, Danny,
for your reply and the comments you make,
and I can see of course that such research work is presenting some particular challenges, thanks for giving us the new link to Thinking with The Body
and for reminding us also of the tool ('Becoming') that (in my memory) was exhibited as a kind of generative/interactive installation that seemed to respond to or engage one's facing it or moving towards it -- it
was troubled the night I was there and got stuck, but on another night it was quite beautiful, and naturally it made me wonder how the dancers in rehearsal work with a creature like that
immanently and let its graphic behavior affect or influence (or not) their movement improvisation or bodily experiences/proprioceptions.
Now also after reading Liam,
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I make stuff, predominantly for museums and galleries but also for commercial clients and occasionally private Individuals. This stuff, is often digital or new media, as with my research into AR, but is often very physical, making furniture or landscaping a playground for example.
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my comment was in fact meant to address the question of how to curate the research dimensions of an artistic or science based or archaeological or tissue culture or landscaping playground, developing wearables, creating movement and intermedia research related process, the findings, prototypes, performances, and thus also what Liam refered to as "organic developmental processes"?
with regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab
[Danny schreibt]
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Hi Johannes
I try to avoid the 'sci-art nexus' wherever possible ;-0 ... more seriously, games are definitely part of a wider engagement mission around our collections and exhibitions.
Thinking with The Body was a really interesting project for us -- it was quite experimental, and was displayed in a temporary gallery during a renovation process. For me, the subject matter was definitely one of the hardest exhibitions that I've worked on. That process of research was hard to communicate to visitors not already familiar with dance or neuroscience. In the gallery it was possible with various exhibits to try to get the visitor to think with their own body; online that's obviously much harder.
Our archive of the show is here:
http://wellcomecollection.org/thinkingwiththebody
-- one of the loveliest parts of it was Nick Rothwell and Marc Downie's 'Becoming', a work that continually iterated images based on a film source, and which was used in the studio as a tool. I was keen to have this stream its images onto the web via a tumblr or something, but internal network problems naturally bested us....
Cheers
Danny
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