interactive art and embodiment: the implicit body as performance - chapter 6 - 'Flesh space': the potential to spatialize

• “‘the interactive artist creates relationships’ between viewer-participants and an ongoing work and space (Rokeby, 1955: 152)”
• “systems we must experience and practise with our bodies”
• “he asserts his desire to be contrary”
• “because computers remove ‘you from your body, the body should be strongly engaged’”
• ‘takes place on the tiny playing-fields of integrated circuits, the encounter with the computer should take place in human-scaled physical space. Because the computer is objective and disinterested, the experience should be intimate’ (Rokeby, 1990)
• Very Nervous System - creating music with the body, response driven, physical wall of sound, generative feedback loops for non-repeatable experience
• “Rokeby highlights embodiment as always improvised: we are both participant in, and creator of, body, work, and space.”
• “Very Nervous System alters our experience of how bodies and spaces occur, together”
• “I’ll put on a CD, and when I make a sudden movement, I feel cheated that the music on the disc hasn’t changed to mirror my gesture.” (Cooper and Rokeby, 2003)
• “You expect the whole world to be interactive” (Cooper and Rokeby, 2003)
• Anna Munster asks “how the capacities of different substances force their unfolding, their production of a particular kind of spatiality… Not what occupies space, but what twists and folds of substance can occupy space, and therefore spatialize, in different ways?” What “relations are made compossible by the simultaneous folding/unfolding of different substances?” (Munster, 2006: 45)
• “How do matter, bodies, and space make one another possible?”
• “works that suspend, amplify, and intervene in the relational emergence of embodiment and spatialisation”
• non-interactive, potentialized art
• “the dancer’s body as a continuous and reversible Mobius strip, forever opening and closing itself to other spaces and bodies”
• “the body’s openness is neither metonymy nor metaphor, but ‘really the interior space that reveals itself once it returns to the exterior, transforming the latter into the space of the body’ (Gil, 2006: 29)”
• “not ‘in’ the between but rather ‘of’ the relation”, “the body is not ‘in’ space but ‘of’ it”, “Bodies and space are made of their relation”
• “‘to consider the body as a meta-phenomenon, simultaneously visible and virtual, a cluster of forces, a transformer of space and time, both emitter of signs and trans-semiotic, endowed by an organic interior ready to be dissolved as soon as it reaches the surface’ (Gil, 2006: 28)”
• “‘to mold space, to expand it, or to restrict it, to make it acquire the most paradoxical forms… because the space of the dancer’s body is riddled with virtual vacuoles [they] can make it into an eminently plastic matter’ (Gil, 2006: 26)”
• “bodies and space are emptied of organs and organisation, making all of matter reversible and topological surfaces, surface energies that continuously affect and (re-)materialize, together”
• “architectural and porous formations”
• “Through experience and practice, those passages and positions of movement become a map of body and space, of interior and exterior”
• ‘prolong the body’s limits beyond its visible contours’ (Gil, 2006: 22)
• like a spider’s ripples on water to someone submerged, but with space (i’d argue, mostly air - its not the space but the substance they move through)
• the way Erin Manning criticises technology as prosthetic - an extension that subjects the body to specific parameters
• no, prosthetic as in ‘an intensified space’ (Gil, 2006: 22)
• “to assemble the body and assemble space, and feel those assembling assemblages as they come into being.”
• “the dancer senses their dancing as both virtual and actualizing flesh and space”
• new spacetimes
• “The dancing ground is technogenetic: a ‘technique of composition, the ground becomes a condition of emergence for the ontogenetic body’ (Manning, 2009: 70)”
• “a dancer doesn’t align to an exact position or person, but rather to the movement of bodies and space around them. A dancer aligns to the dance, to the environment that is itself moving with the bodies within it” - this to me fits really clearly within the context of virtual spaces/simulations/physics/games in the many kinds of virtual collections, boundaries, procedural areas, bounding boxes, etc that dynamically create vectorised spaces that are created by and fluctuate with their containing objects/movements
• ‘movement’s capacity for invention’ (Manning, 2009: 19)
• acceleration, changing change and moving movement
• “pre-acceleration virtualizes and intensifies that moving movement, makes it felt”
• “dancers create occasions of experience where ‘the sensing body in movement alters experiential spacetime such that spacetime is felt in its emergence’ (Manning, 2009: 71) - a topological formation”
• applies to other performance, other stages and scenes and movements
• “the space of the body is everywhere”
• “Manning asserts that digital technologies are not technogenetic (at least not yet). ‘Technogenesis cannot be premapped’ to specific gestures or behaviours, and too rare are the nuanced software systems that make a ‘technological recomposition’ that is emergent with a ‘body system’ (Manning, 2009: 74-5)”
• “while technology might never ‘ground’, it can - and in the very best of cases does - make grounding virtually felt.”
• “if the software creates a semblance of a situation [it] introduces and amplifies spatialization, asking us to concern ourselves with the quality of our own movements in/with/as space” - ie tech can expand our bodily space, not just constrict it to pre-coded space
• “‘the space of the body does not come about except by the projection-secretion of interior space on exterior space’ (Gil, 2006: 26)”
• “Like a learned dance, successful interactive art may make a potentialized context where we move-think-feel the assemblages of flesh and space as they are: continuously actualized and actualizing.”
• “incipient and dynamic mappings of one another”
• “Brian Massumi has cited Lozano-Hemmer’s relational architectures as successfully ‘staging… aesthetic events that speculate on life, emanating a lived quality that might resonate elsewhere, to unpredictable affect and effect’ (Massumi, 2007: 90)”
• “stage a body that is performed and implicated with space” - this reminds me of kids parachute games - the object becomes both a dancing body and a space we are dancing within/without - scheduled and unscheduled interactions within it
• interactive art is not time-based but event-based — preprogrammed interactions but not pre-programmed start-to-end narrative - emergent strategy
• “Lozano-Hemmer explains that when he uses the word ‘alien’ he means something: ‘that’s foreign, that’s non-contextual, that comes from a disparate plane of existence. Many times I use the word ‘alien’ to replace the word ‘new’ as an acknowledgement of the impossibility of originality. When I work in a public space, I don’t try to address the ‘essential’ qualities of the site, as site-specific installations do; rather, I emphasize artificial connections that may emerge from people interacting with seeds/Important/alien memories.’ (Sullivan and Lozano-Hemmer, 2002)”