Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Julie N. Cruse on February 29, 2008 at 11:48pm

hmmmmm - interesting, complicated stuff. need time to digest it.

Permalink Reply by Johannes Birringer on March 6, 2008 at 12:59pm

Further readings has directed me to Stefan Rieger's book on "Kybernetische Anthropologie: Eine Geschichte der Virtulität" (Frankfurt, 2003). and there are some fascinating sections on scientific study of motion, mechanical and human/animal, and especially a neuorologist's experiments with waves (wave motion, pendulum motion): then a suprising reference to the 19th century and the early famous short essay by Heinrich von Kleist on the marionette.

Since Gordon Craig and the Bauhaus artist-designers (Schlemmer, for instance) were equally drawn to these speculations on movement and marionettes (human / non human motion), will, involuntary motion, response patters/reflexes, consciousness and automatism, etc -- i guess this is the science and philosophy context for looking at digital puppets with fresh eyes, particularly within the dance forum here, and also within a transversal range of prfactices now, as have suggested above - looking at how our colleagues (and here i am also thinking of igloo and their new SWAN QUAKE project and Bruno Martelli's and John McCormick's use of the Quake engine.........) in game design and in other 3D world designs understand puppeteering in the digital/virtual sense.

I want to mention Michael T. Magruder's new work, he sent me an email a few days ago, pointing to the website of this work, which refers back to Vitrivius (architecture) and also to the virtual, and specifically make use of interfaces with (1) avatars (2) puppets (3) dolls.

here is the reference:

>>Here is a link for my recent Turbulence commission, "The Vitruvian World",
which is part of the 'Mixed Realities' exhibition now showing in Boston at
the Huret & Spector Gallery, Emerson College. The exhibition will also be
touring to the UK, and will be shown at the HTTP gallery in London at some
point in the future.

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/vitruvianworld/
>>

thanks Michael --- it is so interesting what i disover there, on the weblinked site, that i wanted to share it with all.

regards
Johannes

Permalink Reply by Johannes Birringer on March 6, 2008 at 1:22pm

PS.
I tried to find the Rieger book on "Kybernetische Anthropologie" for our english speaking friends, but it has not been translated. so please read it in german.

i did find references to it, amongst others, in context with discussions of the digital & consciosuness and "affect" (Massumi)......interesting! A german scholar gave a talk at Simon Fraser in Vancouver, and refered to Rieger: I quote that passage, the whole article is available as:

Marie-Luise Angerer MEDIA [AFFECT]
 
Kunsthochschule für Medien / Kunst- und Medienwissenschaften Cologne
Academy of Media Arts / Art and Media Studies
École Supérieure des Arts et Médias / Sciences des Arts et Médias
http://www.khm.de/personen/staff/angerer/index.php?content=material...

She says:
>>>
From the very outset, digital media have been burdened with paradoxical promises. On the one hand, a tactile dimension was attributed to them that supposedly enabled an experience of images that differed from the optical-acoustic experience of analogue pictures. On the other hand, they were denied classical image status. As the logic went, the way they were made (their algorithmic calculation with no “natural” referent/signified) meant they were not pictures in the conventional sense, but only on the surface, while their substrate had long since departed from the pictorial domain. Since then, the many attempts to get a theoretical hold on digital images and their attraction have oscillated between these two poles of the sense of touch and the no-longer-image. According to one current approach, the special quality of (digital) media (art) is the affective addressing of the viewer. As they are no longer proper pictures, these images require a different effort of synthesis on the part of the viewer, i.e. his or her affective-physical involvement. According to this view, the new, immersive situation calls on viewers to organize and structure the visual worlds that surround them. But affective and emotional addressing is not limited to digital images; indeed, affect and emotion are currently at the centre of attention in a wide range of discourses. Media affect immediately loses its special quality, underlining instead the production of the affective, which is the focus here. Media theories, neurophysiology, and neurobiology are working together with digital image production on a politics of the affective.

In recent cultural theorizing, the concept of emotion (along with the notions of affect, feeling and sentiment) has emerged as a key area of scholarly investigation. Drawing on psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, phenomenology and new materialism, scholars have argued that emotions are crucial to the formation of subjects, bodies, communities and politics. At the same time, an ›emotionalisation‹ of media culture is mentioned as a global trend exemplified by tabloidisation, the primacy of confessional, traumatic and scandalising discourses and the rise of reality television. In addition ›experience‹ has become a major issue in art (where viewers and visitors are asked to walk in, to perform, to be moved and to stop thinking). Not only has emotion/affect emerged as a key topic but at the same time representatives of various humanity disciplines have started attacking their own field, arguing that the concentration on language and structure was much too long and exclusively. >>>

...
Recent decades in the humanities, and thus also in media and art theory, have been marked by an understanding of the body that defined it doubly, i.e. as a body-knowledge and a body-jouissance>>>

\\\
[here she seems to move us toward a gendered theory, of motion/emotion, and bringing in the sexual into discussions of the machine: this is not so bad, it's been missing in our discourse since the headier years of the cyborg-manifestos by feminists, and contra Matt Hough, i do very strongly harbor the assumption that our practices are gender biased, and i see that all around me. perhaps you do too?]
\\\
here is Angerer near the end of her talk:

According to Mark Hansen, digital images are aimed less at the optical-visual and more at the tactile-haptic – in other words, it is the affective body that ›sees‹ through feeling. What body? How does it manifest itself? Rather than resolving any of these questions, the implementation of an affective body merely answers them with an instance whose immanence or essentialist character is unmistakeable. But this character also indicates that consciousness can or will be circumvented, with information reaching the brain subcutaneously.

In his "Kybernetische Anthropologie," Stefan Rieger expresses this wonderfully when he writes that the top priority in developing cybernetic machines should be to implant in them a kind of unconscious to endow them with the competency that characterizes the human system of perception, i.e. the ability to oversee and overhear. What John Searle once so euphorically referred to as the hallmark of the 21st century – the »century of consciousness« - now threatens to get in the way of the whole enterprise. For according to Stefan Rieger, it is widely agreed »that human efficiency is based on overseeing and overhearing, always taking place where consciousness is not or is not yet«. In this model, the unconscious is cast simply as the other of consciousness. This is not right, of course, as the Freudian unconscious is bound to language and only ›comes into being‹ via entry into the symbolic order, i.e. the unconscious does not exist as a terrain to be conquered but must be grasped as ›another scene‹.
If artificial machines, recording devices (like those currently deployed on Mars and elsewhere) and computers are equipped with an unconscious that renders them spontaneous and unpredictable, they come closer to being affective life forms.
>>

ciao.
Johannes

Permalink Reply by mpgough on March 10, 2008 at 4:52am

recent research would suggest you are wrong about the 'gender' issue "Girls and young woman are now the most prolific web users" http://tinyurl.com/22tlp8

perhaps your generation / work still has a deep gender bias but things in 'younger' generations are changing.

Permalink Reply by Johannes Birringer on March 10, 2008 at 4:10pm

not sure i believe it (although i do observe my nieces , yes), and not sure how you want to now define generations and what you think my generation is....; basically, i was not talking about web and youtube users, but about the kind of professional work produced in dance tech or digital performance that was under discussion, thus i was looking at power relations and gender relations in the works, and it was just an observation that also seems corroborated in some or in many instances by women who work in the field and also work in programmer and hacker communities and the tool environments (subject of this group)

see Nancy Mauro-Flude's "Social software: fiction, action-at-a-distance and dolls" -
http://interaktionslabor.de/lab06/soso.htm

of course there are many changes. and my comments above (my first post) reflected a very productive non hierarchical relationship between the Kirschner team and the Linz team (Satomi, Perner-Wilson).

Permalink Reply by mpgough on March 12, 2008 at 5:51am

the point is your 'observations' are anecdotal. thus, before saying that this practice is 'gender biased' someone should undertake statistical research.

it is possible the people you work with did not grow up with 'technologies' and have learned them as additional skills. what you see is not a bias in dance-tech practice but access / interest in skills.

we are seeing greater numbers of female 'techies' and tech artists, but in younger generations. thus future dance-tech practice will not have a 'bias'. there is also no inherent reason or aesthetic that could lead us to say 'dance-tech' is by nature gender biased.

tools and technologies does include the web. the article also talks about women studying computing. so this is the right place

nor is this an 'open' look at gender relations/power in dance-tech, because the assumption you make is that the 'power' lies in the technology not the performance. and that remains an unresolved question.