Artaud Forum 5 / International METABODY Forum: "Performance Architectures, Wearables and Gestures Of Participation"

 

Program and Research Projects

 

Caroline Yan Zheng teaches workshop on e-textiles and soft robotics to a very engaged group of participants

 

Additional visual and audiovisual material is here: // Go here for Participants

 

Artaud Performance Centre, Brunel University London

April 7 Symposium-Workshop

2016 15:-00 – 21:30
Performance Architectures, Wearables, Gestures of Participation
14:00 Registration / Theatre Space 001

15:00 Welcome by Prof. Thomas Betteridge, Dean of the College of Business,
Arts and Social Sciences,

Opening Words by Johannes Birringer (DAP-Lab, event organizer)

 

15:15 – 17:oo Provocations/ Roundtable 1

Opening Keynote:
Jaime del Val (Reverso /Coordinator Metabody): Metabody: embodied Media and the wars of indeterminacy and control (provocation)

METABODY is a project that questions the homogenisation of expressions induced by current information and control technologies, which place unprecedented threats to plurality and to fundamental rights and freedoms by reducing all our actions to predictable behaviours, and proposes to reinvent them highlighting the role and diversity of embodied expression through a new concept of interactive architecture that transforms in all its physical and digital aspects, constituting dynamic, participatory and performative environments for outdoors and indoors, an emergent and indeterminate space, a metatopia, a politics of perception in the wars of indeterminacy and control.

www.reverso.org

www.metabody.eu.

 

Short Provocations:
Larissa Ferreira (University of Brasilia, Brasil): Body mixed media: tactics to perform together (provocation)

Body mixed media: tactics to perform together: This presentation is focused in the relation between artistic projects and digital technology, the creation of collaborative platforms which explores tactics of connection of groups and artists to perform together. Presents a cartography of art projects interested on the network and the collective on the interdisciplinary field of performance art, dance and technology.

This cartography is present as an art curatorial since it brings a selection of artists and groups from Brazil who develop the artistic poetics interested on the mixed media (dance, performance and technologies), the socialization and the power of being together.

website: https://larissaferreiradotcom.wordpress.com

Laura Potrovic: From choreo-singularity to choreo-anatomy: dancing the body-score of becoming (provocation)

The body itself can be perceived and performed as a score, body-score, or the one that sets up its own relational modes of becoming the body – in co-presence and co-motion. The body organizes itself through moving and developing each of its organs as nonanthropomorphic thinking tools, therefore, each organ becomes temporal, self-organizing tool-technique. In relation to that, every gene, cell, organ or body itself can be considered as a relational score – writing and rewriting itself in and through moving. Choreo-singularity is singularity of the body which emerges from and in moving. Dancing the body itself includes the relation towards organs as relational techniques, and it provides an exploration of performativity and possibility of developing new dancing organs through moving. Furthermore, this project explores the consciousness as the product of moving and anatomy as the product of consciousness. It explores experience-dependent transformation of organs and if a particular organ is being changed by the experience of moving and how. Choreoanatomy as relational anatomy studies the possibility of dancing our own organs, instead of dancing with them, as well as dancing our entire body instead of dancing with it. This project puts into relation anatomy and dance, movement and molecular memory, in an attempt to investigate the molecular memory, not as a pattern, but as a score, score for dancing organs and body itself. Within the idea of choreo-anatomy moving itself becomes a score for anatomy; moving is no longer conditioned by the anatomy, but moving itself creates performer's new anatomy. Movement anatomy becomes performer's second anatomy or anatomy in Becoming. New anatomies are being created by exploring different anatomies of movement

Salud López (Spain): The perception of imperceptible (provocation)

La idea seria que solicito una residencia como artista para hacer lo siguiente, básicamente ensayos y talleres, produccion creación y una presentación final de una nueva versión de Parad is0 no hay billetes.
Una nueva versión de Parad is0 no hay billetes con la colaboración de artistas y habitantes de Londres , la construcción de esta nueva versión , adaptación del argumento de las escenas a las personas y
los espacios del laboratorio. Ensayos taller y la presentación seria al final. La nueva versión tendría el formato que eligiéramos, traverse- exposición,, escenica, mixta

Les axes de investigacion de Parad is0 et de la traverse-exposition, no hay Billetes son:
- Nouveau paradigme-évotution. L' identification totale avec le nouveau paradigme : un nouveau pas dans l 'évolution est l'acceptation de la fragmentation.
- Lumière-mobilite-temps

Du point de vue plastique c'est le travail de la lumière et de la mobilité.
Du point de vue conceptuel ce sont tes questionnements sur le temps.
- Son -Lumière-frequences
Relation son et lumière , des fréquences ,longueur d'ondes en relation avec le son, l'inconnu (incongnita ) de ce qu'est la lumière, même pour la physique quantique.
- Lumière-expansion
Le fait que la lumière n'est pas que des fréquences . Aussi l' exposé sur la lumière violette,infrarouge, rayons x. Travaux en relation avec la lumière en expansion comme ces précurseurs Val de Lomar, la Loïe Fuller..
- Frequences-perception
Tout en relation à la perception de ce qu' on voit ou ne voit pas, comme les fréquences sonores que l'on n'entend pas ou comme les notes qui s'annulent si elles sont produites dans une fréquence et un espace
déterminé, ainsi que recherche sur la non vision, comme est la pensée dans les personnes aveugles.- Langage-interactivité-incorporel materialitation-ideés, hypertextes-hypermedia, fragmentation-langage

- Pensée-organes
Le travail sur les organes, dans un premier temps, est de rendre visible, la pensée qui se matérialise dans l'organique comme un travail d'expérimentation important qui a un rapport avec la lumière
qu'on voit depuis notre intérieur fortement exprimé dans les états de méditation . Nous nous intéresserons à la part corporelle de la pensée
dans le travail d'artistes comme Artaud. la phénoménologie , et la philosophie de Merleau Ponty.
- Historique-sociopolitique -économique
Réflexion sociopolitique autour de l'Ève Future. + info en este link
http://sld752.wix.com/salud-lopez-produce#!parad-is0no-hay-billetes/cop0
El entrenamiento previo es el entrenamiento para pensadores en movimiento
+ info
Texto entrenamiento y parad is0
http://sld752.wix.com/salud-lopez-produce#!entrenamiento-pensadores-en-movimiento/c1g1d
+ info sobre Parad is0, web en construcción
http://sld752.wix.com/paradis0
+ info sobre mi
http://sld752.wix.com/salud-lopez-produce
www.saludlopez.net

[english version] The perception of imperceptible (Dystopia, fiction-dance, thought, ethics/aesthetics in Paradise there are no tickets by Salud Lopez) -- SEE FURTHER BELOW

Janice Jones (University of Southern Queensland): 13 Moons: A Story of Ashes, Blood, Light (provocation)

Abstract: (291 Words)
An artist-performer and arts educator draws upon the complex and layered Third Space to explore her experience of creative destruction. Movement, spoken word and digital representations articulate and question her deep journey through nine months of grief, disruption and renewal. Nine paintings were created by the artist under the light of a full moon over as many months: these form a digital backdrop to the embodied narrative of her ongoing journey commencing with the loss of her life partner, whose final breath was drawn with the rising of a rare blue moon on 31 July 2015. Engaging her audience in this visceral narrative of loss and regeneration the artist uses ashes, blood and light, words and movements as codified representations of the ebb and flow of grief, and of the power of time as a creative Third Space for intellectual, physical and spiritual growth. After the performance, audience members are invited to ‘walk into’ the final painting, or to remain silent, being and becoming part of the personal, professional and critical understandings generated by the shared experience. The performance may be filmed and shared under a Creative Commons Share-alike license, and it is intended that both film and artworks will be shared as Open Education resources. Note: Human ashes and blood will not be used in the performance: issues around authenticity and representation-embodiment are therefore presented as a point of critical concern: they act both a raw nerve, and also as a thread of illumination along which we may explore points of connections regarding ethics, respect and space arising from the performance-presentation. Artworks yet to be created will be presented in an exhibition and performance piece: 13 Moons – Ashes, Blood, Light in a regional Australian art gallery in in October 2016.

Keywords:
Third space, grief, the moon, Narrative, Embodiment, symbolic representation, Open Education, digital art, dance

 

Peggy Reynolds (Goldsmiths University of London): Grids, Psychic Vortices and Beyond: Gesturing Towards a Future (provocation)

Much of the ease with which surveillance of citizens/consumers is currently carried out is due to the atomized nature of the societies/entities which populate our industrial and post-industrial landscapes. Capitalism, especially in its advanced neoliberal form, has effected the disaggregation of formerly cohesive entities (ecosystems, watersheds, cultures, communities, unions, trades, professions, school systems, personalities, bodies, etc.) at a myriad of scalar levels. Using fear of the other and alienation in general (as well as more aggressive techniques) to reify the concept of the bounded individual, neoliberalism not only isolates the individual from the relationships that might have complicated its status as such, but offers to protect him/her from the problems associated with the isolation which it itself has created – but only, of course, at a price. This price can take the form of coercing the individual to relinquish any claim to privacy now and in the future, as well as insisting that personal data become the sole property of what mediologist Sean Cubitt describes as “an agency not, or no longer, or not wholly human.” Increasingly, one must accede to the use of one’s data (aggregated with others’) in the modeling of the affective state of this virtual, non-human agency if one is to be allowed to participate in the material world to which it acts as gateway. To counter this subsumption of the human to the acephalous agency described by Cubitt, I examine the importance of deemphasizing the particle nature of existence as enforced by neoliberalism and of focusing instead on ways of amplifying the wave form, its compliment (e.g., dual material nature of light). But rather than merely move between the opposite poles of this duality, I will explore in my talk the possibility of subverting, as did artist Marcel Duchamp, the entire social field in which we are embedded.

 

17:00 Workshop (limited space) Studio 003
Caroline Yan Zheng (RCA London):

Workshop with soft robotic material in the choreography of emotion (hands-on lab)

In this Metabody Forum, Caroline offers a hands-on workshop on smart materials whose movement is triggered by emotion sensors.
Wearable technology enable the gathering of data reflecting affective status. However such data is so far mostly used on health-monitoring. The limited projects on creative expression is in a manner that machine behaviour is pre-scripted and meaning is allocated arbitrarily. In this workshop, together we explore how can emotion data gathered by technology be new resource for expression, communication and creativity and imagine the creative application of such data.
No previous experience on e-textile and electronics is needed. Curious minds on this topic are especially welcome.

Proposed workshop process:
* In this workshop, participants will observe behavior of smart material movements driven by emotion sensor.
* Participant then will play with flexible and programmable materials (e.g. shape memory alloy and inflatable silicon) in combination with other material(e.g. textile) or found objects to create own expression of emotion and movement. Participants are encouraged to work in groups to choreograph a combination of movements and behaviours.
* Sharing of outcome and group discussion.
Length of workshop: 2-2.5 hours
Number of participants: 6 – 10 people

18:oo – 19:oo food break / reception

 

19:oo – 21:30 Roundtable 2 / Performance Demonstrations

Federico Visi (ICCMR Plymouth University): Tuned Constraint (demonstration)

In the past four decades, electronic music performance has seen several paradigm shifts in the way it is performed live. New electronic musical instruments and the role of the performer’s body are still highly debated topics at academic conferences and in artistic environments. This is also due to the nature of the medium itself, as the presence of the performer is not strictly necessary for a performance to happen. However, some electronic performers rely heavily on their presence and make use of their bodies in very detailed and profound manners, for instance by performing with sensors capturing their biologic signals.

This work aims at reflecting on the role of the body of the performer in electronic music and the inherent constraints and expressive qualities that the body imposes on the performance. The piece combines recent motion sensors technologies and biosensors that I have been using for my doctoral research with the classic modalities of interaction involved in traditional analogue synthesis, such as operating knobs and switches on a synthesiser front panel. My goal is to explore the constraints that both interface paradigms impose on the gestural behaviour of the body, and to use such constraints as constitutive expressive elements. From a research standpoint, I argue that there is an emerging vocabulary of gestures involved electronic music performance that is becoming part of a shared knowledge. Here, the performer’s body is the site were different control paradigms are actualised, and the actions involved in the process are integral parts of the musical experience of the audience. The kinetic qualities of the body are at the fulcrum of the process of multimodal signification that unfolds during the performance. Both the tactile aspects of operating knobs and switches and the highly embodied interaction through wearable sensors have the purpose of moving beyond the paradigm of deterministic control, introducing semi-conscious elements in the performance.
Duration: approx. 10 minutes.

www.federicovisi.com

Javier Aparicio Frago (Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid, Spain) & Javi F Gorostiza (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain) Managing Complexity between Real-Time Music Composition and Body Events in Synaesthetic Performance through Wearable Computing

Dance practice has been subordinated to music in performing arts, but begin to be independent each other around late 50´s: dance didn´t need any music to exist. By other hand, a kind of musical genre called incidental music diffiers from absolute music for requiring an external idea or image, that makes it sense. Does digital and wearable technologies have now a chance to bring back together in a different way for musical and choreographic composition hierarchy?

MUSICAL COMPOSITION RELATED WITH BODY MOVEMENT IN TECHNOLOGY
• Proprioception of sound
o What´s the sound that belongs to the different actions, possitions and attitudes of the body.
• Stochastic dance performance
o How it works and gets evolved in real time dance performance
o How could be the design of interaction variables that make possibe the intervention of the body with the musical composition and its technological extension
¬¬¬
¬
o Setting relations between theory / musical expression and body movement
o Relating sound atmpospheres to different body attitudes and movements
o Wearable computing design where can be switched this music and its interaction and real time modification

MANAGING COMPEXITY
o From inside (Pyisical environment where body and technology are involved) To outside (Pyisical space where the audience is included)
• The attention of the audience (Change, monotony, chaos, order)
• Leak out from functional and playful goals
• Intention of exhibit an art object, that tries to generate knowledge, around changing ways to do, thinking and understanding performing arts theory and practice.
o From inside (body that lives in movement and receives external inputs) To inside (technological system thats makes possible playing a interactive soundscape that comes from body
• Wearable design that takes part form different meanings levels: (science and art) Physics, mechanics, acoustics, electronics, computing, music, dance, costume design…
• It ssn´t a system where actions of the user imply certain behaviours.

websites: http://alfabody.net

http://danzatecnologia.blogspot.com

Maria Kapsali (University of Leeds)/Simon East (Curvor Ltd): Soundflux: producing soundscapes through movement

Sonolope is a participatory installation that will enable visitors to generate three-dimensional soundscapes while moving in the space through the use of an app installed on their own smart-phones or on smart-watches they can borrow for the event.

Videos of the system in action can be found at http://sonolope.com

The smartphones or smartwatches can be handheld or strapped to different parts of the visitor’s body. Each visitor’s movement will produce a different sound and/or pre-recorded sample which will rotate around the space in three dimensions when played through the quadraphonic speakers installed in each corner of the space. The sounds produced respond to the user’s movement through changes in pitch, volume and duration, as well as moving around the room in three dimensions.
Visitors will be able to choose between moving freely in the space and/or following pre-set tasks written in cards. They will be able to choose their sound and/or sample from their smartphone or watch. The system can also be set up to randomly change what sounds are assigned to each visitor to allow them to experience a range of sounds.
The use of mobile phones and their applications has been explored by a number of artists (Kozel 2010; Blake 2014), in projects which predominantly took place in outdoor urban spaces. Equally, the co-production of sound and movement has been developed through the employment of a variety of mediums, such as video tracking systems and pressure mats (Wechsler 2006; Wilson-Bocowiec 2010; Birringer 2015; Coleman 2015). This installation, which is an outcome of an 18 month-long collaboration, aims to harness the ubiquity of mobile phones and re-purpose them as mediums of enhancing and/or generating alternative states of embodiment within studio practice. The installation will aim to explore the following questions:
• What states of embodiment are awakened by the manipulation of different sounds?
• How may the production of sound affect the mover’s experience of the space and their sense of agency?
• (How) do the boundaries of the body/self change? What states of ‘in-between of the senses’ open up and how do these create meaning? (del Val 2006: 195)
• How is the technology, and the smart-phone/smart-watch in particular, experienced by the user (for example as a prosthesis, medium, tool) and how is the user’s relationship to their phone affected by this new kind of use?

Paula Guzzanti (Queen’s University Belfast), with Martin Devek and Tristan Clutterbuck (Belfast): I-Reflexes

‘I-Reflexes’ is an exploration of the sudden-movement-impulses responses to sounds coming from communication devices in the environment. The piece captures the improvisational interaction of three performers: a solo dancer, a visual media artist and musician, and a sonic artist, and it involves audience participation through the mediation of cell phones.
As the choreography and original music composition evolves and loops, the soundscape of improvisation created by the audience and sonic artist interaction starts to merge, proposing new dynamics of movement.
As the performance evolves audience members are encourage to text, ‘what’s up’, or skype to two phone numbers that are part of the sound installation setting of the piece. The sounds created by this interaction are picked up by mics and are transformed live by the sonic artist.
As the interaction between performers and audience augments, it creates layers of spontaneity. This is aimed at opening a discussion on the sense of space and connection created by connecting performance and audience through mobile communication.

‘I-Reflexes’ is part of a larger PhD research project investigating movement-improvisational practices and embodied consciousness and perception conducted by dance artist Paula Guzzanti at the School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast.

Respondents:

Obioma Oji (University of Edinburgh, PhD researcher on in/tangible membranes between building, skin and clothes)

Obi's PhD practice based research looks at the analysis of maximisation of energy efficiency in the context of existing interior space. This has been done by investigating the relationships people assign to their ideals of comfort around specific objects and circumstances. These are described as virtual or physical intermediate structures or membranes between the building skin and the clothes a person wears. The research has a range of outcomes that include a conceptual GYRO bubble and experimental research methods, which have incorporated playful, immersive interior environments. //

The concept of the spherical GYRO space enables - Sleep, lying flat in a ball; Relaxation, in a rocking cradle or audio room; and, Work in a pod. The human body and GYRO device cooperate to create different circumstances to augment sedentary activities within an interior environment allowing the user to create different types of postural comfort in the various modes the GYRO adopts.
Another practice-based component of the research has been actualised in the experimental interactive workshops that explores aspects of comfort and movement. They gave insights into the in/tangible membranes people prioritise in various interior environments. Everyone is an expert in their own comfort and they were asked how they find and invent comfort in their interior habitats? Participants were invited to interact with the objects and comment [via my COSY workshop designbook] on their physical, sensory and psychological responses to a themed lifecycle of objects and circumstances. These included the Amniotic Sac; a Nursery; a Teenagers Room; a Kitchen; an Office; a Shop; a Lounge; and a Coffin. The modes of ‘transport’ between these ‘fixed’ interior elements include a Pram; Bicycle; Bus; Train; Car; Wheelchair; Ambulance; and a Halo.

Jung In Jung (University of Huddersfield, PhD researcher, Sound Music Image Collaboration Research Centre (S.M.I.C))

Jung in Jung is working with contemporary dancers to compose interactive audiovisual work. She is a PhD Research Student at the Sound Music Image Collaboration Research Centre (S.M.I.C) in the University of Huddersfield

www.junginjung.com

 

Michèle Danjoux (DAP-Lab)

Michèle is a creative and accomplished academic practitioner / researcher with a background in Fashion Design and twenty years experience as a Fashion educator in Higher Education. Her contributions to learning and teaching span both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Until recently, she was Principal Lecturer and Masters Programme Leader at De Montfort University (2009-13) and prior to that Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) for many years. Between 2005 and 2009, she coordinated staff research activity at NTU in her role as Research Coordinator. Her own practice-based research analyses research through design and is situated at the intersections between Fashion and Performance. She has presented papers at international conferences, published in peer-reviewed journals and publicly exhibited her design prototypes. She is completing her PhD “Design in Motion: Wearables in Performance” with the London College of Fashion. She is artistic co-director of the DAP-Lab and direct the design research for all the wearables that are performed in the company's productions.The "Klüver" film installation of emergent design was exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial's "Design in Motion" festival, June 2007. Her Teshigahara collection incorporating sensor technologies premiered at DAP-Lab's Suna no Onna performance staged at Laban Centre, 2007, and was shown at “Inside Out,” Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, in 2008. Most recently, Danjoux has shifted her attention to the exploration and generation of audiophonic garments where the interrelations of sound and garment are prioritized together with the material – informational expressive sonic composition they provoke through gesture and the sensuality of wearing in performance. Her audiophonic designs for DAP-Lab's UKIYO [Moveable Worlds] were featured at KIBLA Media Arts Center in Slovenia and at London’s Sadler’s Wells in 2010; her new collection of werables for DAP-Lab premiered in for the time being (Watermans, London) in 2012, and selected garments and wearable constructs were exhibited at "Critical Costumes" and KINETICA Art Fair in 2013. DAP-Lab’s expanded dance opera, for the time being [Victory over the Sun], premiered at London's Sadlers Wells in 2014; a new series of immersive dance installations, metakimospheres, began touring in Europe in 2015-16. Among her recent publications are "Choreography and Sounding Wearables", Scene 2: 1-2 (2014), 197-220 (in special issue on “Critical Costume”).

http://www.danssansjoux.org

Martina Reynolds (Sociology, Brunel University)

Martina is a Senior Lecturer and Social Scientist at Brunel. Her interests include inter/multidisciplinary research in performance, film, theatre, media and social science, practice led and qualitative research in arts and social sciences, and interactive/multi-media and community engagement. In addition to her academic background, training and practice include filmmaking, documentary and production. She is a Company Director and Producer of Theatre Lab Company, a main UK promoter of ancient and contemporary Greek theatre, art and culture, and whose recent work includes productions of ancient Greek tragedy and comedy at Riverside Studios and Salome at Festival D’Avignon OFF. She has also worked with Steve Dixon and Daemonia Nymphe. This is her second collaboration with DAP-Lab, her first being for Metakimosphere No. 1. She has enjoyed researching, co-creating, filming the metakimosphere projects. She was also co-producer for the 2016 International Metabody Forum London.

http://www.theatrelab.co.uk/

- - - - - - - - -

Many of the participating artists and researchers are offering workshops on Friday and Saturday (April 8 - 9) and present their artistic work in the evening installations and performances. We invited everyone to work closely together during the three days of the Metabody Forum and make use of the studio spaces and performance interactions amongst the participants and our audiences and remote (telematic) partners.

 

Workshops / Performance and Exhibitions

(Friday April 8) 10:00 –12:00

Jaime del Val (Madrid, Spain) with

Salud López (Spain):

Parad_is_o / perception of imperceptible (Dystopia, fiction-dance, thought, ethics and aesthetics in ?Paraiso no hay billetes? [Paradise there are no tickets] by Salud Lopez)

Research and development on diverse watch devices, comparatives and mise-en-scène related to a highly organic society by means of ITs in the information age. The creation of new methodologies as training for thinkers in motion and SLD Laboratory, new dialects between machine-humans and other instances of pedagogic experiences in creation, that tookplace together with the creation process of the play ?Paraiso no hay billetes? by Salud López (2008-2018) to find targeted solutions to the issue of perception and understanding of interconnected nature between diverse systems, ecosystems and other systemic interrelations as invisible as underlying and body based language-thought structures that command diverse behavioural patterns at individual, social, and political levels by means of the union of technological, scientific and artistic practice.

Artifact! This is how ?Paraiso no hay billetes? is explained. How a new play of choreo telematica, or let?s say of fiction-dance by Salud Lopez and her staff, even about how the public can be and is part of both the construct and the object: This new play wants to express itself as an artefact able to develop, evolve, transmute capabilities, and finally transhumane gour being thanks to a complex gestural dialogue between a Human's mindset and a computer's. If transhumanists speak of a new Human that breaks at last with Evolutive Theories, the ruse!, even overcoming death itself, however they say so giving too much importance and trust to technology itself the trap!, as if advancements were only achievable now by chips. What we propose is still faith in Human entelechy itself of biologic and mood grow, even overcoming technological dependency, these own capabilities still to be developed and hidden in the time to come. Ruse, it is not with technology but through itself and by itself. From a necessary openness to perception to a reconsideration of memory not as sealed devices but installed or living in the communication process itself and the overcoming of conscious barriers between things, individuals, and nature; space and time, as if they were different. For instance, this is what happens in Solaris play: human effort to communicate with a different and unknown entity, give back to us as a mirror new knowledge about ourselves that at the same time change our structures and our operating way, our way of being and existing. Or as the oxymoron that put in relation the opposites, strangers where new unimaginable possibilities of beauty. Summarizing, the new world needs new paradigms and request new definitions about everything. To set all constructs from scratch: this would be the ultimate goal; also of desire. This is a new way to start making it, the end, but anyhow we have to start anywhere

The generation process of this play will generate in its own a creation place, as it will take place in open working sessions as this one, online, from a dedicated workshop. Both the workshop and the waves are spaces aimed at a common tool and will be open to other happenings and experiences. It is something similar to what literary and philosophical saloons were in the 19th century, where thought, as waves and tides, was broadcast from.

Translation: Manuel Muriel
Thanks to: Pepa Muriel y Manuel Muriel

Main texts from the LaboratorioSLD project
http://www.saludlopez.net/laboratoriocoreografico.html
en francés
http://www.saludlopez.net/frances/laboratoriocoreografico.html

 

Jaime del Val (Instituto Reverso): Disalignments-Flexinamics

Disalignments is the movement technique developed by Reverso in the Metabody project, consisting of subtle microdeviations of movement from existing patterns and percetion, focusing on kineasthetic experience. Flexinamics is the building technique developed by Reverso in the Metabody project of physical, dynamic, ultraportable, foldable architecture modules, based on flexibility of all components, integrity or consistency of dynamic and flexible relations, and the constant physical dynamism and mutation of the modules, defying the perception of form. Flexinamics metastructures are body extensions in motion, thus inseparable from the Disalignment movement techniques and constitute the basis of the Metatopia environments.Jaime del Val will introduce the main characteristics of the method and the wearable metatopia components - four interconnected metakinespheres - and invite participants to work with them and explore the insides and flexinamics.

 

12:OO: collective discussion

12:30 Studio 101

Janice Jones (Arts Education, University of Southern Queensland, Australia)

13 Moons: A Story of Ashes, Blood, Light: (performance, exploring through dance, music, film and visual art, three phases of Janice’s personal journey through grief, drawing upon the myth of Persephone)

An artist-performer and arts educator draws upon the complex and layered Third Space to explore her experience of creative destruction. Movement, spoken word and digital representations articulate and question her deep journey through nine months of grief, disruption and renewal. Nine paintings were created by the artist under the light of a full moon over as many months: these form a digital backdrop to the embodied narrative of her ongoing journey commencing with the loss of her life partner, whose final breath was drawn with the rising of a rare blue moon on 31 July 2015. Engaging her audience in this visceral narrative of loss and regeneration the artist uses ashes, blood and light, words and movements as codified representations of the ebb and flow of grief, and of the power of time as a creative Third Space for intellectual, physical and spiritual growth. After the performance, audience members are invited to ‘walk into’ the final painting, or to remain silent, being and becoming part of the personal, professional and critical understandings generated by the shared experience. The performance may be filmed and shared under a Creative Commons Share-alike license, and it is intended that both film and artworks will be shared as Open Education resources. Note: Human ashes and blood will not be used in the performance: issues around authenticity and representation-embodiment are therefore presented as a point of critical concern: they act both a raw nerve, and also as a thread of illumination along which we may explore points of connections regarding ethics, respect and space arising from the performance-presentation. Artworks yet to be created will be presented in an exhibition and performance piece: 13 Moons – Ashes, Blood, Light in a regional Australian art gallery in in October 2016.

 

https://eprints.usq.edu.au/view/uniqueauthor/168.html

14:00- 15:30 collective workshop
16:oo Preview of Metakimosphere (DAP-Lab) for visitors from Ealing Association for the Blind

 

18:00 – 21:30 Exhibition-performances

DAP-Lab (UK): Metakimosphere no. 3 (immersive installation-performance, with Michèle Danjoux, Johannes Birringer, Yoko Ishiguro, Azzie McCutcheon, Vanessa Michielon, Helenna Ren, Angeliki Margeti, Hae-in Song, Martina Reynolds, Elisabeth Sutherland, Chris Bishop, Sasha Pitale, Hongye Deng, Waka Arai, and Neal Spowage).

Metakimospheres are kinetic atmospheres – immersive environs that highlight audience participation and sensorial –auditory, tactile, visual – experience. Architectural fabrics create a large stage costume – which can be “worn” by dancers or visitors. Designs and wearables include architectures that behave like living organisms, have auditory, visual and tactile sensory quality, they can be worn and breathed, felt and imagined, transported and taken off. Mediums of live performance, choreography, film, auditory and visual media come together to create a dynamic installation/ performance exhibitions. The exceedingly visceral, tactile and auditory nature of the Metakimospheres, created by Johannes Birringer, Michèle Danjoux and their design and performance company (DAP), also disposes the artwork to have particular interest for the disability community. On Friday, April 8, 16:oo, DAP-Lab welcomes visitors from the Middlesex Association for the Blind to a special one-hour performance.

Instituto Reverso (Jaime del Val/Cristian García): Metatopia

METATOPIA is an ultraportable interactive & performative environment for outdoors & indoors spaces that merges emergent physical & digital architectures, with 3D and multisensory immersion, focusing on indeterminacy, unpredictability and open-ended relation to bodies and surrounding environment. METATOPIA is the concept of indeterminate space of plurality, as creative response to control and prediction architectures in Big Data society.

Credits:
Metatopia-Metatope-Flexinamics Concept and coordination: Jaime del Val (Reverso, Spain)
Metatope building and Flexinamics building techniques: Cristian García and Jaime del Val (Reverso, Spain)
Microsexes - concept, visuals and sound: Jaime del Val (Reverso, Spain)
Amorphogenesis - concept, visuals and sound: Jaime del Val (Reverso, Spain)
Amorphogenesis - 3D visuals programming: Dieter Vandoren (Netherlands) after concept by Jaime del Val (Reverso, Spain)
Amorphogenesis - 3D meshes: Jia Rey Chang (TUDelft-Netherlands) after concept by Jaime del Val (Reverso, Spain)
Disalignments movements techniques: Jaime del Val (Reverso, Spain)
Illegible Affects - concept: Jaime del Val (Reverso, Spain)
Illegible Affects - Software for analysis of movement expressive qualities: Casa Paganini-InfoMus Research Ventre, University of Genoa.
Development of embedded sensors, motors and actuating systems: Marije Baalman (STEIM-Netherlands) (hardware and software engineering), Nicoló Merendino (STEIM-Netherlands) (design) and Jaime del Val (Reverso, Spain)
(concept).
Collaboration on audience interaction and choreographic strategies: Jean Marc Matos (K.Danse, France)
Design consultant: Michele Danjoux (Dap-Lab, UK)

 

Federico Visi (Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR) Plymouth University, UK): Tuned Constraint

Larissa Ferreira (University of Brasilia, Brasil): Corpo em Obra | Body in Process |Körperarbeit (performance installation:

This performance is based on the relationship between body and image, the presence and memory, using coal as a symbol for the memory of the fire. To get coal it is necessary to burn twice, first wood is burning and then the fire is ceased to produce coal. Even when the fire is absent, the temperature of hot charcoal stays).

“I was 7 years old when I went to a bonfire party in São João. The fire was coming to an end. I stepped on burning coals. This was my first performance.” (Larissa Ferreira about the idea for the performance)

This performance is based on the relationship between body and image, the presence and memory. Using the coal as a symbol for the memory of the fire. To get coal it is necessary to burn twice, first wood is burning and then the fire is ceased to produce coal. Even when the fire is absent, the temperature of hot charcoal stays. For Henri Bergson, the perception of presence is memory. For him, the present state is simultaneously a perception of the immediate past and the immediate future. For me the Körperarbeit is between memory, image and presence; the fragile separation between the past, present and immediate future, the impermanence of fire and the duration in the coal. The desire to experience
the state of the body that attempts to transform absence in memory. Can the body be carbonized in the present?”

*This performance was originated created at a artistic residence in Berlin (with the IBEESCENA Funding – 2012). In Brazil the performance become a project and a solo exhibition; mixed media with videoinstallation, objects, performance and dance piece presented at Goethe Institute in Salvador (Bahia- Brazil with the Norwest Bank Funding - 2013).

Details about Body in Process for Metabody For the event the project will be presented as a performance and interactive installation with the audience participation. Draw about the Project with performance and interactive installation:

Part 1. Start the performance with the relation between image and body. Can have a idea with the photos down. The performance will follow the same idea present at this video (original video for first performance in Berlin: https://vimeo.com/51418114)
Part 2. At the end of the performance will be just one image of the body project at the floor. The performer will put coal around the body. Like this photo below * on this photo have the coal covering the image and after the performer take the coal.

Part 3. The performer will pick some of the coal around the image projected and will start to make a powder with it. The memory of the gestures will get impressed at the powder in the floor. Movements, gestures, breathings on the coal powder: impress and memories about what just happened. The past, present and immediate future *The visual looks like this image, but will be made in a circular dimension at the floor, with circular movement. It will be not like a square as the photo shows, the displacement body will be not in lines.

Part 4. At the same time the audience will have a interaction system made with powder coal. The audience will blow the powder and will change the image projected at the floor (the image which is in the middle) *this system is in test. It also can be with the audience moving some pieces of coal. *Also the idea can be expanded with a second projector connect with a live camera. This camera will be recording and projecting the image of the audience blowing the powder, like a close circuit of image. The live video will be project as a layer\superposition.

Maria Kapsali (University of Leeds)/ Simon East (Curvor Ltd): Sonolope: producing soundscapes through movement (participatory installation)

Sonolope is a participatory installation that will enable visitors to generate three-dimensional soundscapes while moving in the space through the use of an app installed on their own smart-phones or on smart-watches they can borrow for the event.

Videos of the system in action can be found at http://sonolope.com

The smartphones or smartwatches can be handheld or strapped to different parts of the visitor’s body. Each visitor’s movement will produce a different sound and/or pre-recorded sample which will rotate around the space in three dimensions when played through the quadraphonic speakers installed in each corner of the space. The sounds produced respond to the user’s movement through changes in pitch, volume and duration, as well as moving around the room in three dimensions.

Visitors will be able to choose between moving freely in the space and/or following pre-set tasks written in cards. They will be able to choose their sound and/or sample from their smartphone or watch. The system can also be set up to randomly change what sounds are assigned to each visitor to allow them to experience a range of sounds.
The use of mobile phones and their applications has been explored by a number of artists (Kozel 2010; Blake 2014), in projects which predominantly took place in outdoor urban spaces. Equally, the co-production of sound and movement has been developed through the employment of a variety of mediums, such as video tracking systems and pressure mats (Wechsler 2006; Wilson-Bocowiec 2010; Birringer 2015; Coleman 2015). This installation, which is an outcome of an 18 month-long collaboration, aims to harness the ubiquity of mobile phones and re-purpose them as mediums of enhancing and/or generating alternative states of embodiment within studio practice. The installation will aim to explore the following questions:

• What states of embodiment are awakened by the manipulation of different sounds?
• How may the production of sound affect the mover’s experience of the space and their sense of agency?
• (How) do the boundaries of the body/self change? What states of ‘in-between of the senses’ open up and how do these create meaning? (del Val 2006: 195)
• How is the technology, and the smart-phone/smart-watch in particular, experienced by the user (for example as a prosthesis, medium, tool) and how is the user’s relationship to their phone affected by this new kind of use?

Paula Guzzanti (School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast), with Martin Devek and Tristan Clutterbuck: I-Reflexes (performance exploration of the sudden-movement-impulses responses to sounds coming from communication devices in the environment. The piece captures the improvisational interaction of three performers and involves audience participation through the mediation of cell phones).

‘I-Reflexes’ is an exploration of the sudden-movement-impulses responses to sounds coming from communication devices in the environment. The piece captures the improvisational interaction of three performers: a solo dancer, a visual media artist and musician, and a sonic artist, and it involves audience participation through the mediation of cell phones.
As the choreography and original music composition evolves and loops, the soundscape of improvisation created by the audience and sonic artist interaction starts to merge, proposing new dynamics of movement.
As the performance evolves audience members are encourage to text, ‘what’s up’, or skype to two phone numbers that are part of the sound installation setting of the piece. The sounds created by this interaction are picked up by mics and are transformed live by the sonic artist.
As the interaction between performers and audience augments, it creates layers of spontaneity. This is aimed at opening a discussion on the sense of space and connection created by connecting performance and audience through mobile communication.
‘I-Reflexes’ is part of a larger PhD research project investigating movement-improvisational practices and embodied consciousness and perception conducted by dance artist Paula Guzzanti at the School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast.

Choreography and Performance: Paula Guzzanti (PhD candidate Queen’s University Belfast)
Music Composition: Martin Devek (independent composer and visual artist)
Sonic Artist: Tristan Clutterbuck (PhD candidate Queen’s University Belfast)

 

Javier Aparicio Frago (Communicaion Science and Arts Department of Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid. Spain): SynBody : real time composition with a physical system

Traditionally, dance practice has been subordinated to music in performing Arts. This work sets out an inversion of this paradigm and propose a system where dance movements control an intelligent sound expression system. This research focuses on the generation of sound by physical events at performance time: body impulses, body contact, body state, and on how to manage the complexity of such data for performing a musical proposal with aesthetic interest.

Our physical system is based on an electronic wearable modular suit that includes a set of sensors such as accelerometers, telemeters and switches for measuring body movements and its relation to the environment, and also bionic sensors for measuring human body inner features such as blood pressure, heart rate and skin conductance. The suit can be easily modified with more or less sensors what allows to test different physical configurations, and different suit versions. The wearable suit works as a wireless MIDI/OSC controller.

A previous research give us some synesthetic connections between body and musical languages that are treated as data for training a Neural Network control system that controls the sound expression that is generated by a sampler-synthesizer where samples and synthesized sounds can be modulated at real-time. The musical environment has been composed considering different aspects of parts of the body. Sounds have been assigned to body attitudes, its relation with other bodies and with the environment, so some categories from an artistic and totally subjective criteria have been established.

Therefore, music is generated at the same time of body movements, but body does not act just as a musical instrument. Control is sequential and nonlinear, so it is not just based on a combinational or logical control: it includes memory. Therefore, there is also a feedback between sound and dance: the performer creates the sound ambient by his/her movements, but the generated sound also has an influence on the following body movements.

The main idea behind this project is to build with depth a hybrid discourse for dissolving the edges between Dance and Sound Art disciplines. Also it raises the roles of musician, performer, composer, choreographer, and dancer again. The performer is at the same time musician, composer and choreographer, and the artwork generated is both a dance choreography and a musical work.

See also Javier's slide presentation on "Managing Complexity in Real-Time Systems" at the symposium - it contains many visual diagrams and sketches illustrating the 'Synbody' creation performed at our event: Go here: Managing Complexity

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Javier Aparicio's technical system hardware on the body: electronic wearable modular suit with a set of sensors (accelerometers, telemeters and switches for measuring body movements and its relation to the environment) as well as bionic sensors for measuring human body inner features

Synbody

SynBody is a performance using a wearable sensor device that responds to body tilt, pressure, contacts and proximity from other bodies, objects or elements in the space.

When the performer is approaching to the audience the sound changes in different levels, and takes out little inprovisated choreographies depending on each person's curiosity to interact and explore new sounds.

Is possible to add classical instruments (like a piano) in the stage, to watch a mixed and augmented sound between a wearable interactive garment that is played by the audience and the body movements and how the body sounds works with the classical instrument.

Maria Kapsali (University of Leeds, UK)/ Simon East (Curvor Ltd, UK) Sonolope: producing soundscapes through movement (participatory installation). Sonolope is a participatory installation that will enable visitors to generate 3-dimensional soundscapes while moving in the space through the use of an app installed on their own smart-phones or on smart-watches they can borrow for the event)

Larissa Ferreira (University of Brasilia, Brasil) Corpo em Obra | Body in Process |Körperarbeit: performance installation: This performance is based on the relationship between body and image, the presence and memory, using coal as a symbol for the memory of the fire. To get coal it is necessary to burn twice, first wood is burning and then the fire is ceased to produce coal. Even when the fire is absent, the temperature of hot charcoal stay).

.

Larissa Ferreira on charcoal floor; Anna Troisi performing OB-Scene in the Artaud Centre's 'green room'/dressing room

Anna Troisi (Bournemouth University, UK): OB Scene. The work is conceived as a sound performance where a self made medical (vaginal) probe is used to transform female sexual arousal into sound, intruding the performer’s body. Data are transformed live into sound through original software.

OB-Scene represents an explicit artistic act of remediation where the female body becomes a cyber subject/object of embodiment of experience and resonates with an ecological sensibility. The sensuous enchantment with our everyday world (with nature but also with object and in particular technology) moves us to progressively change our actual practice of ethical behaviors. The logic of the era of immediacy allows only short term thinking, that do not help to extricate from the invisible network of databanks thoroughly confounded in such a way that the private is public and every secret is told. The work aims to take ‘raw ingredients’ from a transparent biological media and to remediate them, in order to accomplish the desire to pass the limits of representation and to achieve authentic and ecologic emotional response from the viewer’s experience. OB-Scene does not aim to render transparent or to decode the real, but to free the real from the codes that seem to enhance the modernist notion of (creative) powers, the male artistgenius and postmodernist concerns for politics of representation. The work is part of a wider movement called XenoFeminism) that is emerging. OB-Scene takes inspiration from Jane Bennett’s “Vibrant Matter“ (2010), where the anthropocentrism is substituted by the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature an vice versa. The work is conceived as a sound performance where a self made medical (vaginal) probe is used to transform a female sexual arousal into sound, intruding the performer’s body. Data are transformed lively into sound through original software. This work does not foresee any explicit nude or sexual act. The erotic side of the project resides only in the audience perception and awareness of the performance. The performer is designer of the performance, author of the software and builder of the electronic parts involved. This work has been initially presented in form of talk at “Transmediale, Berlin 2016” in the panel “From C to X - an alphabet of intersectional feminism”. After the first public performance of OB-Scene at Metabody Forum, Anna will take the work to the "The Politics of Performance and Play -Feminist Matter" conference at Institute of Philosophy, Leiden University, the Netherlands.

 

[4] Saturday April 9 - Workshops/Exhibitions/Performances

10:00 – 12:00 workshops

 

Salud López (Sevilla, Spain): Parad is o / perception of imperceptible

Jaime del Val (Instituto Reverso, Madrid): Amorphogenesis-Microsexes:

Amorphogenesis is an intra-active environment of digital amorphous architectures and spatialised sound modulated via sensors on the body which act as indeterminate body extensions inviting to explore new kineasthetic sensations. It's connected to the Flexinamic modules as part of the larger Metatopia environments. Microsexes is a metaformance project in which surveillance cameras on the skin and electronically processed voice, constitute the basis for post-intimate encounters in which the body modifies its own perception, in a becoming post-anatomical and amorphous. Amorphogenesis is connected to the Flexinamic modules as part of the larger Metatopia environments.

 

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12:oo collective reflections

Obioma Oji (University of Edinburgh): GYRO (research on how people adjust their ideals of comfort around specific objects and circumstances)

Obi's PhD practice based research looks at the analysis of maximisation of energy efficiency in the context of existing interior space. This has been done by investigating the relationships people assign to their ideals of comfort around specific objects and circumstances. These are described as virtual or physical intermediate structures or membranes between the building skin and the clothes a person wears. The research has a range of outcomes that include a conceptual GYRO bubble and experimental research methods, which have incorporated playful, immersive interior environments. //

The concept of the spherical GYRO space enables - Sleep, lying flat in a ball; Relaxation, in a rocking cradle or audio room; and, Work in a pod. The human body and GYRO device cooperate to create different circumstances to augment sedentary activities within an interior environment allowing the user to create different types of postural comfort in the various modes the GYRO adopts.
Another practice-based component of the research has been actualised in the experimental interactive workshops that explores aspects of comfort and movement. They gave insights into the in/tangible membranes people prioritise in various interior environments. Everyone is an expert in their own comfort and they were asked how they find and invent comfort in their interior habitats? Participants were invited to interact with the objects and comment [via my COSY workshop designbook] on their physical, sensory and psychological responses to a themed lifecycle of objects and circumstances. These included the Amniotic Sac; a Nursery; a Teenagers Room; a Kitchen; an Office; a Shop; a Lounge; and a Coffin. The modes of ‘transport’ between these ‘fixed’ interior elements include a Pram; Bicycle; Bus; Train; Car; Wheelchair; Ambulance; and a Halo.

 

Randall Packer, Galina Mihaleva (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Angeline Young (Arizona State University, USA)

"Touch: Networked Wearables"

Touch Description

The Touch Telematic Performance Workshop is based on a new work entitled “Touch,” created by Randall Packer, Galina Mihaleva, and Angeline Young. The project is a collaboration between the School of Art, Design & Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the School of Arts, Media & Engineering at Arizona State University. This new Internet performance work explores through movement, costume, wearables, interactive sensors, video and sound, how proximity and distance has reshaped, challenged and transformed the way in which we engage in human contact. Our bodies are increasingly coupled in shared electronic space that distances physicality: the local and remote bridged virtually in a “third space.” It is within this third space that we are investigating the amorphous and intangible nature of interaction, connection, and the tactile as we attempt to negotiate and visualize new avenues of “touch” for live performance via the telematic embrace.

Workshop
This live one-hour streaming workshop will join our collaborative team in Singapore and Arizona in a participatory Web-conferenced event in collaboration with the Performance Architectures Symposium at Brunel University. Together with a group of Brunel University MFA students, we will demonstrate our work-in-progress movement vocabulary, wearables, sensors, and overall technical design that explores interaction, connection, touch, and intimacy in the third space. During the first thirty minutes we will overview the project, followed by thirty minutes of demonstration. The students (together or one at a time) will position themselves in front of the camera and will interact live and in real-time, their movement led by Angeline Young in Arizona. Students should be wearing comfortable clothing, and may bring wearables,
objects and other materials to perform with. The goal of the workshop is to experience how wearables, costume, and material combined with live video signal processing and telematics can transform the experience and perception of touch, gesture, and movement in networked performance.

Technical Requirements
The Touch Telematic Workshop requires the following technical configuration: Hardware & A/V
• Macintosh computer with built-in Webcam and microphone
• An optional higher quality camera can be used with capture converter for HDMI input
• Ethernet connection (not wireless)
• Second monitor output to projection system
• Audio output to mixer / PA system (it is generally necessary to have someone operating the mixer to avoid feedback from the PA system by controlling the mic input and audio output)
Software:
• Firefox browser only
• Run the Adobe Connect Connection Test in Firefox:
http://admin.adobeconnect.com/common/help/en/support/meeting_test.htm
o Install latest version of Flash Player
o Install Adobe Connect Add-in
• Launch Adobe Connect in Firefox using the following URL: http://bit.ly/1trzhtK
• Set Adobe Connect full screen (will discuss in rehearsal)
• Adobe Connect will have two video displays, left and right, Arizona and Brunel
• Be sure Adobe Connect is running on the Mac’s Monitor 1
• Max MSP: We will provide a Max patch configured to do the following
o Max will capture the Adobe Connect interface on the Mac’s Monitor 1 and collage the two video displays
o The resulting collage will be output full screen on Monitor 2 (projection) (the above will be detailed in the Max patch and discussed during our rehearsal session on Sat. April 5, 4pm BDT)
Theater:
• Stage and house black except for focused light on the dancer(s)
• Camera pointed to the side so as not to pickup projection or audience
• Dancer’s can face any direction so long as they are in the light
• Sound needs to be calibrated to avoid feedback if microphone is used

Isabelle Arvers (curator/director of Kareron/France)

Calais jungle refugees voices embodied in a game engine: machinima doc

I would like to show you some work in progress done in the calais jungle following my previous post about what was happening in Calais - a city world - done by the NGO with the help of all the communities of migrants.It is said that the government is going to erase the south part of the jungle where all the restaurants, churchs, shops, schools, kitchens, etc... are setted up. It is supposed to be erased.

Here are 3 videos - again work in progress - done through a game engine with in situ interviews and pictures. Machinima usually refers to film making using a video game or a game engine. Here, I am using a game engine/machinima dedicated software that allows me to integrate fix images, create my own caracters (quite hard to get closer to the real persons appearance) and direct them in a virtual space.The idea of mixing interviews and photographies in a game engine began in Brazil last june, during Ruralscapes, an art residency in the mountains http://www.ruralscapes.net/ where I was giving machinima workshops to kids who might become farmers in the future. After the first day of workshop we understood that story telling was an issue and decided to go in their village in order to bring me to their favorite places telling me why it was important for them while i was interviewing them. We ended with 2 spirits stories, mixing pictures we took of all the places and kids interviews:
http://www.kareron.com/videos/

In Calais, as many people don't want to be filmed I decided to focus on the streets and shelters as well as people's voices. That's why there is nobody except people interviewed as virtual caracters.. My first intention was to integrate all the pictures I took of this world city and to represent it through the game engine, while reproducing its cartography and moving through it with the camera. I think it will be present in the next steps of the project.

Zimako interview is in french, he is the builder of the school, the 2 others are in english, the sound is not perfect, hope it will be somehow interesting, regarding this month discussion.
Zimako, at the origin of the idea of a school and the school builder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3XVCvdlFcs
Marko, one of the jungle school builder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc-dWbP-KSw
Mohamed, representant of the sudanese community
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BOUkQvSx8Y
Isabelle

http://www.isabellearvers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/animLogo.gif
Isabelle Arvers
Curator and art critic

http://www.isabellearvers.com
Director of Kareron
www.kareron.com<http://www.kareron.com
twitter: @zabarvers
youtube.com/zabarvers<http://youtube.com/zabarvers>
Skype ID: zabarvers

 

 

18:00 – 21:30 Exhibition-performances

DAP-Lab: Metakimosphere no. 3

Jaime del Val / Instituto Reverso Metatopia

Maria Kapsali /Simon East: Sonolope
Paula Guzzanti, Martin Devek: I-Reflexes (joint performance, on the traces of Larissa's performance painting)
Anna Troisi: OB-Scene
Janice Jones 13 Moons: A Story of Ashes, Blood, Light

 

Collective Jam Session in the large Theatre Space

DAP-Lab: Metakimosphere no. 3

Jaime del Val /Instituto Reverso Metatopia

Federico Visi : Tuned Constraint (/em>

Javier Aparicio Frago: SynBody

+ + + + +

 

 

This conludes the event

 

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Vanessa Michielon and Sasha Pitale perform in metakimosphere no.3 [left], Angeliki Margeti with BeakhandSpeaker and Azzie McCutcheon, Yoko Ishiguro and Sasha Pitale inside architectural dress [right]; costumes and soundobjects designed by Michèle Danjoux, with electronics and object construction by Neal Spowage

 

The DAP-Lab thanks all our visitors for coming to work with us and to share their ideas and creativities.

 

credits:

Design and Performance Lab (DAP) is hosting IMF London 2016 as the fifth Artaud Forum, a series of workshop-festivals inaugurated by Johannes Birringer in 2011, and is pleased to be presenting its new and expamnded version of metakimosphere, developed over the past 16 months, in partial collaboration with core partners of the METABODY project.

The main developments of our research for 'kinetic atmospheres' and immersive choreographic architectures began in the winter of 2014-2015 and resulted in a first installation of 'metakimosphere' in Studio 101, Artaud Center, London (March 2015), a few months later followed by a week-long residency and public performances at MediaLab Prado in Madrid.

DAP-Lab wishes to thank all collaborators in the project for knowledge transfers and artistic co-operations. We acknowledge the inspiration of the mobile metakinespheres created by Jaime del Val during 2014, especially the smaller ready-mades brought to the STEIM workshop in December 2014 (animated by lighting during a test rehearsal with Dieter Vandoren). They sparked a series of smaller tests in London early in 2015, where the DAP-Lab and participants in a MetaSeminar began to extrude the frames and shapes of the small kinespheres and extend out the fabrics into space. This process of building a gauzeous fabrics environment in the studio was driven particularly by Azzie McCutcheon and Martina Reynolds, and Christopher Bishop and Cameron McKirdy contributed the interface programming for the graphic projections that (via Kinect camera) responded to the movement of our embodied acrhitecture. (The process is archived here on the DAP-Lab website).

The first experience of the metakimosphere installation then gave way to DAP’s increasing interest in pro-active, dynamic and interactive architectures as proposed by Nimish Biloria and Jia Rey Chang (LOOP Pavilion) and the Master students who worked on a computationally generated origami pattern based surface with integrated lighting, motion capture and robotic actuation. The {/S}caring-ami team (Anisa Nachett, Alessandro Giacomelli, Giulio Mariano, Yizhe Guo, Xiangting Meng) gave us the polypropylene materials to create new wearables (costumes and sound objects, e.g. Kepler and Accordion). Danjoux’s ideas for conductive wearables and proximity-sensing performance had evolved from her work with Jonathan Reus during the e-textile lab at STEIM (October 2014), and my scenographic sketches for “kinetic atmospheres” evolved in March 2015 during the first public presentation of metakimosphere no.1 (with Azzie McCutcheon, Yoko Ishiguro, Helenna Ren performing. Sound was co-created by Barbara Ulaite and Johannes Birringer, with additional live voice by Pernille Ruebner-Petersen; graphic intra-actions programed by Christopher Bishop and Cameron McKirdy).

The dancers for metakimosphere no.2 were Vanessa Michielon, Azzie McCutcheon and Miri Lee. For the 2016 presentations of metakimosphere no.3, DAP-Lab has invited additional dance artists to join, including Helenna Ren, Yoko Ishiguro, Aggeliki Margeti, Waka Arai, Elisabeth Sutherland, Sasha Pitale and Hongye Deng. Visual interface design was developed by Chris Bishop; the expanded version also features video and interactive graphics composed by Hae-in Song based on her own filmic creations as well as films shot by Johannes Birringer and Martina Reynolds. Documentary filming and production support is provided by Martina Reynolds.

The performance throws light on possible dialogues with a large space; it also may interrupt the freeflow of the space for some periods demanding a more concentrated, quiet performative scenario for distinctive encounters with the vistors. In Madrid this already worked well and focused attention at these moments of intra-action, quieting things down to a level of the organic breathing that can be subtly heard, before different voices (recorded, processed, and live), performed through BeakHandSpeakers and directional speakers (the Acouspade) introduce a ritual-spatial dimension. A wireless smartphone was tested with Marcello Lussana's help, for the transmission of sound and liberation of Miri from being wired, so her use of the space could be very different as she approaches the audience from any point in the space and can move through them. An interesting dialogue on design across bodies - spaces could evolve, and the tonal subtleties worked well with Vandoren's Lampyridae (in Madrid). New sound objects are now created by Neal Spowage for metakimosphere no.3 .

These mobile and intra-active sound objects - called 'TouchSphere', 'RibbonSphere', along with 'Accordion' and the new 'NailfeathersDress' designed by Michèle Danjoux - will take on the same role and can be used in a highly flexible way all across the kimosphere. The proximity sensing sonic intra-actions developed by Jonathan Reus for Vanessa Michielon (with OrigamiDress) will be recuperated at a later stage, in the London permiere of metakimosphere no. 3 the origami dress will partner the area of the space where Elisabeth Sutherland built the weaverbird nest as a suspened habitat. Azzie McCutcheon and Yoko Ishiguro perform the kimosphere or bodyweather from within/under the larger gauzes stretching across the space: they remain largely invisible but are a felt, sensorial presence, and every now and then they emerge like the arms of a polypous to grab something that is outside.

The graphic particle-physics and video projection onto the floors below the performers are programmed by Christopher Bishop - the graphics respond to the motion in the environment via Kinect camera, just as the Scaringami prototype moves and reacts to proximal behaviors via its kinect sensing system. DAP-Lab acknowledges a fruitful collaboration with the TUdelft team (Anisa Nachett, Alessandro Giacomelli, Giulio Mariano), and the excellent cooperation with the STEIM artists Marije Baalman and Nicoló Merendino, who helped to build some of the electronics for the Accordion Object, the Kepler Soundobject, and the fabrication of the BeakhandSpeaker (3d printing). Further work collaborations during the Metatopia week took place with Stocos and with Reverso (building a speakerfilm addition to one of the metakinespheres to be tested in performance), and well as with Jean Marc Matos (K-Danse) and InfosMus Lab (Genua). Johannes Birringer directed the scenography, some of the sound events (breath, motor sound echo, Shaman), and helped with the overall dramaturgy of the intra-actions in the kimospheres. For the London premiere of metakimosphere no.3 he also invited back some of the core members of DAP-Lab's past dance productions: Helenna Ren will perform in the mosquitonet (voice) and Angeliki Margetin will develop her own interpretation of the BeakHandSpeaker role, performing the shamanic voice (provided by Hae-in Song) on the spherical image projection crteated by Chris Bishop.

The last dress that was completed, literally on the day of the premiere, was Michèle Danjoux's new creation of the "NailFeathers Dress", which was enacted and interpreted by Elisabeth Sutherland.

See an evocation of the dress in motion here

Das NagelFedernKleid, für die ghanaische Tänzerin Elisabeth angefertigt, ist wie eine fantastische Aria. Hinten etwa 80 or 90 Nägel in dem konduktiven Texturstoff, als Schläppe mit Nägeln hinten auf dem Boden nachschleifend, die Nägel streifen dabei etwa 12 Piezo-sensoren (kleine Kontaktmicros), die nehmen das Geräusch auf und leiten es um auf den vorne am Bauch der Tänzerin baumelnden Kamera-Lautsprecher (ein Lautsprecher, der die Gestalt einer Kamera hat) -- daraus erklingen scheppernde Geräusche, wie der vermutliche Klang eines mythischen Vogels aus Afrika.

NailfeathersDress -- it is of course a contradiction in terms, a dark and light paradox, heavy metal feathers, and Elisabeth perform it in a unique manner, sometimes vertically, sometimes horizontally, crouched on the floor, her feet dragging, her feet kicking the nails as she walks around the spheres. Each kick against the eighty or ninety nails elicits a small metallic sound, a metal whisper, that is picked up the micro sensors (built by Neal Spowage in collaboration with Danjoux), and the sound is then amplified by the speaker-camera that the dancer wears in front of her chest. The whisper becomes a small rumble as if balls roll inside a wooden box.....

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Elisabeth Sutherland performs the NailFeathers Dress, design & styling by Michèle Danjoux. (c) 2016 Dap-Lab

For a brief film of the dress in rehearsal, go to NailFeathersDress

DAP-Lab plans to move the work to a venue in central London to perform it over a longer period of time and to provide or wide-spread access to its sensual and multisensorial dimensions.

For more extensive writing on the choreographic and architectural ideas guiding the artistic experiments with kinetic atmospheres, see Johannes Birringer's essay, "Metakimospheres," prepared for a new book on 'Digital Bodies: Creativity and technology in the Arts and Humanities' edited by Susan Broadhurst and Sara Price (for Palgrave Macmillan). Go here: Metakimospheres

Brief company history:

The DAP-Lab’s cross-media work highlights convergences between physical movement choreography, visual expression in dance/film/fashion and wearable design, and real-time interactive data flow environments. Since founding DAP-Lab (2004) Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux have brought together artists and researchers from the UK, Japan, S. Korea, China, Brasil, U.S.A. & Europe, and developed choreographies for prototypes of wearable garments which respond in distinct ways to body movement, camera capture, and sensory processing. Michèle Danjoux, in close collaboration with lab members, has developed a number of bespoke audiophonic wearables, linked to analog and digital techniques allowing performers to revisit earlier moments in the repertoire of 20th century performance/sound art and discover new modes of inaudible/audible choreography.

The ensemble has created online performances, video exhibitions, installations and the digital dance-work Suna no Onna (premiered at London’s Laban Centre in December 2007, recreated at Watermans in 2008). The choreographic installation, UKIYO (Moveable Worlds), produced in collaboration with artists from Japan, premiered at Sadler’s Wells, London, after touring Eastern Europe (2010). for the time being was shown at Watermans in 2012, then expanded to a new operatic version shown at Sadler’s Wells in 2014. Metakimospheres have been supported by a grant for METABODY: Media Embodiment - Tekhné and Bridges of Diversity (EU Culture Program), and the Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance at Brunel University, London.

 

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(c) 2016 Artaud Forum / Center for Contemporary and Digital Performance