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UKIYO
(Moveable
World)
a
new project created in a research collaboration between DAP-Lab and
Keio University / Inetdance Japan
. . 
. 
Photographic
studies by Paul Verity Smith for "Ukiyo"
with Yiorgos Bakalos as "Colonel Brazhinsky" (c) DAP-Lab,
2009
Notes
on the creation of interactive images
by
Paul Verity Smith
I
have been formulating a theory based on something that Mark Coniglio
said about introducing the organic into the performance. I think - and
this is now the basis of my thesis - that it is this. I feel there is
something in the connection between the gesture and the interference
with the “image group or - image batch by the dancer that
can re-emerge as a signature and have poetics. What is paramount is
that it must be filmed for the gesture. It is not a movie clip, it is
not a slide show or a still image but it is an object that it designed
to be interacted with. As such it is incomplete without the interaction.
Almost
all of the photographic or film making techniques that are used to make
a piece of film or an edit sequence complete or interesting do not apply
here because they would simply detract from the interaction. Just as
Eisenstein's notion of the montage of attractions is between two pieces
of film cut together, the montage of attractions here is between the
image that is the live dance and the photographic image behind her/him.
The question is not - why would a dancer want to be a video editor,
valid though that is; the question is why should we mess up a perfectly
good dance choreography with wonderful dancers, in beautiful costumes
by projecting video behind it. The notion of the dancer as video editor
was simply a bon mot, an attempt to describe a process that took away
the notion of the creation of fixed montage making meaning.
This sense of connection between the dancer and the media is not the
same as making gestures that click on a particular clip that will give
a completely predictable result. I think that Ioanna's film making (for
our production of "See You in Walhalla") was beautiful, highly
skilled and produces wonderful atmospheric montages of the European
City. But from the point of view of interaction it was the very craft
of this beautifully finished work that left no room for interactivity.
The interactivity should have been the element that finished the work
and that work should have been the relationship between the dancer and
the image. In this regard the jumps, jitters and occasional blackouts
are the same as the flecks from dust on the enlarger or scratches on
an old negative. The are its signature and stamp of authenticity.
What then is this image group image / batch image object? I think that
it is made up of a clearly easily read single gesture. It is not a wash
or a substitute for scenography. It is a drumbeat from the orchestra
pit. Think of images from Hitchcock. The freshly cooked fried egg that
looks healthy and appetising until a cigarette is suddenly stubbed out
in it. Barely 35-30 frames of film but it makes a clear statement and
engenders a feeling of revulsion and remains with the audience for long
after the film is over. This also defines the medium in a way. Hitchcock
s images are purely cinematic – no other medium does this. Look
at the work that Antonioni achieves in Blow-Up with repeated
analysis of six photographs – taking different contexts depending
on the viewpoint or degree of englargement. This concept is reworked
in Peter Greenaway's Belly of An Architect where the fat dying
architect looks along a row of still photographs that without anyone
saying anything allow the audience to figure out that his wife is having
an affair with another man. Coppola makes an entire film in The
Conversation with a short sound clip that we hear over and over
again. In Costa-Gavras' Z a multi-angle shot of a moment of
assassination is replayed throughout the film taking on a different
meaning as each witness remembers (differently) the same scene. In each
of these cases the image or sound is a short sharp clearly defined gesture.
A completely different approach is also that of ambient music. This
is creating images that are there but not necessarily observed. I formulated
an idea for this earlier which was that we could be creating ambiences
– neutral anodyne images that are felt more than read. Using the
Sensordress, mild interventions or disturbances can be felt by the audience.
The ambience is not the same depending on the dancer's dress. The technique
for achieving this I felt would be to use extreme slow motion photography
though time-lapse might also be effective. Another possibility is the
layering of images in such a way that the presence of the dancer is
responded to. Changes in layers depending on movement or position. I
think – and
I was completely wrong about this – that measuring the position
on stage of a dancer accurately and having a response to this could
be as interesting as trying to make a gesture repeat itself on video.
In this way the imagery becomes, as you say one of: the other modes
of thinking (also dramaturgically), and one of those is derived from
digital/interactive arts practices interested in less deterministic
(pre-defined) and more open, dynamic, aleatory and undetermined interactive
and sensorial/affective experiences.....
Paul Verity Smith's photographic
study of gesture motiuon, performed by Helenna Ren (c) DAP-Lab 2008
And your (Johannes) quote from Hansen puts it perfectly into context:
"...it brings together body, sound, and space into a positive feedback
system that creates two kinds of emergence: of new bodily movements
and of new frequency interferences. And while both emergences - human
and machinic respectively - are only possible through the perturbation
introduced by the other, each occurs solely through a reorganization
that respects its constitutive principle of operational closure. While
both follow the same basic rule - let movement create space - each does
so in a manner entirely particular to it."
The
next element is the on all the time nature of the video and interactivity.
The video would be more effective if it was used sparingly. The idea
that we always have to have moving lit images risking an upstaging the
dance or confusing the audience about what they should be watching is
an overall weakness. In film making, the poetry is between the said
and the unsaid. What is edited out is in its way as important as what
is left in. The emotional impact is in what the audience fill in for
themselves. For this reason one of the old premises of the interactive
CD-Rom (a non-lieu if ever there was one) that viewers could chose a
happy or unhappy ending was a complete nonsense. The elements that create
happy/unhappy and a sense of an ending’ are all in the what is
not shown’category. The process of ellipsis means that a cinematic
or performed event will not have an emotional effect until the audience
member decodes the mystery for themselves. Showing something will not
move them. Showing it live and filmed at the same time will not move
them and giving the more information will not move them. This is the
secret behind Noel Coward's dictum on: Extraordinary how potent cheap
music is. Providing the process of decoding is left to the audience
member the emotional impact is of the same intensity whether it be Samuel
Beckett or a song on a jukebox in the corner of the diner. Sophisticated
ideas are interesting but not necessarily moving. Long before the work
with sensors Martin and I did a performance with a jazz musician, Andy
Sheppard, in which we analysed the frequency of his music and had this
influence the images. Martin programmed this but it is now a pre-set
in Isadora. The question we were continually asked was what would happen
if the power failed and all of our technology was lost. My answer was
quite simple. We would send one of the assistants to the Cheap Shop
with £5.00 and they could come back with 500 little tea-light
candles and Andy would play his saxophone and the evening would be quite
magical with that alone and the audience would have a wonderful experience.
The magic of the musician, the dancer, the costume designer and maker,
the lighting designer – a much more recent addition to the troupe,
the dimmer in stage lighting which comes, I believe, twenty years after
the invention of photography - is established and has its own evolving
aesthetics. The first time I ever saw full screen video playing on a
computer without jumping frames from a programme that permitted any
sort of meaningful interactivity was in about 2000 with the advent of
the Mac G4.
Johannes' taking the work of Theremin as being the genesis of this form
of work is absolutely correct and what is interesting is the way in
which the Theremin instrument was immediately adopted. RCA sold them
as fast as they could make them to Hollywood. Critics from the time
talk about this instrument that could emulate any other instrument and
perceived of it as a way in which a whole film could be scored without
recourse to whole orchestras. However, if we actually listen to the
theramin today, even the lovely Clara s recordings, it does not sound
like other instruments at all. It sounds like a theremin. It finds its
own voice not when trying to be violins but when used by Jimmy Page
in Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love or Brian Wilson in Good Vibrations.
By the same logic, the early pictorialist photographers who struggled
with callotypes trying to make them look like paintings or engravings
were ultimately on a highway to nothing - though some very beautiful
images were produced along the way – it required photographers
to accept their own medium and explore its own properties before it
became an art form in its own right. The same goes for film with the
early film makers placing the camera in the best seats of the theatre
and simply filming a stage production. By the same logic dance for the
camera must have something of dance but also something of film language
to be valid.
How
does one artistically reconcile the fact that good editing can make
a poor clumsy dancer look elegant, and in order to show that it really
is the dancer's skill that is creating the magic one has to eschew film
technique and editing and simply let the dancer and the dance do the
work but this is merely documenting not film-making. The same applies
to the use of imagery in interactive dance. Both the dancer s methods
and the image makers methods must be adapted to a new medium.
Laurie Anderson s work as well points the way. Her early shows used
the same tape-slide equipment that I came from. But here again the eccentric
instruments are not just used as a gimmick. She makes say -a violin
that plays a 45 rpm record but there is also a continual social comment
and wit in her work.
There is also a sort of torch carrying as well in this progression.
Bob Moog learned to make theremins (from a kit) and then starting making
them commercially. From there he moved to the synthesizer which he invented
using Theremin's principles. Bob Bielecki who worked for Moog made many
of Laurie Anderson's early instruments. The sensors used in flight simulators
– the first joystick control – was invented by Link whose
parents had made piano roll machines which was the other half of the
synthesizer equation. From dismantled synthesizer parts Michel W at
Steim started making his eccentric instruments and experiments with
sensors, and it was at Steim that Laurie Anderson made her later instruments.
Mark and Dawn went for a residency there and came back with many of
their ideas for MidiDancer, and our Infusions System's Axel went for
a residency and that is how Infusion Systems was born. A small world.
The aesthetics therefore are positioned between process - it is interesting
to look at an art work purely as an example of a new process though
this is not necessarily moving or edifying – and cultural context which
will provide the ready made framework for emotional impact. The process
people are for example: exploring GPS or Biotechnology or concepts of
neuroaesthetics. These ideas lend themselves well to grant applications
in that the language used suggests some form of scientific enquiry into
unknown territories or the creation of some new aesthetic theory based
around changing conditions of whatever but these are not elements that
are going to reduce an audience to tears. And the interesting elements
here in the study of performance going to be based around those elements
that move and touch or excite the viewer. The problem with process ideas
or academic painting or books by people who write novels without using
the letter e is that these are not artistic concepts. I would argue
that that the problem with process based ideas is that they attempt
to go beyond the idea of an artwork as a cultural artifact. This seems
to promise some hotline to a state of consciousness and nirvana that
it illusory. The V.R. phenomenon went down with that ship. The fact
is one was still just looking at images only this time one felt slightly
nauseous while doing so.
Anxd why not mention Michèle's fashion/visual art/live art context
where perhaps "extreme fashion" works on visual effect, excess,
hyperbole, etc, and not on "comprehensibility"
and yes, premise 1: agreed on the side of transparency and 1;1 or literal
mapping. Exactly. Michèle' s costumes are thrilling and exciting.
I am particularly interested in the way she uses the textures of the
found materials. It is a pity that the audience cannot see them closer.
Our problem is to provide an enclosure, a space for the costumes to
– leur mettre en valeur . I am not questioning the ideas of Sensordress
at all – I am certain that it will the future. Either telecomms
or walkman or some forms of identifiers built in. I think that the Sensordress
will probably receive more than it transmits. We were transmitting.
My
question is how we make a performance that gives this value. Sadly what
we learned was that there is very little difference in sewing in an
accelerometer carefully into position and having it not work and just
putting it in the dancer's pocket and having it not work. In a way for
this to work we need to perhaps think of the costuming in the same way
as the video. The costume will be finished by the sensors. In a way
like the video we should be working with unfinished costumes where the
sensor interaction completes the picture. I don't think the comprehensibility
issue is the same. People know what clothes are, they don't know what
accelerometers do. The quality of the costumes is immediately compressible
regardless of one s fashion sense. Even someone with my sartorial elegance
can appreciate them.
We can see indications for the direction of work in the paintings of
Baconm, and for me in the poems of Eliot – it has not been possible
to illustrate Eliot s line on "time past and time present are
both perhaps present" &
Evelyn Cobley states:
"Like the camera lens, the eye reconstructs reality metaphorically;
the signified referent (the perceived object) is as arbitrary as the
signifier (its visual or verbal representation) because it is determined
by culture rather than by some natural reality." (p. 108)
The reader of Dispatches must reconstruct reality from the
arbitrary signifier in the same way as the eye or camera lens. Christian
Metz's exploration of the difficulties inherent in montage is relevant
to the discussion of "Illumination Rounds" as Herr's endeavor
to achieve its literary equivalent. Metz writes:
"Although each image is a free creation, the arrangement of these
images into an intelligible sequence-cutting and montage-brings us to
the heart of the semiological dimension of film." (101)
Though he faults Eisenstein's sometimes too zealous attempts to perceive
"precinematic" montage in all works of literature and film,
Metz cannot but admit the manipulation of syntagmatic paradigmatic significance
apparent in montage film.
Frederic Jameson's theory …of total flow and free floating signifiers
in video proves useful in interpreting the dynamics involved in the
"Illumination Rounds" section of Dispatches. Jameson's theory
of videotext, a wall of televisions displaying a variety of images simultaneously,
bears a similarity to film montage.
The formulations, he writes: pose two signs of equal nature and value,
only to observe that in their moment of intersection a new hierarchy
is at once established in which one sign becomes something like the
material on which the other one works, or in which the first sign establishes
a content and a center to which the second is annexed for the auxiliary
and subordinate functions (the priorities of the hierarchical relationship
here seeming reversible). (87)
Each vignette in this section has a meaning in and of itself, but each
takes on a different meaning when placed in relation to the other vignettes
in the section. This postmodern pastiche and exchange of significance
provide Herr with a method of ordering and interpreting the Vietnam
experience both for himself and for the reader.
We can also see a cinematic approach to writing in Don Delillo' s Underworld
where he takes a single incident in a 1920's baseball game where a ball
is hit into the crowd and then wraps a narrative around all of the spectators
who were in the section of the crowd where the ball landed. There is
a Dutch photographer whose name I forget who takes people who have a
similar sort of look from the street – common fashion sense –
age whatever – and then takes them into a studio with a white seamless
background and makes them pose in exactly the same way. He creates exhibitions
of almost identical pictures in which one is forced to pick out the
tiny differences given that the pose and background are the same.
In this regard we should look more carefully at the se of multiple screens
(e.g. triptyc).. Our MatroxTriple-head-to-go is simply used as a splitter.
We can for example have an image on screen one interact with an image
on screen three. We can have the image part follow the dancer. We can
break up the screens into smaller screens either with graphic lines
or soft edge masks. Images can break up and then reform depending on
the performance needs. This area has not been explored yet working with
multi-projector slide equipment we made this happen all the time using
little metal masks on the slides. We can have very slow building of
an image perturbed by the dancer movement.
The notion of the costumes as characters is also a very strong lead
for imagery. The way in which the textures of the clothing could be
photographed, perhaps even in closeup so that there can be an inter-relationship
between the costume and the character onstage wearing the costume.
I don t think we have tried all our options. We just need five times
as much research and development time and a standby electronics person
at all times. The feedback that I got from my people was that it was
magical. And everyone was overwhelmed with the Suna no Onna costumes.
I feel that Katsura's "unfinished dancing" lends itself to
dancing with sensors and imagery. The unfinished choreography complements
our design of objects precisely to be inter-acted with.
. . 
Yiorgos
Bakalos as "Colonel Brazhinsky" (with phantom limb) guarding
Swiss Réduit, in film shoots on the new movement characters for
UKIYO (c) DAP-Lab, 2009
Cinematic movement character studies by Johannes Birringer
Wearable designs & styling
on this page courtesy of Michèle Danjoux & Johannes Birringer
________________________________________________________________________________
For
the development of the choreographic installation and its interactive
images, go to the February 2009 workshop images:
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This
research project is funded by a PM12 Connect/British Council Grant and
a RDF (Brunel University) grant.
dance
tech network site
of Ukiyo project
All
photos (c) DAP-Lab
Further
notes on design and performance concepts are published on this site.
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(c)
dap 2007-08
Project
directors: Johannes Birringer & Michèle Danjoux
Brunel
University, West London
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