Choreography

Intermedia || Interactive Audience

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For our last study this semester, we were thinking about how the audience can participate while also folding in the first two studies and reshaping the work. We considered taking an easy approach to lighting and technology limiting down to what and why we use tech, light, sound, and movement. We chose to begin with making a dinner table set with place settings digitally. This work was inspired by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-79), a monumental feminist work of its time. Then, we decided to interact by having our cell phones engaged in the work. To talk through with the audience, to text other performers, and to capture video of the event. We also set up an interactive movement study to see if the audience would pick it up and – they did!

Feel free to skip through:

In reflection, this work seemed to be the easiest to complete, and we found a balance between interactions, technology, and movement that seemed to create a holistic environment. While it is important to consider what Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message”… well, we are responding to the message (Dixon 2004). A couple of key questions sit on my mind: What are we saying with the technology we are in collaboration with? What are the stakes that surround this interdisciplinary landscape? The work feels open, free, and uncontained to a specific genre. In a sense Intermedia is freedom.

While maintaining a sense of freedom, I turn to Faye Driscoll’s (2014) Thank You For Coming: Attendance has been a huge influence on the work I do in considering interactivity and connection with the audience. I referenced Faye’s work in the earlier blog post. So when we talk about the community making the work and co-creating, co-authoring, and co-generating the outcome – we are interested in separating from technology for a moment to connect. This is a driving part of the work created in the final study. However, we demonstrated the interference technology has in our daily lives. The way we connect through media to interact has certainly come in full force.

Take a moment to enjoy this work and commentary:

 As the semester came to a close, Norah Zuniga-Shaw asked us what Intermedia is. I responded:

Intermedia is a radical space that allows for interactive engagement that activates the performers, technology, and audience to explore a liminality of openness. This interdisciplinary space transforms the environment to teleport all parties to a sub-dimension of the unknown. Intermedia creates a visual distortion and appetite fostering the collaboration of technological humanness.

Intermedia moves without a container and allows your imagination to run in any direction possible. I gained more insight into the importance of light/projection, how to formulate collaboration within this setting, and how to build a structure around integrating technology. While also learning the array of equipment and programs in the MOLA lab. I am leaving this course with more questions than I entered, but I feel ready to engage and continue the exploration forward. Digital self-signing off for now.

Sources:

Dixon, Steve. 2004. “The Digital Double.” New Visions in Performance: “The Impact of Digital Technologies. Ed. Gavin Carver. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 2004. Print.

Driscoll, Faye. 2014. Thank You For Coming: Attendance. (Film) Walker Art Center. Published 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlB3MrBr2_M

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The Internal | Connecting | Creative Process

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Date: October 26, 2017

Two levels in Creative Process v.210

Mapping out a creative process to connect two parts of my research resonating with Inside the Room and Outside the room branches. Inside the room’s design is led by the Experiment thread, while Outside the room reflects the Research thread. I was compiling this information from a word bank created in the Grad Composition class with Professor Susan Van Pelt Petry and peers. We then each took the word bank and made a visual map of our creative process.

For my challenge, I only used each word one time and practiced this assignment utilizing a present-moment embodiment. Meaning, that I only allowed myself one piece of paper with no option to have a do-over. Utilizing this assignment as a challenge I was aware of my devising boundaries. This project created a meditative space for me to sit with my pen to the paper, and process my process. Which usually feels meta, however, this project was calming while being informative. Most of my reflections have happened through a stream-of-consciousness or analytical essay, so it felt good to move towards a tangible medium to flush out information.

Further noting the attention and weight of each word resonating within my body I continue to let these words reconfigure inside my body. A digital roadway on the frontier of interconnectivity pulsing, sparking, and transferring connections that re-wires and retracts information before surging it back out again.

The system is operating. 

I recognize these maps are abundant within my body, and mind and are the containers to hold, organize, and connect information used to make co-creative spaces. They are roadways of information. Living knowledge intrigues me as I delve into the internal self of producing art. Maybe the cyborg self is emerging underneath the surface below my skin and responding to the familiarity of the motherboard. While the image below relates to this emerging, I examine the depths and intricacies that are possible in overriding.

Cyborg Self Reflection | Awakening

In trying to navigate my cyborg self-relationship I am drawn to this quote by Donna Haraway a professor, consciousness, and feminist scholar, “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not based on original innocence, but based on seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (Haraway 2016, 55). My journey over the past five years has sent me plunging into words, writing, and language – preparing me for my conversations, arguments, and discourse today. Sometimes my consciousness rejects my impulse to respond, and my unconsciousness delivers connectors to reconnect broken bridges of thought. Tracing the map above throughout my creative process enables me to redirect how I am thinking, feeling, and exploring the material.

Responding to a recent visit by Vida Midgelow who presented at the DSA inaugural Scholarly Conference and is a Professor in Dance and Choreographic Studies at Middlesex University London says, “Coming into language is a significant process through which experiential, material and emergent forms of knowledge can be foregrounded, processed and shared” (Midgelow 1994). Previously, I rarely spoke my stance or dared to share the perspectives that ran rampant in my mind.

The information comes to me as this digital space allows me to write about these developing curiosities that are awakening. Identifying as an “other,” I do claim the tools to unearth my potential as a choreographic researcher, scholar, and free-thinker to engage in practices that move humanity towards change. Structures, rules, and traditions can be broken and reconfigured to make manifest new ways of operating that enhance artistic ability, connect technology and humanity, and revolutionize the central core of art-making.

Free Motherboard Vector Art

The above image is how I imagine the framework for my discourse of choreographic research operating–or what it looks like to strategically choreograph, basically my mind on paper. The motherboard vector art is part – object – abstract – micro-processing –  unit –  internet integrated – modern – non-binary projects – future technological advances – daydreams.

 

Works Cited

Haraway, Donna J. and Cary Wolfe. 2016. Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed October 25, 2017).

Midgelow, Vida. and Jane Bacon. 2014. “Creative Articulation Practice (CAP).”                                      Forthcoming in Choreographic Practices. 5[2]                                                                                  https://www.academia.edu/9956868/Creative_Articulations_Process_CAP_  (accessed October 25, 2017)

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Intermedia || Media First

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Archive Date: December 14, 2017

Texture inspires movement, environment, and sound were the starting point for our next study. Our next task gave us a moment of pause to reflect on how we can enter into a work from a different starting point. We recorded and photographed various videos with movement in them to project throughout the campus. Then, we had a full day of sifting through the material and trying different captures on different placements within MOLA.

After selecting the images our next task was to see where they were going to be installed in the space. So we used the arch of mesh to create a container for the work, as well, as using the scrim and wall to project on. Next, came the movement of invention and exploration. This project was challenging since the majority of our group needed to be behind the scenes working on Isadora, MaxMsp, and the lighting. However, the goal for us was to accomplish a welcoming environment in a fluid space for the audience. To me, this was our most challenging study, but it paid off in understanding how to merge movement when media comes first.

Developing the movement to suit moving images takes awareness, quality, and timing to not overload the audience’s visual capacity. We found it helpful to juxtapose the images with more movement with stillness, and the more static images with more movement. Mimicking movement from the screen was also a good way to be informed by the media.

Overall, a more developed version of the media first study would be projection mapping. I have listed here work by Dandypunk who puts the movement in response to the media to create a narrative. This is a different direction than the space we created, but, the work is a good example of a fully realized form of media first that shows the multiplicity of choice within the Intermedia work.

©LROD