----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
what do you mean you broke it ???
what discussion did you broke ..
or that i put an end to it ?? sorry if that is what you mean ..
On 19/07/2014, at 11:36 PM, Garth Paine wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> OK, so I guess I broke the discussion?....
>
> Cheers,
>
> Garth Paine
> gpain...@me.com
>
>
>
> On Jul 17, 2014, at 4:51 PM, Garth Paine <gpain...@me.com> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Hi Sue et al (resending to the correct thread....)
>>
>> I thought it might be useful to respond with some writing around the nature
>> of experience and embodiment - I understand your frame for virtuality, but I
>> am constantly trying to really understand what that is from a kind of direct
>> experience and how it changes based on my conditioning and on the
>> socially/communally understood reference - I am asking myself all the time,
>> to what extent is the accepted paradigm valid - what does it miss, what does
>> it establish through aspiration rather than existent phenomena.
>>
>> So here is part of a framework (edited down here) developed by myself and
>> several others at WISP2010 which I organised at Critical Path in Sydney in
>> 2010/201. This section pertains specifically and only to notions of
>> Experience and Embodiment in interactive works and makes a distinction with
>> pre-existing paradigms of performance
>>
>> Experience and Embodiment contains three subdimensions:
>> Porosity, Perception, and Presence.
>>
>> a) Porosity. The content of the work, or the work itself (the artefact,
>> musical work, play, dance work etc), may be more or less porous or
>> responsive to real-time influence and, correspondingly, more or less sealed.
>> Likewise, the embodied movements of the performer or performers may be (and
>> may be experienced as) more or less open to influence in real time. For
>> instance, in standard mainstream performance a soliloquy in Shakespeare is,
>> to some approximation, a fixed artefact. The words must remain unchanged.
>>
>> b) Perception. In many forms of interactive performance, the perceptual
>> attention and experience of both performers and audience is more diffuse and
>> multisensory or multimodal. Rather than restriction to sight and sound,
>> embodied interactive performance often draws on and taps in to rich
>> kinesthetic or movement awareness, often aligning or confronting the
>> proprioceptive and motor systems of performers and audience members by way
>> of unusual, collaborative, mediated, or hybrid movement forms. Communication
>> is thus not solely the transmission and perception of explicit content, but
>> taps more implicit, habitual, and embodied forms of sensory-affective memory
>> and experience. The openness or porosity of the work may be more or less
>> available to performer and/or audience, and the evaluation of intention will
>> not be entirely conscious and explicit. The experience and perception of
>> commitment, of flow and focus, is a multisensory engagement with the work.
>>
>> c) Presence. Performer/s and audience may be more or less immersed or
>> absorbed in the momentary experience of the work, or correspondingly more or
>> less experientially distant or detached. Presence or distance respectively
>> can occur at a number of levels which need not always coincide, and can be
>> more or less free from presupposition and morality. For performers,
>> paradoxically, a heightened sense of presence can sometimes emerge alongside
>> a feeling of detachment, when there is no longer a need for heavy conscious
>> monitoring and direct control of the minutiae of embodied activity, such
>> that the sequences and interactions that arise in real time seem to erupt
>> from outside the conscious self.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Garth Paine
>> gpain...@me.com
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jul 16, 2014, at 6:23 AM, Sue Hawksley <s...@articulateanimal.org.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Dear Garth
>>>
>>> Thanks for the questions you raise about the fluidity of 'self' and the
>>> different layers of awareness of lived-experience.
>>>
>>> On 15 Jul 2014, at 14:48, Garth Paine <gpain...@me.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I wonder how we situate our thinking when it is sooo complex to become
>>>> aware of the point of reference we establish. I wonder this because I
>>>> want to find where the virtual begins?
>>>>
>>>> recently a friend shared with me a small experiment probably known to all
>>>> of you: Please silently read the following several times - "I can hear
>>>> the voice in my head reading this sentence"
>>>>
>>>> Which made me think about how virtuality is inbuilt - there appears to be
>>>> several of me: me reading, me listening, me observing the listener and
>>>> critiquing the experiment, me in physical form seemingly hosting all of
>>>> these facets of the self etc - and they all seem distinct and material in
>>>> some way - so there appears to be at least 4 of me and therefore I am
>>>> confused perhaps about which is what - ie. where the no-virtual and the
>>>> virtual transition and which me is embodied and how?
>>>
>>> I have been thinking more about the virtual in terms of potential, and
>>> from a performance and theatrical perspective, in terms of play. This might
>>> be a play of or on the imagination, sensation, affect, cognitive processes,
>>> neural pathways etc. and playing on the confusion of selves and bodies, the
>>> plasticity of the brain. Research into mirror neurons reveals that what you
>>> see done by another is as important to the brain as what you do yourself.
>>> The tactile-vision substitution system (TVSS) developed by Paul Bach-y-Rita
>>> reveals that what you feel done is as important as what you see (as
>>> Sophia's research is examining). Electromagnetic stimluation, or damage
>>> to, the temporoparietal junction can create hallucinations or out-of-body
>>> experiences or the effect of something being as if it were other -
>>> something or somewhere or someone else etc. But if we can already 'be' many
>>> bodies, where is 'out-of'body'? or is it just another body, always
>>> potentially available, revealed by what
>>> ever medium facilitates it coming to attention?
>>>
>>> Story can also capture the imagination and generate individual or group
>>> illusions, or mass delusions. After the Fox sisters heard ghostly rapping
>>> noises in their farmhouse in the 1840s, they approached Phineas T Barnum,
>>> and came up with a format for a show which enabled masses of people to
>>> 'see' and 'hear' the dead. Playing on grief and fear and hope, the
>>> spiritualist seance seems to me to be an example of a shared virtual space,
>>> and a form of distributed cognition. The technologies used by mediums to
>>> create apparitions were lower-tech than VR systems (candles and cheesecloth
>>> secreted in bodily orifices, brought to 'life' by some clever manoeuvres)
>>> but it seems to me there is a lot in common in the quest to create
>>> surrogate bodies or experiences.
>>>
>>> best, Sue
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> SUE HAWKSLEY
>>> independent dance artist
>>> s...@articulateanimal.org.uk
>>> http://www.articulateanimal.org.uk
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Hellen Sky
digital choreographer, performer, director/teacher/writer/researcher
Hellen Sky & Collaborators
E- hel...@hellensky.com
Mob +614 03 218 673
Skype - hellenskype1
U.tube - hellenskyable
www.hellensky.com
artist in residence BRIGHTSPACE
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
