sally jane norman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by sally jane norman

Les Cahiers de médiologie, 1996

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Gallimard. © Gallimard. Tous droits réservés pour tous ... more Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Gallimard. © Gallimard. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre eBooks, 2021

NIME 2022, Jun 16, 2022

This article provides a lens for viewing technology as land, transformed through resource extract... more This article provides a lens for viewing technology as land, transformed through resource extraction, manufacturing, distribution, disassembly and waste. This lens is applied to processes of artistic creation with technology, exploring ways of fostering personal and informed relationships with that technology. The goal of these explorations will be to inspire a greater awareness of the colonial and capitalist processes that shape the technology we use and the land and people it is in relationship with. Beyond simply identifying the influence of these colonial and capitalist processes, the article will also provide creative responses (alterations to a creative process with technology) which seek to address these colonial processes in a sensitive and critical way. This will be done not to answer the broad question of 'how do we decolonise art making with technology?', but to break that question apart into prompts or potential pathways for decolonising.

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Oct 11, 2006

Abstract This essay discusses performer status in environments imbued with the artefacts underpin... more Abstract This essay discusses performer status in environments imbued with the artefacts underpinning millennial theatre history that today take on new forms as digital media invest live art. In keeping with a dichotomous conception of human beings as determined by or determinant of their surroundings, human-computer interaction raises questions of identity where individual perception-bound and shared experience is increasingly interwoven to form a new kind of sensorium. In conclusion, the author evokes challenges to notions of identifiable individuals posed by our steadily growing extraterrestrial activities.

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2008

Ligeia, 1993

A pneumatic oscillator apparatus having a pressure operated five-way auxiliary valve for reversib... more A pneumatic oscillator apparatus having a pressure operated five-way auxiliary valve for reversibly operating a reciprocable fluid operated device, a pressure operated five-way main valve for reversibly applying fluid pressure to the five-way auxiliary valve to reversibly operate the latter, and a pair of three-way pressure operated pilot valves for reversibly operating the main valve, which pilot valves are operated in response to the pressure conditions at the controlled outlet ports of the main valve. Pneumatic control means are provided for regulating exhaust of fluid pressure from the controlled outlet ports of the main valve to control the dwell time of the main valve at each end of its stroke, and to thereby control the frequency of the pneumatic oscillator. An adjustable pressure regulated supply is provided for the auxiliary valve to enable adjustment of the pressure applied to the fluid operated device independent of the pressure applied to the pneumatic oscillator, and additional pneumatic controls are provided for regulating exhaust of fluid from the auxiliary valve to enable independent adjustment of the rate of movement of the fluid operated device in either direction.

This paper discusses an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project being undertaken by researchers at ... more This paper discusses an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project being undertaken by researchers at the Universities of Sussex, Bedford, Reading, King's College London and FEUP/INESC Porto. The Motion in Place Platform project is developing methodologies and tools to articulate the human experience of moving through place. As such it explores an often bracketed liminality that resides between material environments on the one hand and immaterial cognitive and behavioural processes on the other. A key technology used by the MiPP team is motion capture and we have been developing multi-channel movement recording suitable for use in the field. Two comparative case studies are discussed to illuminate the scope of the project.

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Jul 2, 2016

This paper sets live coding in the wider context of performing arts, construed as the poetic mode... more This paper sets live coding in the wider context of performing arts, construed as the poetic modelling and projection of liveness. Concepts of liveness are multiple, evolving, and scale-dependent: entities considered live from different cultural perspectives range from individual organisms and social groupings to entire ecosystems, and consequently reflect diverse temporal and spatial orders. Concepts of liveness moreover evolve with our tools, which generate and reveal new senses and places of vitality. This instability complexifies the crafting of live events as artistic material: overriding habitual frames and scales of reference is a challenge when handling infinitely scalable computational phenomena. With its generative affordances, improvised interactive programming, and notational possibilities, live coding introduces unique qualities into the performance arena. At the same time, performance history abounds in adaptive systems which anticipate certain live coding criteria. Historic performance and contemporary coding practices raise shared questions that can enhance our understanding of live art, notably to do with feedback, fixed versus on-the-fly programmable conceptual and physical frameworks, and inscriptive practices and notation methods for live action. I attempt to address such questions by setting live coding in a wider performance history perspective.

The ways we leave, recognise, and interpret marks of human movement are deeply entwined with laye... more The ways we leave, recognise, and interpret marks of human movement are deeply entwined with layerings of collective memory. Although we retroactively order chronological sediments to map shareable stories, our remediations often emerge unpredictably from a multidimensional mnemonic fabric: contemporary ideas can resonate with ancient aspirations and initiatives, and foreign fields of investigation can inform ostensibly unrelated endeavours. Such links reinforce the debunking of grand narratives, and resonate with quests for the new kinds of thinking needed to address the mix of living, technological, and semiotic systems that makes up our wider ecology. As a highly evolving field, movementand-computing is exceptionally open to, and needy of, this diversity. This paper argues for awareness of the analytical apparatus we sometimes too unwittingly bring to bear on our research objects, and for the value of transdisciplinary and tangential thinking to diversify our research questions. With a view to seeking ways to articulate new, shareable questions rather than propose answers, it looks at wider questions of problem-framing. It emphasises the importance of-quite literally-grounding movement, of recognising its environmental implications and qualities. Informed by work on expressive gesture and creative use of instruments in domains including puppetry and music, this paper also insists on the complexity and heterogeneity of the research strands that are indissociably bound up in our corporeal-technological movement practices.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

In this paper we present a new workflow allowing the creation of 3D characters in an automated wa... more In this paper we present a new workflow allowing the creation of 3D characters in an automated way that does not require the expertise of an animator. This workflow is based of the acquisition of real human data captured by 3D body scanners, which is them processed to generate firstly animatable body meshes, secondly skinned body meshes and finally textured 3D garments.

This Zip file contains all PDFs from the conference.

The work presented in this report explores artistic concepts which consider multi-user virtual re... more The work presented in this report explores artistic concepts which consider multi-user virtual reality, tele-presence and augmented reality as appropriate means for developing a concept of extended performance combining VR media with performing and plastic arts. This investigation has been carried out via targeted workshops and competitions organised by GMD and ZKM, challenging persons from artistic and technical disciplines to build new visions of interactive concepts in performative shared and mixed reality environments. The events described in this paper are as follows :

Transmission in Motion, 2016

Documentary and archival traces of dance, which are encountered in media spanning several millena... more Documentary and archival traces of dance, which are encountered in media spanning several millenaries, form an abundant, ambivalent set of records. Meanings derived from such traces are remediated by multiple, possibly contradictory cultural forces due to the often unpredictable resurgence of layers of history, and to the specific slant of our own readings. These are further confounded by the ways digital technologies record and restore compelling multimodal projections of phenomena: computational models whose nested scales, patterns and textures of events characterize complex dynamic systems (the dancing body being one such system) yield holistic, evolving visions that can belie their discrete digital underpinnings. Yet however sophisticated their outputs, our means of engaging with digital recording and archiving technologies are marked by prior cultural traffic with indices and symbols, souvenirs and mementos, and other such echoes of movements. Past practices elucidate our approaches to traces as witnesses of passed time, revealing the diverse epistemic sediments on which they are founded, and to which they appeal. These revelations shed light on the idiosyncratic, contingent nature of our own quests. Four-thousand-year-old Egyptian tombstone reliefs feature sequential inscriptions testifying to choreographic practices that honour the deceased through the rejoicings of the living. Depictions of Hathoric rites from the Sixth Dynasty tomb of Mereruka show dancers holding a mirror in one hand and a wand topped with a sculpted hand in the other: use of the mirrors supposedly to capture reflections of the dancers' hands or of their wands suggests a giddy choreography of physical and virtual images, with whirling movements accentuated by weights tied to the ends of the dancers' long hair. Ostensibly sparse etchings offer environmental and lifestyle clues: depictions of dancers executing steps that evoke the movements of the crane have been interpreted as auspiciously linking this migrant bird's Nile fishing halt to the grape harvest. Black- and red-figure paintings on Athenian ceramics (600-400 BC) provide information on human movements and gestures per se, and intriguing insights into how we might be physically moved to read them: intricate scenes or serial images on amphoras or circular dishes, which must be rotated in order to be fully perused, demand (and reward) their beholder's gestural engagement in keeping with notions of embodied interaction that seem remarkably contemporary. Dance records like these are pictorial constructs created by human hand for specific cultural contexts. By virtue of their chiropoietic status (cheiro: hand, poieo: to make), such traces belong to the broader domain of writing practices. Their modes of transmission are analogous to and part of the wider history of dissemination of written (chirographic), printed (typographic), then digital documents. This opens up comparison between the status of dance records with respect to live motion, and that of writing with respect to spoken language. Questions as to how "live" speech and "dead" writing have been addressed by analog then computer recording and archiving technologies have spawned original scholarship and concepts, including reflection on technological "grammatization" (Auroux) and digital "discretisation" (Stiegler). In keeping with the spirit of Renaissance, Enlightenment, and later positivist traditions, systematic and analytical rather than more synthetic, systemic approaches to movement have tended to dominate the history of dance since its sketchy beginnings as a theoretically transmissible art form. Its positioning as a legitimate domain of study has inevitably brought dance in line with prevailing scientific methods and discourse. Digital tools that today record and transmit human movement in keeping with principles of direct capture and sampling, instead of indirect inscriptional and notational conventions, seem to adopt a more flexible and fitting modus operandi than the drawn-and-quartered analyses of earlier computational systems. Rotman's reflection on the corporeally grounded nature of our most rarefied concepts and practices, and his differentiation between the notation and capture of movement inspire new ways of apprehending and transmitting human motion. The following thematic sections attempt to trace a range of approaches to the recording, capturing, and archiving of dance, in order to set contemporary developments in a broader historical and conceptual context.