The Performativity of Matter Through Time Space and Gesture (original) (raw)
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The puppet theatre is a small site where nonhuman elements come into play. In this kind of performance, everyday objects are transformed when put to work on stage or film. Under the spotlight on stage, objects that may have previously been perceived as passive, redundant and useless are transformed into characters and challenge notions of what is seen as active in the world. When a teapot and a bunch of old animal bones jump into a suitcase and float in a bath in what could be seen in a Jan Swankmajer or The Brothers Quay animation, the whole of humanity is played out. Observations on the liveliness of objects as well as the relationship between object and puppeteer and the process of creating a puppet theatre performance can teach us something of the complexity of human and nonhuman relations. This paper will discuss the practice of working with the materiality of performing objects in order to contribute to new materialist thinking on the vitality of matter.
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This book gathers together a group of international artists, architects, scenographers, performers, and theorists to establish Performance Design as a fluid and emerging field, which explores the speculative and projective acts of designing performance and performing design.
Theater Without Organs: Co-Articulating Gesture and Substrate in Responsive Environments
Living Architecture Systems Group White Papers, 2016
Ludwig Wittgenstein's skepticism about the expressive scope of propositional language, Jacques Derrida's critique of logocentrism, generalized via semiotics to all forms of representation, and Judith Butler's analysis of the performativity of gender motivate the turn to performance as an alternative to representation. In this essay I discuss a genre of responsive environments in which computationally augmented tangible media respond to the improvised gesture and activity of their inhabitants. I propose that these responsive environments constitute an apparatus for experimentally investigating questions significant for both performance research and philosophical inquiry. The responsive environments were designed as sites for phenomenological experiments about interaction and response, agency, and intention under three conditions: (1) the participants are physically co-present, (2) each inhabitant is both actor and spectator, (3) language is bracketed. The last condition does not deny language, but focusses attention on how an event unfolds without appealing solely to textual or verbal communication. As such, these environments constitute performative spaces whose media -- sound, visual field, acoustics and lighting, objects and furnishings -- can be reproducibly conditioned, and in which actions can be rehearsed or improvised. I will describe the apparatus of these performative spaces in enough detail to be able to address certain phenomenological questions about the continuum of intentional and accidental gesture in the dynamical substrate of calligraphic media : continuous fields of video and sound or other computationally animated materials, continuously modulated by gesture or movement. I suggest that emerging forms of calligraphic media present an alternative to linguistic pattern for the articulation of affectively charged events, practically and theoretically interrogating the status of narrative in the construction of theatrical events. The central question, however, is how can ambient and its inhabitants co-articulate an event, or in a related phrasing, what are the dynamics of a meaning-making event? The techniques I employed in a new kind of dynamics for temporal media and people to co-articulate an event were essentially an energetic dynamical system not in the stratum of physical bodies and objects but in the stratum of metaphor, or more precisely of state of event. Modelled after statistical physics of continuous media, this sort of dynamics differs radically from fixed scores and timetracks, from boolean logic, and also from aleatory techniques. Moreover, the dynamics allows unbounded multiplicity and continuous overlapping state, profoundly distinct from digital logic and graph-theoretic logic. Eppur si muove.
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ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2008
In interaction design for experience-oriented uses of technology, a central facet of aesthetics of interaction is rooted in the user's experience of herself “performing her perception.” By drawing on performance (theater) theory, phenomenology and sociology and with references to recent HCI-work on the relation between the system and the performer/user and the spectator's relation to this dynamic, we show how the user is simultaneously operator, performer and spectator when interacting. By engaging with the system, she continuously acts out these three roles and her awareness of them is crucial in her experience. We argue that this 3-in-1 is always already shaping the user's understanding and perception of her interaction as it is staged through her experience of the object's form and expression. Through examples ranging from everyday technologies utilizing performances of interaction to spatial contemporary artworks, digital as well as analogue, we address the notio...
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In this essay I discuss a series of art installation cum performance events called TGardens. These tangible environments'computationally augmented media respond to the improvised gesture and activity of theirinhabitants. They were designed as phenomenological experiments about interaction andresponse, agency, and intention. I describe the architecture of these performative spacesin enough detail in order to be able to address certain phenomenological questions aboutagency and the continuum of intentional and accidental gesture in the dynamical substrateof calligraphic media without grammatical superstructure.
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Living Architecture Systems Group White Papers, ed. Philip Beesley and Ala Roushan, 2016
In this essay I discuss a genre of responsive environments in which computationally augmented tangible media respond to the improvised gesture and activity of their inhabitants. I propose that these responsive environments constitute an apparatus for experimentally investigating questions significant for both performance research and philosophical inquiry. The responsive environments were designed as sites for phenomenological experiments about interaction and response, agency, and intention under three conditions: (1) the participants are physically co-present, (2) each inhabitant is both actor and spectator, (3) language is bracketed. The last condition does not deny language, but focusses attention on how an event unfolds without appealing solely to textual or verbal communication. As such, these environments constitute performative spaces whose media -- sound, visual field, acoustics and lighting, objects and furnishings -- can be reproducibly conditioned, and in which actions can be rehearsed or improvised. I describe the apparatus of these performative spaces in enough detail to be able to address certain phenomenological questions about the continuum of intentional and accidental gesture in the dynamical substrate of calligraphic media : continuous fields of video and sound or other computationally animated materials, continuously modulated by gesture or movement. I suggest that emerging forms of calligraphic media present an alternative to linguistic pattern for the articulation of affectively charged events, practically and theoretically interrogating the status of narrative in the construction of theatrical events.
Performer + Space = Performative Space
Prague Quadrennial 2011 Slovene Section
The spatial machines of performing arts follow the principle of Alain Badiou’s restlessness, embody new interpretations of the classical stage, and establish new variants of utopian concepts of the (neo) avant-garde such as empty space, total theatre, and lieu unique (let us only think of Dragan Živadinov and his concept of the theatre in zero gravity).
Revista Cadernos de Campo v.29, n.2, 2020
Corpos são fabricados em performances simbólicas, envolvendo comportamento restaurado, Kraft (afecções) e uma Weltanschauung performada e dinâmica. Foco no aspecto comunicacional de corpos em trabalho de campo com o Grupo Sonhus Teatro Ritual (Goiânia – GO, 2016-2017). A performance de minha observação participante envolveu aprendizado no corpo. Propus o conceito corpo-símbolo, com Weltanschauung, e além da dicotomia corpo e mente. Percepções são aqui tomadas como ações, assim como discursos o são. Tais corpos buscam transformam o meio e este artigo busca: a) mostrar vantagens de um aporte performativo de análise e b) expandir maneiras de se entender corpos e comunicação.
Theatrical Performance as Experimental Architecture
eCAADe 36, 2018
This paper discusses by way of the authors' recent projects how improvised live dance performance, architectonic composition, and sensing technology converge and inform new opportunities in architectural experimentation. We first lay out the theoretical basis of technology in architectural experimentation in "new rationalities" of technologically augmented aesthetic work. We then briefly describe two projects, X-Change Room and RaumSubsTANZ and the motives behind them. X-Change Room deals with /non-verbal/ ambient display of information and interaction through envelope threshold. RaumSubsTANZ, a short interactive dance composition that highlights the ephemerality of architectural composition augmented by interaction devices. Through the two small projects we attempt to explore a specific technological milieu and reflect on the potentials and challenges of experimentation in architectural composition. The paper presents design methods and techniques that incorporate theories of perception and semiotics by way of an umbrella concept, "ambient displays" and interactive composition. Ultimately, we explore non-verbal communication and theatrical performance as architectural informant that augments semiosis and cognition that pertains to the role of technology at the intersection of primordial senses, cerebral technology, and place-making.