Dwelling in the Virtual Sonic Environment: A Phenomenological Analysis of Dancers’ Learning Processes

Abstract

This article discusses the Embodied Generative Music (EGM) project carried out at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics IEM in Austria. In investigating a new interface that combines motion capture and sound processing software with movement improvisation and performance, I focus on dancers’ learning processes of dwelling in the virtual sonic environment. Applying phenomenology and its concepts, I describe how dancers explore reversibility of sound and movement to shape this connection in an artistically expressive manner. The article proposes that dancers build bodily knowledge through both the sonic environment and their own passive and active, intuitive and deliberate, movement choices. While dwelling in a digital environment changes dancers’ habitual manners of behaving, it opens up to them new kinds of kinaesthetic opportunities of intimacy and pleasure in motion. The findings from this research reveal the importance of bodily interaction with virtual environments in developing new movement-based interfaces.

Notes

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Deniz Peters whose support, encouragement and feedback have been central to my work on the EGM project. I am grateful to all the dancers, especially to Anna Nowak and Alexander Deutinger, and to the other members of the team, Gerhard Eckel and David Pirrò.

1. Johannes Birringer, Performance, Technology and Science (New York: Paj, 2008), 36.

2. Birringer, Performance, Technology and Science, 38.

3. Steve Dixon, Digital Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 205.

4. Scott deLahunta, “Sharing Descriptions of Movement,” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 3 (2007): 3-16; Stan Wijnans, “Sound Skeleton: Interactive Transformation of Improvised Dance Movements into a Spatial Sonic Disembodiment,” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 4 (2008): 27-44.

5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).

6. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry Language Thought, trans. and intro. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 31.

7. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964), ii.

8. Raymond W. Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50.

9. Deniz Peters, “Researching Embodiment in Musical Experience: The ‘Embodied Generative Music’ Project,” in the IMR Conference “The Musical Body: Gesture, Representation and Ergonomics in Musical Performance,” London, 22 April 2009; unpublished paper.

10. I want to describe more specifically those four scenarios which Deutinger and Nowak worked with. Deutinger's five-minute-improvisation took place in the Schwitters scenario, while Nowak used three scenarios, the 3 Spheres, the Tube, the Cage Cross Delay, in her own performance. In general, there are two types of scenarios: relative (intra-body-distance oriented) and absolute (space oriented). Roughly speaking, in absolute scenarios, the sound-movement combination is related to specific placement of tracked targets, while in relative scenarios, it is based on distances of targets within bodily space, regardless of their absolute spatial location. In absolute scenarios such as the 3 Spheres, each spot in the performance space has a particular sound to it (or is silent), with the overall distribution of the sounding sports forming a three dimensional sphere. The 3 Spheres scenario includes three spheres, one rather small, one medium size, and one large, each placed at different heights and in different areas of the stage. The Tube scenario features one small tube positioned in the middle of the performance space. The spheres are filled with sound with small silent holes. The relative scenario the Schwitters uses a mapping of the absolute position of one tracked point in space (on the arm, mostly). The sound material of the Schwitters scenario is an excerpt from a recording of Kurt Schwitters’ The Real Disuda of the Nightmare. The excerpt of approximately nine seconds in duration includes fricatives and a plosive (‘sh’, ‘ch’, ‘k’), together with some inhalation. In the other three scenarios except for the Cage Cross Delay the loop within the sound material moves simultaneously with the performer's motion, whereas in the Cage Cross Delay there is a delay of up to a couple of seconds between the loop motion and the performer's motion, with the delay itself being variable depending on the speed of the performer's motion.

11. Peters, “Researching Embodiment in Musical Experience”, 7.

12. The 3 Spheres scenario, which Peters devised at the end of 2007 and which was then collaboratively refined, was to explore and improve the sonic-haptic illusion effect discovered in the Schwitters scenario, which was in turn conceived and designed by Eckel. To make for a haptic effect, a sphere is perforated with holes that are 5 cm. in diameter and 15 cm. apart in all directions. To have varying pseudo-tactility within a sphere, the ‘holes’ are fully silent in the sphere's centre, becoming increasingly filled with sound towards its surface.

13. Margaret Thompson Drewal, “Improvisation as Participatory Performance: Egungun Masked Dancers in the Yoruba Tradition,” in Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 119–34.

14. Jaana Parviainen, “Dance Techne: Kinetic Bodily Logos and Thinking in Movement,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 27–28 (2003): 159–75.

15. Kent De Spain, “The Cutting Edge of Awareness: Reports from the Inside of Improvisation,” in Albright and Gere, Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, 26–38.

16. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).

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19. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 94; Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1954), trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 22–28; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 394; Theodore Schatzki, Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

20. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 140.

21. Proprioception is the innate and intrinsic position sense that I have with respect to my limbs and overall posture. It is called “the sixth sense” since it allows me to know whether my legs are crossed, or not, without looking at them (Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 143). However, proprioception is not applicable here only, since it excludes how movements are felt and experienced in the body. I use the concept body topography to describe the body as a “terrain” that is shaped in various manners depending on individual, cultural and social differences. Topography does not involve mere body image or body schema (The Phenomenological Mind, 145), since it is related to our cognitive tasks in modifying the body through movement techniques or in understanding “logics of kinaesthesia.” Dancers’ body topography is usually highly specified and cultivated unlike some non-dancers who can move normally but whose body topography may still be dim and obscure, foreign to them, a terra incognita.

22. Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science; James Gibson, “Observations on Active Touch,” Psychological Review 69 (1962): 477–90; Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999).

23. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) (Originally published Le visible et l'invisble, 1964).

24. Kozel, Closer, 36.

25. Dixon, Digital Performance, 560.

26. Ann Cooper Albright, “Dwelling in Possibility,” in Albright and Gere, Taken by Surprise, 256–66.

27. Parviainen, “Dance Techne: Kinetic Bodily Logos and Thinking in Movement,” 172.

28. Albright, “Dwelling in Possibility,” in Albright and Gere, Taken by Surprise, 263.

29. Birringer, Performance, Technology and Science, 112.

30. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 142–43, 159.

31. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 168; Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987).

32. Jaana Parviainen, “Bodily Knowledge: Epistemological Reflections on Dance,” Dance Research Journal 34 (2002): 11–23.

33. Ulric Neisser, “Five Kinds of Self-knowledge,” Philosophical Psychology 1 (1988): 35–59.

34. Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement; Michael O’Donovan-Anderson, Content and Comportment: On Embodiment and the Epistemic Availability of the World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).

35. Susan Leight Foster, “Improvisation in Dance and in Mind,” in Albright and Gere, Taken by Surprise, 3–12.

36. Stephen Grossberg, “Adaptive Resonance Theory,” in The Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (London: Macmillan, 2003), 23–63.

37. See Leight Foster, “Improvisation in Dance and in Mind,” in Albright and Gere, Taken by Surprise, 3–12.

38. Nowak performed the piece only to the members and visitors of the EGM project four times in April and May 2009.

39. Michael Haerdter and Sumin Kawai, “Tradition, Moderne und Rebellion,” in Die Rebellion des Körpers, Ein Tanz aus Japan Butoh, ed. Michael Haerdter and Sumin Kawai (Berlin: Alexander Verlag Berlin,1988), 9–33.

40. John A. Bargh and Kimberly Barndollar, “Automaticity in Action: The Unconscious as Repository of Chronic Goals and Motives,” in The Psychology of Action, ed. Peter M. Gollwitzer and John A. Bargh (New York: Guilford, 1996), 457–71.

41. Jaana Parviainen, Bodies Moving and Moved: A Phenomenological Analysis of the Dancing Subject and the Cognitive and Ethical Values of Dance Art (Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 1998).