Inflecting Particles: Locating generative indexes for performance in the interstices of dance and computer science

Opening

Particles move across a screen with luscious consistency, spilling inky trails behind them, twisting, swirling traces of their motions and a partial record of their performance… her fingers reach out, slice into the air behind her pulling other bones and joints and tissues along in quick succession, falling through space, a fleeting spiral in the air around her… hours pass as he writes algorithmic functions, connects many boxes with many lines, inserts randomness, tweaks, and adjusts numbers, solves innumerable problems and finally can perform the results… letters and numbers cascade down the screen, ragged columns showing the way through a tangle of information, reducing and directing, pointing, gesturing toward possible understanding… and a space opens up, it is a space of wet and dry, of breath and code, of practice and theory, of performance and possibility…

Notes

¹In dance, as early as the 1950s Merce Cunningham and John Cage were interested in computing and were rigorously engaged in understanding and harnessing chance. At the same time but in a separate sphere, mathematicians Alan Turing and John von Neumann were concerned with the very same thing. Since then the shared interest has only multiplied. Contemporary ballet innovator William Forsythe speaks freely about his choreographic process as algorithmic and is a pioneer in interactive multimedia. Postmodern choreographer Trisha Brown has created her own algorithms for dance. The nascent field of dance technology is becoming far more established with the work of dance companies such as Troika Ranch and Australia’s Company in Space, who are themselves technology innovators. Technologist and artist Paul Kaiser, in collaboration with visual artist Shelly Eshkar, has completed some of the highest profile of these projects with choreographers and dancers including Merce Cunningham and Bill T. Jones.

²‘Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art’ (Galanter 2003: 4).

³This is a combined reference to Katherine Hayles’ critique of Hans Moravec in the opening to her text on posthumanism cited below and to film studies scholar Vivian Sobchack’s critique of French social theorist Jean Baudrillard’s objectifying gaze at the bodies in Crash in her essay ‘Beating the Meat / Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of this Century Alive’ (2004). The essence of both critiques is the masculinist tendency to forget the subjective realities of the body in an attempt to theorize our relationship with our machines (in Moravec’s case, the materiality of the mind and in Baudrillard’s case, the lived experience of pain).

⁴Comments contributed by Harmony Bench in another layer of email exchanges within the project.

⁵It is of interest to us that this process is akin to dance critic Marcia Siegel’s dance lexicon approach for performance research. In Siegel’s approach, each performance has its own unique lexicon that emerges while one is viewing the work.

⁶ http://del.icio.us is an online shared URL bookmarking database that allows users to find and organize their bookmarks, discover related resources, and track other users’ links.

⁷ http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/, http://www.writeboard.com

⁸Quote from WIRED issue 2. 12 December 1996 ‘The Unlikely Cyborg’ by Hari Kunzru.