Presentation

This week has been spent focusing on the essay. It is great to begin to draw the ideas out. There is still a way to go and it isn’t a process that comes naturally, but like I said last week, it is a process that I am enjoying.

In Tuesday’s online chat we had individual chats with Andy, so I was able to discuss the essay. Andy was asking when a photograph became a photograph: When you push the shutter button, when its stored in the camera or when it is printed.

From reading an article by Cathy Weis on ageism, I am beginning to question if my understanding of embodiment. I have been thinking of embodiment in a linear way, time based due to our biological nature, and if in fact the notion of embodiment is far more diverse, and possibly more like a tag cloud.

I have read recently that can be argued is that rather than disembodying us cyberspace has in fact has embodied us.

This week I also managed to spend a little time on jotting down some notes for a prototype for the final show. Below is a 1^st draft for the final piece prototype:

Prototype draft 1

But having shown it to a couple of friends and discussed the options with them, they advised me against trying to travel down to Camberwell and create an installation.  Their feedback was the ideas in the presentation were too ambitious in relation to my resources and situation.

So had a good think through options and am going to look in to making a non linear narrative piece with Korsakow. That way all my recourses will be directed to a focused and contained piece and the time frame will be more realistic.

So the next step will be to spend a bit of time going back over Korsakow with my sister who knows more about the programming than I do and get up to speed and aim to put another draft presentation for the prototype together in a week or so.

I am comfortable with proceeding with a more contained project, a lot of my worries for the final piece have been based on options of getting down to London.

Korsakow is a structure that feels appropriate as it allows for interaction and the non linear narrative structure is representative of the way digital media has opened up choices and changed familiar processes. It feels as if it may echo some of the ideas above about the cyber world freeing us from a linear time biological lead understanding.

Appreciating why some of the questions we were posed in the early part of this course matter so profoundly, such as who controls the net and the sharing of information. Given how societies have structured and controlled themselves with biological based hierarchies that are in many ways obsolete in cyber space. (These some how are often found re asserting themselves. Like the sexual stereotyping of many avatars).

Just to end on an exciting piece of news about Mail Art One. At the end of last week I was contacted by the gallery director for the DLI gallery who wished to contact one of the contributors with a view to working with them.

I am really pleased about this as it was one of the things I hoped might be achieved through the publication.  Its aim was to be eclectic, democratic open to any one who wanted to could be included. I am glad I stuck at producing it. It feels really good to have facilitated that introduction.

 

Researching for the essay and trying to get down out the outline this week. Find the ideas behind the subject area I’ve chosen are very exciting, but pinning them down in to a coherent discourse is a slow process.

Have been thinking about the link between the interface of surface, body and embodiment. How when walking you can feel absorbed in to that landscape.

 

 

‘As interface, the skin is obsolete. The significance of the cyber may well reside in the act of the body shedding its skin.’  Stelarc quoted in ‘Natural Born Cyborgs.’ Andy Clark

 

Reviewing and curating the weblog I came across one or two entries where I feel I haven’t been clear enough about the relevance of the content.

The 1st is around the work of choreographer Rosemary Butcher.

Butcher’s work became relevant because she bridges the line between dance and visual arts. Also she was one of the 1st UK choreographers to start using everyday movements to create works. Her work is grounded in the ordinary and banal, everyday movements… walking, running, standing,

 

‘….and the body’s physical relationship to contexts, environments and other objects.’

‘A ‘Conventional Subversive’.’ Josephine Leask: ‘Rosemary Butcher : Choreography, Collisions and Collaborations. ‘  Middlesex University Press 2005( P154)

 

With ‘Undercurrent’  the relevance was the change in the body when suspended in water.

 

‘The water and the trampoline were both what I call ‘interventions’. Their impact upon the movement was not caused by human decision, but by the nature of something else happening.’ 

 

Rosemary Butcher in ‘Rosemary Butcher: Choreography, Collisions and Collaborations.’ Middlesex University Press 2005

 

 

 Another entry I wanted to review was about the example of the traditional Japanese paper making process. The relevance was the level of embodiment involved in this process. In contrast to the level or kind of embodiment experienced using a mouse and keyboard.

 

 This week has been spent researching for the essay which seems to be a huge wall to scramble over. My peers finished theirs this week and posted them having read through them it is obvious the level hat is expected. The comfort is that reading Tuesdays chat archive (couldn’t attend Tuesdays chat due to a hospital appointment) everyone seems to have taken a journey to get to the finished paper.

 

I decided to do some online research in to the context of walking.

 

 

This is the resulting thread:

 

Walking definition

 

http://pattiebellehastings.net/projects/cyborg/manual/cmbook06.html

 

 

 

Drift

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive

 

 

Situationsit

 

 

Totality of everyday life:

 

And this article by Guy Ernst Debord

 

 

Everyday life is not everything – although its osmosis with specialized activities is such that in a sense we are never outside of everyday life. But to use a facile spatial image, we still have to place everyday life at the center of everything. Every project begins from it and every realization returns to it to acquire its real significance. Everyday life is the measure of all things: of the fulfillment or rather the nonfulfillment of human relations; of the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; of revolutionary politics.

 

 

It seems to me that this phrase “critique of everyday life” could and should also be understood in this reverse sense: as everyday life’s sovereign critique of everything that is external or irrelevant to itself. The question of the use of technological means, in everyday life and elsewhere, is a political question (and out of all the possible technical means, those that are implemented are in reality selected in accordance with the goal of maintaining one class’s domination)

 

 

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/89

 

 

Have also been considering developing the ideas in the August steps video.

 

Been thinking about how people walk heel to toe, about the way the physical action of walking moves through the body.

 

Wondering about ways to film people walking to see what might be revealed.

Have a couple of ideas around this, based on the small pieces I did at the end of the course last year at the local community centre here. Need a couple of small video cameras, seen some cheap ones on ebay. Thinking of a mobile structure to house them on to attempt to film different view points simultaneously while moving and reduce camera shake.

 

 

 

Tracked down a lecture posted on the Dance Tech web site by philosopher of embodiment Alva Noe, talking about his book ‘Out of our heads: why you are not your brain.’

 

 

In this talk Noe states that:

 

‘Consciousness is not something that happens inside of us- it is something that we achieve’.

 

‘It depends on a dynamic, on an interaction… it depends on our larger bodies, environment dependent capacities, on our emplacement in a landscape of a particular kind and indeed ultimately on other people as well.’

 

 

Have also been doing some research on Stelarc’s and his ideology. His statement that the architecture of our biological body is now obsolete, that humans already exists as cyborgs due to our use of technologies and are developing even further in to a hybrid cyborg creations.

 

Have ordered a monologue on Stelarc and am hoping to build a better contextual understanding of his position.

 

Artist Patti Belle Hastings takes on some of these same issues in her artists’ book and website Cyborg Mommy.

 

http://pattiebellehastings.net/projects/cyborg/manual/cmbook06.html

 

 

http://www.icehousedesign.com/cyborg_mommy/home.html

Writing my MPR this week helped bring in to focus a question that had come to a head from doing the August step video project.

 

This was:

 

 The role of location (and of clothing) and the relevance of this added information it threw in to the mix when photographing or videoing walking. Initially I  had thought to concentrate on the focus being about the physical act of walking, but was finding that the steps were being inevitably connected to a location and was getting confused by this.

 

 

At the very start of this project in 2007 my aim was to find out whether there was a link to every day movements (e.g. walking) that we didn’t necessarily pay much attention to establishing, maintaining and as repository for  our identities. My initial idea was to present these movements in some way as a portrait, as something that could be seen to relate to a particular individual and their identity.

 

 

Because I had little prior knowledge of the theories and  philosophies that might support my initial idea it has taken me a deal of reading to create the thread to help clarify the idea behind my project, that is that our identities  are partly rooted in these movements, and that we process all sorts of information through our bodies, at a conscious and sub conscious level and that this information directly feeds into making us who we are and the person others perceive us to be which in turn then feeds back in to our understanding of our self.

 

The body and its movements when seen in the light of embodiment theory, as a ‘lived body’, can be seen to act as a sort of conduit which allows us to give and receive constant information about ourselves, others and the world.

 

‘The surface is where self meets what is other than self’.

 

Leder, D.  ‘The Absent Body.’ University of Chicago Press 1990 (p.11)

 

 

So the surface and/or environment where these movements take place (interface?) could be seen to become as relevant as the body movements themselves as the body movements don’t happen in isolation but take on meaning by happening in a context. (That context will need some defining too…e.g. geographical, sociological, environmental, and political to provide it with understood frame work of relevance?)

 

‘The body is at once a biological organism, a ground of personal identity, and a social construct.’

 

Leder, D.  ‘The Absent Body.’ University of Chicago Press 1990 (p.99)

MPR

This project has evolved as a response to my interest in exploring the link between our movements (for the purpose of the MA, specifically non body language movements) and our identities.

My research has come to be  focused  around the link between identity and movement, of embodiment and disembodiment, the materialized, de materialized and the philosophies of Descartes and Merleau-Ponty.

 

Throughout unit one I have focused on constructing a methodology in order to explore these ideas.

Videoing movement, slowing footage down, lifting stills allowed me to make slide shows and short video animations which explore movements

http://www.slideshare.net/susanmort/white-sheet-1

and to ask questions about appropriate ways of filming these movements. E.g. what areas of the body to film, whether or not to include the face, question the role of background and environment?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkI_7T1LPUg

 

I have been using the following programmes

Credo: for animation from video footage of the body.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoYR_sMg-F0

Korsakow: to experiment with a non linear format.

 Isadora:  to create a piece where video and physical interaction may take place in real time.

 

Through out August 2009  I attempted to provide a more systematic and structured context for presenting these movements and have done his by attempting to add an empirical element by wearing a pedometer to record the number of steps I take daily and keep a video diary of myself walking for a short period each day.

 

“But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather there is no form, since form is immovable and reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition.”
                                                             —Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution 

 

‘The surface is where the self meets what is other than self.’  Leder, D. ‘The Absent Body.’ The University of Chicago Press 1990 (page 11)

 

The meeting point between our bodies and the surfaces they encounter will be the starting point to explore the link between identity and movement .

In order to continue this I aim to:

1. Develop core project and methodologies employed to a more specific view point.

2.  Create  better definition of key words e.g.: identity/surface/environment/embodiment.

3. Book motion tracking facilities at Newcastle University.

4. continue to produce paper based pieces alongside digital pieces. http://www.slideshare.net/susanmort/steps-august-2009

5. Produce prototype for final piece.

Previous Post

MAVA started back on Tuesday with the 1^st group chat which caught me on the back foot as I had only remembered in the morning the chat was taking place.

 

T he chat discussion was around the essay and tagging and curating the weblogs.

 

Have felt dislocated from the blogging process since the chat with Andy a month or so back and been unsure as how to use the tool. There was an interesting discussion with Jonathan Kearney abut learning and methodologies to achieve learning.

 

It again brought home to me how entrenched I am in a previous understanding about learning and aims and how I need to make adjustments to my practice.

 

The area around providing a structured context both with in my own vision and also in terms of others practice is proving to be my biggest challenge, to keep a coherent overview rather than to just go with the flow.

 

I am struggling to move away from just letting my practice evolve organically and not keep on top of it to build a context.

 

 

Have been thinking again about the journey of my questioning of movement that developed through becoming aware of repeated actions whilst printmaking, which then lead me on in to dance practice to try to explore this better. The time spent in a dance focused environment provided me with a valuable way of looking at body movement and awareness.

 

I am finding myself struggling across disciplines and their languages or terminologies and thought structures and also across what really amounts to over 30 years of disparately weaving in and out of practice. The request to draw this all in to one directed line of discussion is a big ask. But something that feels core and something that is one of the core reasons I have chosen to take this MA despite it challenging me in any areas.

 

This week I returned to researching movement ideas by looking at choreographers who take repeated movements and build with them.

 

Choreographer Edouard Locke’s work is very specific and precise.

 

He makes this statement about movement:

 

‘the only thing that gives us a shape is our memory of a shape.’

 

And

 

‘Because we are imative creatures if we are not clear about the shape of the body we are perceiving we are unclear about our own shape.’

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaM0B6Cnx90&feature=related

 

 

And:

 

‘when we look at something we have multiple layers. We look at the thing we are looking at and we often have mental images beside them… we are used to creating multiple series of layers visually.’

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMRhfYtQQfc&feature=related

 

 

And for an example of his choreography:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRJd5UeEwI4&feature=related

U2W4

                          some rough notes….    

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Skin

A side effect of the thyroid seems to be that I come up in hives easily.

 

This has meant that I can blind print on to my skin.

 

It has been good to have the summer break to adjust to the idea and implications of having thyroid disease. one thing that I had always had confidence was my body. It was strong, quick, flexible a really useful tool. It has taken adjusting my ideas to accept that I have a physical disease. A sense of security has been removed for a while.

 

I have a sense of frustration at the time lost over the summer because of this. I am very behind in the work needed for the research paper and will need to ask if an extension may be possible.