HYBRID PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE: REAL VIRTUAL GAMES at SDHS and Second Life

INVITATION

HYBRID PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE
REAL VIRTUAL GAMES IN SECOND LIFE

At Working group: Transnational Media Performance
SDHS Conference: Dance and Spectacle

SATURDAY, JULY 11, 14.00-15.30 H (BST)
The Place, London
AND
6.00-7.30 AM (PST/SLT)
SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Koru/219/226/4027
Second Life






















Photo by Andrew Oleksiu/Ti Mosienko during Participatory Performance at PSI 16

This working group session starts with a 5-10 mn hybrid participatory performance based on a short structured movement improvisation between avatars (Second Life users) and participants in London, through SL video broadcast. The performance is followed by working group discussion of the proposed issues including all the physical and virtual participants.

We propose an ad-hoc group aiming to gather scholars, artists, and researchers, to exchange and discuss work that focuses on or implies inter, transnational and transcultural themes, issues, dimensions and particularities, regarding new hybrid performance processes, forms, formats, discourses, audience reach, reception and participation.
The recent access to global communication networks, platforms, has been shaping, influencing and challenging media art trends, including performance and dance. New formats, concepts and work methodologies produce hybrid and networked performances, including, Telematic art,Web or Net art, and art in MUVEs, such as Second Life.
However, rarely does these works integrate or address,cultural intercourse, such as collaborations amongst artists/audience participants from different places/nations/regions. These issues include but are not limited to the choreographic, kinesthetic, language, and technology, confronting our ethnic illiteracy:

−    How is movement and gesture based media work contributing and implying the emergence and development of other modes of creating, interacting and communication amongst artists/subjects from allover regarding common issues related with corporeality discourses?
−    How are aesthetics principles, methods, forms or strategies already hybrids, nomads, and mutants, converging as well as differentiating nations and cultures' within the Western, Eastern, Southern and Asian movement forms as transnational modes of production?
−    How do such exchanges, appropriations and assimilations alter the kind of practices and work being produced  and how are these revealing the dominant tendencies and or the development or a more inclusive, though not standard, subjective aesthetics, dependent on the more or less eclectic artistic education, training and  cultural exposure at large?
−    How is transnational production increasing and mutating, at the present moment of generalized access to the global network, where live performances are not only advertised and documented online, but also happening online through video conferencing based telematics or through virtual characters in MUVE's, such as Second Life?
−    How does media performance accentuate and accelerate the transnational exchanges, convergences and differentiations into new dimensions and proportions, by providing easy network platforms for work?

The working group proposes to organize a blog or ning with calls for papers, performances, or other formats of work, where members can read, watch and or experience works between the annual meetings, through a blog, in order to develop in more depth discussion.
   
Score:
Please arrive to the SLURL 5-10 mn earlier in order to acquire the movement animations I (Butler2 Evelyn) would like to share with you to play during the performance at the SL site. The performance is quite informal and each avatar is invited to use the shared movements to interact with each other. All other possible moves and gestures can be combined freely, including avatar spatial navigation, gestures, chat and voice. Please feel free to experiment with accumulation of moves. They are of different sorts, from floating in the air, moving body parts in various and impossible ways, slow turning in the air.
On top of this in-world interaction, we will try a mixed world interaction through screens placed in physical and virtual spaces, encouraging physical and virtual participants to engage with each other.
Note SL participants: make sure your voice is on, particularly during the discussion.

Real Virtual Games is a project experimenting with the interaction through hybrid modes of embodiment, adapting and creatively applying possible interfaces between physical and virtual bodies and realities. Moving through the world and games available to appropriate and critically create new modes of embodied interaction.
This participatory performance is influenced by Contact Improvisation as a ludic movement form based on communication through physical proximity and contact between participants, sharing weight, flow, energy. Opening out the kinesthetic and kinetic senses, thinking through and witnessing movement interactions moved by the full experience of each moment. These principles of inner and shared embodied experience are based Eastern forms such as Aikido, Tai Chi, Yôga, and Somatics, including Body-Mind Centering, Release, and Alexander.

Be Welcome to come enjoy challenging ways of embodied interaction.
Please share with anyone interested.

Isabel Valverde/Butler2 Evelyn

CONVITE Lançamento de Livro / INVITATION Book Launching


* * * * * Queiram divulgar * * * * *
* * * * * Be welcome to share  * * * * 



CONVITE / INVITATION
cerimónia de lançamento do livro 
 launching ceremony of the book

Interfaces Dança-Tecnologia: 
um quadro teórico para a performance no domínio digital

De/By Isabel de Cavadas Valverde
Edição/Edition Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian / Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, 
Textos Universitários de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, 02/2010

Com a presença de / With the presence of
Luisa Gama Caldas (FA/UTL)
José Bragança de Miranda (FCSH/UNL)


Sexta-Feira, 21 de Maio / 19.30 H 
Friday, May 21 / 7.30 pm
Rua da Fábrica do Material de Guerra, nº1
(em frente aos Correios do Poço do Bispo)

Kinesthetic Empathy 2010 Conference: POSTERS

About my Poster 14:

Title: Rescuing Kinesthesia through Dance-Technology Interfaces: a theoretical framework towards posthuman corporealities
Abstract
Following my theoretical framework on dance-technology interfaces and artistic practice based research in somatic based contemporary dance approach, I have been interested in work that emphasizes the kinesthetic experience, awareness, participation and empathy (particularly when experimenting with media technologies). Mostly as reflexive interfaces, the works have an inclusive and questioning attitude towards the very body-tech interfaces and the visual and audio dominance and consequent lack of focus on the embodied engagement. I would like to argue that, independent from media technology, the type of dance or choreographic approach and movement techniques influences the way kinesthesia is or is not addressed, expressed and sensed by performers and audience members.   
Curiously, I began noticing that the dance works that I enjoyed watching, experiencing or learning about within dance-tech were related to the same aesthetic dance approaches I enjoyed in pieces without media.  These pieces were, for instance, kondition pluriel's Schème II, Sarah Rubidge and  Alistair MacDonald's Sensuous Geographies, Lynn Pook's  Pause, Carol Brown & Escape Design's Sea, Unsee, and Tetsuro Fukuhara's Space Dance in the Tube.
Through semiotic and  phenomenological analysis of hybrid and interconstitutive modes of interfacing amongst the work participants, I argue that these works share a common emphasis on kineasthesia. Wanting to experience and communicate with the audience members through this sense, they develop ways of bringing attention and awareness to it by following and learning about embodying sensations in interactive movement situations. Either watching or actually participating, these works induce immersion by relying on and sometimes isolating the kinesthetic perception from sight, thus being a playful and constructive mode of knowing ourselves and understanding kinesthesia's crucial role to our sense of embodiment  particularly in this technological driven time of disconnection. 
Narrowing the approach to emphasize what I am most interested: kinesthetic awareness, engagement and communication, it was not surprising that these works are rare to find to watch on stage or experience in interactive environments or virtual networked performance formats. I believe this happens due to the imposing power of the image and sound upon movement in most works. And this situation reflects our conservative and Cartesian mentality model where movement is included though instrumentalized to serve the, supposed more intelligent, media environments, diminishing, when not substituting, the bodies, and keeping kinesthetic communication unconscious instead of adapting the interfaces and systems to our corporeal potential expanding what we can be. I will focus on the implications of these approaches' perceptive inclusivity and how they can contribute to raise agency for kinesthesia. As Hillel Schwartz stated in «Torque: the knew kineasthesia for the twentieth century» (Schwartz, 1992), a century later I believe we are getting closer to fulfill this goal for our posthuman society with the support from neurosciences findings on mirror neurons and dual adaptability along  with critical theory particularly on dance, performance and feminist studies.


Blibliography
Bainbridge, Bonnie Bainbridge, Sensing Feeling and Action, The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering, Contact Editions, 1993,
Damasio, António The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000,
Grosz, Elisabeth, Volatile Bodies: towards a corporeal feminism, Indiana University Press, 1994, 
Hayles, Katherine, How We Became Posthumans: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University Of Chicago Press, 1999, 
Hanna, Thomas, Bodies in Revolt: the evolution-revolution of 20th century man toward the Somatic Culture of the 21st century, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, NY, Chicago, San Francisco, 1970, 
Schwartz, Hillel, «Torque: the knew kineasthesia for the twentieth century», in Zone Books 6: Incorporations, the University of Michigan,1992,
Valverde, Isabel, Interfacing Dance and Technology: a theoretical framework for performance in the digital domain, Ph.D. thesis in partial fulfillment of degree. University of California, Riverside, 2004 (publication forthcoming),
Valverde, Isabel, Challenging Body Perceptions: dance towards and resisting new technologies, thesis presented towards the partial fulfillment of the MA degree in Creative Arts: Interdisciplinary Arts, SFSU, 1998

HASTAC Conference - Second Life Panel: Dance and Performance in the Metaverse

HASTAC, Humanities, Arts , Science & Technology Advanced Collaboratory 
It is a huge community of scholars in the Digital Humanities & Arts (UCLA, UCIrvine, UCBerkeley, UCStanford, Duke, etc.)

Conference: Hastac 2010 Grand Challenges and Global Innovations Conference
April 15-17, 2010 hosted by the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at the University of Illinois,
This will be an entirely free virtual event held in a multiplicity of digital spaces instigated from sites across the globe.

Panel in Second Life: Dance and Performance in the Metaverse
Organized by Ana Boa-Ventura, with choreographers: Jennifer Monson, Yacov Sharir, and Isabel Valverde
Saturday* April 17th from 1 - 2 PM CST . (7-8PM portuguese time)
Location of panel in Second Life/SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/LSU%20CCT/128/128/0 


Floating solo dance @ Weathering In/Com Tempo Second Life® Environment


photos by isabel valverde

Photo sequence showing excerpt from performer Isabel Valverde/Butler2 Evelyn during avatar interaction with the SL virtual changing environment. Composed of 2 separated half spheres rendered with images from Portugal and New Zealand coastline and skies, the avatars can experience to be simultaneously at these geographical opposed places. This is one of multiple aspects in development for Weathering In/Com Tempo
By Isabel Valverde and Todd Cochrane

Weathering In 09.20.09


Snapshot_011, upload feito originalmente por isabelv63.

Generating a virtual mockup of the physical environment in Second Life®.
The project will integrate a physical and a virtual participatory environments.
In the mockup we projected possible real-time projections of people broacasted in SL along the avatars. The physical participants are represented as stick white figures. The photos of the mockup (see all at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23123386@N07/sets/72157623050463439/) do also include other aspects of the aimed interactions, such as sound wind/smoke and water. these can also be represented and be work as virtual active responses from the virtual environment to avatars movement and interaction with others and the space.
By Isabel Valverde and Todd Cochrane