“the lens of clumsy maneuverings” – a glimpse of the world I came from.
My degree is in Dance. Specifically, I was in the Interarts Technology Program at the University of WI- Madison, and studied with people such as Li Chiao-Ping, Jin-Wen Yu, Peggy Choy, Phil Zarrilli, and my primary mentor, Douglas Rosenberg. This was in the heady Dot-Com Boom, and I was loving my work integrating dance and technology, not the least because there were so many opportunities to bend the medium of the nascent web and digital video to traditional forms such as dance.
So I was excited when my browser opened up to an article by Nathaniel Stern on “Implicit Art” This was the kind of stuff that I used to be part of, a bit of the world of Dance & Tech that I moved away from as the demands of my own business and family meant I could not spend the hours in the studio.
But as I read the article…well, I felt sad. I felt even more sad when I saw the video accompanying. Not because I missed it – I’m very content with my current career path – but because the video shows an interface and a level of non-virtuosity that was growing to be an excuse back when we were fighting with computers that didn’t recognize video cameras and were happy with the 5-10 frames-per-second we could eke out of our PowerMac 1800’s.
Don’t get me wrong: I look at this video and I’m impressed. I can see where the amount of work and thought and technology that went into it do make it a pioneering work. But at the same time, for someone outside of the dance world, or the dance tech world, even, it would be confusing at best, boring at worst. There’s a lack of costume, of setting, of scene – in short, it feels like the canons of performance have been sacrificed in the name of technology, and while I know how that feels – I’ve done it many times- it saddens me that it’s still necessary.
The results are simple-but-awkward interfaces that ask us to chase and stutter with our arms, smell and breathe with our legs, or see and hear with our hands. Always performative, usually interactive, and mostly digital, Implicit Art asks us to accent, and examine, the feedback loop that is embodiment. It looks at couplings between flesh and world through the lens of clumsy maneuverings.
Maybe I’m wrong. See what you think: is this dance? Art?
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