'In the Company of Strangers'

Wednesday, 11 April 2007

In the Company of Strangers

I am carrying out my MA in dance and film and I am investigating the possible dramas inherent in those moments of perception 'slippage' when we notice, fleetingly, something incongruous or perhaps uncanny/out of the rhythm of our current activity/task, occurring just at the edge of our attention - and failing to follow it up we wonder, perhaps only later, about what it was we had witnessed. What was that?

If you are able to document any of these moments in any way, through writing, drawing, photos, sound or film, I would be very interested. Please post writing or links to other media in the Comments section.

'IN THE COMPANY OF STRANGERS'

Abstract Title:
In the Company of Strangers - Negotiating the parameters of Indeterminacy; a study of the Roaming Body and Departure in Urban Spaces

Abstract:
This performance-based project scrutinizes Indeterminacy as a mediating force impinging upon our behaviour and its subsequent impact on the nature and constituency of engagements and dialogue between people in selected urban spaces. Concepts centring on the dynamics of temporality and embodiment in departure are being investigated in both First Life and the Multi User Virtual Environment, Second Life as two locations on the same world surface of the Real.

My research-practice posits the formation of a new Urban Myth: Experienced through the vehicle of the Roaming Body, our meetings and encounters with people frequently manifest as disjunct mis-communiqués and dis-engagements. I am asserting that this is due to the inevitability in our existence of indeterminacy acting as a significant governing factor in the articulation of our relations with others, reinforcing our description as time-based entities traversing the passage of the everyday. I maintain that this is evidenced in us through the occurrence of a continual, pre-emptive state of departure. Indeterminacy implies motion and emerges, as Massumi asserts, through ‘… an unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary …’. We, as humans, are constantly being drawn away – always either approaching or embracing involuntarily, a state of ‘Leaving’ which co-mingles with and unerringly erodes our efforts to stay engaged with another in the here and now.

In my research/practice, which underpins the concepts in
this masterate, interventionist inscriptions are being used to prompt and interrogate the constituents of encounters and departures in designated public places. Experiential movement frameworks employed are informed by the discipline of Contact Improvisation Dance and Authentic Movement. The working process is being documented using a range of video narrative.

Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, Durham & London, (p.5).

Def: 'The Roaming Body' - the body as entity which can never be fully committed to a set position or location in space and time (Mike Baker Feb 09)

Title image: Dancers - Mike Baker and Sylvie Haisman, Camera - Fiona Baker

Links List / Please find more images at the bottom of this post

-empyre- soft-skinned space
alansondheim.org
AlienNation Co
dance-tech.net
danssansjoux.org
Dr Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Century, in Simian, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991
Dr Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press, 2008
Henri Bergson, Mark Hansen, (bodies in code), microflicks, dad.project, leftluggage, davidandjacob, slightly.net, hyperchoreography, throwdisposeablechoreography, Contact Quarterly, Text and Performance Quarterly, Liminalities, skellis.net, Body Space Image, Jumpcut, Brian Massumi, Marc Augé, T`ai Chi Ch`uan, Body Space and Technology Journal, Slightlymoving, Proximity, Saatchi-gallery.co.uk, Len Lye, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Michel Serres, The Parasite, University of Minnesota Press, 2007
Scott Draves.com
Second Life.com
subtletechnologies - Alan Sondheim
touchcompass.org.nz
Turbulence.org
YouTube (people and blogs - strangers), Discourse off the Walls - Authored Indeterminacies, Peter Lorre,