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

‘What is the appropriate behaviour for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What`s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?’

Buddha.
Human Givens. vol 14, (3) Human Givens Publishing Ltd, East Sussex, England, UK