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October 04, 2005

Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts' Conference

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Emergent Systems, Cognitive Environments

A few of the many papers being presented at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts' Emergent Systems, Cognitive Environments conference--Chicago IL, November 10-13, 2005:

A6. Roundtable: Thresholds of Performance--Organizer: Sha Xin Wei, Fine Arts and Computer Science, Concordia University:

"The panelists (Toni Dove, Kevin Quennesson, Tirtza Even) explore to what extent and how performance needs to be noticed, and how performance needs to be intended and posed to be noticed. What makes a movement a gesture rather than a tic? What happens when we interpose and mix systems of deferred agency, whether it's chorography of rehearsed human perfomers or a network of software video and audio processes? What sorts of entanglement pull people and performance out of the background of unmarked occasions into marked events? The panelists' works reveal multiple thresholds between object and substrate, between scripted and emergent event. We ask of the artists: What new forms of performance can we witness in collective or public spaces? How do such events--organized activity by analogy with organized sound--reshape our notions of performance as well as public space? What are the significances of such coordinated public gestures? How do "things" of "common concern" emerge from such actions? How do meanings and subjects unfold under the interweaving, resonances, or costructuration of performances in public?"

Markus Hallensleben, Modern German Literature, University of British Columbia, The Emergence of Tissue Engineering as Textual Figuration: Stelarc's Cooperation with Tissue Culture and Art:

"In his most recent project, the Australian based performance artist Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou) describes plans to implant a third ear onto his body. I will portray his project, which is developed with the assistance of the Australian research and performance group Tissue Culture & Art, as an example of how techniques of tissue engineering can be applied to artwork. Since Stelarc's third ear will demonstrate the extension of the human body to a highly artificial but living sculpture, it critically mirrors scientific performances, and it reveals an aesthetic paradox of mythical ritual and objective norm in medical sciences. In his project of a third ear, Stelarc reflects the socio-communicative act of a medical experiment and the act of surgery as an aesthetic act of art performance. My analysis will give an answer to the questionable production and reception of the experiment by interpreting the "mouse with three ears," as artwork, even as text, not only because the term tissue comes, like text, from the Latin word texere, but because here we also find the performance of the metaphor (cognitive figure of thought). I will argue that--with the extension of the science to life creations--their performances also have to be seen like other performances based on text or body."

Mark Pizzato, Theatre and Film, UNC/Charlotte, Neurotheatre: Evolving Ghosts in the Human Brain:

"Current discoveries in cognitive neuroscience are changing our understanding of theatrical performance, as an emergent system inside the brain (along with Self and Other consciousness), shared between humans in particular cultural environments. This presentation is taken from my forthcoming book "Ghost Theatres, Movies, and the Brain" (palgrave Macmillan 2006). I will investigate the evolution of episodic, mimetic, myth-making, and theoretic cultures, from hominid to human (according to psychologist Merlin Donald), regarding the ghostly characters of Self and Other within the brain and in performance. How did the interior theatre of the human brain develop over millions of years--towards various cultural modes of mimetic and narrative performance, involving a common neuroanatomy (and its "inner environment" in Dennett's terms), yet distinctive traditions of stage and screen drama today? How are we transforming our cognitive environments and emotional drives, through the current "ghost in the machine" of the brain, expressed by performance technologies?"

Kris Paulsen, Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley, The Telecrowd:

"In Sidney Lumet's 1976 film "Network," newscaster Howard Beale stirs his viewers in to a media-resistant rage. He compels his audience to scream from their windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." Suddenly, a crowd emerges. From windows of every apartment building, faces appear and call out to each other against the unidirectional television. A community of people existing in the same time but in separate spaces emerges. They are linked together by a medium that they all experience in the same time. Building from this image, I examine the telerobotic works of Ken Goldberg (Demonstrate, 2004) and Marie Sester (Access, 2003) in relation to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty's theories of the "presence of others." These philosophers will help us to conceptualize mediated environments that privilege real time over real space, specifically in relation to how we understand co-presence and the ethics of seeing and being seen."

John Bruni, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Towards an Ecology of Performance: Edith Wharton with Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan:

"While Margulis and Sagan's "What is Life?" describes life in the performative, as a becoming rather than a being, their work need not be limited to a debate about holistic naturalism. Their next book, "Acquiring Genomes," argues against the expressing of evolutionary theory through reductive language of economic competition. I wish to look at their work with ecosystems as laying the groundwork for redefining the importance of social environments. Their argument lends support to the shaping effects of environment on self-identity, a point that becomes even more pronounced when read through Judith Butler's theory of social performance. Using the novels of Edith Wharton as a stage upon which these themes become played out, my paper looks at how the reductive theory of evolution that Margulis and Sagan critique stems from an overemphasis on individualism in the twentieth century--the same critique which Butler politically and culturally employs. I hope to show how evolution, seen as a narrative which Wharton is deeply invested, can be seen in a new light; that read through Margulis, Sagan and Butler, a cultural application of evolution need not be read as a cariacature of "social Darwinist" thinking, but instead as a challenge to regard the social environments in which we live as modeled upon the dynamism of ecosystems."

Julia Kursell, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Molecular Musicology--Hearing with David Tudor:

"A Thousand Plateaus" begins with one page of music, entitled "piano piece for David Tudor." This music looks completely unfamiliar; the lines of the staves seem to be inextricably confused. Its composer, Sylvano Bussotti, insisted that the name in the title was not a dedication to the famous avant-garde pianist, but rather an indication of the instrument: Tudor was known to play what seemed unplayable. Whether composed for him or by him, what he played reconfigured instrument and player. It made the human disappear in a relation of instrumental parts that became indistinguishable. The sounds that would result from these configurations were unpredictable for the composer as well as for the listeners. Thereby interrupting the relation between notation and sound, the musical performance gave access to the "molecular content" of music: hearing could be heard. The role of this music in the philosophy of "A Thousand Plateaus," I will argue, was to contribute to a first formulation of a new science of hearing."

Talan Memmott, Dirty Code:

"10 lectures in 10 minutes: dirty code, that makes the harsh protocols, the reasoned syntax of code entirely unreasoned for the desiring machine, the immediate cyborg at the terminal...the extermintaion of terms, the execution as termination...move toward a taxonomadic circuit of, or "tweening," of identity--moving through, across, between various protocols; mostly hidden. It is the surface, though, that "matters"...the point, or place at which the contact is made, where one finds the meaningful product, the product that matters for oneself. This here, at the terminal, on the screen is still severe sublimation of what matters to the product, how it is made material--the relays that form the [spaceless] space between. What matters is the suspect materiality of what matters to the "I" that is the user--here and there. The ten lectures that make up this performance, will not be performed in order. The sequence of the lectures, the performance as a whole will be recombined on the fly, in the moment. The themes for the lectures will include such cryptic (or fantastical/phenomenological) subjects as technontology, [sur]faciality, narcisystems...Improvised diagrams, recursion, emergence, and the use of the neologisms all play a part in making the code of the performance dirty."

Alan Sondheim, Dirty Code:

"Code/program/operators on two levels--that of the performative or symbolic, and that of the referent. In "Dirty Code," as in life, the two are interwoven, 'messy'. It's this messiness that constitutes culture, art, as well as the problematic ideology of purity that underlies everything from Mecca through the Torah to Shinto. My performance exists in the space among codes, cultures, languages, bodies, problematizing these, attempting to rein in the symbolic veering out of control."

Ed Chang, University of Maryland, A Friendster Story: Social Network as Narrative:

"The proliferation of so-called social network applications, like Six Degrees, in the past and Friendster or Tribe.net, in the present, raises the immediate questions: Why is it suddenly important to identify, quantify, and digitize one's friendships, acquaintances, and connections? More importantly, why is it important to be able to see the network? It can be argued that the aggregation of these connections tells a story about cyberculture, about cyberidentity; it is a narrative that critiques and radicalizes cyberspace as a space, place, and temporality of inclusion and exclusion. How do these applications themselves succeed or fail at figuring, graphically and metaphorically, social connections? Finally, how do social networks map and configure self, geography, and conceptions of cyberspace as community?"

Dene Grigar, English, Texas Women's University, 'When Ghosts Will Die': Narrative Performance Through the Use of Emergent Technology:

"This presentation discusses "When Ghosts Will Die," a performance-installation that utilizes multi-sensory elemets such as sound, images, light, and text produced by motion-tracking technology and computers to tell the story about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Inspired by Michael Frayn's play, "Copenhagen," it explores the use of non-linguistic elements in the service of telling stories. While motion-tracking systems have been used in surveillance and training, as well as in the development of virtual reality experiences, smart rooms, human computer interfaces, media arts performances and installations, health and therapy, and for enriching the ambience in computer and video game environments, spaces enhanced by motion-tracking technology have not yet been fully explored as potential for storytelling. The focus of this presentation, then, is to detail ways this emergent technology innovates narrative, particularly those entailing live performance."

See full program [PDF] [via ELO]

Posted by jo at October 4, 2005 11:46 AM

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