movement
machines.org
Stimuli and mobilisations
by Rose Breuss
Movementmachines.org experiments with specific links between dance practices and today’s machines/media, but at the same time also calls up earlier constellations of mediality: Written formations of movement, visualisations of what is said, embodiments of symbolic arrangements of signs, mechanics of movement simulations, the air in movement, the sound of a breath. By means of the stimuli of old and new media on a digital surface, the project undermines the self-evident nature of contemporary media research, „exclusively researching contemporary or modern media“ (Kittler 2021), but also explicitly deals with digital gamification, the use of playful means and dynamics in contemporary dance practice.
The use of digital media and (also digitized) materials of various kinds has become a matter of course in dance-choreographic working strategies. Videos, photographs, texts, sketches, dance notations etc. not only inspire the creative and staging processes of dancers and choreographers. Media and materials simulate and stimulate motor skills and function as movement machines. Dance movements become visible beyond the performative act – as a ‘promise for the future’? (Maria Ley Piscator)
The attribution of the ephemeral nature of dance is sometimes stubbornly reproduced. It is argued that every time the dance act ends, the dance also disappears. A closer look at dance practice, however, shows that dance is developed in a media-laden milieu that is richly occupied with various transfers. In the act of (dance) movement, in actu, dancers create specific links to a certain material or medium. In movement machines, (energy) extraction and (energy) generation are at work – effects that produce the specific, also a-normative dance movement or ‘specific instance of kinesis’ (Ruprecht 2019).
The following collection of material marks a mosaic-like and sketchy conceptual arrangement of experiments on interfaces between body and machine. The concept of the movement machine offers a spectrum of considerations. Which movement machines are meant? The dancer as the most perfect body machine possible? Or the thinking machines of dance? The machine-like nature of thought? The media machine? The „interfaces“ between man and machine seem to be becoming more blurred today. How and in what way is the advancing technomorphic character of the body also reflected in dance practices and what information do the artistic self-designs in the interface between body and machine provide?
In my sketchy and inhomogeneous reflections, movement machines open up a thought space for dance practice in which the idea of the ‘nature’ of the human body and the artificiality of the machine can be questioned and re-configurations of stimuli and mobilisations in dance-choreographic processes become possible. A thought material (numbered 1-13) outlines excerpts of my questions on various interfaces between body and media and vice versa and uses drawings, text passages by theorists from various disciplines and an experimental Super 8 film and thus different media and means for reflection on the topic Movement Machines in Dance.
1-3: Which internal and external mechanisms drive the machine?
The glove guides the hand (1785)
„[I]n the world, where you alone think you can act, a thousand invisible hands are pressing and moving, which use yours only in lieu of gloves!“
„Let men be the machines of angels.“
Jean Paul: Titan (1800 -1803)
The bird swims, the inner gear (1738)
by the author
The external apparatus moves the limbs (before 1800)
Photographed by Les automates : figures artificielles d’hommes et d’animaux, histoire et technique by Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz (1949)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Canard_pr%C3%A9sum%C3%A9_de_Vaucanson_2.jpg
4: What happens when the recording machine starts to move?
Movement Research A filmed Essay, Super 8 film/Video: Andreas Kurz / Texts: Rose Breus
Breuss, Rose:(Tanz-)Bewegungen – Striche, Routen und Routinen, Spuren und schwarze Stellen, München 2017, epodium ezine #2
https://www.epodium.de/e-zine
An essay on movement research filmed on Super 8 overlays dance notations and reflections on the dancing body with unstable backgrounds. Shifts, fades, trembling, slipping away and disappearing become visible. The light that falls on what is shown flickers, outshines and reflects its source.
5: Which body are we talking about? Which body is being s(t)imulated and mobilised?
Sarasin, Philipp: Reizbare Maschinen, Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765–1914, Frankfurt am Main 2001.
If bodies not only have an individual history, but are also subject to historical change as bodies in general, then the nature and matter of the body, as we perceive, imagine, represent and process them, are no longer a reliable reference outside of speech and action. […] The human body then ceases to be a timeless standard […] thus the barrier between culture and nature, which until recently was perceived as fundamental in our civilization, falls away.
(Sarazin 2001, 11)
If you want to talk about bodies, you need a language that can bring out more than what you think you see.
(ibid., 96)
6: How a machine imagines/simulates the body?
Haarman, Anke: Die andere Natur des Menschen, Philosophische Menschenbilder jenseits der Naturwissenschaft, Bielefeld 2011.
In 1986, the National Library of Medicine of the United States of America set out to meet the demands of the information age and create a digital dataset of the entire human body. […] To create the basic digital material, the search began in 1989 for a male and a female corpse, each of which had to be intact, middle-aged and normal. The male body was scanned using computer tomography (CT), documented using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, then placed in gelatine and sawed into 1871 slices from head to toe, millimetre by millimetre, in a specially constructed sawing apparatus. After this sawing, the body slices were photographed and the photos scanned. Six months later, the female body was sawn into more than five thousand 0.33 millimeter-thin slices using a more sophisticated sawing technique following corresponding CT and MRI documentation. At 40 gigabytes, „she“ is more data-rich than „he“ (15 gigabytes). The digital body cross-sections (cryosection images) are stored together with the CT and MRI documents as Visible Man (1994) and Visible Woman (1995) on the Internet. They are available free of charge and afteravailable to any user for further processing after registration.
(Haarmann 2011, 92)
Much has been written about this human simulation model, mainly because the mortal remains of a man executed in the USA served as the physical basis for the male body model.
(ibid., 91)
So do we have to accept this knowledge and the way it positions us as a final nature – or is there a possibility to ask ourselves whether there is a diversity of concepts of nature and spaces of possibility of knowledge beyond that, which allows us to perceive and think up alternative concepts of the body?
(ibid., 8)
7: Can only the production process create the body?
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari: Anti-Ödipus, Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie, Frankfurt am Main 1977.
„The body is created in the production process.“
(ibid., 55)
In the Desiring-Machine Deleuze/Guattari explain the process of re-embodying:
Consequently, Proust thought that the whole is also produced as a part alongside parts, without uniting or totalizing them after all, but rather referring to them by founding divergent communications between non-communicating tubes, transversal unities between elements that preserve their peculiar differences. Thus, during the train ride, it is by no means a wholeness of events or the unity of views that is established, but a wholeness and unity of transversals, which the confused passenger draws from one window to another in order to assemble the „fragmentary and opposing parts of my beautiful scarlet, capriciously fleeting morning sky and apply them to an equal surface […] Assembling, applying to a surface, that is what Joyce called „re-embody“.
(ibid., 55)
8: Complex structures of historical knowledge as a machine?
Cramer, Franz Anton:Incompleteness as opportunity, On historical claim in dance
https://tanzfonds.de/magazin/essay-unvollstaendigkeit-als-chance/
https://tanzfonds.de/en/magazin/essay-incompleteness-as-opportunity/
In each interpretation, reformulation, collage or reconstruction of past events, a form of subjectivity can emerge whose completeness is constituted by the artistic side of it, and it will do so again. History can never be complete. It requires subjectivity and that is only based on parts, excerpts and detail. It can only be complete within the meaning of art: a complex structure of historical knowledge, subjective interest, emotion, designing and pre-positioning. We imagine history by imagining the present. This is the task of the archive. Here is where its potential lies, and its potential here is inexhaustible.
9: When the actually opaque media machine roars and shows itself?
Krämer, Sybille: Medium, Bote, Übertragung. Kleine Metaphysik der Medialität, Frankfurt am Main 2008.
Media are inconspicuous, opaque, transparent. The screen is no longer there as soon as the movie begins. We hear sentences, music and no sound waves. Only in the disturbance, in the noise, does the medium shows itself.
10: Do media machines mediate between heterogeneous bodies and domains?
Kittler, Friedrich A.: Aufschreibesysteme 1800, 1900, München 1993.
The writing angel as a gramophone trademark (Kittler 1995, 377)
A medium is a medium is a medium. […] It can therefore not be translated. Carrying messages from medium to medium always means subordinating them to other standards and materialities. In a system of writing, where it becomes a task „to become aware of the abysses that separate one order of sensuality from the other“, the necessity of transposition takes the place of translation. […] It cannot invoke anything universal, and must […] leave holes.
(Kittler 1995, 336)
11: Which contact and touch zones with machines influence our emotions?
Angerer, Marie-Luise: „Speculation about 1:0. On the productive difference of the interval“ in:Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, Timon Beyes (eds.): Performing the Digital, Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures, Bielefeld 2017.
https://elibrary.utb.de/doi/epdf/10.5555/9783839433553
Angerer, Marie-Luise: Nichtbewusst: affektive Kurzschlüsse zwischen Psyche und Maschine, Wien, Berlin 2022.
[M]edia can no longer be defined as prostheses which amplify the senses, but that instead, they have attained a new immersive dimension, that they replace our senses, that they also make our senses more intense and more subjective, more intimate and more technical, that perception, memory and affect become a matter of technical modalities.
(Angerer 2017, 91)
Affect is that which appears too quickly and disappears too quickly to be noticed.
(Massumi quoted from Angerer 2022, 16)
In a technologically upgraded environment, the human body is adapted to non-human companions. New contact and touch zones influence our affects.
12: (Dance)Machines can reverse time, humans cannot
emit of ytilibisrever eht // the reversibility of time
Kittler, Friedrich A.: Aufschreibesysteme 1800, 1900, München 1993.
Kittler, Friedrich: Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften. Leipzig 2003.
Jeschke, Claudia: „Praxeological Approaches to Dance Historiography“, In: Dance and Theory, epaper, Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava 2022, 2-13.
https://www.vsmu.sk/htf/katedry-a-pracoviska/centrum-vyskumu-htf/zborniky-tanec-sk
Landwehr, Achim: Die anwesende Abwesenheit der Vergangenheit, Frankfurt a.M. 2016.
Data processing is the process in which the temporal order of processes is made displaceable and reversible through procedures and spatialization.
(Kittler 1993, 58ff)
One of the elementary experiences of human existence – the irreversibility of passing time – is abolished in the game of media. Time itself becomes a variable that can be manipulated. A temporal event becomes materially storable and therefore manipulable.
In a lecture at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava in 2022, dance scholar Claudia Jeschke discussed the time concept of ‘chronoference’ developed by Achim Landwehr and discussed it in relation to praxeological approaches in contemporary dance:
From a time-theoretical perspective, the material never remains the same, even if it retains its outer form. It is exposed to a constant tension that moves between an initial temporal marking, a handing down, an actualisation and a futureness. Because of this tension, the historical must be constantly rewritten. In this respect, one can state that the historical never simply is, but becomes constant.
(Landwehr 2016, 70)
13: Digital Cultures are performative cultures; they entangle with human bodies.
Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, Timon Beyes (eds.): Performing the DigitalPerformativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures, Bielefeld 2017.
https://elibrary.utb.de/doi/epdf/10.5555/9783839433553
[D]igital Cultures are performative cultures. They condition and are shaped by techno-social processes and agencies, and they afford new possibilities for performative practices and interventions. It follows that the study of performativity in its heterogeneous dimensions cannot afford to ignore the agencial forces and effects of digital technologies and their entanglements with human bodies.
(Leeker, Shiper, Beyes 2017, 10)
Rose Breuss
Choreographer
Professor of Movement Research, Anton Bruckner Private University Linz
Rose Breuss completed dance and dance notation studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Theaterschool Amsterdam, Temple University Philadelphia USA, University of Surrey, Labanotation Institute. From 2006 to 2022 she was Director of the IDA – Institute of Dance Arts at the Anton Bruckner Private University Linz, where she was appointed University Professor for Movement Research. Currently she teaches in the Master’s and PHD programmes at the Institute of Dance Arts and has worked as a guest lecturer and assessor at numerous international dance universities. She is currently conducting research in a PEEK Project, supported by the Austrian Science Fund. As choreographer and driving force behind the Dance Company Of(f) Verticality, she has been invited to numerous (inter)national guest performances, including Odeon Wien, Bregenzer Festspiele, Wien Modern, Brucknerhaus Linz, Sophiensäle Berlin, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, DANCE München, International Dance Summit Berlin, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Transart Bozen, Carinthischer Sommer and others.
www.rosebreuss.com
www.cie.offverticality.com
Bibliographie
Angerer, Marie-Luise: „Speculation about 1:0. On the productive difference of the interval“ in: Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, Timon Beyes (eds.): Performing the Digital, Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures, Bielefeld 2017, transcript
https://elibrary.utb.de/doi/epdf/10.5555/9783839433553
Angerer, Marie-Luise: Nichtbewusst: affektive Kurzschlüsse zwischen Psyche und Maschine, Wien, Berlin 2022, Turia+Kant
Breuss, Rose:(Tanz-)Bewegungen – Striche, Routen und Routinen, Spuren und schwarze Stellen, München 2017, epodium ezine #2
ISBN 978-3-940388-59-9
https://www.epodium.de/e-zine
(retrieved 9.9.2024)
Cramer, Franz Anton: Unvollständigkeit als Chance, Zum historischen Anspruch im Tanz
https://tanzfonds.de/magazin/essay-unvollstaendigkeit-als-chance/
https://tanzfonds.de/en/magazin/essay-incompleteness-as-opportunity/
(retrieved 9.9.2024)
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari: Anti-Ödipus, Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie, Frankfurt am Main 1977, Suhrkamp
Haarman, Anke: Die andere Natur des Menschen, Philosophische Menschenbilder jenseits der Naturwissenschaft, Bielefeld 2011, open transkript, DOI: 10.14361/transcript.9783839417614
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html
(retrieved 9.9.2024)
Jeschke, Claudia: „Praxeological Approaches to Dance Historiography“, In: Dance and Theory, epaper, Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava 2022, 2-13.
https://www.vsmu.sk/htf/katedry-a-pracoviska/centrum-vyskumu-htf/zborniky-tanec-sk
Krämer, Sybille: Medium, Bote, Übertragung. Kleine Metaphysik der Medialität, Frankfurt am Main 2008, Suhrkamp
Kittler, Friedrich A.: Aufschreibesysteme 1800, 1900, München 1993, Fink
Kittler, Friedrich: Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften, Leipzig 2003, Reclam
Kittler, Friedrich; Ofak, Ana: Medien vor den Medien, Paderborn 2021, Wilhelm Fink
Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, Timon Beyes (eds.): Performing the DigitalPerformativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures, Bielefeld 2017, transcript
https://elibrary.utb.de/doi/epdf/10.5555/9783839433553
(retrieved 9.9.2024)
Alice Laagay, David Lauer: Medientheorien, eine philosophische Einführung, Frankfurt am Main 2004, Campus
Landwehr, Achim: Die anwesende Abwesenheit der Vergangenheit, Frankfurt a.M. 2016, Fischer
Ruprecht, Lucia, Gestural Imaginaries, Dance and Cultural theory in the Early Twentieth Century, New York 2019,
Oxford University Press
Sarasin, Philipp: Reizbare Maschinen, Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765–1914, Frankfurt am Main 2001, Suhrkamp
All German passages have been translated by the author with the help of DEEPL.