Dancing the Virtual

Dancing the Virtual

It's time to send in your call for participation! See below and please pass on...
It will be great to see you again!
Erin
PS you can also access it at http://www.thesenselab.com/TechnologiesOfLivedAbstraction/HTB/call.htm

Call for Participation

HOUSING THE BODY, DRESSING THE ENVIRONMENT

“what emanates from the body and what emanates from the

architectural surround intermixes” ^Arakawa&Gins

Part 2 of Technologies of Lived Abstraction a 4-part event

sponsored by The Sense Lab (Erin Manning, Concordia University ) and the Workshop in Radical Empiricism (Brian Massumi, Université de Montréal)

August 24-27, 2007

at the Society for Arts and Technology, Montréal

“In the skin itself,” wrote William James, “there is a vague form of projection into a third dimension.” Conversely, in the third dimension there is an echo of the skin. The body is not what is inside the skin. The body is what emerges at the intersection where what is inside the skin reaches out to meet its environmental return. The body is what makes a life of a moving in-between.

This event will be dedicated to a collective exploration of the dynamic cross-genesis of the body and its constructed environment. The environment will be taken to include not only the architectural surround but also technological and cultural extensions of it. This cross-genesis involves not only the reciprocal reach-and-return of skin and space, but also extends to other modes of perception (proprioception, hearing, vision, smell). For Bergson as for theorists of “embodied cognition,” the relation between perception in all its modes and action is also one of reciprocal reach-and-return. This wider cross-genesis, of action and perception, in turn opens onto thought. Every perception: already a thinking in action. Every act: a thought in germ. The premise of this event is that there is generative nexus between action, perception and conception which can be modulated from the environmental side. In constructing our environment we are not only housing the body, we are building modes of embodied experience and thought. We are refitting the body for new forms of life: cross-dressing its self-expressive potentials. The event is conceived as a collaborative exploration of this extended nexus, zeroing in on the formative moment at which action, perception, and conception constructively (e)merge together and diverge.

“our agenda should be to short-circuit action, perception and construction” ^{Lars Spuybroek}

This is not a conference. There will be no prepared communications. It is a “research-creation” event organized along the lines of a structured improvisation. We would like to challenge the dichotomy between creation and thought/research by establishing a working environment in which the emphasis will be placed on the ways in which creative research reinvents collaboration and on the new modes of thought and action this makes possible. This project proposes to create such a platform of experimentation – where the body is actively produced through technologically mediated environment – in order to foster the future potential of research-creation. What we propose is to ask how movements of thought can engender creative tools that further the production of culture. New forms of collaboration are here not simply locales for experimentation: they are matrices of cultural becoming. Experimentation will function as much at this collective level as at the conceptual level, and on both levels technically. The aim of the event is produce a platform for speculative pragmatism where what begins technically as a movement is immediately a movement of thought. Participants are invited to propose pragmatic “platforms of relation” that can be experimented with during the event.

“our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofa penetrates the body” ^Boccioni

Come couch with us

Invited Participants: Toni Dove, Independent artist, New York http://www.tonidove.com/

Greg Lynn, University of California-Los Angeles / FORM Architectural Office (to be confirmed) http://www.glform.com/

TO APPLY AS A PARTICIPANT

Send us a (max. 1 page) response to our call outlining how you can envisage contributing by April 1 2007. Participation is restricted to a total of 40 people (including students, researchers, artists, dancers, architects, writers, programmers, etc). A reading package will be sent to all participants in advance. If you would like to propose a platform of relation, please attach a second page describing it.

Send proposals to emanning@alcor.concordia.ca.

Moving toward Housing the Body

Hi everyone! We are working toward the call for participation for Housing the Body, Dressing the Environment. We would like to encourage all of you to come up with techniques/platforms for relation to propose by February first (with your call for participation). Let's reactivate the blog! Tell us where you're at...
Erin

Termini, Arrivals and Outcomes (and real work)

When you go through U.S. customs and immigration in Vancouver (when you're not even going to the U.S.), the question of arrival becomes a strange one. Arrival here seems premature, to arrive before departure, to have in fact pre-empted it, even replaced the experience in total. Stranger still, you are asked to evaluate the customer service afterwards. This is in order, I assume, to see if the customer service outcomes were arrived at (they were – everyone was very pleasant and professional). What does it mean, however, when your only real sense of arrival at the U.S., experience of the U.S., is the satisfactory fulfilment of customer service (maybe this is something Australians just can't understand)?

Or, when flying to Sydney from Montréal, each new arrival at an airport just seems to take you to a new departure or transit lounge. There only seems to be something like Blanchot's non-arrival of arrival made quite literal and simple (as Christine described it to me during speed dating, or was that the arrival of non-arrival?). I never really feel I arrive, not even at Sydney airport (even when I declare my can of maple syrup bought for me by Pierre at the markets .... only after my bag has been x-rayed, the final clearance of thresholds, do we all feel that everything has been satisfactorily pre-empted). Even Sydney airport seems a place of blank transition, another place from which to immediately depart. Finally home, it is true, I feel I have arrived. So of course, I immediately go to work.

The relation between arrival, departure and transition was something that came up for me time and time again during Dancing the Virtual - in different guises: arriving in a new (and wonderful) city; discussing the terminus (and for me, misunderstanding it – I know I was not alone but I felt I misunderstood it in the best possible way); wondering if the workshop would get there in the end, that is, whether we really would "dance the virtual" (and I think we did – even if I myself did it clumsily). If there was a dance of abstractions at Dancing the Virtual, it was perhaps one between arrival (terminus), departure (forward address) and transition (microgestures, infralanguage, or "simply" activating relation in movement).

How appropriate then to be reminded of the fragility of this dance. We can in fact be thankful for the reminder. Here I refer not to flying around the world, but to the idea expressed shortly after the event, from outside of it, that it would better for people to be doing "real work", presumably focussing on pre-determined outcomes, rather than on transitional processes. It is as if the latter – not safely pre-empted – had to be reduced to "just fun" (they were fun of course), without purpose, without direction – experiences that would never arrive at anything important.

Of course, the case is the opposite (and not just because I know for a fact that the postgrads I am involved with would have loved to have had this experience, and not only because all the postgraduates I spoke to at Dancing the Virtual were thinking so deeply and so sensitively).

Perhaps at airports at the moment pre-emption makes sense (or at least we know why it is happening). But do we want our every action, every thought to be pre-empted (even when this is entirely unncessary and in fact unproductive), to be tied to defined outcomes, put to "real work", drawn away from creative research, inventive thought, the kind of thought that pays attention to transition, that moves with it, that is moved by it? I wonder, as one so often focused on outcomes myself, whether to focus too much on outcomes is never to be able to arrive.

This is perhaps a technical question. If so, it is a question full of irony, particularly when it comes to the technics of outcomes and pre-emption. Outcomes and pre-emption attempt (futilely but with a kind of sad passion) to float between real abstraction (the kind that bridges and assembles experience) and actual events. Outcomes and pre-emption try not to touch either real abstraction or actual events. In fact they actively avoid both. This is why they never arrive, or at least only arrive "blankly", and endure only as dessication. For their posture is frozen - it contains no microgestures, no potential for preacceleration (or it is a posture that denies it might be engaged with such things). As such, the technics of pre-emption and outcomes can never go through the necessary transitions in order to arrive, or even simply to live, without twisting the whole process towards a frozen posture, a sad passion. This is a technics that is afraid to dance the virtual, the actual, or anywhere in-between. And, it is a technics that wants to round us up, like so many wayward cattle, towards outcomes, and away from transitional experience.

There are, fortunately, other technical forms of expression, with their own rigour and precision. These would include the simple but (for me) beautiful movement exercises, or the (technical) direction to "create a movement of thought", the extreme discipline of calligraphy, of tango, of coding the remix, of being able to think with the transitions with clarity. These direct us towards experience (as Susan said in one of our pods, we had to begin to move at the beginning, to move immediately into the the transitions, before even thinking of the "outcome", to continue to feel our way through the transitions). And, obviously, it is only by experiencing transition that we arrive. This is the arrival not of Blanchot, or at least not with his accent, but of James, for whom the terminus is absolute in the sense that there is no ambiguity about having arrived somewhere in experience (even if the sense of the transitional experiences involved is to some extent retroactive, in the remix).

It is an arrival that seemed simple enough perhaps for James in his walk to the Memorial Hall, but is today sometimes harder to feel. So for allowing us to re-invent some of the subtleties in this sense of arrival in Dancing the Virtual, I remain extremely grateful. And if it is true that we have to go back to our "real work", as of course we do, this does not mean, I think, that we have to abandon the dance. It always was our real work.

exfoliation

Today I was told that by stimulating the creation of Dancing the Virtual and by encouraging the students to read together I was "distracting the students from doing their real work." I was told that while "we would all like to have reading groups" there simply was no time in the academy for these kinds of ventures. I fought with everything I had to protect those who have made exfoliation not only a way of learning, but also a way of living. Institutions (in my experience) are about consolidation. Consolidation for the instution is inscribed within a moral framework of "doing" where doing involves ascribing to what is perceived to be the very real limits of the discipline. Dancing the virtual was an experiment in resisting discipline even while acknowledging the very real need for constraint. Constraint and discipline are not the same thing. Constraint creates an opening for improvisation. Discipline holds you to a representation of that which has already been done. Teaching and learning go hand in hand for me. If teaching is to discipline I will not teach. I am proud of the students who have taken this provocation seriously. At the same time I am deeply sad and angry that this initiative is considered worthy of punishment. I am writing this not only because of what Dancing the Virtual set out to do regarding this tenacity toward discipline (and thoughtlessness) but because when I thought I would drown this afternoon I felt the effects of the event and it strengthened my resolve.
Erin

Pastness and forward address

I wake up this morning feeling exquisitely nourished. I thought I would be exhausted (that may still come!) but instead I feel a richness of experience coursing through me. Thank you for creating this event with us.

For months, the event lived within a shifting actual occasion, alternatively composed of the brian-erin pod, the erin-nadine pod, the nadine-marie-evelyne-alanna-nasrin-ronald-troy-celine pod, the all-of-us-at-the-sense-lab pod, the at-the-table-at-Erin-and-Brian's-pod, the reading-group-pod, the alexandre-karmen pod, the freida-karmen-harry-erik-antoine-sense-lab-topological-media-lab-workshop-in-radical-empiricism pod, all pods regrouping regularly, finding new points of attraction (and dissension), working to conceptualize an event that could create a movement of thought.

In February we became affected (literally - you were contagious) by you, each one of you, your names, your interests, your virtuality (yes, we checked up on you in any way we could, spending hours surfing the internet, getting way-layed regularly on Steve's blog) and we began to conceive this movement of thought with you. But virtuality demands consistency to be experienced as such, and the consistency you brought (I think of chocolate cake batter) was more delicious than we could have imagined (and we have good imaginations). These come to mind in my desire to regenerate the present:

Jose, Alanna, Nadine, Ronald dancing the new version of Twister last night (Troy got this one on camera!); Nadine on the old (and better) Twister trying to convince herself that her legs were a meter long; looking across the room during the last speed dating and seeing Alexander and Jose on the inflatable mattress in the tent intensely engaged in conversation; experiencing Tagny and Troy in relational movement body to body (Tagny's eyes were closed and Troy was smiling!); getting wrapped up in Christine's exquisite elastic with Joao becoming Erin's hair; podding with Joao and Jose telling us about becoming-sunset; listening (enraptured) to Steve (Shaviro) talking about Whitehead and explaining abstraction; remembering (again) the becoming-airplane of the child and the wonderful example about love Jose so generously shared with us (and loving the conversation always happening twice - theory should always happen in repeat-mode); delighting in a conversation with Steve (Goodman) about exfoliation and dj-ing where the dj becomes-sound in the convergence of the milieu (the milieu of the synchronicity of the records, the milieu as environment-body); revelling in Susan's exquisite intensity as she furrowed her eyebrows and exclaimed "but I want flesh!"; feeling enriched by the generous and warm and brilliant presence of Sher (impossible to forget Sher's half-smile, a warm look she carries with her always, it seems); loving Stamatia's infinite intensity (and even her capacity for self-deprecation which allows me to re-tell how wonderful I think she is); wondering still about how Andrew manages to navigate the cusp of virtuality and actuality that seems to me to make him otherworldly, infinitely intense and infinitely becoming-child - I think he knows about the plane of immanence; remembering a great conversation with Derek about weather and parachutes and loving that we have a geographer amongst us who donates ripped maps. And I haven't even mentioned the wisdom of Joao, the enthusiasm and intensity of Alexandra, the infinite openness of Philipa (who knows so much and yet stays so open to learning), the rigor of all the students (who have impressed us beyond words), the quiet and very intense magnetism of Brian (and for those of you who got closer, his extraordinary sense of humour), the warmth of Xin Wei and his ability to encapsulate always generously, Harry's smile, Erik's capacity to work the example, Paul's enthusiasm (even though he was documenting the whole time), Michael's great comment about cinema and the dark precursor in the last regroup, Jaime's willingness to share and learn, Alexander's joy, Ronald's intensity, Nadine's real-ness, Celine's courage, Marie-Evelyne's gaze, Alanna's smile, Nasrin's laugh, Tagny and Jhave's blog (and there is so much more to say about them both separately and together), Antoine's dance (behind Sher!), Elinor's curiosity and enthusiasm, Ken's infinite capacity to become-child(especially when he is tracing c's with his body), Tom's amazing capacity to translate (and not only literally), Heidi's heidiness (generous, serious, funny, knowledgeable), Chris's capacity to become-multiple (but can be become-one?).
Thank you. Let's not let the dust settle.
Erin

Brian actualises

Here's Brian actualising (or perhaps virtualising, or both). There are some more low light pics at my flickr site.

what it was like

I'm posting this during the José Gil session. José is speaking with such clarity about Deleuze - about differentiation, identity and series in which identity is the maintenance and development of the singularity of an ongoing differentation. He is also talking about the dark precursor - perhaps this afternoon is the dark precursor for next year, or perhaps we shall have to wait until, like the dark passage before the lightning, it strikes nearby. The fur is still on the rostra, and people have folded themselve onto these and the inflated bed at the centre of the space. They look a little tired but interested still - there is much to bring into new series, new forms of living, of working). There is a string of lights "falling up" the steps of one of the rostra, and the tent still stands. Tom, Erin and Brian are translating José faithfully, although José's French is so clear even I can understand. In fact, we are getting a wonderful commentary along the way from them, in a slightly divergent collection of series (four series). How do we understand this discussion with regard to our new found relationality in movement (which I'm sure is really Erin turning everyone into tango enthusiasts), and the dance DVDs we have just seen (I had never seen that Paxton video from the 1960s - still the divergence and flow shocks), or the interview with Cunningham (for me the point is that Cunningham always seeks a structure to enliven the series, to proliferate them, but that this is a structure which sometimes perhaps seems to leave behind aim, perhaps even terminus if this is taken as a kind of aim through transitional relations - where are these left, and what would it mean to take Cunningham's giving of his aims, his termini, to the open world, its rich ecologies of divergent series, which after all are not quite the same as walking to the Memorial Hall?). Perhaps it is only with the terminus (and it seems to me that Cunningham multiplies termini, brings them forward) that we are freed into new ecologies, moving towards what José has called (as Erin says beautifully) the "dust of micro-vibration". Heidi's mobile (cell) rings with a very beautiful tone - perhaps this is the first sign of what follows the dust of micro-vibration. The discussion continues, but it is perhaps important to allow this dust some time to collect ...

"How do we make what makes us?" Stengers

Greetings from the nomadic pod (Jamie and Elizabeth),

As we orbited the inside of DTV as a nomadic pod, we attempted to become "topological equivalents" of DTV participants to come: that is, people who have done the readings for the event, who are wholly interested in the event and in participating in its creation with great anticipation, but who have not had direct experience of the event.

As a nomadic pod, we have thought and acted experimentally about makings of "us" ... and how makings of "us" exist in relation to strangers. We have been thinking and acting exprimentally with how "we" of the current DTV exist in relation to unknowable DTV participants yet to come ... how "our" forward address constructs both a "we" and "strangers."

Our nomadic transmissions from outside/inside DTV "back" to DTV are an attempt "to communicate in some kind of divergence" ---not too much divergence, and not too little. We attempt "a new kind of communication that holds together the differences and different intensities." Jose Gil


We have attempted to think/act experimentally about translating DTV "to" "strangers":
"...instead of uniting ... a transduction of energy, between two intensities, one belonging to one series, another to another series." Jose Gil


MAYA LIN (architect, artist):

Though I have become more aware of my shared cultural identity through my work, I also am aware of the feeling of always not quite being from either place (China, the United States). And this feeling of isolation or remoteness has also been an influence on my work. I sometimes think that the works I have made, especially the more emotional ones, were done by a distanced observer. I remain somewhat emotionally detached in order to make works that evoke so much emotion in others.

More from Friday Night at the TML

Some of the experiments from that evening anticipated many of the movements of thought that have emerged, prematurely, and transduced from this weekend. As well, these experiments, such as the movement/fire and the bright reflective form with the lights move us forward to "Housing the Body" and the "Society of Molecules."

Friday Night at the Topological Media Lab

Thanks to Xin Wei, Harry, and the other members of the Topological Media Lab for the Friday night 'tour' of Concordia and Hexagram's Black BOx experimental space.

a few questions that might constitute a contigent core

abstraction
coherence
silent sensing

we gather to think about thought: what is experience? pure perception?
direct recognition? affective tonality? an actual occasion?
prehension?

these are words discursively defined within a metaphysical milieu
they are reflective of specific core resonances in western thought
mind is embodied
in both matter and time

spatially extensive, temporally experential

how is it i see you
how is it i hear you
who is it who hears
who is it who sees

can words describe what goes on within the body beyond thought?

before words
before thought
before feeling
before analysis
is there anything?

is there truth that exists outside or more-than sense?
is everything data?

phenomenology traverses a line of history emerging from pre-history
in the first apprehension of space, the calculus computed by the
membrane of a cell
develops denotations and connotations about the direction of that
which is external-other

the task of interpretive faculties is always to track paths, assign
meaning, generate symbolic meaning and references

emotionally subjective experiential questions like:
when will i die? who am i?
or socially-contextual queries such as:
how should i be?

are replaced by ruminations over the fundamental quanta of consciousness:
is self emergent at the moment of awareness?
what is the pure gesture? how is mind immanent in matter?

Concept Capsule

Greetings from the Nomadic Pod:

We invite you to collaborate with the Nomadic Pod during Monday's lunch break at DTV.
We are offering a "concept capsule" from outside/inside DTV.
The concept capsule consists of the following movements:
1) go outside during lunch for 15 minutes and put your experiences of being "inside" DTV into relation with those "strangers" who are not moving with you at the moment.
2) during that time, create a "postcard" (addressed forward to future participants in future DTV's) that releases (passes on in a non-representional mode) experiences and sensations of DTV.
3) post it to the blog.

The edges of translation

An edge we are experiencing as a nomadic pod in the city is the edge of translation. Experiencing language as an edge of inside outside as those around us fluctuate between languages in response to us. Such fragments or translations might become what is carried forward for future DTV participants. How might our mode of address then respond in the present...


through the translator machine:
Un bord que nous éprouvons car une cosse nomade dans la ville est le bord de la traduction. En éprouvant la langue comme bord d'extérieur intérieur en tant que ceux autour de nous flottez entre les langues en réponse à nous. De tels fragments ou traductions pourraient devenir ce qui est reporté pour de futurs participants de DTV. Comment la force notre mode d'adresse répondent alors dans le actuel...




Par la machine de traducteur une plus de fois :
An edge that we test because a wandering thimble in the city is the edge of the translation. By testing the language as edge of interior outside as those around us float between the languages in answer to us. Such fragments or translations could become what is deferred for future participants of DTV. How the force our mode of address answer then in the current one...

Nomadic Pod

Greetings from outside Dancing the Virtual,
As we go out into the city, we invite transmissions and movements of thought from within dancing the virtual.

In particular, are concepts or elements of abstract machines emerging within dancing the virtual that would be augmented or prolonged by being put into relation to "strangers?" Strangers ("us" and the people yet to come to DTV) who are connected to dancing the virtual across distance and difference?

We'll send a transmission soon.
Send responses whenever convenient.

Jamie and Elizabeth

merci from ny_times0@mac.com

Dear fellow travelers,

Thank you all for such a marvelously intense, enlightening, and commited day.
I'm sorry that I probably will have to work in the TML Blackbox Sunday 11 - 5 or 6 , so cannot join you tomorrow.
Too bad for me since I would love any chance to explore Deleuze and Bergson etc with DtV.

However I trust that Harry Erik, Karmen, Freida, and Alex's substrate magic will at least in part realize what I can only describe discursively.

However I'm with you in spirit -- it would be a pleasure to carry on the many movement spawned by our exercises and discussions today. If jhave or someone can connect to iChat I'd be happy to participate in re-embodied form as ny_times0@mac.com .

immanently yours,
Xin Wei

Low Light Dinner Photos

There's a few photos from Saturday's dinner at my flickr site.

Inside/Outside Dancing the Virtual

Greetings from Jamie and Liz,


Our performative response to this morning's Concept Design I experience is to become a nomadic pod. We will extend the movement of Dancing the Virtual in ways that connect it with edges of the city's becoming else.

Our contribution to the abstract machine will consist of transmissions like this one from the edges of the city's becoming else back to the inside of Dancing the Virtual event. We offer our inside/outside movements as catalysts to engage issues potentially raised by the abstract machine's forward address to the future "strangers" who will participate in Dancing the Virtual events to come. This is our first posting.

We invite collaborations and will be checking the blog regularly.

“Language is by no means our only articulate product.” - Suzanne Langer


"The Landscape becomes the new field of action in which the “users” stop being normal observers and become indispensable elements for the definition of the space that hosts them.” Luca Galofaro –from Artscapes: Art as an approach to contemporary landscape

"Being inside and outside the work implies a movement, a participation of the audience…" - Nancy Holt

In Preparation

Brian and the tent

To give perspective, Brian stands contemplating the tent.

Tent test 2

Tent test in the TML black box

This was the first test of the tent before the 'beginning' of Dancing the Virtual.

Notes in English from Gil's text (in French)

Dancing the Virtual

Hi everyone - here are notes I've compiled based on what Brian and I consider a pivotal text for this event (Jose Gil's La danse, le corps, l'inconscient). Since many of you are anglophones, I thought I would work through the text and try to bring out some points I consider relevant. My comments are in green - the black text are direct translations from Gil's text. I really look forward to seeing all of you tomorrow.
Erin

José Gil La danse, le corps, l’inconscient. Terrain n35 septembre 2000 Danser [text in black is loosely translated from Gil (page numbers refer to the print-out), text in green is by Erin]

THE NEXUS

1- what would be a nexus of dance movements? This nexus must be constructed.

3- What does it mean to experiment, to “try”? It is to arrive at “physical coordinates” where “energy” passes “naturally” (Cunningham). Forms compose themselves…depending on the destiny the dancer wants to give the energy, creating an intensive node or attenuating its momentum (élan), accelerating the speed, modulating the force of the movement. Energy operates throughout in both Cunningham’s vocabulary and Paxton’s (although Paxton will speak more in terms of “conscience”). I would prefer intensity.

4- Cunningham creates series that emanate from patchworks (not unlike James’ concept of the mosaic). The challenge will be to think both these concepts in terms of a wholeness that is not made up of parts. Gil makes this move through the notion of virtual fields “between” movements which he later calls nodes of intensification as well as differentiation without rupture.

- (coming from Duchamp): how does an object…after a certain “habituation” …become an object of art? Habituation is used throughout this article as closely tied to a tool (where a tendency would be more like a technique). Gil suggests for example that walking is not yet dancing because it remains goal-directed and thus embedded in a kind of habituation that would always reproduce itself. This will be relevant to the relational movement exercise (which will expand on this notion of habit toward a more Deleuzian idea that habit is never a strict repetition, but a repetition with a difference). The point Gil is trying to make is well-taken, though: that movement that becomes art (or dance) becomes so because of it becoming qualitatively more-than.

- to think the patchwork, Gil turns to the Deleuzian notion of series. Different or divergent series of gestures accomplished by the same body in a unique time-frame end up “integrating”… (this is the nexus of which he speaks above, a term also central to Whitehead’s thought). Gil suggests that these series become heterogeneous because their continuity depends on a certain chance or accident (hasard) – we could call this improvisation. The location of this improvisational tendency is in the between of the series and therefore not necessarily actualised. This suggests that a repetition of the series will always create a transduction (he mentions this later in the article) – which means a change of state (usually qualitative but also tendentially quantitative). Here we get close to the ways in which Deleuze is thinking repetition and difference in the chapter on the movement of thought. To “integrate” is to “diverge”.

5- The convergence therefore does not produce itself; on the contrary, and paradoxically, the divergence of the series builds accentuating itself (va en s’accentuant) or, better, accrues an autonomy and an intensity. Gil speaks here of what Cunningham calls “structural points” or nodes which are the instants where one series links to another. These virtual centres are sites of resonance between divergent series that produce a collective effect. How they connect is always singular, always differential [in Deleuze’s words, “elles vont en se différenciant]

-The points of contact or of crossing constitute nodes of intensification of the series. An interesting point here is that these “tensions” of the between can include non-danced gestures.

- If we have the impression that two series form a whole, it is because they enter into the same background continuity (continuité de fond) that composes the rhythm of the divergence that separates them… Rhythm here functions also as the virtual center, that will is almost-imperceptible and yet makes the movement become what it is. Rhythm as an intensifier of the between (where measure would work on the actual movement).Rhythm guarantees gaps (écarts) within continuity, enabling a movement of differentiation without rupture modulating time, speed, distance internal to intervals, without destroying the line of flux of the energy.

6- The choreographic nexus implies a background continuity of the circulation of energy, even if, on the surface, the series collide or separate off from one-another, or break. In fact, a choreography is composed of multiple strata of time and space. The background continuity, as a stratum of assemblage for all strata (strate d’agencement de toutes les strates), guarantees the nexus, the logic proper to the composition of all its movements.

THE QUASI-ARTICULATION OF THE BODY

- Gil suggests that dance is not composed like a language (where language is understood as a combinatorial system of signification) because it is impossible to cut the movements of the body into units – where these units would be like phonemes of “natural” language [this comment is similar to what Bergson says about movement in his introduction to Matter and Memory. Langer makes the same point in “Discursive and Presentational Forms”]. Gil highlights the fact that in movement there is no such “unity” that could be separated from its relation to the other “units” so that a clear boundary could be drawn between one movement and another (this is further developped in Gil’s Metamorphoses of the Body). Here, he suggests that there is always a sliding or a piggy-backing of units assembled and assembling. A little later he will talk about the movement of a hand always implicates micro-movements of the elbow and the shoulder, slight changes in balance, etc. To understand only the “mechanics” of movement is not to understand movement as such. Movement here becomes aligned with “quality”…

7- The dancer is therefore not simply a “physical” body (in the context of a purely “actual” body) but an expressive body that can fill itself with sense or become bloodless, absent, empty (like the psychotic body…)… The expressive body can also become the oversaturated body. As the movement becomes more-than (expressive, oversaturated), the dance becomes world rather than function. The expression is not of a subject buit of the world where the world is what is danced.

- quasiarticulation: the articulation of the body creates sense that is different from the sense created in language (closer to symbolism in the way Whitehead talks about it). Since the body is not quite articulated (in the linguistic sense), Gil says that its movements emerge from a quasi-articulation. It is this quasi-articulation that assures [the body’s] mobility, its operativity, its integration in space, keeping it from falling into amorphous immobility or into the inexpressivity of a pure object.

8- what articulates itself in the body are not unities of movement but entire zones of space. Because these zones cannot be strictly differentiated (since one zone drags with itself part of another zone) the body remains quasi-articulated. Since there is this piggy-backing of zones (like the strata), there is a quasi-syntax to the body which always remains singular, even while it inscribes itself in a margin of indetermination. Due to this margin of indetermination, the “zones” remain dynamic (similar to the concept of exfoliation in Gil’s Metamorphoses of the Body). This is why each gesture will remain at once unique and common.

OVERARTICULATION

9- Finally, if we consider the danced gesture, this quasi-articulation of the zones of the body and the overlapping of movements this implies lead to a sort of overfragmentation of the gestures.

10- Dance brings the body into movement because the body is already in movement… The body moves always imperceptibly because it is always in tensional equilibrium.

- Balance produces movement (metastable equilibrium). This metastability automultiplies the gesture – where the gesture at the microscopic level proves always to be composed of a multiplicity of gestures – implying what Gil calls an overfragmentation. Movement thus becomes a continuum of microgestures such that one gesture always composes itself with(in) others. This concept of overfragmentation is equivalent to an overarticulation. Overarticulation is the surplus of movement overactualized (and therefore rebecoming virtual). In this movement of overfragmentation of the gesture…the tendency is toward the abolition of the gesture as sign: tending toward the incarnation of sense. Sense here seems to me to be close to symbolic reference in Whitehead. [sign is not used in a Deleuzian sense but in a more purely linguistic sense].

11- Sense does not here pre-exist movement – sense emerges from movement (and particularly from movement’s virtual tendencies as seen in overfragmentation and overarticulation).

THE IMMANENCE OF MOVEMENT

11- Cunningham wanted to multiply movements to the physical limits of the body: overfragmentation of gestures opens the way for the passage of energy and facilitates its flow.

- In the danced movement, sense becomes action. It seems to me that for Gil when sense becomes action – or when the imperceptible becomes real – we have the plane of immanence of movement. Immanence realises the sense in the movements of the body. … a constitution of a plane that permits the danced movements to attain the point of fusion about which Cunningham speaks. This point of fusion is the “virtual center” or “structural point” discussed earlier, a becoming-moment where the dance and the dancer are fused in body-spirit – a becoming-dance of world. (Whitehead makes frequent use of fusion in a similar sense).

12- We will no longer be able to affirm that what makes the nexus of the oeuvre is ineffable, because it is there, realised in the immanence of sense in the dancing of bodies. This plane of immanence will emerge from the points of contact between the series, creating a fusion or an extreme intensification where matter and form are no longer opposed and through which the body becomes more-than. (Speaking about dance and music, Gil states that musical notes are actions of the body, vibrations of corporeal movement.) Gil thus explains that the dancer creates his/her plane of immanence by transforming the quasi-articulation into an overarticulation. The dance translates the mass of embodied and embedded sense into its intensive journey…

CONTACT IMPROVISATION

13- To create a plane of immanence while dancing, at least two conditions are required: that body and thought become one in the movement (Cunningham’s concept of fusion); that the movement of the body be infinite, which implies that it can assemble with other dancing bodies.

THE UNCONSCIOUS COMMUNICATION OF BODIES

17- Gil underlines that the idea of consciousness does not imply a “pure consciousness” but a “consciousness of the body” which propels an intensive osmosis of mutual impregnation (through the contact).

THE CONSCIENCE OF THE BODY, HOLES, COMMUNICATION

17- If there is an opening toward the unconscious that is transmitted without consciousness knowing the transmitted content, it is because a dynamism particular to the consciousness of a body (of each dancer) begins…: consciousness opens, decenters itself, loses its reference points, fills itself with “holes.”

18- After Paxton, Gil calls this a swiss-cheese-consciousness (a working model for consciousness). This “consciousness” operates not as the transmitter of sense (the creator of a movement, for example) but as an opening through which movement can happen that is “too quick for thought”. These are defined as virtual movements.

19- Paxton calls this virtuality of movement the small-dance and suggests that this virtuality is perceived as real through the contact of contact improvisation.

- Important here is the notion that we do not respond strictly to actual movements, but perhaps even more so to virtual –pre or –over movements. It is in this sense that we dance the plane of immanence of movement.

Magnolias, Dogs Making Mistakes, Microbrains and Freeing the Imagination

I've been thinking about this still from a video of a magnolia for several years. It seems both complete and incomplete - about to perish and still becoming. It is nature unfinished. William Connolly has remarked that “nature itself is unfinished and full of micro-differentials that periodically accumulate to generate new things” ... It seems to me to be thinking - and it reminded me of Deleuze and Guattari when they write that “everywhere there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things” (What is Philosophy?: 213). For me, this series of events - the magnolia itself, its further mediation in video, the way it has opened up many of my thoughts about cognition and also education in productive ways - has led to many questions. One question that interests me is how such a micro, differential, inorganic life of things - as in this magnolia event series - challenges the contemporary politics of cognitive models (by which I mean the way in which models of thought that do not often begin relationally seem to invade more and more of contemporary culture, and not without political impact). Whitehead puts this in terms of dogs, not flowers, when he he accepts even the value of error (in symbolic reference) as something that can free the imagination. "We all know Aesop's fable of the dog who dropped a piece of meat to grasp at its reflection in the water. We must not, however, judge too severely of the error .. error in symbolic reference is the discipline which promotes imaginative freedom. Aesop's dog lost his meat, but he gained a step on the road towards a free imagination". Looking forward to dropping the meat (luckily there is a very good vegetarian restaurant nearby), trying to grasp the reflections in the water, making mistakes in symbolic reference and freeing the imagination at Dancing the Virtual.