Archive for science
March 29, 2008 at 4:20 am · Filed under studio, media, video, teaching, TONY, dance and technology, science, space, physics, apples, computer graphics, opengl, education, performance, school, pedagogy, astronomy, learning, hermes, arts, double feature, animation
Last month I wrote a guest post on Matt Gough’s blog quodlibet titled math skills. It addressed the question of what fundamentals of physics and mathematics should be included in the dance technology curriculum.
Since dance-tech is in its infancy and still forming as a field this is an open question. This issue is not simply about inserting math and science into an arts curriculum but more so about how these two worlds partner. The action is reciprocal, math and science inform the dance and dance-tech provides new ways of knowing math and physics.
Force is one of the central landmarks of physics pedagogy. Gravity is Newton’s force.
And to use the force you must learn the force.
Simulation is a great way to learn about forces.
So is dancing.
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October 22, 2007 at 12:47 pm · Filed under studio, architecture, technology, TONY, science, theatre, space, dance technology, visible, stage, video cube, sarah lawrence college, you, politics, set design, performance, school, michel foucault, discipline, dance house, design, audience, intermission, ASHLEY, performance space, theory, art installation, THE ( INTER ) MISSION, social network
Over the past few weeks of my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College, the students and I have been programing, dissecting and repurposing surveillance systems to develop mediated performance outlets/environments. To aid and inform our strategies in this project we have been thinking and reading about panopticism.
What is panopticism anyway? wiki wiki
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical architecture imagined in the 1780’s, is illustrated above. The name literally means the “all-seeing place.” He describes it as a multi-purpose architecture whose design principles are applicable to constructing factory, school, prison, hospital or asylum. A multi-story ring of individual cells surround a central watchtower; every cell is visible from the watchtower while the watcher remains invisible.
The viewer can see everything while remaining invisible.
This panoptic prison named Presidio Modelo, built under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado in Cuba, once held the one and only Fidel Castro. It is now a national monument.
Foucault uses the Panopticon to analyze the new ways in which power is exercised in the modern world and the role surveillance technologies play in creating a disciplined/docile body. He describes Bentham’s architecture as a kind of multi-staged performance space.
The unverifiable possibility that a subject is being observed at any time is the essential mechanism by which the machine operates. Visibility, as Meghan noted in class, makes one take responsibility for their own subjection.
He who is subjected to the field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play simultaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. Discipline and Punish 202
What does this have to do with performance? Everything…
Foucault describes the stacks of cells; “They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
In one way the panopticon is like a super-theater, a nesting of many stages.
However Foucault stresses that surveillance architectures are exactly the reverse of those of theater. He writes, “We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine.” Survellence allows one to see many while theater and spectacle is based on many seeing one
Compare the structure of the Panopticon to that of the Globe Theater.
Different yet the same. Definitely involved in a complex tangle.
This assembly can be used as a dance technology. On April 28th and 29th 2007 Martha Williams directed and performed in a dance installation entitled Stacked, converting an out of business clothing store into a surveillance menagerie. Each dancer took residence in one of nine changing rooms which they themed and designed the interiors of. Camera feeds from each cell were composed and projected in the central room so that all of the dances could be seen at once.
Turning the panopticon back into a performance space constitutes a double reversal.
With this in mind, take another look at the dance-cube I prototyped last fall. In this staging the cameras are on the perimeter of the studio so that the gaze is directed from the outside in (as in theater) rather than from the inside out.
Though still, looking at this dance I am reminded of the cells of the panopticon.
“They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
Could we characterize the structure of the internet as panoptic? Here is a great essay that explores that question.
This very space is haunted by panoptic geometries. Have a look at the contributor list in the sidebar, look at all those little faces, “perfectly individualized” subjects you can see all at once and may click on to reveal “so many small theaters.”
The design of social networking and internet dating sites, showing all your friends faces in an array, seduces us with a kind of panoptic fantasy, being able to see many at once. This is where things become slightly more complicated. Just like the panopticon embeds tiny theaters in an array, these social technologies embed so many small panopticons in a matrix of connectivity. Each cell is now its own theater and watchtower.
All these ideas should not creep us out. Rather, they should inform our thinking about performance and visibility and the way technology provides new venues for artistic expression. It is an open problem. In my estimation projects like Martha William’s Stacked, my dance-cube, or The(Inter)Mission are all part of a project to reverse-the-panopticon. While flirting with aspects of surveillance and making the subject hyper-visible, they enhance communication rather than simply separate us into little boxes.
So next time you feel like you are under surveillance consider it an opportunity to put on a show.
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May 26, 2007 at 2:42 am · Filed under SLOAN, ballet, events, science, mobile, maya angelou, museum of natural history, flavorpill, astronomy
Posted by Sloan | via mobile phone
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May 26, 2007 at 2:37 am · Filed under SLOAN, events, science, mobile, museum of natural history, astronomy, flavorpill.net, robert redford
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May 13, 2007 at 7:58 pm · Filed under dance, dance event, dancers, friends, TONY, science, space, sarah lawrence college, choreographer, performance, community, project, sara rudner, process
Posted by Tony Schultz
Happy mother’s day! Today my dance-mom, Sara Rudner, is presenting an afternoon of music and dance in Dancing-On-View (Preview/Hindsight) at the Baryshnikov Art Center from 5 - 9 PM. Sara describes the work as a “marathon installation in non-theatrical time and space in a celebration of dance and dancers. The audience, free to come and go throughout the event, is invited to stand or sit, and determine the length of the experience.” I went to an open rehearsal this past Wednesday. Tonya Plank went this past Friday. Her account of the work can be read here.
Sara invited me to a rehearsal of the project back in March. The work, first shown in 1975, presents dance as a practice more than a performance. For Sara moving is something worth doing more than seeing. In this way the rehearsal has as much meaning as the final performance. I felt joy in knowing many of the dancers. The dancers included Rocky Bornstein (Kristin’s physical therapist), Megan Boyd, Linda Cohen, Erin Cornell, Erin Crawley-Woods, Laurel Dugan (who I have introduced to you before), Maria Earle (friend and former graduate student of history with my mother Priscilla Murolo) , Liz Filbrun, Peggy Gould (Sarah Lawrence friend and faculty), Anneke Hansen, Patricia Hoffbauer, Rachel Lehrer, Merceditas Manago-Alexander (Sarah Lawrence friend and faculty), Sara Rudner, Vicky Shick (who presented Plum House at DTW), Maggie Thom (daughter of Rose Anne Thom, Sarah Lawrence friend and faculty) and Lori Yuill.
At the March rehearsal Sara Rudner had been kind enough to explain to me some of the compositional processes going on in the work. Much of the choreography is manifest through performing variational operations on phrases of movement. These compositional variations can be considered as transformational mappings of movement in both space and time. Reversal, for example, maps the right side of the body to the left side of the body. This can be thought of as reflecting movement across the sagittal plane of the body. Inversion generally maps the front side of the body to the back side of the body, in effect,a reflection of movement across the frontal plane of the body. Retrograding a phrase of movement runs it backwards in time, creating a reflection across the time axis. Many more kinds of operations can be used to transform movement, including moving it in space (translation) and changing the facing (rotation).
As Sara described these techniques I was struck how theories of physics used these same ideas. When physicists build theories of the world they characterize these theories by their symmetries in space and time. For example, to theorize the behavior of particles we want that behavior to be independent of where we perform the measurement. Smashing two electrons together should have the same effect so matter if we do it here or there. This is called translational invariance. The effect should also be independent of how our system is oriented in space. This is called rotational invariance or isotropy. The symmetry of a system in mapping right to left and left to right (as Alice does as she goes through the looking glass) is called parity invariance. For simple particle theories reversing a physical system in time yields another physically realizable system. This is called time-reversal symmetry.
The lesson in this way of thinking is that when we know a dance we automatically know all of the dances that can be manifested from this dance through these variational techniques. In physics we know that for a theory to be “good” its mathematics must obey the same symmetries that we observe in the physical phenomenon we are trying to characterize.
In watching the rehearsal/performance of Dancing-On-View one is struck by great deal of thinking being done by the dancers. This recasts the dancing (female) body as no longer just an object to be studied but as the site of the production of knowledge. Sara Rudner’s work and creative approach invites one to see dance as a research practice very close to science. The knowledge produced from this work cannot be fully translated to the viewer. These physical insights are things that must be experienced. In this way Dancing-On-View is much more than a mere performance, it is an invitation to dance physical theory.
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April 2, 2007 at 12:23 am · Filed under dance, rehearsal, TONY, science, research, education, politics, sara rudner, michel foucault, choreography, discipline
| | Posted by Tony Schultz
Last week Sara Rudner invited me to sit-in on a rehearsal for Dancing-on-View: Preview/Hindsight. Rehearsal is such a rich environment. Watching everyone focused and communicating, physically and verbally, in a well lit studio is different than watching a performance. It involves problem solving and systematic thinking in much the same way that a scientist works in the laboratory. Rehearsal is a research and development practice. This makes perfect sense as dance, I believe, is a form of science.
I watched the rehearsal to with Sara’s son, Eli. He is a computer scientist, physicist, martial artist and just about to graduate from college. For the first half of the rehearsal Eli and I spoke about programming languages, computer vision, and augmented reality, mostly techie stuff. Then our conversation began to drift, as if directed by the moving bodies in front of us.
The topic turned to from electronic to more abstract technologies, namely techniques for imposing discipline over the body and how they relate to dance. I invoked the name of Michel Foucault. In his book Discipline and Punish, he systematically describes the modern emergence of these technologies of power over the body. His treatment includes a historical and critical presentation of what I will call choreographies of power. This includes: military choreography (marching and weapon manipulation), pedagogical choreography (unison seating of students on command etc), incarceral choreography (strict control of prisoner in time and space by strict schedule and segmentation in cells) and productive choreography (examination and encouragement of physical efficiency in productive labor).
Though Foucault never refers to dance explicitly, or choreography, it seems that his philosophy of power and the body is intimately connected to ideas about dance. Dance is a discipline and choreography requires a technique of power over the body. Indeed technique is what gives the dancer power over their own body. In this way the dancer is always simultaneously bound and set free by their technique. Is this a fundamental contradiction?
Watching the rehearsal from this particular theoretical perspective made Eli and I giggle since it brought, by analogy, comparison between Sara and the associated power personas of the drill sergeant, school master, prison warden and factory manager. I always have this vision of the old-school ballet mistresses who would walk around with a cane and use it to illicit disciplined limb work. Though she did shush Eli and I at one point in our conversation, Sara is definitely not one of the above mentioned whip-cracking dance masters. She is, in fact, one of the most kind and generous people I have had the pleasure of knowing. She is also very interested in critiques of power and ways of disrupting its formations. Sara knows that dance is about power.
This line of thinking clearly needs more development. In my next post I will try to describe the work I observed at the rehearsal and relate it to ideas from physical theory. I have started seeing many similarities between dance and physics, the two pure forms of physical science.
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