interactive performance

Description (in English)

The Deer is a rhythmic, image-driven literary psychothriller about a physicist who hits — what appears — to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. This piece is an interactive text/recording and/or a performance piece which carries the user through the text line by line. As the narrator becomes more and more emotionally fraught, audio effects bend the narrator’s voice to the point of incoherence, mirroring the breakdown of language in the face of trauma.

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Description (in English)

Abra is an exploration and celebration of the potentials of the book in the 21st century. A collaboration between Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, Ian Hatcher, and a potentially infinite number of readers, the project merges physical and digital media, integrating a hand-made artist's book with an iPad app to play with the notion of the “illuminated” manuscript and let readers "hold the light" of language. In the artist’s book, the poems grow and mutate as the reader turns the pages, blurring the boundary between text and illumination, marginalia and body. Animating across the surface, the poems coalesce and disperse in an ecstatic helix of words, taking turns "illuminating" one another's margins and interstices.They play with the mutation of language, both by forming new portmanteaus and conjoined phrases, and also through references to fecundity as it manifests in the natural world, the body, human history, popular culture, decorative arts, and architecture, placing the shifting evolution and continuous overlap of all these spheres in dialogue with the ever-changing technology of the book. The iPad version of Abra, which provides a physical backdrop for the artist's book into which it is inserted, extends and revels in this ephemerality, putting special emphasis on interactivity to highlight the role of the reader. The poems spring to life onscreen: not only do they conjoin and separate, with a swipe of his or her finger, readers may join the collaboration and mutate the text further, creating new juxtapositions and surprising turns of phrase. Their texts provide scores for potential performances of the work, making Abra function much like the magic word of its origin–abracadabra–as an unpredictable living text. We are interested in both exhibiting the hybrid artist's book / iPad app and performing from the work. We would also be happy to give a presentation, if that is of interest. While the project is a collaboration between 3 people, only Amaranth and Ian are applying to present it. We both plan to attend the conference and are especially interested in the opportunity to expand the performative possibilities of the text, which to date has been performed by Kate and Amaranth in conjoined costume. Abra is being produced under an Expanded Artists’ Books Grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. The project will launch this spring. For exhibition, our piece requires an iPad running iOS7 and a podium. We can provide the artist's book. For performance, we can provide iPads and adapters. Amaranth Borsuk's books include Between Page and Screen and Handiwork. She teaches at the University of Washington, Bothell. Kate Durbin's books include The Ravenous Audience and E! Entertainment, among others. She teaches at Whitter College. Ian Hatcher is a text/sound artist and programmer living in New York.

(Source: Author's abstract)

This piece won the 2017 Turn on Literature Prize.

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Description (in English)

The application encourages user movements / act
and turn them into a / personal / own performance.
captures / records user interactions. 12 levels.

"ZYX uses the iPhone or iPod Touch's built-in motion-tracking capabilities to guide users through a series of gestures, from turning in a circle to raising one's arm up and down. Each time a gesture is performed correctly, the phone clicks; when all gestures have been completed, the device sounds an alarm in celebration. This app situates the user in a realm that is both virtual and physical. Bystanders see the user as performing a strange dance; in contrast, the iPhone observes and rewards the user's adherence to a prescribed set of movements. This dissonance between the virtual space inhabited by the iPhone user and the physical space occupied by the observer has become an everyday phenomenon, exemplified by the experience of passing someone on the street who appears to be delivering a nonsensical monologue while speaking into the microphone of a wireless mobile device."

(Source: http://zyx-app.com/)

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Description (in English)

Corposcopio is an experimental collaborative performance that associates circle dance and mobile technologies. The purpose of the interactive performance is to stimulate, simultaneously, the perception of the media in contemporary reality and the collective body emergence. Corposcopio departs from the experience of circle dance, a very ancient group activity, present in different cultures in the world, and aggregates real time image manipulation, software art, VJ, and remix aesthetics.

The transparent, ubiquitous and pervasive presence of computer systems in contemporary spaces is a quotidian fact. Nevertheless, the emergence of digital communities demonstrated the power of human factor in the disruptive use of technologies. Human beings are social beings. Our depart point is to bring an ancient practice, the circle dance, to the scenery of real time image manipulation, ubiquitous computing and mixed reality. The performance itself deals with co-creation development and uncertainty. Each performance has peculiar characteristics hence it is an open system, open to receive the group interaction and participation.

The circle is probably the oldest known dance formation. Ancient circle dances movements are cultural manifestations present in different countries around the world, including Greece, African, Eastern European, Irish Celtic, Catalan, South American, Central American and North American. They have a great power of community integration. The experience stimulates an extended consciousness, a simultaneously perception of the individual body and the collective body. Our hypothesis is that each group will catalyze the emergence of an embodied consciousness of our mediated situation in a different way. As Bernhard Wosien, one of the pioneer researchers on circle dance, has said, dance is a path to totality. In Wosien's view, circle dance has deep ritual characteristics and evokes a tremendous collective enthusiasm. In Corposcopio experience, we observed a great vibration produced by the group movement in harmony with the music. In Brazil, there is a lot of amazing circle dance and one of the most popular is called “ciranda”, whose movements are inspired by sea waves. Ciranda is performed by hundreds of people and some participants fall into trance.

The music has a fundamental role in Corposcopio project. The songs have been chosen by Andrea Leoncine and Andrea Soares, based on their research on folk music and Brazilian music. Dudu Tsuda has created new versions of traditional and folkloric songs, introducing unexpected accords and transformations on form. Tsuda's compositions are open systems that dialogue with enthusiasm and energy with the participants of the circle.

Corposcopio Project comprehends three different systems: the technological, the musical and the interactive arena, that is the place for the circle dance. The technological system is composed by systems of input and output. Two computers receive the images sent by mobile and unmovable devices. Wi-fi cameras, allocated in the dancers' bodies and cell phones transmit the images from the movable point of view. Three fixed cameras, situated around the circle and another one hanged on the ceiling provide the images from the unmoving angle. The camera situated on the ceiling transmits a design that reassembles different and dynamic mandalic patterns. The images received are manipulated in real time using Randox, software developed by Nacho Duran. The projection of images follows a script that has different levels and narrative elements.

(author description/statement)

Description (in original language)

O projeto Corposcopio é uma instalação cíbrida que integra dois mundos. Por um lado, os participantes são convidados a vivenciar uma atividade muito antiga e presente em diversas culturas do mundo: as danças circulares. A proposta é estimular a experiência da riqueza ritual presente nas danças realizadas em círculo, de mãos dadas. Tais danças têm uma grande capacidade de agregar pessoas em grupos colaborativos. Por outro lado, questões referentes ao cotidiano tecnológico são propostas a partir da utilização de imagens midiatizadas, bancos de dados e remixagens. Nesse sentido, Corposcopio utiliza elementos tais como câmeras de vigilância, tecnologias móveis, aparelhos de telefone celular, estética do banco de dados, projeções e manipulações de imagens em tempo real.

O projeto é composto por três sistemas que se integram na atividade. O primeiro, composto pelos sistemas de captação e manipulação de imagens em tempo real, evoca o mundo dos VJs, da software arte e das tecnologias móveis. Nesse mundo de imagens, todo o grupo dialoga e se integra em remixagens, releituras e fragmentos. O segundo compõe a paisagem sonora, ambiente vibracional que interage com os participantes, em um diálogo co-criatvo. O terceiro mundo é criado pela interação das coreografias e os corpos dinâmicos. Nas versões que realizamos, foi evidente a importância da presença das coreógrafas na interação inicial com os participantes, na maneira de abrir o convite e conduzir as explicações dos passos. Os diálogos vivenciados extrapolam os níveis verbais e alcançam níveis sutis, de olhares, posições dos membros, bem como movimentos respiratórios.

O projeto Corposcopio conjuga três níveis de relações. No primeiro, buscou-se trabalhar com a percepção e o estímulo dos sentidos. A vivência da dança circular é altamente poderosa no sentido de gerar uma percepção do corpo como elemento dinâmico dentro de um corpo maior, o corpo do grupo. A escolha de músicas também teve por objetivo gerar integração entre os participantes. A seleção envolveu: músicas tradicionais brasileiras (cirandas, jongos e cocos): e músicas tradicionais de várias culturas (grega, israelense, nórdicas, escocesas, colombianas, entre outras). A experiência também se reforça a partir da projeção das imagens de corpos dos participantes e da criação de um corpo colagem, composto por fragmentos de corpos e interferências gráficas relacionadas a narrativas pessoais. Todos esses aspectos compõem o nível estético.

O segundo nível corresponde aos atos vivenciados nas possíveis interações. O projeto parte de uma asserção de repudio à espetacularização e assim, o caráter interativo é incentivado e constituinte da proposta. Logo no início da atividade, os participantes são convidados a se aproximarem do espaço integrador e compor a roda. Várias vezes, as pessoas que não aceitam o convite acabam participando num segundo momento, ao perceberem o envolvimento dos demais. Uma outra possibilidade de ação diz respeito à atividade de registrar imagens dos corpos em movimento e enviar por Bluetooth para a mesa de imagens, onde operam os VJs.

O terceiro nível compreende as relações lógicas que os participantes estabelecem com o processo. A proposta tem por objetivo instigar a percepção das múltiplas dimensões nas quais nossos próprios corpos transitam e uma reflexão sobre a atual condição cíbrida em que vivemos. Em outras palavras, o projeto evoca o corpo como um índice nos bancos de dados dos sistemas de vigilâncias e nos sistemas de informação e, ao mesmo tempo, o corpo em movimento e como um elemento ativo na constituição do grupo. Nessa zona de interstício, nessa vivência nômade e cambiante, o projeto se realiza como um discurso de expansão de consciência, pois, por mais paradoxal que pareça, somos, ao mesmo tempo, agentes determinantes nos grupos que compartilhamos e peças duplicadas, corpos sem órgãos nos sistemas informacionais.

(descrição da artista)

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By Eric Dean Rasmussen, 18 June, 2012
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Abstract (in English)

This panel will deal with the relationship between extreme affect and electronic literature: How are pain, sex, and death _embodied_ in E-lit, virtual worlds, and textuality so that the abstract, for the reader, performer, or user, becomes empathetically embodied within hir? In other words, how can the skipping/skimming, which characterize the Net, be delayed, so that an actuality of politics and the body emerges? This panel will explore this and related issues. (Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

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The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street
New York City,
United States

Short description

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) presents an evening of multimedia, interactive performative-readings highlighting a broad range of born-digital literary forms, including game-inspired, collaborative, database, film/video, generative, and kinetic image work. The evening's presentations showcase five projects selected from the second Electronic Literature Collection, published in February 2011, and created by Oni Buchanan, Jhave, Illya Szilak, Sandy Baldwin, and collaborators Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, with videos by Paul Ryan.

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