Re: waving

Johannes H. Birringer (j.birringer@nwu.edu)
Fri, 03 Oct 1997 00:58:44 -0500

Welcoming [back] the mistakingly unsubscribed and waving at the the newly
drancing members on our list,
I want to think about/remember Amanada's dancers and actors, as she compares
choreography/scripting process to html:

>>The coding is in a way pure, human body moving in time and space, without
>>the additional codyfication of language, but complex, because the human
>>body with all it's experiences and histories is complex.

>>new thought:
>> html scripting: codes linking information together to create a surface -
>>a "face". A simple action changes the "face" in a second.
...
>>Memories placed in a machine,....- which
>>MUST be connected in a network ... by a human,
>>and collected by a body who knows their memory is located throughout the
>>body and not just in the brain.

>>I say we are already soaked in technology - u can't add it, but u can add
>>more.

I like this image of waving through scripted multimedia facemaking that
changes and is connected through networks of other bodies and
consciousnesses and their ways of reading a changing face (who am I? and why
do I go here?). But the analogy is not entirely convincing, I am not sure,
since the face on the screen, changing, is - as you say - a surface and not
a body. The additional, accumulative (hypertext, multimedia) codification
creates a certain complexity, perhaps a certain rhythm (as we experience our
on-line exchanges and the assemblages of pages, realvideo, clips staggering
onto our little faces), but we might need to talk about the complexity of
surfaces. And the still relevant distinctions of the dancers waving at
people (in front, or behind), and I am thinking here of the stills (the
slides) that I was able to see of Stephan Bryant Park Webbedfeats, and the
jerky scenes of the live clips of Faust-in-the-Park. My computer was playing
a frustrating game with me, I couldn't get a sense of the event at all, and
I stared at a frozen face. I think one can say, well, I have to add/upgrade,
make the computer work faster, so it approximates full motion video.

[Question to our membership: this event was prepared at length, mentioned
so often, with passon, and nobody has commented one syllable on it? how so?]

I think we'd then have to discuss the game of approximations. The soaking is
fine, I agree with Amanda, but I am not sure about the adding more. I want
to be careful about what is happening to the attention to the adding, and
the concentration that allows me to look or wave, and perhaps see why the
face has changed and my body impacted or my consciousness moved in another
direction. I am not an information collector, and I notice that my audiences
are not necessarily into collecting either. How is hightech dance or theatre
collected-experienced........[Scott mentions "Moving Target," a very
problematic work for me, and he suggests:
>The choreography 'on the floor' is reflected
>and visually takes on more dimensions on the mirror than the standing work,
>which takes on the flattened visual appearance of floor work....

mmmmmmh. I think that's an interesting example of simple overcoding, double
coding (refractions and kaleidoscopic effects, very flashy and not very
interesting to me).

Also, the stimulation and the filtering varies, depending on the venue, I
think in a drancing situation or a disco or on the street it's different. On
the stage the waving gets complicated when you have simultaneous waving of
images of waving with the wavers. So often this becomes reductive (to the
folks on the floor, the ones who stand there when the computer crashes).

But still I have utterly no idea what Stephan's dancers in the flower beds
were waving at.

greetings from a hot late summer in Texas,
Johannes Birringer
DDA Studio, Houston