Session Information
29 SES 14, Research Workshop: Game Structures & Situations
Research Workshop
Contribution
Mediatised, postdigital contemporary performances claim for new kinds of writing techniques and texts that integrate multiple languages, artistic crossings and interceptions with new technologies and scientific knowledge (Causey, 2016; Morris & Swiss, 2006; Cubitt, 1998). Arte Total- a Portuguese artistic structure - is focused in exploring new modes of artistic creation, involving digital technologies and alternative modes of writing for performance, through practice-as-research methodologies (Nelson, 2006). We propose to describe, illustrate and analyse critically the use of these methodologies and mediaturgies (Marranca, 2010) in a commented live demonstration/ workshop of these methodological approaches for artistic creation and research. The team of creators of diverse artistic and scientist origins, base their artistic research and aesthetics is Nietzschean and Deleuzean concepts of posthuman subjectivities, and are inspired by Lacanian psychological linguistic approach. This particular research aims to explore the link between psychomotor processes of thought, writing and movement. Each of these processes are actions involving more or less visible cognitive and physical components. The underlying search is to know how a creative dance process can be translated/ transformed into writing and thought, and its opposite: how writing and thought can be translated into creative dance. How they influence each other?
Method
A procedure was introduced to sequence the connection between thought, writing and movement. The aim was to trying to nullify their differences, to bring them closer together, to break the boundaries between them, by equalizing time and procedures for each process. It was sought to force the body to be as faster as thought, and thought as spontaneous as the most thoughtless movements.The procedure defines an endless sequence of periods of 10 s. to think, 10 s. to write and 10 s. to move. This algorithm has produced fluidity between the different processes of thought, writing and movement, creating a disinhibiting or liberating automatism that intensifies the connection of the inner and outer processes of the performer in an endless feedback. Performers become faster. Processes become closer and more interconnected. The act of writing becomes an extension of body movement - ”merging the body with writing” using Jean-Luc Nancy´s expression (2008) - just as thought becomes an extension of movement and writing. Improvisation becomes easy and spontaneous; the panic of the blank sheet disappears. In addition to encoding, in a code invented by themselves - their thoughts-movements - the performers must also decode the signs and codes of other performers, interpret them and translate them into movement-thoughts. Throughout this procedure the performers become machines of codification and decoding of signs, corresponding to thoughts-movements and evoking the machine concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Bogard, 2009). A new language is created. It is therefore an open, ever-living language that is constantly transformed in every new decoding, translation, interpretation and recoding. The performer uses that language to rewrite and reinvent him/herself, keeping in renewed movement, in connection with other performers and feeding on their contributions. Thus constructs a new world through a rhizomatic procedure, exceeding inherent structures of thought and movement, as if trying to produce the unconscious (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Conley, 2009). Performers are now poised for new stimuli and improvisational challenges. They will be surprised with a video. It is a mediatized stimulus that will be integrated into this creative process. How will they decode, translate and embody?
Expected Outcomes
This research falls within the mediatised, postdigital contemporary performance searching for new kinds of writing techniques and texts that integrate multiple languages, artistic crossings and interceptions with new technologies and scientific knowledge (Causey, 2016; Morris & Swiss, 2006; Cubitt, 1998). However, it assumes a critical and reflexive position in its experimental way looking for forms of artistic and political resistance. The way the performers construct their own language is an example of these acts of resistance. They create and renegotiate their codes constantly, while producing and receiving new signs, to encode and decode. They create an open, fluid language that they produce, which gives them agency, authorship and creative power. For Jacques Lacan (1975), our reality is constituted by language, and it is this matrix that constitutes us as subjects, but also that educates us, subjugates, dominates and oppresses us (Evans, 1996). However, it is possible through art to create a new language and with it agency and power. Michel Foucault (1975) argues that power-knowledge regimes define, through discourse, the limits within which the subject thinks and deliberates. However, it cannot prescribe the specific content of any particular thought or action. (Hoy, 1986). And, therefore, there is space to resist and to autonomy, which is related, to a large extent, to the capacity for critical reflection. In this research, the agency of performers in freely creating and re-creating codes and signals, allows us to reflect on and denounce control processes related to postdigital culture, and to explore ways of resisting them.
References
Bogard, W. (2009). Deleuze and Machines: A politics of technology? In M. Poster & D. Savat, Deleuze and New Technology, pp. 15-3. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Causey, M. (2016). Postdigital performance. Theatre Journal, 63, 3, 427-441. Conley, V. A. (2009). Of rhizomes, smooth space, war machines and new media. In M. Poster & D. Savat, Deleuze and New Technology, pp. 32-44. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cubitt, S. (1998). Digital aesthetics. London: Sage. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (trans.) B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, D. (1996). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London & NY: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir. Paris: Edition Gallimard. Hoy, D. (1986). Power, repression, progress: Foucault, Lukes and the Frankfurt School. In D. Hoy (Ed.), Foucault: A critical reader, pp. 123-147. Oxford: Blackwell. Lacan, J. (1975). Le Séminaire XX: Encore. In Jacques-Alain Miller (Ed.), Le Séminaire. Livre XX. Encore, 1972–73. Paris: Seuil. Marranca, B. (2010). Performance as design the mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s firefall. PAJ, 96, 16–24. Morris, A. & Swiss, T. (Eds.) (2006). New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge and London: The Mit Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008). Corpus. (trans.) Richard A. Rand. New York: Fordham University Press. Nelson, R. (2006): Practice-as-research and the Problem of Knowledge. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 11(4), 105-116.
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