Prepping for a talk from Johannes Birringer

Over the past year or so, I’ve been mulling ideas over in my mind surrounding the confluence of dance and movement, technology, business, psychology, anthropology, design, architecture…just many, many ideas. Not only has it been hard to keep these ideas straight for myself as I develop them, it’s also been very difficult for me to articulate my thoughts to others or to find research articles that reflect my thoughts. At one point, the best I was able to do was to create a semi-affinity diagram on notebook paper, with lines connecting all my terms to each other. Sadly, it just looked like a very sophisticated, yet abstract word find.

Searching for justification of my ideas was frustrating, and it was hard to find any information relating to what my interests were developing into. I knew there was something out there that must have had some relevance to my interests, but it was discouraging to come up empty so much. I had never come across it anything combining movement, performance, business, technology, and design it in any of the literature I was familiar with relating to human-computer interaction, or even user experience design.

Finally, sometime last year I found an editorial written by Johannes Birringer. It had been published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, on the Digital Cultures Lab, held at Brunel University in London in 2005. After I read it, I think I’m pretty much convinced that the man is a genius. Not only was he able to completely articulate everything that I had been trying so desperately to articulate, he had also figured out how to practice his theories, something that I can still barely imagine.

Tomorrow, in an event sponsored by Barnvelder Movement/Arts and Dance Source Houston, he will be in promoting his new(est) book and giving a presentation on the interrelationship of digital media art, performance, and choreography in his own choreography. In his talk, “he will address the recent history of dance and technology and the emergence of interactive art and bio art in an international context of art & science collaboration.” I had to reschedule my going away dinner, but this is an opportunity I cannot pass up.

Here’s what I had to say on his article, after sitting on it for months.

From the within the perspective of a cultural acceptance and embrace of digital technology, Johannes Birringer (2005) discussed the aesthetic impacts on traditional notions and classically held assumptions regarding dance and performance disciplines. The 2005 Digital Cultures Lab attempted to more clearly define the cultural effects of digital technology, “what digital cultures are, how software, design, programmability and discrete digital coding transform older continuous media, and how we can grasp art and performance within increasingly technological and globalised contexts in which we live” by facilitating “provocative” collaborative projects between disparate domain practitioners – e.g., interaction designers, fashion designers, choreographers, dancers, and software. It appears that although these collaborations produced interesting and intriguing projects, the lab concluded with lingering questions regarding the cultural and definitive meanings behind these collaborations. Despite this, I mark the Lab as a successful attempt at collaboration between dance and performance, and design and technology, and I seek to add to this work.

Tomorrow, I expect to be wowed.

“Birringer is artistic director of the Houston-based AlienNation Co. and directs the
Center for Contemporary and Digital Performance at Brunel University, London”

More info…

One thought on “Prepping for a talk from Johannes Birringer”

  1. After the talk, I became aware of three types of aesthetic experiences in interaction design and dance/movement – the aesthetic qualities of dance/movement; interactive aesthetics, more specifically focusing on the design aspects of the interaction and pattern libraries; and computational aesthetics. This last one came from an interaction between a dance and a computer program that would react/adapt to recognized human patterns. The reaction/adaption could be seen as aesthetic, but quite different from the interactive aesthetics or movement aesthetics.

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