[NetBehaviour] Viola and Reverberant Space

[Johannes Birringer]

Being skeptical, I would venture to argue that it won't work, at least not the part
that I was particularly interested in: the reverberation.  You mention your
colleague Foofwa dancing, in that environment, and you played in it and
your microphone picked up the sound, the tremors and oscillations. 

My interest lies in following through this experience of the resonation (tactile/haptic/kinetic
and aural) and going deeper than skin, "beneath the surface of the event" as performance
artist Victoria Gray calls it writing about a silent dance she performed
crawling backwards on the floor for a long time.... 

She remembers how she "wove in and out of the negative space between bodies in the room (picture). 
The ground became a surface with which to detect the movement of spectators as each shift in the room 
was sensed through my skin via my bare torso. At times, it felt that my bones were conducting and 
amplifying the minutest sound of people’s movements. As such, these movements were sensed through my body as vibrations, rather
than as visual information. My spine became a powerful aerial, conducting my peripheral senses. It
was my primary orienteering device; an interface that processed not visual but kinesthetic data. Put
simply it was as though each of the thirty three vertebrae in my spine became eyes, whilst the
31 pairs of spinal nerves acted as highly sensitized fingertips."

She of course argues that her performance called the primacy of visual senses
into question. 

In some of our own work with the DAP-Lab, and our constructions of
audiophonic wearables (costumes and costume-instruments), we were particularly interested
in how the garments, and the sound they make or enable to be generated (& amplified
or processed) shift attention and awareness to aural and tactile registers; we had scenes
also performed in near or complete darkness, and when we used light/electricity, in one
scene on the "generation of the electric", we work with heavy pure noise. 

And we continue to experiment with "noise dance", further limiting or restraining the projected "worlds" (screens)
we used to work with for a long time (film, video, photography, animation, 3d virtual worlds).
The resonant analog-audio dialogues between costume instruments hold out attention, we study those now,
and how the performers internalize their own sense of movement (if no external displacement 
across space is physically possible, if digital projections were de-placed or shrunk) and
feel affect .....

that is why I raised also my questions about affect. How do others make sense of the affective?


And so bye bye, Oculus Riff and Google Glasses and so on, their visualizations, i would have thought,
cannot cope with the reverberations, in fact have to eliminate them.


regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/forthetimebeing.html

(pic: Victoria Gray, Pressure Points (2011) (c) V Gray/Roshana Rubin-Mayhew.
reference:
Victoria Gray, "Beneath the Surface of the Event: Immanent Movement and the Politics of affective registers,"  Choreographic Practices 4:2 (2013), 173-87.

________________________________________
{Alan schreibt}

The question of Cave audience is critical in a way. It's possible for five
or six people to watch/participate at the same time, and larger caves have
the potential for larger audiences of course. That will come. There are
people working on exporting the whole environment using software that will
permit viewers to use tablets, laptops, etc. If viewers use Oculus Rift or
some such, they'd experience the 3d environment, only in front of them;
there are people doing this already with virtual worlds. I can imagine a
time shortly when augmented reality technology will permit a full-blown
projection into the 'real world' as well. All of this, like virtual worlds
themselves, are on the cusp of new development.

Foofwa danced in the Cave with Azure, and it was amazing. Soon. Whether or
not I'll have access depends on 'the kindness of strangers,' since I'm not
formally connected anywhere.

- Alan

On Wed, 8 Oct 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote:

>
> Dear Alan thanks for your replies. After reading you I realize that my
> questions about vibration were too much influenced by working in dance
> and theatre, forgetting how important, as you suggest, vibration and
> oscillation has been in music and sound art; 

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