[NetBehaviour] Viola and Reverberant Space

[Alan Sondheim]

You're absolutely right here, of course, and it's why we do as much live 
as possible; at least for ourselves in the Cave, the tactile is critical. 
But I also work in virtual worlds and am interested in mixed reality 
performance online, just as I'm interested in film and video for example, 
or these email lists for that matter. So for me, it's bye-bye to you 
perhaps for Oculus Rift and probably AR (which is what Google Glass 
produces), but for me, they're critical although unaffordable; there's an 
economics at work. But of course to see your performance/production, I 
would also have to travel, and there's an economics in that as well. (We 
tend to do as much as possible for free of course, but there's still the 
getting there.) As examples, the Alps work we did with Foofwa, which 
involved dancing with the very low frequency (VLF) radio antennas near the 
Aletsch Glacier - the experience was amazing, but on another level so was 
the video. Perhaps the holodeck will eventually produce tactility as well, 
but that's not currently available. So what you're talking about, for me, 
slides into issues of economics, sponsorship, travel opportunities, and so 
forth, and I have to deal with, as do you and everyone, with what's 
available to us; being outside the institution (I don't want to make too 
much of this), I do what I can, which may not be enough of course.

- Alan

On Thu, 9 Oct 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote:

>
> 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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