[NetBehaviour] Sound in the construction zone / Telepresence & Migration with Alter egos.

Johannes Birringer (Staff) Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk
Fri Jun 14 19:14:56 CEST 2019


Dear Alan, and all:

thank you for your response, and I also wish to thank Annie Abrahams for being so positive & allowing me to show images and excerpts from Distant Movement #11 in Romania.

Alan your remembering mocap, and of course all your experiences working with avatars and modified "bodies" in virtual space -- this makes me pause, as in one sense we seem to have progressed mercilessly (not myself, i mean the technoculture, gadget makers, drone builders, roboticists and engineers out there), while on the other hand, Hito Steyerl remarks, we are inside 'absence management" during our 'junk time commitments" (Duty Free Art, p. 26, chapter on "The Terror of Total Dasein"), and "acceleration is yesterday's delusion" (p. 24).  

So, looking back at my old tapes again, circa 1999, 2000,  i remember fiddling with mocap for the first time, having also noted that some of the more well known choreographers (Merce Cunningham, Bill T Jones) at the time took an interest in mocap and animation; Bill's "Ghost Catching" (created with Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar on the software side) came out in 1999, and I remember Bill being worried that the animation does not quite look like his fabulous black body.  Well, to my immense bafflement, Bill T Jones has been lured back (by Google), to do a little more dancing testing, now with AI and machine learning mocap, a system called PoseNet.  It is a funny and slightly disconcerting video demo, with three dancers he brought with him, here:  https://billtjonesai.com/   He is still worried that the machine can't affect emotion.

Anyone working with PoseNet, wanting to hook up with the DAP-Lab, to do some unemotional tests? please let me know, for the fun of it.

I remember the other day having longer chats with Alter 3 (Offloaded Agency), a robot featured at The Barbican Centre's new show, "AI: More than Human" - 
see photo attached. Well actually, Alter 3 didn't talk; he moved his arms incessantly, while I waited for his machine learning AI to kick in and see me, respond, interact with me. I tried for 20 minutes, and noted a minute change in his left wrist and his right forefinger gesticulations (it has no legs, pelvis, and no shoulders to speak of, the eyes are small cameras, no hair). Actually, the chat then ensued between Takashi Ikegami (one of the engineers/programmers suddenly present), and I'm informed the Alter 3 operates mainly on 2 modes, conscious (awake) one, when it sees and its camera sends info to the machine learning part/algorithmic translation that moves the limbs; unconscious (sleep) mode when it closes its eyes and keeps moving the arms in preprogrammed sustainable memory mode. Isn't that wonderful. The trouble is I can't see much of a difference between awake- and asleep-machine, but I'm biased, of course, in my enfeebled rage against the machine. 

regards
Johannes Birringer
co-director, DAP-Lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap

________________________________________
From: NetBehaviour <netbehaviour-bounces at lists.netbehaviour.org> on behalf of Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>
Sent: 14 June 2019 17:36
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
Cc: Alan Sondheim
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Sound in the construction zone / Telepresence & Migration

I find all of this fascinating and the fluid ontologies of performers and locations remind me of the work I've done with mocap, although that's bound in one visual/sonic space, grounded there; if there were a way to project / work with the altered mocap at a distance w/ AR it would be amazing, the transportation of ruins. Thank you for sharing!

Best, Alan




On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 11:02 AM Johannes Birringer (Staff) <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk<mailto:Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>> wrote:
dear all,
having just seen the amazing list of events on the further-list, I recalled the conversation we had on Sound in the construction zone; several of you responded to me;  & I had promised a small Bucharest diary, and here comes:

"Telepresence and Migration" took place May 30 at CINETic (International Center for Research and Education in innovative creative technologies, part of UNATC
National University of theatre and film), located right behind the National Theatre, and across from the University Square where last year we took part in the Pride Parade and demo. The event was organized by theatre director Marina Hangaru, who works at the Teatrul George Ciprian (Buzãu). Marina and artist colleagues between Romania, Spain and Portugal had engaged in an EU (Creative Europe Program) project dealing with the effects of economic migration on families (and especially children). Marina co-directed a telematic and live streamed performance with actors in Romania and Spain (in the 2 distant locations), performed multiple times also in front of physical audience in the two locations. It was a full length play, titled "Planet of Lost Dreams":

https://youtu.be/qujWr_5b_Cw

The event in Bucharest brought some of the participating artists together, alongside sociologists and researchers who addressed the problematics of migration, whereas some additional guests (ironically from the UK) - after Bianca Floarea had sketched the landscape of cultural cooperation in Europe outlining who is eligible for grants and who might be partially or non-eligible (Moldova, Macedonia, Ukraine, Uk after Brexit..) -  were asked to comment on telepresence and networked performance.  Marina spoke eloquently on the concept of telepresence in view of the results of the "Tele-Encounters" project, filtered through the lens of New Media studies and New Media Dramaturgy. How do you build a telematic performance from ground zero, integrating technology to tell a coherent story? She analyzed the “levels of organization” of "The Planet of Lost Dreams" telematic performance, trying to establish how and if telepresence can change our understanding of the theatre (or media) and vice-versa. The project was performance oriented but also sociological, with audience questionnaires revealing intriguing insights into how the performance was perceived, offering potential starting points in articulating a dramaturgy of the telematic spectator. Marina also mentioned a phase 2 project (the participants’ sense of presence in the 360° short films created by Portuguese artists as part of the project).

Later in the afternoon Alexandru Berceanu (who is director of CINETic) presented his own fieldwork, a fascinating VR project called ATINGE (Touch) -  through which you can experience the life and culture of Roma people. Based on documentary work in segregated and non-segregated Roma communities in Romania, Turkey, Italy, and Sweden, the project provides insight into the challenges and successes of Roma individuals of different religions and from different countries as seen by themselves.
(In Europe, families or large groups of people live in precarious and temporary conditions, often without access to water minimal sanitation, or minimal safety. TOUCH is an invitation to empathy, Alexandru told us).

In my own talk, following Andy Lavender's more philosophical reflections on "taking time" in telepresence, I tried to re-visit my early telematic dance work in 2001-03 which I could barely find amongst my old digital tapes, it looks clunky and yet viscerally complex at the same time, working with dancers on live feed cameras mixing 5 to 7 sites in the USA, Brasil and Japan at a time when we were still learning how to use the internet for such collaboration. I then compared 'Planet of Lost Dreams' (a naturalist theatre play meshed up telematically) to other contemporary networked performances, e.g. Annie Abrahams' recent "Distant Movement 11", the Station House Opera collaborative telepresence work "At Home in London and Gaza", and finally a surreal dance piece I saw at Tanzhaus Düsseldorf last month, Eric Minh Cuong Castaing's "Phoenix"

https://vimeo.com/318882496


which was performed with three French dancers and drones, and a live link too Gaza too where Palestine performers showed us their parcours on the rooftops, under drone eyes.  It was actually an amazing work that also caused me to think hard about where surveillance or camera-feed life is moving: "Sur scène, trois danseurs et des drones sèment le trouble. Évoquant à la fois les avions téléguidés de notre enfance comme les nouvelles armes meurtrières des guerres technologiques du XXIe siècle, les drones (« gros bourdon » ou « bourdonnement », selon la terminologie anglo-saxonne) sillonnent la scène et interagissent avec les danseurs. Exposés à leur vrombissement incessant, ces derniers évoluent dans un espace tour à tour sensible, terrain d’opérations ou fenêtre sur le monde, connectés en temps réel avec d’autres artistes subissant, à Gaza, la présence permanente de ces machines..."

have a look at Minh's short trailer, and you will also be surprised how topical such work might be in relation, say, to the work that Eyal Weizman & Forensic Architecture have done in counter surveillance and media excavations of settlements, architecture, politics, and violence, & a new mapping of the (telepresent) connections between climate change, drought, drones, armed conflict.


respectfully
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap

photos show the young actress Andreea Darie (who plays the daughter in "Planet") and Marina Hanganu introducing us.













________________________________________
From: NetBehaviour <netbehaviour-bounces at lists.netbehaviour.org<mailto:netbehaviour-bounces at lists.netbehaviour.org>> on behalf of marc.garrett via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org<mailto:netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>>
Sent: 11 June 2019 11:42

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