Culture Rover

thinking through the digital & the body.

Digital Incarnate: The Body, Identity, and Interactive Media, an exhibition at Columbia College, features multiple paths to the place where the corporeal and virtual meet. This is a place with a long history: humans have been pondering the body and the mind, the physical and the mental, for millennia. But it’s also a new place: a site in which the technologies of the digital both echo older histories and point-click toward unknown destinations.

Digital Incarnate @ The Arcade Gallery, Columbia College Chicago, February 8 – April 2, 2010.

Two of the displays—Luftwerk‘s Doppelgänger and Troika Ranch‘s Liquid Mirror—are playful and fun. They pull the viewer’s body into the digital through shadow play, silhouettes, and light shows. Actual limbs and their visual extensions blur on a dark screen in Luftwerk’s piece and flickers of light in Troika Ranch’s vertical screens.

One thinks Marshall McLuhan here, but also, glimpsing darker shadows in the shadow and light, x-ray scanners at the airport and other modes of surveillance. The body seemed to evaporate into the digital in these pieces in ways that were at first frolicsome, but increasingly ominous: the body etherealized, but also filled with foreboding.

OpenEnded Group‘s Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar lean toward the traditions of animation in their collaborations with Bill T. Jones and Merce Cunningham. The OpenEnded pieces—Ghostcatching and Hand-drawn Spaces—are striking for how much they reproduce the signature styles of these two famous choreographers in digital form.

As Kaiser explained in his talk, the transformation of Jones’ body to the digital realm revealed his muscular, flowing, vibrant dance style (the markers to record Jones’s dancing body would literally rip off as he moved). When OpenEnded Group combined the motion of a male and female dancer in a Cunningham piece, the angular, skeletal aspects of Cunningham’s choreography remained. They were even accentuated by the merging of two actual bodies into one digital body. Cunningham’s already-abstract emptying out of subjectivity and control from his dancers’ bodies were even more ghostly and phantom-like as they flashed across three screens.

A final computer station features a collaboration between the choreographer William Forsythe and  researchers at Ohio State University. Synchronous Objects, a complex digitalization of Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced, feels like a lab report, but one that is endlessly entertaining. One Flat Thing becomes quite multidimensional, almost overwhelmingly so—it is indeed reproduced. The user can instruct the computer to map out different aspects of the dance: traces of the dancers’ limbs, the negative space between the dancers, particular relationships between different dancers, and more.

I’m not sure if it’s art or science, or both, but it is something. One plugs into the matrix, in control of data that may lead to new programs of the very self. As fingers manipulate a dance of virtual space, bodies may simply become like so many other buttons, knobs, dials, and touch screens that we use to move between the flesh itself and our machines. Or, perhaps, at the module, our bodies tap into a grid we never knew we already occupied. We begin to glimpse a secret map of the place where inside and outside might merge in what essayist Sondra Fraleigh calls “the elusive soma,” the “body mysterium.”

Choreography has become cartography. We reach the edge of skin at the synapses of the circuit board, and feel, for a moment, sitting in front of a boring screen, waiting for a video to upload, the electrifying shock of watching the material leap into the virtual—what is becoming what might be.

koosil-ja/dancekumiko’s algorhythms.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. – Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”

Blocks of Continuality/Body, Image, and Algorithm, Koosil-ja/danceKUMIKO‘s multimedia dance performance, explores “the coexistence of the digital and flesh worlds” to dramatize “the potential of a dynamically networked body situated in digital environment.”

At first you are drawn to the screens onstage, trying to grasp how the dancers are “playing” them, but soon this grows frustrating, and you realize that it makes much more sense to watch the dancers themselves, and the ways they are registering the onslaught of images and sounds. But even that starts to lose its centrality. One is ultimately left in a Benjaminian “state of distraction,” lost in the dizzying architecture of the digital network, bodies dancing through in fragmented bits and bytes.

In the opening series of pieces, images of traditional dancers, advertisements, famous paintings and sculptures, and other material flash up on the screens and the dancers cut and paste movements together from these digital sources. A girl kicks her foot against a wall, repeatedly. And the dancers follow suit. An African tribal ceremony shifts to a Picasso nude to an advertisement for cigarettes. The dancers seek to lose themselves—and the audience—in the gestural mix. It is not altogether unlike Merce Cunningham’s Cage-ian efforts to choreograph dance by improvisatory chance rather than controlled design. One is not surprised to learn that Hwang studied with Cunningham.

The final piece of the performance grows more intriguing when the dancers attach digital sensors to their bodies, and musician Geoff Gersh plays a large thumping pneumatic bar with his brain waves (also by digital sensor). Here the give and take between digital and flesh promises to be most “dynamically networked.” However, the results are a bit disappointing. The screens feature rather stereotypical “virtual world” imagery and the relationship between dancer movements and digital screens is predictable. The cyborg at this dance turns out to be a wallflower.

What is oddly the most compelling moment is when the dancers, musician, and technicians alike incorporate the wiring up of technology into the performance itself. The choice to lay bare the process of getting into digital gear, calibrating the equipment’s remote control capacities, and verbally announcing when the dance is about to begin (“Ready, ready, ready, go,” the call goes round) made visible the complex coordinations required in all networks. The digital, this Brechtian moment suggested, is above all else social.

It is indeed the sociality of the digital network that Koosil-ja and danceKUMIKO start to summon into heightened form. This sociality is where the flesh and the digital meet. The social body is between the buttons, on the beams, and in a digital ether whose long tail turns out to be embodied itself: it’s the foot of a young woman kicking against a wall.