INTERAKTIONSLABOR -THEORY / THEORIEN
no.1
spiff / unstablelandscape / Marlon Barrios Solano
no.5 Publication
the first book in Interaktionslabor Series of catalogues: Wechselwirkung
no.1
marlon
barrios solano
spiff/unstable landscape
SPIFF
is a forty minutes improvisational dance/multimedia piece that evolves from our
relation with the cinematic images, the constant becoming of our subjective experience
towards an apocalyptic retro-futuristic digital world of patterns of light. It
dwells in the clash between presence and speed, metaphors and patterns, love and
impermanence. SPIFF is the last incarnation of UNSTABLELANDSCAPE premiered May
20th at The Advanced Center for Computer Arts and Design/OSU/Columbus,Ohio.
In SPIFF, two dancers perform improvisational dance within a real-time interactive
digital multimedia environment. The performers are their own DJs and VJs using
traditional and non-traditional interfaces. I have developed a series of "landscapes"
that have unique, yet changeable characteristics in both the dance and their multimedia
deployment. The system is designed to offer a series of video and sound characteristics
specific to each section.
The
options of the system are generated by the combination and juxtaposition of a
limited set of real-time processes. The dancers improvise and the computer "improvises"
within a preprogrammed "controlled randomness." In SPIFF", I combine the use of
cameras for optic tracking and accelerometers connected to wearable wireless devices
made from hacked game controllers worn by the two dancers to modify sound and
image characteristics of the landscapes.
Optic
motion detection and tracking creates a constantly changing, yet contingent relationship
between the dance and the media. Sensors are used to trigger non-linear changes
on the media. SPIFF is the result of a series of experiments on generative/interactive
multimedia in which dance, digital image and sound are algorithmically manipulated
creating a mutable landscape and a hybrid improvisational system. The digital
artist, Phillip Galanter, writes that generative art refers to any art practice
where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a
computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is then set
into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed
work of art.
This
premise accurately describes what I attempt to do with dancers and computers.
It has been an important part of my research the integration of notions of improvisational
performance in dance improvisation, the portability of the digital DJ/VJ culture,
real time interactive technology with the bottom-up architecture approach in embodied
robotics. UNSTABLELANDSCAPE is a continuous process of investigation on the different
characteristics of the cognitive systems: openness-closure, feedback, self-reflexion,
materiality, symbolism and architecture.
SPIFF/UNSTABLE
LANDSCAPE V
Credicts:
Kristin Hapke, dancer
Nadine
Spray, costumes
Vita
Berezina-Blackburn, 3D/motion capture Specialist
Matt
Lewis, programming
JulieAnna
Facelli, media developer
Lighting: Lillian Gray
Concept,
direction, interactive design and performance by Marlon Barrios Solano
UNSTABLELANDSCAPE is my artistic and research platform to investigate and deploy:
-Dance improvisation within digitally augmented environments.
-The
dramatic tension between design and desire, abstract patterns and anthropomorphic
depictions.
-Real
time composition or improvisational performances with hybrid systems (humans,
computers and other living systems).
-The
improvisational creative act with generative strategies and systems.
-Alternative human-computer interfaces for dance performance and multimedia installations.
-Embodied,
embedded and distributed cognition.
-The relation between moving bodies, cognition, technology and the design of experiences
and realities.
-The
intelligence of biological systems and bottom-up or biologically inspired architectures
for art making and performance systems.
-The relation between improvisational digital pop-culture (DJ/VJ), art making
and social events/performances.
As
a dance/new media artist (dance improvisation, digitally augmented performance,
interactive installations, generative media) and a researcher (relationship between
socio-technological discourses about mind, intelligence and bodies and their instantiations
in dance training and compositional strategies), I am interested in an a trans-disciplinary
and "hands on" approach to understand improvisational systems, their intelligence
and aesthetics. As a director of improvisational performances, I have been developing
a model of performance of improvisation that enhances the skills needed by the
improviser, so as to handle simultaneously, the dynamic design of choreographic
composition and the ongoing generation of meaning with physical actions.
It
is a model that intersects algorithmic notions of movement and composition with
awareness/embodied training. It is focused on the interaction among performers,
as observers of their own actions and the movements and changes observed by the
audience. I integrate "real-time" interactive multimedia technologies (mainly
using MaxMSPJitter and alternative interfaces) to create environments where the
improvisation takes place.
I
develop digital contexts where I play with metaphors and physical tasks, inhabiting
them and recreating precise, yet mutable performative worlds. I amplify the dance
improvisation with improvisational multimedia environments. I attempt to reformulate
the investigation on dance and new media technology to an actualized paradigm
that takes into consideration new theories of cognition and embodiment, biological
models of intelligence, emergence and complexity theories, and a post humanist
perspective on our relation with techno-scientific discourses and representation
about minds, bodies, dance and digital tools.
I
believe that the composition of aesthetic improvisational systems is based on
the discovery and re-application of simple rules of interaction within a system,
where embodied cognitive processes have complex emergent properties that we call
the dance or the aesthetic experience. I am interested in investigating the possibilities
of new media to continue the re-examination of dance, performance and art making
that was initiated by Duchamp, continued by Fluxus and Judson Church pioneers,
among others. I believe that dance and digital technologies as a field needs the
reformulation of the dance artist as a researcher with a more scientifically based
approaches on fundamental processes of motion, sensing, composing and experiencing
(embodied cognition).
At
the same time, this artist researcher must think deeply the complex relation between
embodied practices, epistemologies and the philosophical lineages of the practices
themselves. Dance improvisation and interactive/generative systems are the perfect
domains to investigate questions of agency, control and autonomy in relation with
the phenomena that we understand as design, motion, change, growth, development
and evolution: an ongoing changing composition.
Currently,
my work has two main conceptual manifestations that are not totally separate but
deploy a dialectic tension:
-Deconstruction
of the compositional premises of what we understand as a dance or a video. Total
real time interaction towards exploring the aesthetics of patterns and changing
forms. Nothing is pre-recorded.
-Metaphorically oriented pieces with extreme sampling and pre edited material.
My work is about change and explores the ecology of what is already present: our
memories embodied in biological bodies, digital tools, trainings and procedural
parameters. I place my work in the confluence of an epistemology that is attempting
to understand the relation of the pervasive exactitude and mutability of this
inhabited form, that is our body, with the elusiveness of metaphor and thought.
In
September 2004, I will be working with the composer and sound designer Mark Aengier
in new sensor driven piece at ACCAD. Placing our bodies as the epistemic center,
I envision the development of UNSTABLELANSCAPE beyond the local performance and
gross movements of the dancers towards the use of autonomous streams of data,
subtle measurement of biological functions (breathing, heart beat, earth movement
, GP systems and distributed performance using the internet).
I
am also starting to investigate the possibilities of combining Motion Capture
data, real time interaction using Open GL and its generative potential/Artificial
Life/genetic programming with MaxmspJitter in collaboration with Matt Lewis. I
would like to explore the augmentation of the system hybridicity and maximizing
its bottom-up architecture with the integration of organic tissue such as neurons
and muscle cells to the real time aspect of the video-soundmovement continuum
(residency at Simbiotica, Australia). Later, I will expand the performance with
this bio-digital generativity and with analog/biologically inspired robots. It
is a continuation of the aesthetics of emergence.
To
visit the Unstable Landscape website, click here.