© Seok Jin Han
June 2015
59262 Words

This thesis and the work to which it refers are the results of my own efforts. Any ideas, data, images or text resulting from the work of others (whether published or unpublished) are fully identified as such within the work and attributed to their originator in the text, bibliography or in footnotes. This thesis has not been submitted in whole or in part for any other academic degree or professional qualification. I agree that the University has the right to submit my work to the plagiarism detection service
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Date: 08 June 2015 _______________________
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In the field of dance, the advent of the virtual and robotic body of a human performing subject pushes choreography in new dimensions since these nonhuman presences bring into question how they engage with the perceptual and embodied experience of the human subject. To resolve this question, this thesis analyses selected digital performances where choreographic composition is employed in creating the posthuman, addressing how the human body is engaged with its technological self and vice versa, and then how these choreographic practices evoke ideas about the posthuman subject and its embodiment. For the analyses of the case studies, I draw upon critical posthumanism and post-Merleau-Pontian phenomenology as a theoretical framework, which helps the posthuman escape from an anthropocentric humanist bias against technology’s physical and cognitive ability as a threat to humanity and from a popular posthumanist desire for the disembodiment and transcendence of the body.
This thesis argues that in the case studies the choreographers manifest the posthuman, as an alternative and affirmative vision of the human, which resists an anthropocentric view on the nonhuman as the ‘Other’ or something to control. Instead, they rethink technology as a constituent part of the construction of human subjectivity, while reframing choreographic knowledge of human embodiment as a synthesis of corporeal and digital thoughts. Posthuman embodiment in the choreographic works urges us to rethink the notion of the anthropocentric and Cartesian human subject in terms of the human’s relation to machine, and re-inscribes the body’s doubled condition of presence and absence in the experience of the (physical and/or virtual)
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world. Also, the case studies reveal the validity of choreographers’ specialised knowledge of bodily ways of being-in-the-world in a posthuman age and the possibility of expanding their knowledge into further domains.
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I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my principle supervisor Melissa
Blanco Borelli for her consistent support, patience with my writing and enthusiastic encouragement that she offered, from the beginning to the end of this extended journey. This research could not have come to fruition without her generous support. I would like thank my co-supervisor Nicolas Salazar-Sutil for his insightful feedback and advice that helped me pull my thought together and tie up loose ends. I want to acknowledge the advice and insight of my former supervisors, Sherril Dodds,
Alexandra Carter and Rachel Fensham. I also thank to the faculty of the Department of Dance Theory at Korea National University of Arts, Professor Chae-Hyeon Kim,
Professor Young-Il Hur and Professor Kyung-Ah Na, who intellectually inspired me and initially made me decide to follow a research career.
I offer heartfelt thanks to my PhD colleagues in School of Arts at University of
Surrey. I have gained fresh inspiration, motivation and support from our PGR community. I thank all the artists and researchers who kindly agreed to provide me with their valuable materials.
This work is dedicated to my family for their tremendous patience and encouragement and for their strong belief in me. Without them, I would probably not have survived such a demanding period of life. I will forever be grateful for their love.
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Declaration .................................................................................................................. 1
Abstract ....................................................................................................................... 2
Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................ 4
Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... 5
List of Illustrations ....................................................................................................... 7
Chapter 1 Introduction .............................................................................................. 8
Chapter 2 Choreography for the Posthuman
2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 32
2.2 Choreography Beyond Dance ...................................................................... 34
2.2.1 Choreographing Movements in Dance and Performance art ............ 34
2.2.2 The Separation of Choreography and Dancing ................................. 41
2.3 Choreographing an Interface ........................................................................ 47
2.4 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 57
Chapter 3 A Theoretical Framework for the Posthuman Body
3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 63
3.2 Beyond the Ontology of Liveness ................................................................ 65
3.3 Re-visioning Humanism in Posthumanism .................................................. 71
3.3.1 Post-anthropocentric Approaches to the Posthuman .......................... 71
3.3.2 Critical Posthumanist Approaches to Human Embodiment ............... 75
3.4 Toward the Posthuman Body in Post-Merleau-Pontian Philosophies ........... 80
3.5 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 88
Chapter 4 An Intersection Between Humans, Robots and Cyborgs
4.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 95
4.2 The Australian Dance Theatre’s
Devolution (2006) .................................... 96
4.2.1 Dancing with Robots and Cyborgs ................................................... 96
4.2.2 Resisting Robots and Cyborgs as the Other .................................... 105
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4.3 Human’s Animality ...................................................................................... 109
4.4 Robots as Living Organisms ........................................................................ 114
4.5 Therianthropic Cyborgs ............................................................................... 118
4.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 125
Chapter 5 The Virtual Double
5.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 131
5.2 The Virtual Double ...................................................................................... 132
5.3 Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine (2008)........................................................ 139
5.3.1 The Co-existence of the Physical and the Virtual ............................. 139
5.3.2 The Virtual Double and its Agency .................................................. 144
5.3.3 Doubled Embodiment of Posthuman Subjectivity ............................ 151
5.4 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 158
Chapter 6 Audience Immersion
6.1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 164
6.2 Discourses on Immersion ............................................................................. 166
6.3 Sarah Rubidge’s
Sensuous Geographies (2003) .......................................... 169
6.3.1 The Emergent Digital Sound as the Dys-appearing Body ................ 169
6.3.2 The Re-embodiment of Inter-/subjectivity........................................ 176
6.3.3 The Merging of Physical and Virtual Space ..................................... 180
6.4 igloo’s
SwanQuake: House (2005/08) ......................................................... 183
6.4.1 Embodied Experiences through the First-person Point of view
Avatar ............................................................................................... 183
6.4.2 The Player’s Disappearing Body ...................................................... 193
6.4.3 The Juxtaposition of Physical and Virtual Space ............................. 198
6.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 201
Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 207
Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 217
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Figure 1 White Bouncy Castle (1997) by Dana Caspersen, William Forsythe and
Joel Ryan ................................................................................................ 46
Figure 2 The Fact of Matter (2009) by William Forsythe ....................................... 46
Figure 3 Apparition (2004) by Klaus Obermaier ..................................................... 49
Figure 4 The Spine ................................................................................................... 98
Figure 5 The Cube .................................................................................................... 99
Figure 6 The Bigbots ................................................................................................ 99
Figure 7 The Choir ................................................................................................... 99
Figure 8 The Swarm ............................................................................................... 100
Figure 9 The Spine ................................................................................................. 100
Figure 10 The Body Extensions .............................................................................. 100
Figure 11 A female dancer with an electronic shock .............................................. 133
Figure 12 A duet with diagonal bars of light ........................................................... 133
Figure 13 A cluster of dancers as a giant spider ...................................................... 141
Figure 14 A duet with the smoky trace .................................................................... 143
Figure 15 A man controlling the lasers .................................................................... 143
Figure 16 The installation space .............................................................................. 172
Figure 17 Audience participants’ behaviours .......................................................... 172
Figure 18 Audience participants’ behaviours .......................................................... 172
Figure 19 Inside igloo’s installation at the Barbican Art Gallery, London ............. 185
Figure 20 The dressing table console located in the basement room at V22, London
.................................................................................................................................... 185
Figure 21 The oval mirror frame at the end of the corridor at V22, London .......... 187
Figure 22 The female dancing avatars in the underground warehouses ................. 192
Figure 23 Street view from the roof of the building in the virtual world .............. 192
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In the history of Western theatre dance, technologies were employed as tools for set designs, lighting and costumes, contributing to the corporeality and theatricality of the human performing body. Since the mid-twentieth century, media technologies capable of recording and reproducing objects have penetrated performance spaces, and projections of film and video images have been embedded in live dance performances
(Dodds, 2004, pp.1-2). Beginning in the 1990s, choreographers have adapted digital technologies such as telematics, 3D images, motion tracking, robotics and artificial intelligence and strived to completely assimilate them into new choreographic practices.
Computer-generated images and sounds and mechanical/robotic products are intertwined with performers or audiences’ corporeal bodies. When choreographers are involved in the creation of the body-technology interface, they often collaborate with experts in other disciplines such as film, new media art, engineering and computer science. The choreographers’ compositional and aesthetic strategies, then, are applied not just to compose physical movements in space and time, but rather to arrange how the physical movements are adapted and reconfigured by mechanical and computer systems. They compose a performer’s biological and mechanical embodiment as a hybrid entity called the ‘posthuman’, or design an architectural environment which instigates audience interactions with machines and makes audiences aware of themselves existing as the posthuman. The intimate and reciprocal relationships between the physical inputs and the artificial outputs are creatively built.
Consequently, distinct boundaries between human beings and machines become blurred in their embodied experiences.
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Choreographic explorations of technologised bodies are natural and inevitable since digital technologies have encroached upon nearly all elements of our life and impacted on ways of perceiving, thinking and communicating with others. In the new millennium, dance practitioner and scholar Kent De Spain indicates that in a digital age dance is radically redefining itself, as it is able to exist as distinct from its medium of expression, the human body (De Spain, 2000, pp.12-15). The advent of the virtual and robotic body of a human performing subject and the separation of dance from the corporeal body push choreography in new dimensions since, due to the absence of corporeality, these nonhuman presences bring into question how they engage with the perceptual and embodied experience of the human subject. How are virtual and robotic beings created? What role do they play in constructing human subjectivity?
What relationship do they have with the corporeal body? Will they override corporeality? These questions are at stake in choreographic practices in a posthuman age.
To illustrate examples of technological associations with the human dancing body,
Ghostcatching (1999), a ground-breaking installation work co-worked by Bill T.
Jones, Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, primarily raises an issue of virtual dancing in the absence of the human body. This piece constitutes a multiple of virtual dancing bodies whose movements are initially extracted from Jones’s improvisational moving via a motion capture system and transformed into a three-dimensional moving drawing. The virtual representations of Jones are disembodied beings that do not retain his mass or musculature, but viewers can recognise his presence within the animate beings or his bodily being in a virtual world. Jones also indicates his experience of perceiving the self in a virtual space, stating that ‘when I saw the dots swirling around on the computer screen later, I was mesmerized, and I was quite
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moved. Because, though there was no “body” there, that was my movement. It was different than video, it was disembodied, but there was something “true” in it’ (Jones, quoted in De Spain, 2000, p.11).
It is not just visual verisimilitude that makes it possible to conceive the virtual being as a newly embodied self because the virtual embodiment of the human subject also takes non-anthropomorphic figures. In the Australian Dance Company, Chunky
Move’s
Mortal Engine (2008), which will be analysed in depth in Chapter 5, kaleidoscopic, liquid, ghostly and geometrical images of digital projections are constantly metamorphosed in real-time response to human dancers’ movements on stage. It is noticeable that the virtual figures emanate from the human dancers by means of the dancers’ motor agency being expanded into a virtual space. The dancers perceive the virtual world and the self through the digital image. What these choreographic practice examples reveal is that Western dualistic assumptions of human and machine, subject and object, physicality and virtuality are challenged since the corporeal body never disappears, but instead engages itself in being-in-thevirtual-world. Also, virtual images become part of the embodiment of dancers’ subjectivities while entwined with corporeal bodies in the experience of the world.
In the early stage of dance-tech practice, Jones made an impressive statement about what attitude dance artists would be required to have in order to be ready for the future: we have to be careful that we don’t get left behind, or that we don’t miss an opportunity to share what we know about the human body and what we love about live performance, share it with the future; and that we don’t become so protective of this little domain that we have which, as we know, is
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undervalued and underfunded, that we don't have the courage to step out.
(Jones, quoted in De Spain, 2000, p.5)
In the fifteen years since then, Jones’ early cautionary suggestion seems to be well taken by choreographers. In the face of nonhuman performing beings, choreographers apply their special knowledge of the body to the technologised body in consideration of a bodily way of living in the virtual world. They contemplate how the corporeal body is reconfigured into digital information and, in reverse, how this information affects the corporeal body.
In the thesis, I thus intend to argue that choreographic practices involving the nonhuman body and creating the posthuman decentre anthropocentric bias against technology as the ‘Other’ or something to control, and instead rethink technology as a constituent part of constructing human subjectivity. They also re-instate the body as a conduit for embodied experience via a human-computer interface, while reframing choreographic knowledge of human embodiment as a synthesis of corporeal and digital thoughts. These choreographic experiments with nonhuman bodies would lead to the revaluation of the body in human experience and establish the validity of dance in a digital age. To argue that, this thesis aims to analyse selected digital performances where choreographic composition is employed in creating the posthuman, questioning how the human body is engaged with its technological self and vice versa, and then how these choreographic practices evoke ideas about the posthuman.
Choreography and Digital Technologies in Performance
I use the term ‘digital performance’ to name my case studies of choreographic practices that incorporate digital technologies, since the case studies cover not only a
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broad site for choreographic substantiation but also specifically focus on virtual/robotic forms as part of human embodiment, rather than recorded forms (the difference between the virtual/robotic and the recorded will be discussed later). As critical attention afforded to the intersections of dance and digital media have proliferated since the new millennium, dance scholars and practitioners have attempted to name choreographic practices that utilise digital technologies in various ways, such as ‘computer dance’, ‘cyber dance’, ‘virtual dance’, ‘Internet dance’, ‘edance’, ‘Webdance’, ‘interactive dance’, or ‘telematic dance’, as indicated by
Valverde (2004, p.36).
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Above all the rest, ‘digital dance’ (Rubidge, 1999) or ‘dancetechnology’ (Valverde, 2004) are most often used as catch-all terms that are not subject to particular technologies used or their effects on dance works. At the end of the twentieth century, British digital performance practitioner and scholar Sarah
Rubidge gave a definition of ‘digital dance’ and traced the development of digital dance works in Britain. She states that digital dance can be defined as a work which
‘must involve the conspicuous use of choreographic concepts as an organising principle, rather than as a means of realising a more general artistic vision’ but which could ‘bear(s) more resemblance to an installation than a dance work, or a work which does not even feature images or representations of the human or anthropomorphic body’ (Rubidge, 1999, p.42). She argues that choreographers or media artists impose a set of choreographic principles upon structuring movements of digital dance works, which are no longer confined to human movements. In comparison with Rubidge, dance practitioner and scholar Isabel Valverde prefers the word ‘dance-technology (dance-tech)’ to denote ‘a transition from being taken for granted as two separate disciplines leading to their hybridization’ (Valverde, 2004, p.38).
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Valverde admits the problematisation of using the word ‘dance-tech’, pointing
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out the controversy in considering a choreographic work in a digital interface as
‘dance’ since the application of digital apparatus provokes choreographers to change not only the site for the presentation of dance production, but also the subject of embodiment (Valverde, 2004, p.36).
Rubidge and Valverde suggest the different terms to designate choreographic engagement with technological devices, but both of them implicitly acknowledge that choreography as a mode of thought oriented toward the body in space and time is able to separate from dancing and detach its locus of substantiation from the body.
Reflecting Rubidge and Valverde’s perspectives, I assert that choreographic practices are no longer restricted within theatrical spaces and can take place within installation works that do not involve professional performers or even within web-based platforms or video/computer games where users’ disembodied selves are present.
These choreographic productions then may not be regarded as dance performance, but rather are conceived as media art or installation work. In case studies of this thesis, an intersection between choreography and technologies not only produces a dance performance, but results in an interactive installation, a video game, and a robot performance. This is the first reason I position my case studies within the context of digital performance.
As a matter of fact, however, there has also been ‘a haemorrhaging of nomenclatures’ in theatre and performance studies (Klich and Scheer, 2012, p.11) to describe performances incorporating digital media − virtual theatre, cyborg theatre, multimedia performance, intermedial performance, digital performance and so on.
Each of the nomenclatures commonly encompasses a broad range of technologically mediated performances, but defines the distinct scope and parameters of the field.
The term ‘virtual theatres’ was coined by Gabriella Giannachi and used for the title of her
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book published in 2004. She positions virtual theatres within the context of interactive arts practices, excluding live performances utilising digital technologies alongside the live performers within the scope of virtual theatres. Virtual theatres commonly include viewers whose experience of the works are remediated as the viewer is simultaneously present to the real and the simulated world. ‘In the world of virtual theatre, the work of art and the viewer are mediated’ (Giannachi, 2004, p.4, original italics). Giannachi also emphasises that when the viewer’s presence is multiplied and dispersed in various locations, s/he is allowed to not just enter into the work, but also act upon it (Giannachi, 2004, p.11).
Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer’s use of the term ‘multimedia performance’ extends the boundary of virtual theatre, referring to theatre or performance which employs media technologies as a constituent element of the work and which foregrounds the performative act rather than a linear narrative or a text based one
(Klich and Scheer, 2012, pp.17-18). They define multimedia performance through works spanning from post-dramatic theatre
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, dance and performance art to video installation and immersive environments, mostly taking place from the 1990s onwards.
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s ‘cyborg theatre’ is framed within the domain of multimedia performance as it has narrower scope. Her examples of cyborg theatre are mostly live theatrical performances using video, either analogue or digital, on monitors or projected. Parker-Starbuck’s definition of the term ‘cyborg theatre’ involves recognising a sharper focus on mutual relations and thereby integrations between bodies and technologies within the space of theatre, not necessarily denoting a literal fusing of the two entities (Parker-Starbuck, 2011, pp.6-7).
The term ‘intermedial performance’ refers to live performances that incorporate film, video or digital media. Its concept is articulated by the members of the Theatre
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and Intermediality Research Working Group of the International Federation for
Theatre Research, in order to mark a notable shift in theatre and performance that produces mutual dependence between different media in a multi-tracked textual composition and dis-/reorients perceptions of the performance. This paradigm and process of the performance is proffered as intermediality which appears in territory inbetween performers, viewers and media involved in the performance (Chapple and
Kattenbelt, 2006, pp.11-12). That is to say, intermedial performance not only denotes performances encompassing analogue or digital media but also emphasises the effect of performance, that is, the change of modes of a viewer’s perception. While intermedial performance entails interplay between different media, ‘digital performance’ requires computer technologies that play a constituent role ‘in content, techniques, aesthetics, or delivery forms’ (Dixon, 2007, p.3). ‘Digital performance’ is a term defined by Steve Dixon and Barry Smith, covering a broad range of performance works, from live dance and theatre performance and performance art to installation art, web-based art, CD ROMs and video games. Digital performance requires having trained performers or audiences/viewers/users who perform or enact performative events. Accordingly, Dixon and Smith exclude ‘non-live’ and ‘noninteractive’ performance forms such as film, television, and video art from the scope of digital performance, although digital technologies are incorporated with these art forms (Dixon, 2007, p.x).
Among these nomenclatures that are employed to describe intersections between performance and technologies, I use the term ‘digital performance’ to define not only the scope of my research that encompasses a range of choreographic forms ranging from a theatrical performance to an interactive installation, a video game and robotic performance, but also the subject matter of my research that specifically focuses on
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virtual and robotic presences rather than screen-based or recorded presences. This research primarily intends to call into question the ontological status of the human subject, corporeal body and agency distinct from the nonhuman subject, technological body and agency. The virtual body and the robotic body more radically undermine the ontological distinction between human and nonhuman in human experience of the world than mediatised representations of the human performer. As recorded bodies obviously reveal their actual human referent, we can easily notice that the mediatised image originates from the human body and is controlled by human agency. By contrast, virtual bodies having no reproduced image of actual humans with mass and musculature and robotic bodies made of metal, rather than flesh and blood, are seemingly separated from the corporeal body of the human subject. Also, these bodies are often embodied by the joining of human and technological agents, which brings into question how human subjectivity is constructed. To support my case studies which choreograph the posthuman or an environment for becoming the posthuman whose subjectivity is embodied through interplays between materiality in the physical realm and information in the digital realm, I find the term ‘digital performance’ more precise than other terms since computer technologies fulfil a crucial role in manifesting embodiment of posthuman subjectivity.
Methodology
My research on posthuman embodiment through intersections of the body and technology in choreographic practices is certainly not a new research subject. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, a plethora of books have appeared in theatre and performance studies, and many of publications take into account dance or choreographic practices to some extent (Giannachi, 2004; Dixon , 2007; Birringer,
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2008b; Salter, 2010; Parker-Starbuck, 2011; Klich and Scheer).
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Compared to theatre and performance studies, dance studies has attracted relatively little critical attention and debate concerning intersections between choreography and digital media with the notable exception of several significant books that focus upon dance-tech practices
(Popat, 2006; Kozel, 2007; Portanova, 2013). Historical, critical and artistic perspectives on how digital media intervenes in the form and content of performance arts have poured into academia, but there has been a scholarly tendency to illustrate a wide-range of past and current aesthetic-technological-scientific experimentations and raise related theoretical issues at the superficial level. Nonetheless, some of the scholars propose distinct theoretical and methodological points of view for critical analysis of dance, theatre and performance practices (Dixon, 2007; Kozel, 2007;
Parker-Starbuck, 2011; Portanova, 2013).
In this thesis, I intend to provide in-depth and substantial analyses of posthuman embodiment in choreographic practices and take a posthumanist and phenomenological approach as a theoretical and critical approach, primarily drawing upon critical posthumanism and post-Merleau-Pontian philosophies. My methodology is influenced by, but distinct from, two leading digital performance scholars’ theoretical and methodological approaches ― Dixon’s posthumanism and Susan
Kozel’s phenomenology. In Chapter 3, I will investigate specific theories of posthumanism and phenomenology, but here address the rationale of my theoretical and critical approach, compared with Dixon and Kozel’s approach.
My posthumanist standpoint was initially inspired by Dixon’s proposition of posthumanism as a theoretical and critical framework for digital performance in the book Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance
Art, and Installation (2007). The book is described as a history of digital performance,
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but the author does not merely provide a genealogy of digital performance. The author not only addresses the histories, theories and contexts of digital performance, but also presents specific illustrations of practices which are categorised according to four thematic concerns: the body, space, time and interactivity. Artistic practice examples often involve the relevant critical and theoretical discourses (and vice versa) throughout the sections. When Dixon investigates seminal concepts and discourses surrounding the field, he suggests posthumanism as a more appropriate theoretical framework than postmodern and poststructuralist theories which digital performance scholars tend to rely on. According to Dixon, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, key intellectuals in these movements, help contextualise non-hierarchical structure, hypertext system and non-linearity of digital performance. However, he also suggests that it has to be acknowledged that they fundamentally have antipathetic attitudes towards new media technologies. Dixon claims that posthumanism argues for an intimate and integrated relationship of human and machine, which helps digital performance scholars conceptualise the unified subjectivity of the posthuman performers.
Posthumanism resists humanism that assigns the primacy of human ontological existence and epistemology over the nonhuman and upholds an essentialism which reifies the human subject into a fixed category with predetermined and invariable characteristics. From an anthropocentric perspective, the posthuman, whose subjectivity comes into being through a partnership of human and machine, would inevitably evoke scepticism because the increase of the nonhuman’s physical and cognitive ability raises concerns about a potential menace to the human subjectivity, the body and humanity. On the contrary, from the viewpoint of posthumanism as postanthropocentrism, human subjectivity is always co-evolving with nonhuman others,
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so ‘not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that’ (Braidotti, 2013, p.1). Accordingly, in the posthumanist paradigm, the posthuman can be conceived as a new vision of the human whose subjectivity is constructed and embodied through interplays of materiality and information and whose cognitive system is distributed across human and technological agents. The posthuman does not necessarily mean a disembodied being that frees the mind from the body or erases embodied experience, but a new embodied mode of being in which there is no absolute boundary between the body and technology. This posthumanist notion of the posthuman challenges Western dualisms and hierarchical system of the human and the nonhuman, self and other, subject and object, mind and body.
I believe that, for choreographers whose idiosyncratic knowledge is about bodily ways of perceiving and cognising the world and who reject Cartesian notion of the body, the use of technology would never be intended to erase the body and replace it with abstract information void of corporeality, unless they purposely envision an apocalyptic world with anthropocentric concerns regarding the end of the human. In contemporary choreographic experiments with relations between the human and technology, choreographers rather seek ways of experiencing the (physical and/or virtual) world through technological intervention and of reconceptualising what the human body means in a posthuman age. Therefore, posthumanism gives an appropriate stance for examining choreographic practices that allow us to rethink anthropocentric humanist bias towards a nonhuman performer or the technologically meditation of a human performer.
Although Dixon makes a valuable contribution to digital performance discourses in terms of his initial proposition of posthumanism, he overlooks that there are
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different strands of posthuman theory. Cultural theorist Bart Simon discerns ‘popular posthumanism’ from ‘critical humanism’ (Simon, 2003, p.2). ‘Popular posthumanism’, which is now more often referred to as ‘transhumanism’, tends to lay itself open to the censure of the Cartesian human. Popular posthumanism and cybernetic theories as the ancestor of posthumanism tend to unveil a fantasy scenario in which consciousness can be separate from its biological embodiment, which reinscribes the Cartesian humanist subject (Miccoli, 2010, p.56). For instance, a well-known roboticist Hans
Moravec raises the prospect that human consciousness will be downloaded into a computer (Moravec, 1988). This view on the disembodiment of consciousness conforms to Cartesian dualism of mind and body and replicates, or even stretches, a liberal humanist notion of the human subject in a more apocalyptic context (Hayles,
1999, p.287). Since popular posthumanism calls for the erasure of embodied experience, it does not necessarily account for a bodily way of experiencing and being conscious of the virtual. As the opponent of popular posthumanism, ‘critical posthumanism’ puts emphasis on embodiment, whether in a material or immaterial substrate, and the involvement of bodily perception in experiencing the world. In my posthumanist approach to choreographic practices, in order to avoid falling into the trap of recapitulating the Cartesian subject, I specifically focus on critical posthumanism, and also take phenomenological accounts of posthuman embodiment that help shed light on how the corporeal body affects and is affected by technological bodies in the experience of the world.
Phenomenology develops concerns consistent with posthumanism in terms of anti-essentialism and Cartesian mind/body dualism. This philosophical movement emerges as a revolt against the subject-object and the body-mind dichotomies prevalent in tradition Western philosophy. It attempts to explore the epistemological
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structure of the human’s experience of phenomena, investigating how things appear to us, which depends on our subjective experience of the things rather than their objective being. Also, in phenomenology, our bodies as ‘the lived body’, which is distinct from the physiological or psychological body, take a key role in the constitution of our subjectivity and the intersubjective engagement with others while experiencing the world and being experienced by the self. Phenomenology expands its philosophical discourse into the understanding of phenomena within their sociocultural context. This approach is called ‘a critical phenomenology’, which mainly explores how ideology, politics and languages impact on the construction and constraints of the human being’s lived body and experience of the world, as seen in feminist phenomenological approaches to gendered embodiment and sexual hierarchy
(Beauvoir, 2009 [1949]; Young, 1993). Likewise, phenomenology can adapt and respond to posthumanist questions of the disembodiment of consciousness and the human being’s domination over the nonhuman.
My phenomenological reflection upon posthuman embodiment mainly relies on
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his followers, since Meleau-Ponty’s philosophy centres on the body and its impact on human consciousness and perception. In this sense, my research offers parallels with dance practitioner and scholar Susan Kozel’s phenomenological investigation of a relationship between the human body and technologies. In her book Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (2007),
Kozel addresses how she performs phenomenology through embodied practices with a variety of digital technologies, including telematics, responsive architecture, motion capture and wearable computers. Her own performance experiences, whether performed or choreographed by herself, are illustrated with consideration of phenomenological reflections, in particular, Merleau-Ponty’s theory. Phenomenology
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is not just a conceptual system that theorises the structural features of human subjective experience and of objects as experienced, but it is also a distinctive method for studying human life from the inside rather than from an outside, objective point of view. Kozel suggests that the integration of personal experiences with a phenomenological method can be achieved by breaking away from the doctrinaire approach and developing the internal, first-person and subjective methodology as a new paradigm (Kozel, 2007, pp.10-11).
There are two things that distinguish my phenomenological approach from
Kozel’s. First of all, my research intends to provide phenomenological reflections on the performing experience of others rather than my own experience as a dancer or an audience participant. I acknowledge that within dance studies, existing phenomenological approaches to dance count on the use of the phenomenological method: the first-person description of sensuous and immediate experiences of performance without having presumptions and prejudices about performance (Pakes,
2011, pp.34-36). The first-person phenomenological perspective on lived experience enables dancers to address and theorise their own experience of feeling, moving and thinking through the body. However, phenomenology also provides a valuable theoretical frame to understand others’ experiences, as I apply phenomenological philosophies to critical interpretations of dancers and audience participants’ embodied experience with their virtual double or robotic prosthetics. What is important here is that my phenomenological reading of others’ experiences is carried out through my embodied experience of their performances. It means that the performances experienced are shaped by my subjective perception of them even though I try to have some degree of critical distance. Thus, according to phenomenology, the understanding of others emerges within one’s perceptible and intelligent world, and
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also the understanding of the self is realised in relation to the world and others
(Fraleigh, 1991, p.15). That is to say, my methodology is the second-person and intersubjective, rather than the external, third-person and objective. When Kozel discerns the first-, second-, third-person phenomenological methodologies, she articulates what the second-person phenomenological methodology implies.
Presenting a phenomenological interpretation of someone else’s experience is based on two realizations: the first is that phenomenological philosophy provides the conceptual framework and methodological sketch for interpreting the experiences of others; the second is that the sensibility and interpretive power comes from the physical experience of the phenomenologist.
(Kozel, 2007, p.58)
In this thesis, my critical interpretations of others’ experiences are conducted by adopting a set of related phenomenological concepts to their posthuman embodiment and involving my empathic perception and consciousness of them, without the intention of producing true knowledge from an objective scientific stance.
In addition to my second-person methodological approach, the other differentiating factor between Kozel’s and my phenomenological methodology is my posthumanist perspective. For me, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy reinscribes dualism by assigning a priority to the body/human over the mind/technology and maintaining a subtle ontological distinction between the biological and the technological, which will be examined in Chapter 3. My phenomenological reflections on posthuman performing bodies adopt Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, but to be accurate, rely more on post-Merleau-Pontian philosophies, some of which directly interrogate the relationship of human beings and technology in the lived experience of the world
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(Ihde, 1990, 2002, 2008; Verbeek, 2005, 2008, 2011; Hansen, 2006). In particular,
Peter-Paul Verbeek and Mark Hansen give me the critical framework for articulating how a bodily way of being-in-the-world is rearranged or redeployed through technology and its agency, and for avoiding denigrating technology’s intentionality and capability to experience the world. My critical posthumanist and post-Merleau-
Pontian phenomenological approach is primarily an anti-dualistic framework that refuses an anthropocentric bias against technology as the external and a popular posthumanist desire for the disembodiment of consciousness. This approach helps better understand the entanglement between the body and computational systems in the human experience of the (physical or virtual) world, with emphasis on a technological being as part of the human being’s lived body and its embodied experience.
Structure of the Thesis
This thesis begins with ‘Choreography for the Posthuman’ which re-evaluates an orthodox sense of choreography and expands its notion to the design of a humancomputer interface in the context of digital performance. In a historical sense, the term ‘choreography’ means a movement compositional system for dance.
Choreographic practice exists as dance performance and its production is presented through the human body and its movement. The contemporary notion of choreography is, however, no longer exclusively used to name an activity of making dance as it is conceived as a referent for devising an object, an installation, and performance art. In digital performances, choreographic thoughts and methods are substantiated for designing even an immaterial environment, that is, an interface where humans interact with computers. In this chapter, I examine how the notion of
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choreography has been reframed in terms of the expansion of the site for its substantiation and the reconfiguration of choreographic knowledge itself. In so doing,
I argue that in order to choreograph an interface, the existing choreographic knowledge of the human being’s bodily way of perceiving and embodying the world and the self is reconfigured, as combined with a computer system.
Chapter 3, which is entitled ‘A Theoretical Framework for the Posthuman Body’, draws upon a variety of critical and philosophical discourses that help conceptualise a networked, virtual or robotic being as part of the human being’s doubled or hybrid being. This scholarship ranges from performance studies scholars such as Peggy
Phelan and Philip Auslander, to posthumanist scholars such as Donna Haraway and
Katherine Hayles, to phenomenologist philosophers, in particular, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty and his followers such as Drew Leder, Don Ihde, Peter-Paul Verbeek and Mark
Hansen. This chapter brings to light an anthropocentric bias against mediatised, virtualised and cyborgian representations of the human performer, revealing how the integration of technologies and corporeal bodies calls into question hierarchical dualisms between bodily presence and absence, liveness and mediatedness, physicality and virtuality. In examining the aforementioned theories, I propose critical posthumanism and post-Merleau-Pontian phenomenology as my theoretical and critical standpoint through which to interpret technological entities (the robotic and the virtual) and their entanglement with the human performing subject in choreographic practices.
Based upon the reframed notions of the human body and choreography, the following three chapters conduct analyses of choreographic practices in the digital performance context that feature different types of human-machine interactions
(performer-robot, performer-digital image and audience-digital sound and image) and
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embrace distinct types of performance environments (theatrical performances or interactive installations). The digital performance example that I select for each of the chapters raises distinct issues: cyborg and robot, virtuality and immersion, respectively. In the case studies, I look into how professional performers, or audiences, become posthuman during their experience of the works. I focus on what forms of inputs and outputs are engaged in an interface and what relationships between the two are established. I will then examine, from an anti-anthropocentric and anti-Cartesian point of view, how the human-machine interactions presented in the performance examples challenge dualistic assumptions of the human subject, the corporeal body and reality.
I acknowledge that there are many ways of embodying the posthuman in the context of digital performance, which primarily hinges on who interacts with what.
The human subject, who can be a professional performer, an audience member or an online user, has its technological self in the form of a telematic or animated image, a digital sound or robotic prosthetics and encounters others while exploring a physical, virtual or mixed environment. Some works present real-time interfaces between human and nonhuman beings during performances while others use the ‘delayed’ interfaces (Valverde, 2004, p.42), often with motion capture technologies which capture performers’ movements and processes and edit them before being presented to the public. Susan Kozel points out that a human-computer interface used during or prior to performances has a different aesthetic impact on the works. However, for
Kozel, a real-time processing of motion capture systems and their possible accidents of ‘imprecision, indecision, or “swithering”’ assign a sense of autonomy or agency to nonhuman beings (Kozel, 2007, p.234).
In keeping with Kozel’s perspective, I find that a real-time human-computer
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interface more effectively and evidently manifests that technologised beings are not just the disembodiment of the human subject, but part of its doubled embodiment that results from the contamination of the corporeal and the technological. Accordingly, for case studies of this thesis, I select digital performance works that possess a real time interface, apart from Devolution . Metallic robots and prostheses emerging in
Devolution are technically not capable of responding to human performers and perform as pre-programmed. To date, robotic performances presenting real-time interface between human performer/audiences and robots which may have their own agency or may be directly controlled by operators have rarely taken place at theatrical settings, as compared with galleries, museums and trade shows. Nevertheless, I find it pertinent to cast light on robotic beings in Devolution as the work features robotic beings not just as part of posthuman subjects, but also as nonhuman others. This work offers a space for consideration of whether the human and nonhuman robots can make a balanced alliance.
On the basis of the above, in Chapter 4 ‘An Intersection between Humans, Robots and Cyborgs’, I will look into Australian Dance Theatre’s Devolution (2006) which present three types of performing entities: humans, robots and cyborgs. By metaphorically transforming dancers and industrial robots into creatures, the work rejects the dramatisation of a robot invasion and the battle of human beings against robots and instead manifests human dancers and metallic robots as co-existing equal living organisms. The collapse of an opposite relationship between humans and robots is not just metaphorically represented but also literally actualised through the incorporation of robotic devices into the body. Robotic prostheses are attached to the dancers’ bodies, which makes them exist as therianthropic cyborgs. By reflecting upon animal studies, science studies and phenomenology, I investigate how these
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organic, metallic and hybrid performers that metamorphose into zoomorphic and therianthropic beings challenge humanist assumptions about technology as Other. In so doing, I insist that the work manifests the collapse of anthropocentric dualism and hierarchy of the human over nonhuman others including animals and robots.
In Chapter 5 ‘The Virtual Double’, I shift my focus away from metal embodiment of a human subject to its virtual embodiment. In Western society, cultural connotations of virtuality are built on Cartesian dualism between body and mind, the physical and the virtual, strongly influenced by William Gibson’s notion of cyberspace where the body is substituted with or surpassed by information. Gibsonian cyberspace has been largely adapted and delineated in computer science, popular culture and arts, while in critical theory it has been criticised for not just subordinating the body to mind but obliterating the body. I oppose the concept of Gibsonian cyberspace that radicalises Cartesian dualism, but at the same time intend to avoid reinscribing dualism that prioritises the corporeal over the virtual, which is caused by delimiting the body to its sensory-perceptual aspects and dissociating it with its cognitive and abstract aspects. In this chapter, I reveal that virtuality is not disembodiment but re-embodiment of physicality, by analysing Chunky Move’s
Mortal Engine (2008). Drawing upon Mark Hansen’s concept of ‘bodies in code’, I examine the ontological implications of the virtual double and its chaotic behaviours enacted by its own autonomy in relation to dancers’ embodiment and agency in a virtual environment. In investigating how the dancers contaminate their virtual double
(and vice versa) in light of Drew Leder’s theory of bodily disappearance and dysappearance, I argue that the dancers’ doubling in the physical and the virtual represents a unified subjectivity.
In Chapter 6 ‘Audience Immersion’, Leder’s theory is again employed in
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investigating how audiences in two installation works ― Sensuous Geographies
(2003) and SwanQuake: House (2005/08) ― are immersed in the virtual environment which is coupled with the physical environment. In a multi-user installation Sensuous
Geographies , co-created by Sarah Rubidge and Alistair MacDonald, audiences create their own sounds through their individual movements and also communicate with other participants through their sounds. In exploring the virtual soundscape shared with others, their perception and awareness of their own bodies in the physical environment are enhanced by a range of haptic materials placed in the installation space. By contrast, in Igloo’s 3D computer graphic installation
SwanQuake: House , when audiences inhabit and navigate a game environment through the eyes of their avatar, they are prompted to shift their attention to their presence in the virtual world.
Juxtaposed with the virtual space, their experience of the physical space gives rise to the confusion of being in the physical and the virtual and subsequently enhances the
‘real’ of the virtual space in their perception. I will explore how the respective audiences in the two installation works experience a computer-generated environment in different ways, in light of bodily ‘dys-appearance’ and ‘disappearance’. In doing so,
I reveal that both of the installation works enhance the audiences’ immersion in the virtual environment through their relationship with the physical environment, which engenders the obscurity of the distinction between the physical and the virtual.
In conclusion, I point out that choreographic explorations of the potential of technology can be differently interpreted, depending on one’s point of view. From my posthumanist perspective, through the disembodiment of the corporeal body in a virtual world and the cyborgisation of the human, choreographers neither offer a dystopian nor utopian vision of a posthuman future. Rather, by manifesting the posthuman as the possibility of human beings, choreographers explore changes of
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ways of perceiving and embodying the self and the world through the entwinement of the body and technology. In these practices, the human co-evolves with nonhuman others, and technology makes a reconciled and dynamic partnership with the body for the construction of human subjectivity. I argue that this posthuman subject manifested in the choreographic works urges us to rethink the notion of the anthropocentric and
Cartesian human subjectivity in terms of the human’s relation to machine, and remind us of the body as a primary medium for experiencing the world, whether the physical or the virtual. Also, I claim that these choreographing practices that create the posthuman prove the validity of choreographers’ specialised knowledge of bodily ways of being-in-the-world in a posthuman age and the possibility of expanding their knowledge into further domains.
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1
Valverde enumerates these terms that denote specific features and contexts of computer technology that are used, although there is considerable overlap in the use of these terms.
2 Valverde presents a typology of dance-technology practices with depth analyses of selected examples, examining the four most prominent tendencies within the dancetech interface − the univocal, random, faceted and reflective interface (Valverde,
2004). Each of them has different focal points in terms of the representation and experience of the dance-tech interface, addressing one visual, or aural, representational form (the univocal Interface), multiple representational forms (the random interface), a political content (the faceted Interface) or an interactive environment (the reflexive Interface).
3
‘Postdramatic theatre’ is a term coined by German theatre scholar Hans-Thies
Lehmann to define prominent theatre forms emerging from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Postdramatic theatre, as the epitome of postmodernism in theatre, refuses to adapt the play-text and incorporates media, primarily filmic or video images along with the live performers. Lehmann highlights the impact of media on aesthetics and forms of theatre, stating that the ‘spread and then omnipresence of the media in everyday life since the 1970s has brought with it a new multiform kind of theatrical discourse’
(Lehmann, 2006 [1999], p.22, original italics).
4
Only single-author books are enumerated here, but many anthologies of performance and technologies have been published as well.
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In Sarah Rubidge’s
Sensuous Geographies (2003), audiences are invited to engage in an installation space where their individual and collective behaviours are transformed into data, which generates sound strands. The British choreographer Rubidge aims to encourage the participants to create their own sound signatures through interacting with a computational system and other participants’ sounds. In doing so, the participants become bodily sensation-oriented. She labels the installation work as ‘an emergent choreographic event’, indicating that her choreographic tenor is embedded not in composing human movements, but rather in designing a performative interface in which corporeal movements and their reconfigurations take place respectively in a physical and a virtual space (Rubidge, 2009, p.362). In other words, for the creation of this installation, her choreographic strategies are deployed in building mutual and dynamic relations between the spatio-temporal dimensions of the audiences’ impromptu movements and multi-layers of emergent digital sounds.
In a historical sense, choreography means ‘the writing of dance’ (Birringer, 2008a, p.118) or ‘the making of dance’ (Butterworth and Wildschut, 2009, p.1), both of which imply a compositional system for dance. Choreographic practice exists as dance performance and its production is presented through the human body and its movement. However, Sensuous Geographies demonstrates the implementation of choreography without execution of a performer’s movements. In this sense, Rubidge regards the work as ‘a new mode of choreographic practice’ (Rubidge, 2009, p.362).
The term ‘choreography’ is no longer exclusively used to name an activity of making dance. Artists from other arts domains, such as visual art, film, and architecture have
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ingrained choreographic ideas and principles since the 1960s. Furthermore, this term potentially refers to an arrangement of movements outside the arts field, like a salesperson who enacts improvisational choreography (Foster, 2011, p.2). Dance scholar Susan Foster suggests that the current implication of choreography is ‘an inclusive naming of diverse patterning of movement’ (Foster, 2010, p.37), which can be either precisely arranged or improvised, but is always regulated under certain circumstances. The enactment of choreography is expanded from forming and organising movement itself, to designing an object or an environment through which people perceive, move and think in various ways that are planned and desired.
The contemporary notion of choreography as a structural system of human movements in diverse contexts becomes radically challenged in the context of digital performance. Some of the digital performance works, which are selected as my case studies, can hardly be seen as choreographic practices in an orthodox way because they do not necessarily have human dancers, but they instead present digital images and sounds. When choreography is employed for intersections between corporeal and virtual/robotic bodies, it means designing a real time human-machine interface for posthuman performance. Accordingly, in a human-machine interface, choreographic knowledge of the body should be closely associated with computational systems since they have to reflect upon non-human behaviours in correlation to human behaviours.
The significance of the integration of a human body and a computer system in choreographic practices came to the fore in a workshop ‘choreographic computations: motion capture and analysis for dance’ at The International Conference on New
Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) where it was affirmed that ‘a shared understanding of movement and gesture is evolving to support the application of complex algorithmic procedures to equally complex choreographic creation’ (NIME,
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2006).
In this chapter, I primarily investigate how the notion of choreography is reframed in the context of digital performance, by tracing historical changes of choreographic approach to the body. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part contextualises the contemporary meaning of choreography in the arts by illustrating how choreographers employ their unique and complex sets of principles to devise dance performances, objects and installations. The second delves into the entanglement of choreography with a computational system in the context of digital performance. Based on the re-evaluation of the orthodox sense of choreography examined in the first part, I will argue that when choreography is employed in designing a human-machine interface, it implies not only the separation of choreography from dancing or the human body but also the reconfiguration of choreographic knowledge of the human body itself.
2.2.1 Choreographing Movements in Dance and Performance Art
In her latest book Choreographing Empathy (2011), Foster explicitly examines how the notion of choreography has changed through different historical contexts, according to the advent of new dance forms. From an etymological point of view, the term ‘choreography’ originates from two Greek words:
choreia (the production of movement, rhythm, and voice) and graphie (the act of writing) (Foster, 2011, p.16;
Barthes, 1985). The term ‘choreography’, as the synonym for orchesography, was first introduced in Roul Auger Feuillet’s classic treatise on dance notation Choréographie
(1700).
5
By the eighteenth century, choreography was used to refer to a system of
‘reconciling movement, place, and printed symbol’ (Foster, 2011, p.17). Also, a
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choreographer was a person who was able to read and write a dance score. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the invention of pantomime ballet, highlighting facial and gestural expressions of characters in a plot, brought about an ontological problem since there was no distinction between movements and notated symbols. The inadequacy of the notation system to convey mimetic and dramatic movements of pantomime ballet entailed the separation of choreography and dance notation.
Throughout the nineteenth century, choreography no longer meant documenting a dance by assimilating movements into abstract and value-free principles, but it was still indiscriminately conceived as the process of training, creating and performing dance (Foster, 2010, p.35).
In the early twentieth century, the growth of modern dance in the United States led to a realisation of the necessity of emphasising choreography as the unique act of creating movements imbued with representational and emotional expressions (Foster,
2010, p.35). Moreover, the choreographed movements began to be considered as the essential nature of dance, while contributing to securing the authority of dance, giving it equal status with other art forms (Lepecki, 2006, p.4). For instance, Martha Graham, often called ‘the mother of modern dance’, considers the moving body as an instrument to express her artistic message, mainly associated with the human spirit and emotion, which can be personal but at the same time transcendental. In Graham’s works, a dancer’s body has to be technically disciplined to enact emotional characters.
According to John Martin, a theorist, critic and advocate of modern dance, it is not before Graham that dance established its ontological ground, which rested on movements in which choreography took place (Martin, 1933, p.6). For Martin, in
Romantic and Classical ballet, movements were bounded by narrative structures and the strict rules of ballet techniques. Even Isadora Duncan, known as a pioneer of
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modern dance, was inclined to view movements as subject to music. Martin asserts that in order to be accepted as an art form in its own right, dance should be aligned with movements that represent individual and universal concerns through choreography as a unique process of dance (Martin, 1933, p.6).
Since the 1960s, on the other hand, the meaning of choreography has not been confined to inscribing movements into the bodies, but it has extended to setting a structure which instigates the bodies to move, in response to the designed environment. Emerging at the Reuben Gallery and the Judson Church in New York, postmodern dance as the antithesis of stylised and expressive movements of modern dance tended to claim distinct artistic initiatives to modify a compositional procedure and to extend beyond a theatre space as the site for performance. The postmodern choreographers in the 1960s and 1970s had individual aesthetic concerns and methods, but shared common ground regarding what choreography means in their works. They intended to abandon movements that represent someone or something else and instead present the body itself as a message. Their choreographic focus is on investigating how and why movements proceed, rather than what the movements display. These movements, then, are not required to be in harmony with music or to be conducted in a stylised manner with technical virtuosity. Instead, the choreographers devise how pedestrian movements and everyday gestures are arranged and combined by using task-oriented and improvisational processes which give rise to physical and sociopolitical awareness.
As an iconoclast, Anna Halprin’s concept of directing rather than choreographing had significant influence on the early generation of postmodern choreographers, such as Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer
6
, Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton
7
. For Halprin, improvisation is the key method to emancipate the body from institutionalised
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movements of modern dance as well as behaviour patterns affected by anatomical structures and social norms. She encourages dancers to open up their bodies’ capabilities through improvisation which is implemented either in an anatomical way to articulate and re-assemble various body parts or through imagery activities which facilitate the freedom of movement by spontaneous impulses (Banes, 1987, p.22).
One of Halprin’s students, Simone Forti first presented her seminal work
See Saw
(1960) at the Reuben Gallery. In its premiere performance, Rainer and American sculptor Robert Morris performed on a play-like structure which resembled a see-saw.
The two performers did not execute pre-determined movement sequences but instead improvised while finding and losing their equilibrium. In Forti’s dance constructions, such as Roller (1960), See Saw, Huddles (1961), Hangers (1961) and Slant Board
(1961), she sets up minimum rules for performers to accomplish a task which is often associated with a devised object or sculpture. The subtle choreographic principles allow the performers to freely explore the physical features of their bodies that ‘move or be moved by some thing rather than by oneself’ (Rainer, 1968, p.269).
As described above, the early postmodern choreographers in the 1960s and 1970s embrace pedestrian movements that are instigated by objects or through task-based activities. In this sense, their compositional strategies reveal a significant parallel with
Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the readymade 8
that proves that an ordinary manufactured object can become an artwork after it is selected and repositioned by an artist (Lepecki, 2010, p.155). For the early postmodern choreographers, a dance performance is considered ‘as a made event distinct from its execution’ (Foster, 2011, p.62). The role of a choreographer is emphasised in directing the structure and the process in which performers borrow and arrange movements, rather than in creating the movements to express the choreographer’s intention and message. Moreover, in
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order to aim for open and fluid communications with external conditions and audiences as unpredictable compositional elements, their choreographic practices often take place at non-theatrical sites, such as museums, galleries, outdoor, and public spaces where boundaries between art and life or between a performer and an audience dissolve. Extending beyond the frame of the theatrical environment allows the audience to have close proximity to the performance space and directly involve oneself in the work.
With the change of the function, method and site of choreography, postmodern dance practices in the 1960s and 1970s bear a resemblance to visual arts, in particular, performance art that has had an experimental orientation toward corporeality, ephemerality and movement composition since the end of the Second World War. The term ‘performance art’ came into its own as a distinct form of visual arts in the early
1970s. In performance art, visual artists turn to their own bodies as a medium for materialising their ideas (Goldberg, 2011). Performance can be loosely defined as
‘live art by artists’ (Goldberg, 2011, p.9), but it not only refers to performances which are held in front of audiences but also encompasses ones which are presented through photography, video, film and/or text that record the artists’ operation of the body in public or private settings (Jones, 1998, p.13). Performance art was heralded by a prominent phenomenon, ‘conceptual art’, which emerged in the mid-1960s.
Conceptual artists insist on their ideas or processes which take precedence over objects, while spurning the art market in which the ideas cannot be bought and sold.
Conceptual art provides direct inspiration for performance artists who give priority to a performer’s embodied activity as ‘a demonstration, or an execution, of [their] ideas’
(Goldberg, 2011, p.7), In performance art, ‘the artist’s body becomes both the subject and the object of the artwork’ (Sharp, 1970, p.17).
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According to RoseLee Goldberg, who wrote pioneering books on performance art, performance art flourished in the 1970s and established itself as a distinct genre of art in its own right. Since the early twentieth century, however, an artist’s engagement with his or her own body has been used as a means of deviating from traditional approaches, such as painting on canvas and sculpting objects and regarded as the vanguard of avant-garde activities (Goldberg, 2011, p.7). Thus, in a broad sense, performance can be traced back to Dada and Futurism
9
in the 1910s and 1920s, embracing a range of art movements, such as Happening and Fluxus 10 in the 1960s,
Performance art and Body art
11
in the 1970s and 1980s, and technologically-mediated body works
12
in the 1990s (Jones, 2000, pp.21-23).
In the world of painting, Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock initially spurred artists to recognise an art-making process as a work of art. Pollock’s actions, such as dripping, spattering and daubing paints on a canvas with a brush while moving back and forth and from side to side, left traces which constituted an abstract painting. The
American critic, Harold Rosenberg, labelled Pollock’s works ‘action painting’ in which the canvas is viewed as ‘an arena in which to act… What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event’ (Rosenberg, 1952, p.22). In action painting, how an artist moves is directly linked to what his or her work is. Hans Namuth’s photography and films documenting Pollock’s creative process take a significant role in emphasising the artist’s bodily action as an essential part of his works, along with the products themselves (Phelan, 2010, p.24). Swayed by Pollock, an increasing number of visual artists have foregrounded their own embodied activities (Schimmel,
1998; Jones, 1998). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, performance artists tended to eschew ‘the dramatic structure and psychological dynamics of traditional theater or dance’ as well as proscenium stage, but instead bring ‘bodily presence and movement
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activities’ into focus, in galleries, museums or private studios (Hayum, 1975, p.339), which is what the early postmodern choreographers in the same period wished to pursue. In other words, while the visual artists directed their attention toward their bodies or movements, the choreographers intended to abandon movements pretending to be something or someone in favour of everyday movement, improvisation, and task-based structure. Artistic processes and manners of executing the body or movement in dance and visual art became imbricated.
To give examples of the intersections between the two art forms, Allan Kaprow, the inventor of Happening as a genre of performance art, calls himself an ‘action artist’, advancing Pollock’s concept of ‘action painter’ (Goldberg, 2004, p.17).
Kaprow first performed 18 happenings in 6 parts, often regarded as a symbolic piece of avant-garde performance, in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York. In the work, the sequences of actions of six performers are determined by Kaprow’s prescribed cards which instruct what gesture, timings and steps the performers will enact.
Kaprow’s compositional strategies for Happening and the minimalist approach to movement are aligned with choreographic method and content in Judson Dance
Theater
13
(Solomon, 2010, p.42). Bruce Nauman, the American visual artist, uses a variety of mediums, such as sculpture, installation, photography, film and performance, acknowledging that not only an object, but also an artist’s activity can become a work of art, which largely reflects the key idea of conceptual art (Wallace and Keziere, 1979). For example, his performance piece Walking in an Exaggerated
Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-8) is a ten-minute film that shows himself slowly walking on the boundary of a taped square in his studio and pausing for a bit in an absurd posture just before taking a step forward. The title of the piece literally explains what he is doing on the film. During the repetitive enactment of the
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simple but precisely controlled activities, he evokes self-awareness and brings a hypersensitivity to mundane movements. For him, there is a resemblance between his performance and dance, which was conceived after having a conversation with
Meredith Monk, the postmodern choreographer and composer.
I guess I thought of what I was doing sort of as a dance because I was familiar with some of the things that Cunningham had done and some other dancers, where you can take any simple movement and make it into a dance, just by presenting it as a dance. I wasn’t a dancer, but I sort of thought if I took things that I didn’t know how to do, but I was serious enough about them, then they would be taken serious.
(interviewed with Sciarra, 2005, p.166)
Nauman proposes the breakdown of the distinct boundary between dance and visual arts, since dance and visual artists share artistic intentions, compositional strategies and performance modes. As the concept of choreography has been expanded, choreographers’ and performance artists’ approaches to the bodily presence have interpenetrated each other. This phenomenon implies that choreography is not necessarily an exclusive term to refer to dance artists’ way of composing an artwork, and also that choreographic practices do not always need to produce dance works.
That is to say, a long-held assumption that choreography belongs to the realm of dance is challenged.
2.2.2 The Separation of Choreography and Dancing
Strongly influenced by early postmodern choreographers, contemporary North
American and European choreographers have radically experimented with the orthodox notion of dance since the mid-1990s, namely La Ribot, Jérôme Bel, Xavier
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Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, Jonathan Burrows and Juan
Dominguez, to mention a few. The choreographers whose works are often labelled
‘conceptual dance’ venture to disentangle dance from the moving body and to conceptualise choreography as the object of dance (Cvejić 2006; Cvejić and
Vujanović, 2010).
14
It might be absurd to group these choreographers into one community that manifests shared aesthetic features, but they could belong to a family of resemblances in terms of ‘rearticulating social-political dimensions of the aesthetic’ in dance (Lepecki, 2010, p. 155). They are concerned with what sort of concept is performed, rather than how bodies are represented in association with movement technique, style and themes. In doing so, the object of their dance is not the bodily movement itself, but rather the process of choreography. The choreographers focus less on inscribing movement in time and space and more on formulating a work of choreography through which a dance can be shown without ‘flow or a continuum of movement’ (Kisselgoff, 2000, p.6). The deconstructive practices of this so-called conceptual dance undertake the political and critical investigation of the aestheticism of dance. They overthrow the ontology of dance as ‘being-toward-movement’
(Lepecki, 2006, p.7) and consistently reinvent dance itself through choreography as a political practice (Cvejić and Vujanović, 2010, p.2).
For example, in French choreographer Xavier Le Roy’s groundbreaking solo work
Self-Unfinished (1998), his body is dismantled and constantly metamorphosed into an unclassifiable being. He slowly contorts his body and shapes it into a robot-like, animal-like and unseen creature. The artist conceptually and choreographically investigates what the body can be, by shedding and radically recasting the body to represent the ongoing metamorphosis between the human and the animal, the organic and the mechanical, the male and the female (Lepecki, 2006, pp.41-43). By contrast
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with Le Roy’s work, Jérôme Bel’s
The Show Must Go On (2001) directs access to the linguistic operation of the body, rather than its materiality (Cvejić, 2006). Eighteen performers’ movements, stage settings and even audiences’ reactions are instructed by the lyrics of eighteen pop songs. What occurs on the stage represents nothing except the lyrics of the songs played by a DJ sitting in front of the stage. Bel’s choreography rests on ‘general instructions for activity’ (Paxton, 1982, p.56) in association with the words of the songs, not on the performers’ virtuosic movements.
In contemporary avant-garde choreography, the intentional severing between dance and movement incites an urgent anxiety about a menace to dance’s future on the ground of the loss of its own identity (Lepecki, 2006, pp.1-2). Dance scholar
André Lepecki (2004; 2006; 2010) asserts that in Western society, dance viewers’ expectation of forceful motility of the body is the product of modernism. As stated above, in the early 1930s, John Martin’s project for securing dance’s autonomy as an independent art form builds on movement. Reviving but expanding the early postmodern activities, the so-called conceptual dance artists refrain from the excessive preoccupation with movement, which is still predominant in the current dance scene. Lepecki views the choreographers’ political challenge to the modernist ontology of dance as exhausting a certain form of dance which displays a continuous flow of movement (Lepecki, 2006, p.8). The choreographers’ focus on the conceptual operation of choreography may be easily misunderstood as a disregard for corporeality and perception of the body. Dance writer Bojana Cvejić cleans up this misconception in the contemporary avant-garde dance practices, by stating that
… the work of the so-called conceptual dance isn’t based in the withdrawal of the perceptual. It doesn’t map the linguistic onto the perceptual, even if it is
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influenced by the so-called Duchamp effect, the word does not prevail over the movement. There is no dogmatic prohibition of physicality… On the contrary, the practices are based in configuring other materialities of movement and body expressivity, which would no longer rest on the Romantic notions of the ineffable and unfathomable, the speechless anonymity of the body.
(Cvejić, 2006)
Cvejić affirms that shunning the aesthetic and kinetic aspect of the body is a new choreographic strategy for disclosing invisible aspects of the body, which is achieved by confronting the political operation within the body. Significantly, when the choreographers modify and expand the notion of dance, they expose corporeally the political process underneath the visible body. Accordingly, their choreographic attempts ‘are not mere conceptual propositions but actual possibilities for action’
(Lepecki, 2010, p.155). Dance practitioner and researcher Efrosini Protopapa suggests the term ‘possibilising dance’ as more suitable than Lepeki’s term ‘exhausting dance’ in that what the contemporary dance scene brings about is not exhaustion, but fatigue of dance’s relation to movement that leads to opening up new possibilities for dance
(Protopapa, 2009, pp.2-22).
During the last two decades, contemporary European and North American choreographers have undertaken the separation between dance and movement, diversifying the performance modes and methods in dance. Their acts of resistance to dancing movement then have brought into being the separation between choreography and dancing. Ribot, Charmatz, William Forsthye and many others have invaded the world of visual arts, by exhibiting objects as a product of the integration of choreography and visuality. They create sculptures and installation artworks in which the object of the choreographic practices may not be the body, but a space or an object
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which stimulates a viewer’s bodily experience of it. It was not the first time that choreographers had employed their embodied knowledge in creating artworks. In her installation work The Stream (1970), Trisha Brown, one of the original Judson Dance members, aligns pots, pans and vessels which are filled with water and sets up them in the middle of New York’s Union Square. These everyday objects are lined up inside a
U-shaped wooden structure. Passers-by enter into the structure and walk through it while either putting their feet into the objects or stepping aside from them. The built space induces the passer-by to change their own perception of everyday objects through physical experiences.
William Forsythe, a choreographer who is well-known for his idiosyncratic way of distorting and investing classic ballet vocabularies, admittedly is not generally included among the so-called conceptual dance artists. However, his ‘choreographic objects’ installed in art galleries or museums and the conceptual articulation of choreography is a ‘critical act of deep ontological impact’ (Lepeki, 2006, p.1), questioning the notion of choreography. For Forsythe, ‘choreography is the term that presides over a class of ideas: an idea is perhaps in this case a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action’ (Forsythe, 2008, p.8). In this definition, he explicitly rejects the notion of a concurrence between choreography and dancing and, instead, proposes an alternate locus of the substance of choreographic thought, which Forsythe calls ‘choreographic objects’ (Forsythe, 2008, p.6). In other words, choreographic ideas, which are about a suggestion or imagination of what happens in the body in response to spatial and temporal conditions, are not necessarily bound to the corporeal body, but can be manifested in artificial and non-human forms.
His early installation work White Bouncy Castle (1997), co-created with Dana
Caspersen and Joel Ryan, is a massive inflatable castle for an indoor space (see Figure
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Figure 1 White Bouncy Castle (1997) by Dana Caspersen, William Forsythe and Joel Ryan ©
Julian Gabriel Richter
Figure 2 The Fact of Matter (2009) by William Forsythe © Julian Gabriel Richter
1). As soon as visitors enter the choreographic space, they unavoidably become participants since they get to experience a different state of gravitation and equilibrium by virtue of the elasticity of the substance. In contrast, in his recent installation The Fact of Matter (2009) consisting of numerous plastic rings hung at a different level, participants are given a challenge to their physical ability (see Figure
2). In hanging in the rings and crossing without touching the ground, their bodies swing, stretch away, and lose balance and momentum, which makes them aware of their inability or ability to control their own bodies. These choreographic objects are neither stable nor already existing forms to be seen, but mobile and potential conditions for an event in which space and time are reconfigured through the participants’ bodily experiences (Manning, 2009).
Contemporary choreographic practices have come to redefine the ontological ground not only of dance but also choreography. In the aforementioned examples of choreographic objects, the notion of choreography is expanded from ‘an act of selfexpression’ to ‘a more impersonal process that could be realised and experienced by
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individuals in different ways’ (Foster, 2010, p.36). In that regard, it is not surprising that a site for incarnating choreographic thoughts can even be an immaterial system or programme ― neither a material object nor a human body ― where a human subject interact with a computer or others through a computer. However, it is significant to recognise that choreographing an interface implies not just the changed notion of choreography in the historical context and the expansion of the site for substantiating choreographic knowledge, but it entails a shift of choreographic knowledge of the human body.
As shown above, the focal point of choreographic investigation of the body has been changed from aesthetic, emotional and material aspects of the body to its cognitive, intellectual and immaterial aspects. This shift of the choreographic approach to the body does not call for the withdrawal of perceptual functions of the body from choreography, but instead refuses the dualistic notion of the body as a purely physiological entity. Choreographic experiments with abstract and invisible aspects of the body are radicalised in a human-computer interface where a human subject has the virtual embodiment through the body’s association with a technological system (and its agency). I therefore propose that choreographing a human-computer interface reorients the notion of choreography at another level since it brings about not only the separation of choreography and dancing but also reconfigures choreographic knowledge of the human body and its way of embodying the (virtual) world and the self within it.
To give some examples of choreographic practices where human performers interact with their technological counterparts, Apparition (2004) is an interactive dance and
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media performance, directed by Klaus Obermaier, in collaboration with two dancers,
Desirée Kongerød and Robert Tannion. The Australian media artist Obermaier organises complex vision algorithms to achieve diversity, dynamics and fluidity in the interactions between physical and virtual manifestations. In the work, there is a stunning scene in which an optical illusion makes the male dancer look like he is tumbling into the digital galaxy (see Figure 3). Computer graphic animations consist of digital particles, whose direction, speed and shapes are constantly modified in real time according to the proximity, velocity and size of the dancer’s movement. While the dancer sits unmoving, the screen shows the lightning straight-lined winds that blow toward his body just like the moments preceding a storm. He then begins to move all around the stage, by rolling, leaping, kicking, turning and extending. The energetic flow of his movement is immediately tracked by the clustering visual particles which keep curving, swirling, disseminating and gathering. The dynamic interface between his body and the digital storm metaphorically pictures a black hole of the digital space into which he is drawn. The digital images react to the performer’s movements, but are not entirely controlled by them since the computational system has a self-organisation process, which triggers its own behaviours. To some extent, the two dancers improvise with the chaotic and unanticipated behaviours of the virtual partner, even though their movement composition is pre-determined and rehearsed.
The dancers’ movements, whether scripted or improvised, are composed through their mutual relations with the digital beings, and vice versa.
In the case of Sarah Rubidge’s interactive installation Sensuous Geographies , introduced in the beginning of this chapter, her choreographic ideas and methods of composing movements are employed in building a sound installation environment where audiences feel their kinaesthetic sensation through emergent digital sounds.
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Figure 3 Apparition (2004) by Klaus Obermaier © Klaus Obermaier
Choreographing human-computer interactions in stage performances and in installation works has different focal points: the former centres on composing dancers’ movements in relation to emergent digital entities while the latter facilitates audiences’ embodied experiences of a computer-generated environment. However, choreographic practices for either stage or installation works are commonly deeply involved in designing a human-machine interface − how an interactive system functions and how this functionality is presented to human dancers or audiences. In order to understand practical and conceptual implications of choreography for a human-computer interface, the meaning of a human-computer interface needs to be clarified.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘interface’ means ‘a point where two things meet and interact.’ In computing, it refers to ‘a device or program enabling a user to communicate with a computer, or for connecting two items of
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hardware or software’ (Waite, 2012), often interchangeably used with a ‘user interface’ or a ‘human-computer interface’. Most computer systems are capable of communicating with users, and the failure or the success of the interactive system hinges on ways of designing a user interface which is often considered to be the most significant aspect of the interactive system (Baecker et al., 1995, p.xi). The user interface relates to every aspect of the interactive system that is visible to the user, ranging from hardware, such as input and output devices, to software that adapts and processes inputs from users, and generates and presents outputs to the user. To facilitate an effective dialogue between humans and machines, the user interface needs to be constructed before building software architecture, and be canvassed during the entire design process of the interactive system (Nigay & Gray, 2006). The good and effective design of the user interface is oriented toward the user’s perspectives, responding to difficulty in learning, performance speed, error rates and subjective satisfaction. In order to consider the user’s experience, it is required to comprehend not only the software’s capabilities and limitations but also perceptual, cognitive, behavioural and psychological characteristics of users in general or in a particular population (Baecker, et al, 1995, p.xi; Jacob, 2000). When the interface is well designed, it becomes almost imperceptible in the users’ experiences, so the users are able to immerse themselves in the computer-generated world (Shneiderman, 1998, p.10).
When choreographers are engaged in designing a human-computer interface for either a stage performance or an installation production, their compositional ideas and methods are implemented in order to devise ways in which corporeal bodies (of professional performers, audiences or online users) interact with computer systems or other bodies through the systems. Choreographers establish how and what kind of
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physical inputs from humans (ranging from mouse clicking to full-body motion tracking) are inserted and decoded into an interactive system and how the system produces outputs through its programmed parameters, determining what hardware and software devices are appropriate. As few choreographers have the technical background for identifying, organising and maintaining software components, they often collaborate with computer engineers/media artists throughout the interface design process, especially regarding software architecture which requires technical knowledge and skills.
When choreographic thoughts are substantiated for designing an interface, where the human subject’s input continuously communicates with the machine’s output and vice versa, choreographers and media artists foreground the process of perception and embodiment through the operation of the body and a computer system. To look into my case studies, in Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine , when a dancer’s agency is expanded into a virtual space, how her virtual image moves is not the same as how she moves in a physical space. As the virtual image has its own autonomy to control its movements, it does not have the same moving shape of the human body or a causal relationship with the human body. Rather, the virtual image possesses chaotic and unexpected movements, which give rise to a dynamic and intense relationship with the dancer. In the case of igloo’s SwanQuake: House , an audience member plays her/his invisible avatar through which the player navigates the virtual world. The way in which the controller is used is directly related to how the avatar moves. Unless the player presses a button to jump and move forward, the avatar never does. In designing an interface, the bodily way of inhabiting a virtual world and having a doubled embodiment is the essence of choreography.
Choreography for a human-computer interface has been enacted and discussed
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from the early stage of the application of digital media in dance. In the early 1990s,
Tom Calvert and his colleagues in computing science created a software programme
Lift Forms , which as a compositional tool for dance was aimed at digitally visualising and stimulating choreographers’ creative ideas on movement. According to them, to project choreographers’ methods for creating and organising movements on the operation system of this computer interface is essential to provide users/choreographers with ‘a more intuitive, direct, and transparent’ way of creating movements of computer-generated anthropomorphic dancers through the interface
(Calvert et al.,1993, p.115). Choreographers and dancers’ reflections on the effectiveness of the interface are deeply involved in the design process. One of the original members of the team which created Life Forms , Thecla Schiphorst, has not only a technical background but also formal training in contemporary dance.
Therefore, it is evident that her embodied knowledge on composing dance was employed in designing Life Forms . Moreover, Merce Cunningham, one of many choreographers and dancers who participated in the project as users, adopts this computer interface for the creation of his new works, with the support of Schiphorst, and has an influential impact on the evolution of the interface.
Life Forms presents a computer interface as a locus for the substantiation of choreographic ideas and compositional skills, but it has a limited view on the ontological status of the interface as an online venue for dance performances.
According to Calvert and others, Life Forms is a useful tool to assist in the choreographic process of a dance performance, like recording technologies. However, what is happening in this interface is not a dance performance because of the absence of kinaesthetic experiences of digitally-animated dancers (Calvert et al. 1993, p.116).
I am doubtful whether animated dancers in Life Forms lack in kinaesthetic sensations
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since users’ kinaesthetic, affective and cognitive activities are embodied in the creative process of digital dancers. From my anti-anthropocentric and anti-Cartesian views, these computer-generated anthropomorphic dancers can be conceived as an alternative embodied form of the users’ experiences enacted through the association of the human body with a computer system.
Unlike Calvert and others, Katrina McPherson and Simon Fildes conceive a choreographic interface as ‘a non-linear dance performance “space”’ (McPherson and
Fildes, 2001). The media artist-video dance maker duo redeploys a set of short clips of their prior dance film work in a non-linear way and restages them on the World-
Wide Web or in computer-based installation work, enabling users to produce new versions of the performance at the point of interactions. The artists refer to their creative process as ‘hyperchoreography’, a term and concept that is based on Ted
Nelson’s notion of networked hypermedia and its features, including costing less, transcending political and geographical boundaries and pluralising viewpoints
(Nelson, 1974, cited in Hannemyr, 1999). The concept of ‘hyperchoreography’ corresponds to dance scholar Harmony Bench’s notion of ‘computational choreographies’ in that both the concepts signify choreography for an archival interface and dance performance within the interface. Nevertheless, there is a slight difference between the two concepts as Bench’s computational choreographies cover archival sources ― including not only an artist’s prior dance video contents but also user-generated contents ― and put emphasis on the performance of the interactive system that execute coded choreography, in addition to the performance of computer users.
According to Bench, the term ‘computational choreographies’ means choreography ‘as a script or code that enables performance’s temporality and
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unpredictability to translate into the technologized spaces of digital media’ (Bench,
2009, p.155). A choreographic score is encoded in establishing a set of computer instructions which define parameters for possible behaviours and outcomes of the computer system. As a set of codes that are choreographically scripted are executed, the codes perform or generate performative events. For Bench, web-dance works are performed not only by computer users who operate dance contents, but also computer processors that execute choreographic codes, and Internet browsers that interpret and display the codes (Bench, 2009, p.157) . Bench then points out that in a web-based dance built from an archive or a database of recorded performances either enacted by professional dancers or uploaded by computer users, the archive or the database which generally works for storing and preserving performances can function as ‘a generator of real-time performances’, which Bench calls ‘computational performances’
(Bench, 2009, pp.167-168). McPherson and Simon’s ‘hyperchoreography’ and
Bench’s ‘computational choreographies’ commonly propose an interface as a site for substantiating choreographic knowledge and regard this interface as a dance performance space. In particular, in Bench’s concept of computational performances, which refers to performances or the performative acts of a computer system, a computer system can be construed as a non-human performer.
What I want to point out here is that in the concepts of computational choreographies and hyperchoreography, a designed interface is primarily where a recorded performance of human dancers is generated. The existing choreographic knowledge ― how to create movement materials, organise the materials and arrange various elements for performance ― is embodied in devising possible ways of redeploying and re-creating recorded dance performances. In this sense, this choreographic process is similar to an editing process of dance film, and the only the
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difference is that computer agents or audience users becomes editors for creating a recorded dance performance. By contrast, in choreographic interfaces where a professional performer, an audience participant or an online user generates his/her virtual self, as in Life Forms , choreographic knowledge is not limited to how to create and compose the human’s physical movement in time and space, because of sensorimotor and cognitive functions of the body is extended or altered through the intervention of a computer system in the body. The existing choreographic knowledge of a human subject’s bodily way of being in the world has to be reconfigured by reflecting upon a computer system’s perceptual and embodied operation. For instance, in igloo’s SwanQuake: House , in order to choreograph a player’s way of inhabiting a virtual world as his/her invisible avatar, choreography is devised in consideration of his avatar’s way of inhabiting the world.
Bill T. Jones addresses an issue relating to virtual dancing, stating that ‘there’s something about movement ― in time, in space ― that must succeed on its own, without the help of the human personality and human performers. And there we go back to the drawing board. What is a gesture? What is space when there is no space?’
(Jones, quoted in De Spain, 2000, p.15). Jones’s statement that the advent of virtual dance gives rise to fundamental questions about choreography corresponds to my argument on reconfiguring choreographic knowledge for posthuman ways of being in the world. When the contemporary notion of choreography is considered as a referent for devising a dance performance, an object or a computational environment that has mediatised representations of human performers, it is inherently founded on ‘the fundamental political, ontological, physiological, and ethical question’: ‘what can a
[human] body do?’ (Lepecki, 2006, p.6). In contrast, in choreographic interfaces where the human subject becomes posthuman, this fundamental question of
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choreography is combined with what a machine can do. To choreograph an interface where humans experience dis- and re-embodiment and have doubled embodiment, choreography requires understanding the human body and a computer’s perceptual and embodied system.
As choreographic knowledge means sensibilities and composition of the experience of the human as posthuman, choreography for the posthuman is inherently interdisciplinary. Baecker and his colleagues emphasise that interface design and development is a multidisciplinary process that calls for individual specialists from a variety of disciplines ranging from graphic and industrial designers to cognitive and psychologist researchers. They then point out that these individual specialists are required to learn comprehensive knowledge and look out for ways of humancomputer interactions (Baecker et al., 1995, p.xi). I argue that the interdisciplinary nature of choreographing an interface for the posthuman does not mean that dance artists/choreographers just collaborate with computer engineers/media artists. Rather, it implies that choreographic knowledge embodied in digital performance practices embraces the understanding of a computer system’s ways of engaging in the human being’s sensorimotor and cognitive functions. This is not to say that choreographers have to relearn a new discipline to acquire technical skills and knowledge on computer programming. Rather, they need general knowledge on human-machine interfaces so that they are able to find convergence with other experts in different disciplines. I therefore claim that choreography in the context of digital performance not only expands a site for substantiating choreographic knowledge, but also reframes choreographic knowledge itself as a synthesis of physical and digital thoughts.
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In order to redefine what choreography means in the context of digital performance, this chapter elucidated the changed concept of choreography in Western culture. The orthodox notion of choreography as a writing of movements began to be undermined by the Judson Dance members in the 1960s and 1970s. The early postmodern choreographers revolving around the Judson Dance Theater experimented with choreography, by opting for task- or game-based structures, improvisation and pedestrian movements, instead of fully scripted scores, narratives, spectacles and virtuosic skills. At the same time, visual artists became interested in performance in which an artist’s body becomes the object and subject of their works, claiming that the artist’s conceptual and creative process can be a work of art. The concurrence of dance and performance art in compositional and thematic concerns and practice modes calls into question choreography as an exclusive term for dance artists or dance works. In the past two decades, this phenomenon of choreography has become radicalised by the contemporary European and North American choreographers. The so-called conceptual choreographers undertake a socio-political critique of the aesthetics of dance and initiate the extrication of choreography from dancing.
To deviate from a display of kinetic beings and turn toward physical thinking may be viewed as a menace to the ontological status of dance as distinct from other art disciplines, as well as to choreography as the unique compositional system for dance.
However, it is important to acknowledge that the separation between dance and the spectacle of the moving body, or between choreography and dancing, threatens a certain form of dance that exhibits a continuum of movement and at the same time leads to the diversification and expansion of political and aesthetic aspects of the body.
It also expands dance artists’ embodied knowledge by entering upon the other art
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fields where choreographic ideas and methods are substantiated not in the bodies, but in objects manipulated in reference to viewers’ bodily experience of them.
In this chapter, I extended contemporary debates on the concept of choreography from its substance to its thought itself. In digital performances including dance, performance and installation art works, when choreography is employed in the design of an interface through which the human body interacts with digital images or sounds, choreography reflects on possible embodiment enacted by the human subject and the machine. In creating the interface, choreographers/media artists shed light on how the human subject is perceived, cognised and embodied through the entanglement of its corporeal body and the machine. Then, their choreographic sensibilities substantiated in the interface design process do not constitute embodied knowledge of the human body as a biological organism, but that of the posthuman body as an integrated being of the biological and the mechanical. In this sense, I argue that choreographing the interface for the posthuman necessitates the understanding of how a machine perceives a physical input and acts upon a virtual world.
Choreographers do not necessarily have to acquire technical skills for the architectural design of an interactive system, but have to comprehend how the machine and its operation affects the human’s cognitive and perceptual function and vice versa. In the next chapter, I will seek for theoretical and critical standpoints from which to understand choreographic practices for designing a human-computer interface, where choreographers reconceptualise human embodiment as a synthesis of a physical and digital being and go beyond Western ontological dualisms between the human and nonhuman, the body and mind, physicality and virtuality.
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5
In the 1670s, Louis XIV, known as the Sun King who established the Académie
Royale de Danse, commissioned Pierre Beauchamps, the principal dance master, to invent the dance notation system so that dance could be preserved and disseminated for teaching and performing without personal instructions. Feuillet’s notated scores adopted symbols devised by Beauchamps that signified spatial directions and positions of feet and legs. In point of fact, the earliest use of the term ‘choreography’ was in the title of French dance master Thoinot Arbeau’s dance instruction manual,
Orchésographie (1589), which means a writing ( graphie ) of dancing ( orchesis ), but
Feuillet’s Choréographie
as a systematic notation system was more widely distributed over England and Northern Europe than Arbeau’s Orchésographie
(Foster, 2011, pp.17-18).
6
Rainer seeks the neutrality of the body by stripping away technical, emotional, stylised and narrative movements. She employs tasks or game-like structures, or utilises the objects, in order to invest the moving body with non-self-referential objects, which are seen in minimalist sculptures (Rainer, 1974, p.71).
7
Paxton develops contact improvisation, which, as a new dance form, is a spontaneous physical dialogue between two moving bodies. Participants, either professional or novice, do not pretend to be someone or something, but rather perform the self, following their own kinaesthetic sensations, in response to contact with the partner (Novack, 1990).
8
Duchamp’s notorious readymade work, Fountain (1917), is a urinal which is laid on its side and signed by the artist with a fake signature. By exhibiting it at a gallery, the artist claims that in order to be a work of art, there is no different status between an object made by an artist and an ordinary object already made. For him, the act of
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choosing the urinal and uprooting its practical function transforms the ordinary object into the work of art. He lays emphasis more on the viewer’s understanding that is triggered by the object, less on knowledge that is conveyed by the object itself, which means the termination of the age-long association between an artist’s labour and the value of the work (Krauss, 1977, pp.76-80). His anti-art approach is in the forefront of
Dada, which is an anti-authoritarian movement growing out of revulsion at rationalist and formalist approaches to plastic form. Dada foretokens a new art movement,
Conceptual Art, which lays weight on an artist’s idea rather than a product fabricated by the artist (Smith, 1994, p.256).
9
Futurism is an Italian avant-garde movement, beginning in the 1910s. It celebrates advanced technologies and rejects old forms of medium to represent urban life.
Influenced by Futurism and other early European Avant-garde movements, such as
Cubism and Expressionism, Dada was born out of a reaction to World War I, by artists who gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dadaists insisted on anti-war politics while refusing any norms and forms of the dominant bourgeois ideology and nationalism. Futurisists and Dadaists employed diverse forms, ranging from performance and speech to poetry, photography, sculpture and painting, but performance can be considered as the most prominent form to express their anarchistic and defiant nature (Goldberg, 2011, pp.7-8).
10
A loosely collective group, Fluxus was named and organised in 1961 by Lithuanian artist and poet George Macunias. Strongly influenced by John Cage’s experimental music, members of Fluxus, such as Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik,
Wolf Vostell, La Monte Young and Yoko Ono explore an artist-centred creative process, rather than the market-driven product, using various mediums, such as
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experimental music, performance art, poetry and film. Favouring spontaneous art events, Fluxus artists refuse commercialism and professionalism in the arts and adopted anarchic attitudes to social-political issues in the 1960s (Goldberg, 2004, pp.38-39).
11
The terms ‘performance art’ and ‘body art’ are often interchangeably used, but
Jones points out that body art needs to be recognised as distinct from performance art because in the 1980s performance art came to be more theatrical, narrative and spectacular, often involved with aural and visual images, taking place in a stage-based setting in front of an audience. By contrast, body art is a name only for performance art works obsessively based on the self’s body as the political site. In body art, an artist exhibits the process of objectification of his or her own body, which is often fetishised and sexualised in exaggerated and uncomfortable ways (Jones, 2000, pp.16-
47; 1998, p.13).
12 Jones notes that in the 1990s, performance artists turned to installation art in which the body is invaded and transformed by technologies so as to reconstruct the body through its fragmented images or through the juxtaposition of the material and immaterial body (Jones, 2000, pp.16-47).
13
In 1961, a dance composition class took place at the Merce Cunningham’s studio, led by Robert Dunn, a pupil of John Cage. The following year, choreographers, who attended the class, first presented their own repertory at the Judson Memorial Church in the Village, New York, with huge success. Afterward, based in the venue, they regularly organised workshops and performances, under the name of Judson Dance
Group. The founders of Judson Dance Theater were Simone Fonti, Yvonne Rainer,
David Gordon, Steve Paxton and Deborah Hay, to name a few (Goldberg, 2011,
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pp.140-141).
14
Dance theorist Bojana Cvejić argues that the term ‘conceptual dance’ is an inappropriate name since it could give rise to the misunderstanding of the contemporary experimental choreographies as well as the notion of dance. Conceptual dance is often considered to be opposed to pure dance, which could be easily misconstrued as one having no concept. Every dance work is constructed with a concept, which is isomorphic to ‘ideas, belief, values, procedures and meanings’, even if an artist weights the aesthetic and perceptual aspects of corporeality. What contemporary avant-garde choreographers do is to thematise a concept of choreography as writing and embody their idiosyncratic concept of choreography
(Cvejić, 2006).
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In dance, theatre and performance studies, an ontology of performance is premised upon the presence of human performers and spectators (Dixon, 2007, p.133;
Remshardt, 2008, p.50). According to Remshardt (2008, p.51), it is widely believed that the live human performers would provide the spectators with a sense of liveness, presence and reality. At the same time, from a semiotic perspective, the human performers’ subjectivity and identities are signified and represented through their embodiment within which the spectators discover meanings. That is to say, dance, theatre and performance studies are inclined to approach embodied presence as a prerequisite for performance. However, the emergence of networked, animated, robotic presences of a human subject has become a contentious issue in performance discourses since these disembodied performers subvert the humanist dichotomy between bodily presence/absence, liveness/mediatedness, and reality/virtuality. In this chapter, I attempt to establish a theoretical framework for posthuman performers whose embodiments are inextricably associated with technologies, in order to elucidate convincingly the ontological nature of virtual and robotic presences and avoid disregarding them as fake, unreal or antihuman. In interrogating philosophical and critical discourses on technological incorporations of performing bodies, I will identify my methodological approach for analysing digital performances.
A pertinent development in the fields of dance, theatre and performance is that the anthropocentric bias has been challenged by the invention of photography and film.
The meaning of technological mediation or reproduction of live performance calls into question whether the mediatised events have the same ontological status as the
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live ones. This chapter will begin with two performance scholars, Peggy Phelan (1993) and Philip Auslander (2008, first published in 1999) who are polarised in their opinion about the nature of live and mediatised performance. Auslander’s notion of liveness is further investigated in relation to Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacra and simulation (1994 [1981]), which contribute to the conceptualisation of transformed notions of liveness, presence and reality in digital performances.
I seek to resist an anthropocentric bias against nonhuman presences which equate to a lack of humanity and corporeality by adopting Auslander’s argument that there is no inherent ontological distinction between live and mediatised performances, human and nonhuman performers. However, at the same time, I call into doubt Baudrillard’s nihilist and apocalyptic vision of originality and reality in our simulated society that entirely wipes out our historical and phenomenological notions of human beings, corporeality and reality and replaces them with technological beings, virtuality and simulacra. To avoid anthropocentric humanist and radical poststructuralist approaches to choreographic practices creating the posthuman, I propose critical posthumanism and post-Merleau-Pontian philosophies as useful and appropriate theoretical and critical perspectives. First I examine how posthumanism challenges humanist essentialism of human nature and a social hierarchy of human and nonhuman. While pointing to the Cartesian mind/body dualism of popular posthumanism, I elaborate on critical posthumanism and its approach to posthuman embodiment. Also, I draw upon
Merleau-Ponty and his followers whose theories help me conduct my posthumanist analysis of relations between the body and technology in embodied experience delineated in choreographic practices.
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Two American performance scholars Peggy Phelan and Philip Auslander give a proper starting point for the later discussion of an ontological relation between human performers and their technologically generated selves, as they represent opposite poles of academic debates on technological mediation of performance. In Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (1993), Phelan asserts that in order to be viewed as performance, the locus of a performance practice has to be the live human body.
When human embodiment is captured through a technological medium, its quality of the ‘live’ is diluted. As she argues,
Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.
(Phelan, 1993, p.146, original italics)
For Phelan, mechanical reproduction of performance never exists as the authentic and the real, since a live performer in shared temporal and spatial relationships with an audience is guarantee of the presence of the performance. She considers mediatised representations as intrinsically secondary to live ones. The mediation of a performer’s self, however, is regarded as a precondition for creating signifying practices. This means that the performer’s body, which is present to audiences, is live but a mediated reality because of ‘a conceptual a priori mediality of all representational practices’
(Klöck, 2005, p.117).
Although denying non-live representations as performance,
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Phelan acknowledges a semiotic sense of the presence of the performing body, stating that ‘in the plenitude of its apparent visibility and availability, the performer actually disappears and represents something else – dance, movement, sound, character, “art”’
(Phelan, 1993, p.50). Phelan recognises that the body in performance never stands in itself, yet she still advocates that the ‘liveness’ of the body is a necessary and immutable condition for performance.
Phelan’s firm definition of performance, which tends to privilege corporeal proximity, immediacy and ephemerality of live performance over non-live performance, was debated in Auslander’s provocative and influential book, Liveness:
Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2008), which was originally published in 1999.
For Auslander, an ontological preconception that mediatised, primarily recorded performance, lacks the live, authentic and real nature results from the historically constructed notion of liveness. According to his argument, liveness is not an ontological condition of performance, but rather is a historical and social construct.
With the advent of recording technologies and the development of broadcast systems, the term the ‘live’ has been used to distinguish live performances from mediatised ones (Auslander, 2008, pp.56-60). According to Auslander, the experience of early recording technologies ― sound recordings like a gramophone ― remained clearly distinct from that of live performances. Early recording technologies were used as subordinate means to complement or preserve the primacy of live performance, so this was nothing to do with a distinction between the live and the recorded. However, with the advent of broadcast technologies, the concept of the live was brought into being so as to make a distinction between the live and the mediatised which began to be experientially confused by live radio or television broadcasts. Auslander illustrates the case of radio that allows listeners to only access the mediatised form of sounds
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they are listening to, so they can never be sure whether the source of the sounds is live or recorded. Live broadcasts are neither purely live nor purely recorded since they are spatially separate from and temporally simultaneous with audiences. Liveness of broadcast technologies goes beyond the existing scope of the live and stands for happening ‘in the “now”, but not necessarily the “here”’ (Klich and Scheer, 2012, p.71).
Accordingly, Auslander assigns the cause of the superiority of corporeality over mediality to the traditional mode of human sense perception. He insists that the condition in which performance is perceived as live is altered according to technological changes. He borrows this idea from Walter Benjamin’s argument that
‘the manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well’ (Benjamin, 1969 [1936], p.222).
15 Liveness is produced, depending on the beholder’s perception of a being in time and space, regardless of its medium through which the being is presented.
16
Accordingly, Auslander denies the ‘live’, authentic and real as the inherent properties of performance and challenges the ontological distinctions between live performance and mediatised representations of performance.
In this sense, Auslander’s deconstruction of liveness is closely allied to the poststructuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra having no real referents. The term ‘simulacrum’ has been broadly used to refer to all representative images, objects and products which are created through media since it was developed by Baudrillard (Dixon, 2007, p.143). To be more precise, as the key idea of his text
Simulacra and Simulation (1994 [1981]), Baudrillard problematises a universal understanding of what the real is, while claiming that, in a postmodern society, ‘there is no real’ (Baudrillard, 1994, p.107). According to his theory, simulacra have no
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original and real referents because we copy the real through media and reproduce the simulacra: the real that we referred to is the simulation itself. In other words, all that we perceive is the simulation already imagined and reproduced.
17
The incorporation of interactive media technologies with performance not only corroborates Auslander’s assertion that there are no ostensibly intrinsic characteristics of live and mediatised performance, but it also extends to the ontological debate on the human performer. Theatre and performance scholar David Saltz uses the term ‘live media’ to define interactive media’s capacity to respond to performers in real time, contrasting it with ‘frozen media’ (Saltz, 2001, p.127) .
Sounds and images, which are pre-created and stored in a computer, are instantaneously manipulated by adapting to human performers or audiences’ behaviours. That is to say, interactive media have
‘the spontaneity or variability’, as a live performance does (Saltz, 2001, p.109). Saltz then points out that if a machine itself is capable of not just generating a sense of liveness but also enacting its own autonomous behaviours in response to other entities, as a bot with artificial intelligence does, it can be perceived as a kind of performer
(Saltz, 2001, p.127). Interactive media’s potential status as a non-human entity performing ‘live’ is indicated also by Margaret Morse, who states that ‘a machine that thus “interacts” with the user even at this minimal level can produce a feeling of
“liveness” and a sense of the machine’s agency and ― because it exchanges symbols
― even of a subjective encounter with a persona’ (Morse, 1998, p.15).
Susan Broadhurst’s Blue Bloodshot Flowers (2001) exemplifies the reframed ontological status of the machine. In this performance work, Jeremiah, which is a computer-generated animated head, is able to change his facial expression as a reaction to human movement, by means of artificial intelligence technologies. In expressing his emotion, such as anger, happiness or sadness, he is programmed to
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demonstrate a specific facial expression in reply to a certain movement of the human performer or audience. At the same time, he puts on a random face which, in the eyes of the viewer, endows this virtual entity with a look that is similar to a real entity.
Broadhurst implicitly indicates the ontological similarity of Jeremiah and a human improvising artist, stating that ‘in every performance Jeremiah is original’ (Broadhurst,
2004, p.51). Here, the stated originality of Jeremiah implies not only his capability for spontaneity, but also for autonomy as an independent entity.
Auslander also argues that in digital culture, the debate on liveness is extended from the ontology of performance to that of performer, as he compares radio with chatterbots ― computer programmes that converse with human users via typed words.
According to Auslander, if the operational system of the chatterbots is intricate and advanced enough to be comparable to human conversation, we might not be able to recognise whether the typed words that we read emanates from human beings or the chatterbots. This is because it is impossible for us to identify the sources of the words, which is analogous to the phenomenon of a radio’s sounds. Auslander then makes the significant and provocative statement that ‘[the chatterbot] it undermines the idea that live performance is a specifically human activity; it subverts the centrality of the live, organic presence of human beings to the experience of live performance; and it casts into doubt the existential significance attributed to live performance’ (Auslander, 2002, p.21). A human being is no longer the sole and exclusive subject of live performance since the human ability to perform in real-time is shared by the chatterbot.
Auslander’s poststructuralist reorientation of an anthropocentric assumption of ontological divisions between a live and the mediatised performance and between a human and nonhuman performer offers a valuable critical approach to overcoming anthropocentric bias against the nonhuman. However, I also warn that a radical
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poststructuralist approach that find no ontological division between the human and the non-human performer may fall into the trap of ignoring the importance of acknowledging the bodily existence and bodily senses.
18 For example, with the concept of ‘the desert of the real’ (1994, p.1), Baudrillard declares that signs no longer represent any reality and simulate a hyper-reality where meaning implodes.
Although his argument echoes our information and media society, it entails the absolute removal of historical and phenomenological aspects pertaining to human beings and reality and the substitution of them with technological entities and simulacra, as Poster criticises that ‘[Baudrillard] totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view of the world from that limited base. He ignores contradictory evidence’ (Poster, 1988, p.7).
An uncritical espousal of Baudillardian philosophy insists on ‘total erasure of previous historical understandings of notions of technology, society, the self, the body, consciousness, and the “real”’ (Dixon, 2007, p.142), which can be seen as an apocalyptic vision of the technologised body of a human performing subject that choreographers would never intend to offer through their creative experiments with technology. As illustrated in Chapter 2, choreographic practices that create the posthuman would not envision a simulated world where the body and the real disappear and the bodily senses end. They instead attempt to place technology not as the ‘Other’ that competes with the human subject or erases the body, but as the constituent part of the human subjectivity. Reflecting Auslander’s poststructuralist rethinking of a live human performer, I argue that, for a critical analysis of choreographic practices having the posthuman, it is important to acknowledge that a distinction between the human and nonhuman is historically constructed rather than
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ontological given and to understand how the notion of human subjectivity, the self, the body in a digital age is changed, rather than being erased. I thus propose posthumanism as a valuable theoretical foundation, which challenges anthropocentrism and its essentialist approach to human nature, as distinct from nonhuman nature, and its hierarchical value system privileging the human over the nonhuman.
3.3.1 Post-anthropocentric Approaches to the Posthuman
Rapid developments in computer science, advanced robotics, nanotechnology and bioethics have called into question the humanist notions of the human body, human nature and human agency as they have made humans become the posthuman. As a generic and comprehensive term, the posthuman refers to the human whose ontoexistential conditions are inextricably associated with the nonhuman. According to
Rosi Braidotti, one of the leading posthuman(ist) theorists, ‘the advocates of advanced capitalism seem to be faster in grasping the creative potential of the posthuman, than some of the well-meaning and progressive neo-humanist opponents of this system’
(Braidotti, 2013, p.45). Compared to the increase of capitalism’s challenges to the posthuman, conceptual and theoretical discourses on the posthuman still revolve upon traditional humanism, which is hard to embrace the human potential in becomingother-than-human without the prospects of either human enhancement and transcendence or human extinction and apocalypse. Braidotti insists that this
‘posthuman predicament’ calls for theory that helps humans rethink the decline of human(ist) exceptionalism followed by the advent of the posthuman. She then suggests posthumanism as posthuman theory that looks more affirmatively towards
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the human and the nonhuman (Braidotti, 2013, p.36).
In Western philosophy and social science, humanism is premised on the belief that most humans share a universal and inherent nature and value, which are superior to those of other sentient beings on earth. However, this ‘human nature’ is represented by one specific type of person (male, white, Western and elite class) as a whole, excluding other types of people as well as other species (Weinstone, 2004, p.3).
Posthumanism undermines the humanist notion of being a human as an organic and metaphysical whole, viewing the concept of the human’s immanent nature as a hierarchical social construct. Posthumanism is generally considered as a periodising term to refer to after-humanism or the end of humanism which should not be confused with the end of the human.
The term posthumanism was initially announced by the literary theorist Ihab
Hassan in his keynote speech at the 1976 International Symposium on Post-Modern
Performance, which was published as ‘Prometheus as Performer: Towards a
Posthumanist Culture?’ in 1977. In the paper, the mythological figure of Prometheus is used as a metaphor for posthumanism in the late twentieth century. In Greek mythology, Prometheus, a Titan, is described as a trickster who transgresses the divine law by stealing fire from his father Zeus. At the same time, he is considered to be a hero who moulds the human race out of clay and provides the human with knowledge, techniques and arts in disobedience to Zeus’s will. For Hassan,
Prometheus’s boundary-crossing that transcends divisions between the human and the divine and between man and machine exemplifies a posthumanist culture that dissolves anthropocentric dichotomies.
We need first to understand that the human form— including human desire
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and all its external representations— may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism.
(Hassan, 1977, p.843)
It was long after Hassan’s declaration of posthumanism as a paradigm shift in humanism that scholars directed their attention to the posthumanist paradigm and considered the vision of a posthuman future. Before and after the new millennium, academic discourses on the posthuman existence in a technological age emerged in literary and cultural theory (Halberstam and Livingstone, 1995; Hayles, 1999;
Badmington, 2000; Fukuyama, 2002; Graham, 2002; Wolfe, 2010; Braidotti, 2013).
In his book What is Posthumanism?
(2010), Cary Wolfe argues for the deconstruction of human nature and human exceptionalism, contending that there is no unified human subjectivity because we are always radically other, already in- or ahuman in our very being—not just in the evolutionary, biological, and zoological fact of our physical vulnerability and mortality, our mammalian existence but also in our subjection to and constitution in the materiality and technicity of a language that is always on the scene before we are, as a precondition of our subjectivity.
(Wolfe, 2010, p.89).
Wolfe’s posthumanist notion of human hybrid subjectivity shows that the human is no longer defined in a strict dualism against the non-human realm. The human’s unfixed nature and its mutable relation to the nonhuman undermine the humanist hierarchical system that places the human above the nonhuman others including animals, machines, objects, systems and environment. Posthumanism as a critique of
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anthropocentrism claims that nonhuman beings’ ontological status and epistemological approaches are no less valued than those of human beings, appealing to environmentalism, deep ecology, animal rights and robo-ethics. The end of the privilege awarded to the human does not necessarily open up a new solipsistic supremacy of the nonhuman. Rather, post-anthropocentric posthumanism envisions a posthuman future in which human and nonhuman subjects ‘newly and differently’ inhabit with not ‘the triumphal surpassing or unmasking of something but an increase in the vigilance, responsibility, and humility’ (Wolfe, 2010, p.47).
In the posthumanist paradigm, the posthuman figure and its subjectivity by means of cognitive aspects of computer system and the biological extension can be dissociated from anthropocentric ambition of domination or anthropocentric anxiety about the threat of other subjects and the loss of humanity. Rather, the posthuman, which urges us to rethink about what the human is, can be seen as the possibility of rehumanising and reinventing the human to address and ‘resist the ‘inhuman(e) aspects of our era’ (Braidotti, 2013, p.3). In this sense, the posthumanist concept of the posthuman subjectivity offers new insight into technological representations of the human performing subject that are generated through telematics, motion-tracking, motion-capture animation and virtual reality systems. The anti-hierarchical and antiessentialist approach of posthumanism extends performance discourses on questioning ‘who performs?’ to ‘what is human?’ (Remshardt, 2010, p.137) and help understand the process of constructing human subjectivity through a coupling of the body and technology. Then, it is questionable how posthumanism approaches to the body in constructing posthuman subjectivity, which may resist or confirm to Cartesian notion of the disembodiment of a human subject.
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3.3.2 Critical Posthumanist Approaches to Human Embodiment
There are two different strands of posthumanism which have different views of posthuman future and human embodiment in the face of corporate biotechnology and informatics. These strands are characterised as ‘popular posthumanism’ and ‘critical posthumanism’ by Bart Simon, who points out that ‘for popular posthumanism, the future is a space for the realization of individuality, the transcendence of biological limits, and the creation of a new social order’ (Simon, 2003, p.2). In ‘popular posthumanism’, which is now interchangeably used with the term ‘transhumanism’, technologies are able to improve human beings, by overcoming and enhancing the frailty and weakness of the human body (Nayar, 2013). Some popular posthumanist scholars characterise the posthuman utopia as a separation between the human body and mind and a disembodied existence in cyberspace (Moravec, 1988; Minsky, 1982,
1988, 1994; Tipler, 1995; Kurzwil, 1999).
American cyberneticist Marvin Minsky (1982; 1988; 1994) is one of the most influential figures in posthumanism and transhumanism. His philosophy is based on cybernetic vision of human beings. As the origin of the prefix cyber-, cybernetics has been developed by scientists in engineering, biology and psychology, and computer science since World War II.
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Cybernetics is a multidisciplinary approach to interconnections between humans and machines through the communication and control systems of mechanical devices. Within the cybernetic system, there are no longer boundaries between the human and the machine since the machine enables the transmission and reconfiguration of inputting from one entity to generate an output in another entity. The cybernetic system was adapted for the informational process of computers.
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For Minsky, human beings can be simulated in cyberspace through a pattern of information extracted from them. Hans Moravec was the first scientist to
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argue for the technological possibility of operating the human’s immortal existence in cyberspace, which is called ‘transmigration’. In his seminal book
Mind Children: The
Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988), Moravec contemplates a technological system to scan the human mind from the brain surface and simulate the mind in a computer. The human can then exist immortally in cyberspace while releasing the self from the body.
The above popular posthumanist scholars are often referred to as advocates of transhumanism, which Wolfe defines as ‘an intensification of humanism’ (Wolfe,
2010, pp.xv, original italics) or ‘“bad” posthumanism’ (ibid., p.xvii). They uphold and reinforce liberal humanism while foregrounding science and technology as rational systems which can progress and optimise the human’s rational ability by reforming the corporeal body. I contend that the disembodiment and transcendence of the corporeal body that popular posthumanism intends to pursue is built upon the
Cartesian assumption of the mind/body division, which is what dance practitioners and researchers strongly oppose on the grounds that the body is considered to be the primary access to the world and its perceptual-motor function is interconnected with consciousness. This posthuman ‘utopia’ where the body disappears is an apocalyptic vision in choreographic practices.
Opposite to ‘popular posthumanism’, ‘critical humanism’, which is initially called by Jill Didur (2003), resists human liberal humanism and popular posthumanism. It instead pursues an alternative framework for rethinking posthuman future and the human as a being co-evolving with the nonhuman, adapting deconstructive reading techniques of antihumanism of posstructualists, such as Michel Foucalt, Jacques
Lacan, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, who seek to reverse the hegemony of anthropocentrism (Herbrechter, 2013 p.3). Critical
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humanism objects to techno-reductionism that considers technology as the prime mover of a social hierarchy. Instead of revealing how humans enhance and overcome their physical and mental abilities by means of technology as the ‘Other’ or the external source, as transhumanism does, critical posthumanism calls attentions to the mode of human existence in relation to nonhuman beings which is no longer the
‘Other’, but integral to the self. In doing so, critical posthumanism puts emphasis on embodiment as essential to human existence, criticising the erasure of the body in popular posthumanism that simply re-inscribes humanism in a more horrible context, rather than opening it to revision.
To explicate critical posthumanism and its implications for the body, in her weighty text, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1991), Donna Haraway characterises the female body as the cyborg, a hybrid entity interwoven with organism and machine, in terms of the ability to protest and reconstruct femininity onto which patriarchal ideologies are projected. Haraway redefines the human which merges with the nonhuman, thereby contributing to posthumanist notions of cyborg ontology. Her argument focuses on a radical conception of gender identity that draws upon feminist epistemology. Different from Haraway’s posthumanist approach to challenging the phallocentric or male-centred subject of humanism, Katherine Hayles, one of the most prominent cultural posthumanists, takes issue with the anthropocentric subject of humanism. Hayles is credited with developing Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as a cultural metaphor for the notion of the posthuman as one possible construction of a new model of subjectivity, which is distinct from a historically specific construction called ‘the human’. For Hayles, the posthuman does not mean a human being whose physical body has an implant or is literally modified through technologies, but one whose subjectivity is constructed in association with the technologies (Hayles, 1999,
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p.4).
Hayles’s vision of the posthuman emphasises ‘information pattern over material instantiation’ (Hayles, 1999, p.2). Materiality of the human subject is translated into information consisting of the binary code, so embodiment is attributed to information patterns rather than the corporeal presence. Information is separate from its body and instead oscillates between material and immaterial substrates. For Hayles, posthuman subjectivity is not constructed through material experiences, nor a set of informational processes, but through interplays between embodied materiality and seemingly disembodied information. Accordingly, ‘[t]he posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’ (Hayles, 1999, p.3).
Also, as a collective and heterogeneous subject, the posthuman’s cognitive system is distributed across the human and the nonhuman and operates through communications with one another. According to Hayles, we have already become posthuman since we live in environments where our cognitive process has been associated with computer systems, often in inconspicuous ways. For instance, we use such devices that contain computer chips as electronic doors that begin to swing as people approach or electronic watches that set the time and date by automatically receiving radio waves.
Although Hayles aligns herself with the cybernetic lineage, her notion of the posthuman casts doubt on the cybernetic myth of the obliteration of embodiment and
Hans Moravec’s prospect of a separation of body and mind and consciousness without embodiment (Hayles, 1999, p.1). Hayles redresses the cybernetic vision of the human subject as a disembodied being consisting of only bodiless information patterns, which is founded on the division of information and materiality and the privileged position of information over materiality (Hayles, 1999, p.12). For her, the concept of
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the cybernetic posthuman does not entail the complete erasure of bodily materiality because ‘information cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being as a material entity in the world’ (Hayles, 1999, p.49). The posthuman is always embedded in a material world, so its subject is produced by interplays between abstract information and embodied materiality. Hayles dismantles liberal humanists’ anxiety that human consciousness and its physical presence are substituted by artificial consciousness and its virtual presence. Hayles’s vision of the posthuman is non-dystopian because
… the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice.
(Hayles, 1999, p.286)
In other words, the arrival of the posthuman does not signal the end of the human nor the beginning of the antihuman, but implies another possible vision of the human, which is constructed through productive partnerships between the human and nonhuman.
Hayles’s concept of the posthuman, whose embodiment is constructed through dynamics between materiality and information, resists Cartesian accounts of the posthuman as a disembodied being and instead elaborates its doubled embodiment. In this sense, Hayles’s posthumanist approach offers an appropriate theoretical foundation to dance and performance scholars who consider posthuman performers not as beings made up of the information flows eliminating corporeal experience, but
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as hybrid beings that embody themselves in perpetual and dynamic interactions between physical movements and their reconfiguration, digital image and sound.
Halyes’s posthuman theory proves that not all posthumanism falls into the Cartesian trap of seeking the human’s immortal and disembodied existence in cyberspace, as popular posthumanism does. Following Halyes’s critique of the popular posthumanist view concerning the Cartesian liberal subject, and her emphasis on embodiment in posthuman experience, my posthumanist analyses of digital performances focus on how the human performer or audience experiences the world and embodies the self through the virtual double or prosthetic body ― how the corporeal body perceives and affects the technological body and vice versa. For exploring my posthumanist concerns relating to technology’s impact on human perceptual and embodied experience, I rely on post-Merleau-Pontian philosophies that investigate a relation between human beings and technology in experience. Before looking into post-
Merleau-Pontian phenomenological perspectives, I will examine Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and its influence on posthuman discourses, as well as its limitations.
The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of the major figures of phenomenology, established a paradigmatic shift in Western philosophical ideas that disregarded the human body from the Cartesian dualist view. Merleau-Ponty lays great stress on the body, in particular its perceptual activity, as a primary means of constituting human experience. He argues that when human beings perceive the world and are perceived by the world, the relation between subject and object is blurred because the body is neither an internal subject nor a fully external object of experience. In his final, unfinished book, the visible and invisible (1968 [1964]), the
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interdependence of the body and the world is articulated further with the concept of
‘chiasm’. Throughout the book, he brings new depth to the ideas about the relationship between human bodies and their surrounding environment, people and objects within it, as he elucidates that perception of the body, especially vision and touch, has double sensations, which is called ‘reversibility’: seeing and being seen, touching and being touched. The chiasm identifies with the intertwining of subject and object, the sensate and the sensible, or the lived body and the experienced world.
For Merleau-Ponty, our bodies are flesh, but flesh is not confined to skin, bones, and muscles. Rather, flesh is suggestive of the chiasmic relation between human bodies and the world. Under the porous and pliable skin our bodies and the world are intertwined. Due to the thickness of the flesh, our bodies can extend beyond our body outlines through sensations, so the physical body is ‘only shadow stuffed with organs’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p.138). To apply his concept of flesh to the understanding of the virtual, when computer technologies are engaged in the chiasmic relation between the body and the world, we experience and are experienced through computer systems.
The virtual body can be seen as another shadow stuffed with binary codes, but ‘it might mean for the very materiality of our bodies to be a weave of flesh and shadow, tangible and intangible’ (Kozel, 2006b, p.138). In other words, thanks to our bodies as flesh, we can experience a virtual world while having the doubled embodiment of a physical and virtual body.
Drew Leder, a phenomenologist, points out that within phenomenology there is a narrow understanding of the lived body that equate it with ‘one’s immediate sensorimotor grasp upon the world, as contrasted with faculties of abstract cognition’
(Leder, 1990, p.7). Merleau-Ponty prioritises the lived body and its perceptual activity, not intellectual mind in Cartesian terms. Yet this does not imply that his concept of the
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lived body rules out intellectual thought in a perceiving and acting body. The partiality toward sensorimotor abilities tends to overlook embodied cognition which has to be considered as constitutive of being-in-the-world. Abstract cognition is embodied meaning-making as perceptual experience, rather than the absence of it.
Leder’s account of the body as absence as well as presence implies that the virtual can be no longer conceived of as a being alien from perceptual and embodied experience by reason of the absence of the body.
Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on the lived body not only reject the body/mind split but also expand the understanding of the body to go beyond the skin surface and extend into the world through the intertwining. However, despite Merleau-Ponty‘s emphasis on the interrelatedness of subject and object or of the physical body and the outer world, he expresses his fear of a threat to humanity caused by the artificial mediation of the human body in the following statement:
… [human] interiority no more precedes the material arrangement of the human body than it results from it. What if our eyes were made in such a way as to prevent our seeing any part of our body, or some diabolical contraption were to let us move our hands over things, while preventing us from touching our own body? Or what if, like certain animals, we had lateral eyes with no cross-blending of visual fields? Such a body would not reflect itself; it would be an almost adamantine body, not really flesh, not really the body of a human being. There would be no humanity.
(Merleau-Ponty, 1993 [1964], p.125)
During his life, the physical and virtual dualism had not yet come into being.
Moreover, his philosophy did not even touch upon relations between the human body and technology. However, it can be assumed that he remained sceptical of our bodies
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merging with or being extended by technologies. He takes no account of technological intentionality and embodiment, making a distinction between the physical body and the technologically-constituted body.
Contemporary philosophers and media scholars, who primarily draw upon
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, consider the intertwining of the body and technology in terms of technological impacts on perceptual and embodied experience.
Don Ihde, an expert on human-technology relations, suggests that technological artefacts extend the body’s ability to perceive, be perceived and act while they are incorporated in our body schema. Merleau-Ponty defines the body schema as an operational system within one’s body which informs what takes place within boundaries of the body proper (skin) as well as what happens in the world in relation to embodied enaction (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [1945]).
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Ihde attempts to characterise four different types of the relationships humans can have with technologies which mediate human experience of the world. Technologies serve as semi-transparent means and become part of human embodiment, like a pair of glasses and a blind man’s cane (‘embodiment relation’); humans can perceive reality by interpreting mechanical representations of it, like a thermometer (‘hermeneutic relation’); technologies are experienced as beings when humans having direct interactions with them, like self-checkout ticket machines (‘alterity relation’); and technologies are not directly experienced yet give structure for perception, like automatic central heating systems (‘background relation’) (Ihde, 1990, p.99).
Technological artefacts provide human beings with new ways or contexts for experiencing reality. Such experiences are achieved through technological mediation of bodily perception of the world, so our bodies never exist in isolation from technologies. However, for Ihde, the body and technology are still two distinct, albeit
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interconnected, realms. He implies technology partly constitutes how human beings experience the world, but he does not take account of technology’s own capability to experience the world and its impact on human experience (Verbeek, 2008, p.389).
Stating that ‘[virtual reality] bodies are thin and never attain the thickness of flesh’
(Ihde, 2002, p.15), he prioritises the human body as an exclusive being that can play an ontological role in the construction of reality.
Media philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek proposes two more human-technology relations to complement Ihde’s four types of the relation of mediation (Verbeek, 2011, pp.139-148). In doing so, Verbeek brings into focus various forms of intentionality involved in the relations of human-technology, to which Ihde does not direct his attention. As one of the key concepts of the phenomenological tradition, intentionality means the human’s intentional structure of always being directed toward the world and perceiving ‘something’ by positioning ourselves within the world. The concept of intentionality discloses that the human and world can be understood only from their relation to each other (Verbeek, 2008, pp.388-389). In three types of intentionality
Verbeek discerns, the first category is technologically ‘mediated intentionality’ that occurs when humans perceive the world through technological artefacts, which is connected to Ihde’s four types of human-technology relations (p.142). ‘Cyborg intentionality’ takes place when technologies are not merely embodied by humans but rather literally amalgamate with humans, as with prosthetic limbs or an artificial pacemaker that is inserted on a patient’s body (p.144). This form of human intentionality is co-constituted by a new hybrid entity of the biological and the mechanical in which humans and technology are no longer distinguishable.
‘Composite intentionality’ means the co-existence of human intentionality and technological intentionality (p.145). Technological artefacts experience reality of their
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own accord, and human intentionality is directed at the ways the technological artefacts represent an existing reality or construct a new reality. In both cases, the reality can be accessed only by the technologies. Obstetric ultrasound that produces a visible image through reflected ultrasound or advanced driver assistance systems exemplifies a form of composite intentionality. In Verbeek’s concept of cyborg and composite intentionality, technologies are not just used in the service of human intentionality, but they also have their own intentionality while merging with human bodies or allying with human intentionality. As technologies are employed in connection with the body as well as the environment, the boundary between humans and technology becomes blurred.
The media scholar Mark Hansen radicalises Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chiasmic structure of human bodies and the world, by arguing that human agency can be augmented through the co-functioning of human and machine. His book Bodies in code (2006) illustrates diverse digital art works from which he makes the point that both physical reality and virtual reality are accessed through embodied perception, so the body is the primary point to all modes of reality. Significantly, what he means by the body here is ‘a body in code’, which is not ‘a purely informational body or a digital disembodiment of the everyday body’, but ‘a body submitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorialization ― a body whose embodiment is realized, and can only be realized , in conjunction with technics’
(Hansen, 2006, p.20, original italics). Put another way, in bodies in code, embodiment comes into being only through technical modifications of the coupling of body and world.
For Hansen, what is at stake in the increasing responsibility of technics for shaping human-world relations is that, different from Merleau-Ponty’s restricted
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vision of technics, technics do not simply ‘extend(s) the spatial range of the body schema’, like a blind man’s cane, but they rather ‘fundamentally redeploy(s) the body schema… toward the purpose of creating a world out of the primary data of bodily motility’ (Hansen, 2006, p.48, original italics). When technics take a constitutive role in the motile body schema, the representational body image is no longer taken through the experience of the body proper having a material mass, as since it appears outside the body proper through the way the data generated from technical enactive body schema represent ones’ body. Hansen’s notion of bodies in code overcomes the opposition between human bodies and technologies, by stressing that the virtual generated through technological intervention does not transcend embodiment but instead underlines it, augmenting human agency rather than replacing it with technological systems.
The aforementioned post-Merleau-Pontian philosophies assume posthumanist attitudes to technologies, although the authors do not call themselves posthumanists.
Their philosophies include questions related to technology and its phenomenology, which is differentiated from human’s phenomenology of technology. They adopt a classical phenomenology’s rejection of subject/object and mind/body dualism, but extend its debate to the physical/virtual dualism by bringing into focus the unavoidable and empowering role of technology in the human being’s lived experience. Verbeek’s view of technology as a role in constituting a new, hybrid being or constructing reality and Hansen’s notion of embodied agency, distributed and augmented through the co-functioning of human and machine, have a different focal point, which is technological intentionality on its own and technological exteriorisation of embodiment respectively. Both of the theories, however, no longer privilege the human being’s solipsistic way of encountering the world, but instead
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concede technology’s place within it. The human subject and its embodiment are constructed through the multiplication of agents that have their own ways of experiencing the world and are entwined with each other. In this sense, Verbeek and
Hansen’ theories correspond to posthumanism’s anti-anthropocentric and antiessentialist view on the posthuman subject and its doubled or hybrid embodiment.
Since the mid-2000s various phenomenological accounts of virtual embodiment have been developed in the realm of dance and performance studies (Kozel, 2007;
Nedelkopoulou, 2008; Popat, 2012; Popat and Palmer, 2008; Popat and Preece, 2012).
They offer detailed insight into the disembodiment of a performing subject, beyond the scope of its mediatisation. Their phenomenological reflections concerning virtual bodies, which particularly centre on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of a human body, underpin digital performance practices, as they claim that the virtual is not a disembodied being or world which competes with or transcends the physical, but it is merely another mode of being-in-the world in which the body and technology are entwined. However, given that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy leaves little room for technological agency to perceive the world in its own way, if a theoretical viewpoint on digital performance is entirely reliant on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, it may revolve around humanistic views on the human body as a univocal source of being-inthe-world, which maintain the physical/virtual division.
My posthumanist concern with Merleau-Pontian accounts of technological bodies in dance and performance discourses resonates with dance scholar Sita Popat’s argument that the physical/virtual dualism is deeply embedded in theories and philosophies of the body and technology (2012). According to Popat, philosophical and critical discourses on digital media, which range from classical phenomenologies to contemporary media theories, take anti-Cartesian approaches to dismantle the
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physical/virtual division in human embodied experience, and there is subtle dualism instilled in their discourses. In the early twentieth-century phenomenology, Merleau-
Ponty’s concept of the body and its intertwining with the physical world negates technology’s capacity to experience the world (Popat, 2012, p.17). Also, it presumably leads us to divide our embodied experience of the physical and the virtual world since, for Merleau-Ponty, our bodies are intertwined with the world because the flesh of our bodies is shared with the flesh of the world (Popat, 2012, p.25). Responding to Sita
Popat’s statement that ‘we need to develop theories and practices that help us to learn how to experience embodied encounters in, and to be part of, the diverse flesh of a mixed reality world’ (2012, p.25), I suggest critical posthumanist theories and post-
Merleau-Pontian philosophies to understand the posthuman’s heterogeneous and collective subjectivity and its doubled embodiment in choreographic practices. Here, I do not intend to defy Merleau-Ponty and relevant philosophies and other posthuman theories. Rather, I believe that posthumanist interpretations of phenomenological experience of the posthuman help us critique a deeply embedded dualism that maintains the separation between the physical and the virtual and the prioritisation of the human over the nonhuman.
In this chapter, I have attempted to establish a theoretical framework for critical analyses of choreographic practices that embody the posthuman and challenge an anthropocentric bias toward the live human body as the presence of performance. This chapter began with an investigation of Auslander’s method of reframing of the concept of liveness, which prompted me to call into doubt an ontological distinction between an embodied human being and a disembodied technological being.
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According to Auslander, live performances are neither intrinsically superior to nor more valuable than reproductions of performance. For him, liveness was historically constructed to discern live performances as the original event from recorded ones as the following event. With technological advances in our cultural environment, a live event has been closely associated with interactive media technologies, so it has become difficult to apprehend liveness as the authentic, unique and real quality inherent to live performances. Auslander then extends the reorientation of the anthropocentric assumption of liveness to the ontological debate on a non-human entity, proposing a machine as an alternative autonomous entity to perform ‘live’.
In keeping with Auslander’s argument, I insist that, for a critical reflection of nonhuman beings in choreographic practices, it is important to rethink anthropocentric assumptions of a fixed human nature and its ontological and epistemological priority and investigate how humans and their experience of the world are inextricably intermingled with technologies. Therefore, this chapter has proposed that critical posthumanist and post-Merleau-Pontian philosophical discourses of the posthuman can contribute to the understanding of choreographic conceptualisation of the non-human and its disembodiment, emancipating it from anthropocentric bias and Cartesian mind/body division. Critical posthumanist views help us think the posthuman without giving it to humanist anxiety concerning dehumanisation or to popular posthumanist fantasies of disembodiment. Resisting humanist exceptionalism, critical posthumanism reconceptualises the human subject, which is no longer distinct from technology, but co-evolves with technology. When critical posthumanist discourses elaborate on how posthuman subjectivity is embodied through materiality and information, what the body means is reframed, which can be articulated through Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body.
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F or Merleau-Ponty, our body is not confined to the skin surface since its functions, including sensorimotor activity and abstract cognition, are activated through the bodyworld intertwining. From post-Merleau-Pontian points of view, when technologies are engaged in human-world relations, they not only help humans to experience the self and the world through mediation, but they are also able to perceive and embody the world in their own ways, which extend or even deploy the human’s way of being-inthe-world. In this sense, as technologies in digital performances take a role in constructing a new reality such as a virtual world or constituting a new being like a cyborg, the virtual representation of a performer’s body or a metallic prosthetic body attached to the physical body does not exist as separate from the performer’s body.
They become part of the embodiment of the posthuman performing subject. Based upon the notions of posthuman embodiment and choreography as reframed in this chapter and the previous one respectively, the following three chapters will undertake critical readings of selected digital performance examples that possess a choreographic interface producing nonhuman entities.
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15
In his book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1969 [1936]),
Benjamin indicates that the reproduction of an art object through mediatised technologies, such as photography and film, reactivates in the beholder’s horizon the object’s originality that emanates from its historical context (Benjamin, 1969, p.221).
According to Auslander’s interpretation, what Benjamin means by the term
‘reactivation’ is that reproduction is not merely a replication of the original, but rather a production of ‘the renewed status’ of the original from the beholder’s point of view
(Auslander, 2009, pp.84-85). Although Benjamin implicitly suggests an effect of the beholder’s perception of an art object in his/her own circumstance, rather than regarding it as extrinsic to the object (Silverman, 1996; Hansen, 2008; Auslander,
2011), he nevertheless draws a distinction between the original and the reproduced.
For Benjamin, the original work of art has ‘its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’, which corresponds to its particular aura exposed in the work (Benjamin, 1969, pp.220-221). This aura as an indicator of authenticity becomes absent or markedly muted when the originals are reproduced through a lens-based system.
16
Matthew Reason points out that Auslander overlooks ‘the perceptions of actual audiences’ and conducts his empirical research on what makes audiences perceive a live performance as the ‘live’, through analysing discussions with the audiences
(Reason, 2004).
17
In Melissa Blanco Borelli’s article ‘Dancing in Music Videos, or How I learned to
Dance Like Janet… Miss Jackson’, she reflects on originality or reality in popular music videos, illustrating her and her friends’ embodied experiences of imitating the choreography of Janet Jackson’s Miss You Much music video. She points out that as
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choreographic movements in the music video are originally created for a mediated event, Jackson’s ‘live re-presentation of the original or “authentic” mediated event materialised as the simulacrum of the video’ (Blanco Borelli, 2012, p.54). Also, the
‘real’ perception of the music video can be dislocated by the live re-presentation because its realness derives from Jackson’s presence in the music video and the learner’s perception of mediated Jackson. This corresponds to Baudrillard’s concept of the indistinguishability of reality and simulation.
18
Reflecting on the cultural critique of the radical poststructuralist approach,
Auslander clarifies his intentions: ‘In challenging the traditional opposition of the live and the mediatized, I am not suggesting that we cannot make phenomenological distinctions between the respective experiences of live and mediatized representations, distinctions concerning their respective positions within cultural economy, and ideological distinctions among performed representations in all media.
What I am suggesting is that any distinctions need to derive from careful consideration of how the relationship between the live and the mediatized is articulated in particular cases, not from a set of assumptions that constructs liveness as an ontological condition rather than a historically mutable concept and the relation between live and mediatized representations a priori as a relation of essential opposition’ (Auslander, 2008, p.62). Although he proposes no significant intrinsic property between live and mediatised representations, he also admits any distinctions between them can be made from specific approaches that do not stand upon their ontological opposition but rather investigate their relationship as historical and conditional. If Auslander’s suggestion is applied to the debate on mechanical or computer-generated performers, it can be inferred that the non-human agency can be
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seen as either ontologically distinct or indistinct from the human agency, depending on a specific approach to their relationship, which is not ontologically given, but historically constructed.
19 The Western world has a long historical lineage in the field of cybernetics. Norbert
Wiener reflected on the antecedents of cybernetics, classifying the history of automaton into four stages regarding the technologies and ideologies of the age in relation to the body (Wiener, 1961 [1948], pp.39-40). In the age of magic, the automaton was considered as the magical being, the Golem, which was an anthropomorphic being of animated clay, was brought to life, and controlled by the
Rabbi of Prague. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the automaton emerged as clockwork, like a doll spinning round on the top of the wind-up music box. In the nineteenth century, the automaton became a heat engine which conserved and degraded energy by burning fuel, which was analogous to burning glycogen, fats, and protein within the human body. While the heat engine does not adapt itself to the external environment, the present age’s automaton is operated by an electronic system which is capable of effectively responding to the external world. In the present, communication and control mechanisms of the electronic automaton are used in automatic doors, radar guns, and calculators and so on.
20 Norbert Wiener, one of the leading scientists in cybernetics, insists on the similarity between the human’s nervous system and the computer’s binary code, regarding the all-or-nothing character that both of the systems possess. He further suggests the possibility of the machine’s capacity for having its own autonomy and artificial intelligence, which will make the machine closer to the human body’s feedback mechanism. At the same time, Wiener warns of the possibility of the
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replacement of human control, intelligence, and communication capabilities with artificial ones (Wiener, 2003 [1954]).
21
In Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception
, the French term ‘schéma corporel’ was initially translated into ‘the body image’, but now it tends to be rendered into ‘the body schema’ since what Merleau-Ponty means by schéma corporel is the operational process of embodied organism, rather than its visual form
(Tiermersma, 1989; Gallagher, 1986).
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In digital performance, posthuman embodiment is represented in a variety of forms ranging from a mediatised or virtual counterpart of a human performer to a cyborg as the actual merging of a human body and a machine. The cyborg as the part-organic, part-technological being is grounded upon cybernetics that insists on the modification and augmentation of the human body through the communication and control systems of the machine. Throughout history, the cyborg and its precursors such as automata and robots have provoked anxiety about the loss of moral agency and the violation of the human’s ontological status. The cyborg as a monstrous, uncontrollable and fearful figure has roots in the Western imagination of monsters, automata, and robots as ubiquitous figures which have long been depicted as a threat to the human race in literature and science fiction since Frankenstein's monster in Mary Shelley’s novel
Frankenstein (1818). Cyborgian and robotic figures have been increasingly pictured in positive ways from the 1960s onwards, offering optimistic visions that human’s association with technologies can save humankind from an apocalyptic event.
22
These positive images of cyborgs and robots, however, are still built on the assumption that the human is in control of technologies, exalting the unique status of the human as a subject through its opposition to the nonhuman as an object.
In this chapter, I will examine Australian Dance Theatre’s Devolution (2006) in which organic, metallic and cyborgian performers represent zoomorphic and therianthropic beings. Human dancers not only co-exist with robotic machines but also exist as cyborgs, human beings with robotic appendages.
By drawing upon
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various theories, from animal studies (mainly, Giorgio Agamben), science studies and phenomenology (primarily, Don Ihde), I will explore how three types of entities – the organic, the robotic and the hybrid – resist anthropocentric humanist perspectives on robotic and cyborgian figures, which are often relegated to the ‘Other’, distinct from humans, excluded from human moral agency or controlled by humans by all means.
In so doing, I argue that these performing entities — human dancers performing animality, robots passing as living organisms and human dancers wearing robotic prostheses — manifest the transgression of ontological boundaries between humans and animals, the natural and the artificial, humans and robots, and reformulate hierarchical and conflicting relationships between them.
4.2.1 Dancing with Robots and Cyborgs
The work Devolution , which is directed and choreographed by Garry Stewart in collaboration with the French-Canadian roboticist Louis-Philippe Demers, is performed by thirty robotic and ten organic dancers. The company’s artistic director
Stewart, who is renowned for choreographic exploration into the extremes of the body’s capacities, has grown the company’s international reputation. His interests in working with other artists from different areas, such as photography, architecture and video, have led to the creation of original and ground-breaking works which transcend the conventional boundary of dance. During this creative period, Demers’s robots captivated Stewart and immediately became Stewart’s new and yet unexploited artistic force for choreography. Demers has specialised in machines and media, creating more than 175 machines and working with diverse artists, including Robert
Lepage, Stelarc and Cirque du Soleil. Devolution was the first work in which Demers
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staged his robots to co-exist with human dancers. In Devolution , the two collaborators create an extraordinary and striking world in which humans and machines are placed in collision and confluence with each other. The choreographer takes an ecosystem as the metaphor, exploring choreographic relations to ecosystem processes such as mutualism, territoriality, parasitism, swarming, predation, carnality, symbiosis, and senescence (ADT, www.adt.org.au).
Aside from robotic and organic bodies on stage, there is another form of bodies, which is projected onto a black scrim covering at the front of the stage. This video projection featuring ADT dancers’ bodies, sometimes not identifiable as humans, is the UK-based video artist Gina Czarneck’s adapted version of her previous work
Nascent (2005) in collaboration with Stewart and ADT dancers. Nascent portrays ‘a visual and visceral journey through and about being’ (Czarneck, http://www.ginaczarn ecki.com) through capturing and recomposing the ADT dancers’ improvised and choreographed movements. Separate clips from Nascent are selected and retouched for the wide projection in Devolution so that they can co-exist with robotic and human live dancers. These projection images are interspersed throughout the work while functioning as transformation scenes. They often appear and disappear by overlapping with dancers and machines on stage. In the projection, the dancers’ bodies are moving in a gravity-free state, but at the same time intertwine with each other. The masses of the combined bodies are multiplied and exhibited like a cell division, a DNA strand, or the spinal column (see Figure 4). Also, in other scenes, a dancer’s body, looking like a ghostly apparition, moves in slow motion and leaves behind his or her white traces. A constant stream of the after-images mutates the dancer’s body and its movement. In Czarneck’s micro and macro images of beings, the dancers’ bodies are modified, intertwined and mutated so that their anthropomorphic shapes evolve into
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Figure 4 The Spine © Gina Czarnecki new beings that are undefinable and fluid.
As in Czarnecki’s projections in which dancers’ images are left recognisable as apparitions or abstract figures filled with carnality, ADT dancers and Demers’s robots on stage also metamorphose into animal or therianthropic creatures. Borrowing from various industrial manipulators, Demers invents the following six robot species, each of which exhibits different scales, shapes and functions: 1) large geometric structured machines suspended from the ceiling and gliding on tracks (‘The Cube’ [see Figure
5]), 2) two dinosaur-like gigantic ambulatory robots appearing from both sides of the stage (‘The Bigbots’ [see Figure 6]), 3) a row of towering robots occasionally bending
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Figure 5 The Cube © Chris Herzfeld Figure 6 The Bigbots © Chris Herzfeld
Figure 7 The Choir © Chris Herzfeld back and forward at the rear of the stage (‘The Choir’ [see Figure 7]), 4) a colony of spider-like electronic creatures crawling across the stage (‘The Swarm’ [see Figure 8]),
5) an electronic python poking down from above and wriggling (‘The Spine’ [see
Figure 9]), 6) robotic prostheses, like limbs or antennae, attached to different parts of
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dancers’ bodies (‘The Body Extensions’ [see Figure 10]) (Demers, 2010). Stewart stated that these robots’ behaviours were pre-programmed, although the degree of unpredictability and arbitrariness that they still exhibited made it unsafe for a cast of dancers to dance with them (Stewart, cited in Madden, 2007). In some instances, due
Figure 8 The Swarm (still image from video)
Figure 9 The Spine © Chris Herzfeld Figure 10 The Body Extensions © Chris Herzfeld
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to the Bigbots’ sudden erratic and risky behaviours, dancers were not allowed to enter onto the stage, so the two huge robots moved alone or the artist had to abandon staging these robots (Sykes, 2007). Demers’s machines were fastidious and cranky performers, not docile and governable ones.
These metallic performers are totally scripted and controlled by a remote human operator. In other words, they are neither capable of responding to human dancers nor controlling themselves through their own agency or intelligence. Technically speaking, although the term ‘robot’ signifies a machine operated and controlled by computers, it has been used to refer to many kinds of machines, not limited to computational devices (Dixon, 2007, p. 281). In a broad sense, Demers’s machines can be referred to as ‘robots’ even though their acts are not based on computation. Demers’s attempt to attach his robots to dancers’ bodies is conceived as the natural and logical consequence of the genealogy of automata and robots since robots, the most innovative form of the automaton to date, induce cyborgs to come into life (Giannachi,
2004, p.44; Dixon, 2007, p.278). In the middle of the twentieth century, robots appeared in the manufacturing industry, and since then, their use and role have gradually increased in society, including military robots for combating or defusing bombs, domestic robots, such as vacuum cleaners, and medical robots like robotic surgical arms or nursing robots for elderly and disabled people. The advance of the automaton has branched out beyond robots as artificial intelligent beings, into cyborgs as hybrid beings fusing human bodies with robotic and computational systems, coupled with cybernetics.
In Devolution , ADT dancers appear with metallic appendages located in their upper chest, upper back, legs or arms. The behaviours of the artificial prosthetics vary according to their mechanical structures and material characteristics: a long, foil-like
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machine strapped to the chest or the back repeatedly bends and waves menacingly; rigid metallic rods attached to limbs often have glitches while swinging; a snake-like machine fastened to the upper chest wriggles at will. These prostheses deform the dancers’ bodies, who appear like therianthropes — beings that share human and animal traits. Not just the dancers’ body shape but also their bodily ways of perceiving the self and the world are entirely altered by the prostheses. Then, their corporeal bodies and prosthesis are experientially indistinguishable. I will use the term ‘cyborg’ to refer to these therianthropic creatures. In doing so, I find necessary to clarify what I mean by ‘cyborg’, since a range of the body-machine coupling is regarded as cyborgian relations.
In the Introduction of Cyborg Handbook (1995, pp.2-3), Chris Hables Gray, Steven
Mentor and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera indicate that there is no consensus on the definition of ‘cyborg’ because types of cyborg and human-machine relations have proliferated. Cyborgian figures have emerged in the military, medical science, science fiction, popular culture and daily life, ranging from the fictional character (creature) of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (1818) or RoboCop
’s superhuman (1987), to an actual individual attached with an artificial organ, limb and supplement, to an organism having genetic manipulation, and to a combat pilot controlling his aircraft through the helmet-mounted display which allows him to shoot at a target with his eyes.
As a compound of ‘cybernetics’ and ‘organism’, the term ‘cyborg’ was coined in
1960 by NASA researchers, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, in their speculative research on a human astronaut whose bodily functions are regulated and altered by mechanical operations so as to survive in an extraterrestrial environment.
Their initial definition of the cyborg was a man-machine system which ‘deliberately
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incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments’ (Clynes and Kline, 1995, p.31).
The world’s first cyborg was a white laboratory rat at New York’s Rockland State
Hospital in the late 1950s. Medical scientists experimented on the rat with an implantable osmotic pump which injected chemicals into its body at a controlled rate
(Clynes and Kline, 1995, p.31). Although the development of cyborgian technologies arose from military research, which constantly seeks possibilities for enhancing humans and achieving superpowers, medical science has also employed cyborgian technologies to the task of restoring and normalising human bodily functions.
23
According to Hayles (1995, p.322), approximately ten percent of the US population are cyborgs in a literal sense, including people with artificial organs, limbs, skin, heart pacemakers, and drug-eluting implants.
24
As indicated above, Clynes and Kline’s initial notion of the cyborg centres on mechanical alternation of the human’s biological conditions for the body’s homeostatic functioning in the space environment. Although Clynes and Kline’s scientific investigation into the cyborg is speculative, they are concerned with a real potential cyborg as the literal fusing of the human and the machine. Donna Haraway offers a different perspective in her seminal essay ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1991), in which the cyborg becomes a political metaphor, highlighting its potential to disrupt the Western traditional dualisms between human and animal, autonomy and automaton, the natural and the artificial. For Haraway, a cyborg is a creature of social reality as well as of the imagination, standing for possibilities to question what nature and the human are and to destroy political and physical boundaries that cause class, ethnic, and cultural differences. In this sense, Haraway declares that we are already cyborgs, stating that
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By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated as hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.
(Haraway, 1991, p.150)
Similar to Haraway’s metaphorical rather than literal application of the term ‘cyborg’ in reference to alternate subject constructions, David Hess also proposes the concept of metaphorical cyborgs, called ‘low-tech cyborgs’ which he defines as ‘any identity between machine and human or any conflation of the machine/human boundary’
(Hess, 1995, p.383). For Hess, the cyborg implies the mechanical extension of the human body and its functions. Therefore, humans relying on low technological devices, such as eyeglasses or hearing aids, can be conceived as cyborgs in a broad sense.
As seen in critical theory, theatre and performance scholars give different accounts of what the cyborg means. In her book Cyborg Theatre (2011), Jennifer Parker-
Starbuck builds upon Haraway’s political and feminist approach to the cyborg in order to analyse multimedia performance works which do not necessarily feature the physical implantation of technologies into the body but rather offer metaphorical representations of relationships between performers and technologies on stage
(Parker-Starbuck, 2011, p.3). In contrast with Parker-Starbuck’s application of the term ‘cyborg’ as a political metaphor, Gabriella Giannachi uses the term ‘cyborg theatre’ to refer to an art form which is primarily involved with cybernetics and creates a live cyborg performer in which the biological organism is literally modified and augmented through the machine. Steve Dixon acknowledges that in critical theory, cyborg is used as ‘a metaphor, a dreamlike fantasy, and/or a literal being’ (Morse,
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1998, p.126), but he then points out that the future vision of cyborgism is the physical implantation of computer technologies into the human corporeal body (Dixon, 2007, p.306). Both Giannachi and Dixon illustrate cyborg performance artists including
Stelarc
25
, Orlan
26
, Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca
27
, to name a few. With consideration of an array of ways of signifying cyborgs in critical theory and theatre and performance studies, in this chapter I use the term cyborg as a literal being to refer to dancers with a metallic prosthetic device (how they become cyborgs will be examined later). The prosthesis is not the replacement, maintenance or enhancement of the dancer’s body part, but it functions as the extension of limbs in an abnormal manner or the attachment of an extra body part. As a result, this mechanical addition to the body incapacitates and mutates the mechanics of the dancer’s movement. The prosthesis becomes part of the dancer’s body in a non-normative way of being in the world.
4.2.2 Resisting Robots and Cyborgs as the Other
As indicated above, the work Devolution dramatises an ecosystem within which human beings commune with robots. In terms of relationships between robotic and human performers within the metaphorical ecosystem, Stewart seeks to shun the banality of a hostile relationship between a vulnerable man and a bleak machine or between an organic creator and a mechanical creature (Penelope, 2006). Instead, he reveals that
As performing entities, the robots are given equal status to the human bodies in the work, albeit with some major operational differences. I haven’t tried to conceptually separate robots and humans as different ‘species’ but have been interested in the collision and confluence of the two. Let’s see what happens when we collide these operating systems — that sort of thing. It’s as much an
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experiment in morphology and function as anything else.
(Stewart, cited in Brannigan, 2006)
Stewart posits human dancers as equivalent to robots and conceives them as two different performing entities, each of which has its own operational system (Stewart, cited in Brannigan, 2006). However, the responses of audiences may give rise to interpretations of the work which are incompatible with artistic intention. For example, one journalist states that ‘[t]he conflict between humanity and technology looms large in Australian Dance Theatre’s Festival spectacular’, drawing a parallel with
Hollywood science fiction films such as Terminator and War of the Worlds (Burdon,
2006). I assume that the impression of the opposite relation between human and technology in the work is an inevitable reaction caused by the historical bias that nonhuman or technological beings can violate the West’s social and ethical standards.
Before the cyborg and its forerunners – automata, and robots – were scientifically invented, their cultural imaginations as monsters, devils and abominations were long featured in literature and science fiction, relating to emerging technologies, their influences on society and anxieties about the border of the human.
To exemplify cultural connotations of technophobia, R.U.R.
(
Rossum’s Universal
Robots ), which was created by a Czech writer Karel Čapek in 1923, features humanoid automata, which Čapek calls ‘robots’ ― originating from the Czech word
‘robota’ meaning forced work or servitude ― serving in the factories and military forces. In this play, the robots, which we now label as androids, are initially manufactured to substitute human labour, and some robots with intelligence and memory soon begin to believe that they are physically and mentally superior to humans. The robots eventually obliterate the human race, but then they are confronted
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with their inability to reproduce. The play concludes with the emergence of a new generation of robots who are able to have love, emotion, and empathy that signify salvation for humanity. Foregrounding the robots, the writer projects not only anxieties about the replacement of human labours with the assembly-line in the industrial society, but also fears about technological domination over humans after the devastation of World War I. Furthermore, the play ignores the concept of the human’s becoming machine and instead emphasises the importance of preservation of humanity and nature from the threat of robots. Since R.U.R
., robots have been widely imagined as a menace to human beings in science fiction films, including the Maschinenmensch in Metropolis (1927), HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), replicants in Blade Runner (1982), and Skynet’s assassins in The Terminator
(1984).
The term ‘cyborg’ was coined in the mid-twentieth century, but it is generally considered that the first description of a cyborgian figure is the monster that appears in Mary Shelley’s novel
Frankenstein (Gray et al., 1995, p.5). In this fiction, the eccentric and obsessive scientist Victor Frankenstein brings the creature into being in his experiment by assembling parts of human and animal corpses. Upon discovering that the creature is not a human being but a monster with a gigantic figure and repulsive appearance, he disowns the creature. The abandoned monster desires to fraternise with humans and searches for a companion who will understand his existence. However, his hopes are dashed by people who are terrified by his inhuman appearance, which inspires his rage and leads him to seek revenge against his creator.
Throughout Western history, pessimistic views of technology have proliferated ― for example, in representations of fearful machines ― and have been accompanied with widespread scepticism about the dehumanisation of humans. Despite such
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negativity, recent science fiction films and television series foreground optimistic visions of technology, often imagined through heroic cyborgian figures that defeat their demonic antagonists, thereby reflecting scientific advances toward the cyborgian future and technological encroachments on our society from the 1960s onwards.
Ranging from television characters like The Six Million Dollar Man (1974-78) and
The Bionic Woman (1976-8) and to comic and movie characters like Wolverine in X-
Men (2000) and Tony Stark in Iron Man (2008), the idea of mechanically enhanced or genetically modified humans entered into the mainstream through the portrayal of a cyborg hero or heroine whose superhuman physical and mental ability is used to save humankind from human or cyborg villains. However, according to Parker-Starbuck, these fictive imaginings of the cyborg are safely and superficially illustrated without challenges to the West’s social and cultural norms (Parker-Starbuck, 2011, p.21).
28
Hopeful depictions of cyborgs in science fiction films are primarily grounded on
‘liberal humanism’s technological determinism’ (Parker-Starbuck, 2011, p.22) which supposes that technologies can co-exist with bodies only if humans are in charge of technologies.
In most of the positive cinematic and television depictions of cyborgs, humans use technologies in morally justifiable ways to pursue peace for humankind. To put it in another way, even though the fictive cyborgs manifest the increasing technological agency and its intimate incorporation into the human, they tend to position technologies as external instruments used for the sake of human beings without critical reflections on technologies’ engagement in the construction of the human agency and subjectivity. Contrary to cinematic and television depictions of robotic and cyborgian figures, robot and cyborg representations on stage attempt to go beyond criticising or praising technology itself and complicate ethical and political problems
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related to the human’s evolution through machines as well as metallic embodiments and their humanisation. Steve Dixon defines a general term ‘metal performance’ to mark out digital performances employing robots and cyborgs and points out that metal performance often dramatize ‘a return to nature and the animal, and to representations of therianthropes (human-animal hybrids)’ (Dixon, 2007, p.272, original italics).
These two leitmotivs for metal performance are apparently shown in Devolution , although the work does not put forward particular animals in mythology and folklore as suitable for creating therianthropes. In Devolution , the human dancers, metallic robots and human-machine cyborgs are represented as animal-like or therianthropic beings that blur boundaries between human beings and animals, the natural and the artificial, the corporeal and the metallic. Next, I will investigate Stewart and Demers’s choreographic approach to representing the three types of the performers and their implications in terms of challenging anthropocentric opposition between humans and animals, nature and artifice and humans and robots.
The opening scene of Devolution is Czarneck’s image of a cluster of naked bodies twisting and turning. The floating cluster gradually multiplies and spreads out over the scrim. When a glimpse of dancers appears on the stage, the image dissolves into darkness. The dancers, dressed in leathery armour by costume designer Georg Meyer-
Wiel, hardly show their faces to audiences since they mostly pull themselves down to the floor, drooping their heads and leaning forward while moving. Their limbs constantly unfurl and fold while their fingers remain tense with wrists bent. The distorted posture and odd angles of the body parts make them appear like non-human beings. Despite the restricted range of sight, the dancers move like edgy, sentient, and
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animalistic beings, following their instincts. At times, the dancers cease moving as they hold deformed postures, poising themselves on one leg with their head down or standing upside down for a long time. The dancers’ uptight and alert movements are combined with composer Darrin Verhagen’s booming and creaking sounds and ghastly blue lighting. With a sudden thundering sound, the dancers’ movements become energetic and fast to an extreme degree. They storm against each other: tumbling speedily, flying high, throwing themselves into each other, brutally falling onto the ground and rolling over. Ten of the resilient and powerful dancers carry out acrobatic and violent movements in their respective ways.
The appearances and movements of the dancers evoke regressive, primitive and animalistic characteristics. The exposure of torsos or buttocks and the layered leather costumes reminiscent of larva carapaces explicitly imbue the dancers with atavistic traits. When the dancers enact extremely fast, powerful and aggressive movements, they rarely move in erect positions but instead mostly hunch their backs and occasionally crawl on four limbs and stand upside-down. ‘Ballistic’, but at the same time ‘grounded’, attributes in choreography dare dancers to exceed their physical limits (Stewart, cited in Lobley, 2007). Stewart reveals that his intention of manifesting the zoomorphic potential of bodies is carried out by ‘distorting the body away from an upright pedestrian orientation and challenging the Cartesian view of the body’ (Stewart, cited in Brannigan, 2006, p.2). Although he does not elucidate how unerect postures and movements help to contradict the Cartesian view of the body, I presume that it is related to a deliberate hindering of vision, which is a sense in which the mind is enacted most strongly in the Cartesian understanding.
29 The dancers heighten kinaesthetic sensations and engage less with visual sensations, which connotes escaping from mind control over body and returning to the instinctive nature
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of the human body.
Through instinctive and sometimes feral qualities of dancers’ movements, dancers no longer reveal themselves as human beings. Although dancers primarily do not mimic specific animals’ behaviours in a direct manner, there are some scenes that recall images of certain kinds of creatures to audiences. For instance, a pair of dancers whose mouths stick together while their arms hold each other tight and their limbs are repeatedly entwined or stretched out. They are suggestive of two battling praying mantises. In the middle of the performance, a female dancer lifts up her back while supported on four limbs and creeps on the floor with her head upside-down. Her limbs are constantly folded and unfolded at odd angles. Her body shape and movement evoke a spider-like creature. Throughout the work, ADT dancers exhibit extreme physicality, as they follow bodily instinct, possibly without vision, and conjure zoomorphic figures. In so doing, they reveal the shared nature between humans and animals, which is acknowledged in Stewart’s choreographic intention to resist a social tendency to deny the human as biological beings and its instinctive nature which is shared with animals or other creatures:
. . . we’re trying to position humans more as creatures or animals – which is what we are. We think about ourselves as being separate from the animal world […] yet we are actually driven by very basic and primal instinctive forces. […]
Devolution is about devolving or regressing back conceptually to the idea that we are instinctive biological creatures, rather than extraordinarily cultured beings that are separate from nature.
(Stewart, quoted in Read, 2006)
Stewart prioritises the body and its instinct over the mind and consciousness while emphasising humans as biological beings rather than cultured ones. However, it is
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possible that he reinforces the Cartesian dualism of body and mind, of nature and culture, and dissociates the corporeal body from consciousness, rationality and cultural conditions. His dualistic thought on the visceral nature of living beings is also revealed in his statement that Devolution shows that ‘in the midst of technology we remain subject to the instincts of the flesh’ (Stewart, www.adt.org.au). In terms of the
‘devolution’ of human dancers into animals or creatures, I intend to address dancers’ display of their animalistic nature not in a way of opposing biological and instinct aspects of the human to its cultural and conscious aspects. Instead, I will elaborate how social hierarchy between humans and animals is constructed in the Western historical context, by drawing upon Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s theory. In so doing, I propose my posthumanist interpretation of the dancers’ metamorphoses into animals as the rejection of an ontological distinction between humanity and animality.
Since the 1970s, animal studies has emerged and developed as an interdisciplinary paradigm which not only addresses animal welfarism, rights, and exploitation, but also calls into question human-centric perspectives on the relationship between human and non-human animals, responding to increasing ethical issues of biopolitical controls, the military’s infringement of freedom, and the government’s surveillance of the nation through a biometric database (Parker-Starbuck, 2006, p.26). In the age of anthropocentrism, global capitalism and Western imperialism, the human’s mastery and control, not only of nature but also him/herself, is driven more by technological advances, generating the animalisation of humanity and casting into doubt what distinguishes humanity from animality. In this sense, animal studies parallels with cyborg theory since both tackle the drastic changes in Western societies and the attendant questions about the human’s relationship to the nonhuman, which is animal
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and machine respectively.
In his book The Open (2004), Agamben offers theoretical insights on the ongoing teleological concept of humanity in relation to animality. He contends that the human is produced with and against the animal through an ‘anthropological machine’ which he refers to as the mechanism in Western philosophy and science underlying our process of distinguishing between humans and animals. The anthropological machine propels humanity by excluding the animality of the nonhuman and the animality within the human itself. In doing so, the machine brings about the ontological hierarchy between humans and animals and upholds the human’s mastery over nonhuman species. Agamben provides two variant versions of the anthropological machine, proving how humanity is set against those that are not (fully) humans through inclusion and exclusion (Agamben, 2004, p.37). The pre-modern anthropological machine defines the inhuman by humanising the animal. For example, ape-men, slaves and barbarians were deemed as animals in human form. On the contrary, the modern anthropological machine demarcates the inhuman by animalising the human, to the extent that Jews during the Holocaust and, more recently, Iraqi internees were considered as humans in animal form. The humanised animal and the animalised human demonstrate an unstable and ambiguous border between human and animal. In order to make border clearer and to ennoble the human, we justify the subordination of the animal to the human and deny the ambiguous nature within the human itself.
Agamben contends that if the anthropological machine is stopped, the relation between the human and the animal will be reformed, which is exemplified by an image of the banquet of the righteous on the last day of history. The image, taken from a thirteenth-century Hebrew Bible, portrays the righteous as animal-headed
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beings. Given that in the rabbinic tradition ‘the righteous’ stands for the remainder of
Israel at the coming of the Messiah, Agamben proposes that the quintessence of humanity is the reconciliation of man with his own animal nature (Agamben, 2004, p.3). For him, when we cease being hostile to animals and acknowledge that humanity is not incompatible with animality, the human will exist as man, neither dominating nature nor animalising man. Agamben concludes that within the human itself, humanity and animality can co-exist in a state of harmony and stasis, although he does not account for how to apply this reconciliation in relation to morality, technology and the animalised world (Seri, 2005).
Agamben’s concepts of resisting the anthropological machine and bringing forward the reconciliation of the human and the animal is visualised in Devolution where human dancers metamorphose into animals in human form. Distinct natures belonging to humans and animals respectively no longer exist within the dancers who twist, bend and curve their bodies, crawl about on all fours, stand on their hands and enhance instinctive and kinaesthetic sensations. From an anthropocentric humanist perspective, the animalised dancers may be conceived as the Other, lacking in humanity and subordinated to the human. By contrast, from my posthumanist perspective, they are viewed as the embodiment of the animalistic nature of humans.
This is because that the dancers become animalised, which is not the opposite of humanity but rather inherent within it.
As is the case with human dancers, robots also take the form of animals. The robotic artist Demers rejects stereotyped depictions of machines, as opposed to living organisms, and instead represents robots as creatures. To look into robotic machines
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which are staged as separate entities from human dancers (robotic prosthetics attached to the human dancers will be discussed later), robots are fabricated from abstract and geometrical figures of industrial manipulators. They are not sleek and smart high-tech machines, but rather somehow regressive and clumsy industrial machines. Their mechanomorphic appearances resemble non-representational architectures or symbolic metallic sculptures, but their zoomorphic behaviors echo living organisms.
Two peering giants, a mob of diminutive robots and an elongated metallic cylinder are respectively transformed into clumping carnotauruses, crawling spiders and a wiggling python. Their inert mechanomorphic shapes are reformulated and evolve into living organisms. As stated above, the robots are pre-programmed machines without their own intelligence or a sensory-motor ability to respond to human dancers.
If it were possible for them to operate autonomously and enact unpredictable and hesitative behaviours in response to the dancers, they would appear more like living organisms. However, as Cleland (2011) points out, unlike the field of scientific robotics where key concerns are functional, effective and sophisticated qualities of robots, including artificial intelligence and sensing and emotional systems, artistic practices attach importance to how an audience perceives and interprets the robot’s appearance and behaviours, which hinges on robots’ performing ‘ability to persuasively simulate or pass as human, or alive, or intelligent’ (Cleland, 2011). In
Devolution , the robots and their zoomorphic behaviours successfully act as living organisms that co-exist with human dancers as another species.
The robots, as one kind of organism living in the metaphorical ecosystem that the artists present, overthrow the ontological distinction between machine and organism and parallel machine with nature in the evolutionary process. In science studies, there have been philosophical and critical discourses that find machines equivalent
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to living organisms. As indicated earlier, the cybernetic theorist Norbert Weiner makes a comparison between the human nervous system and the computer’s binary system and proposes the prospect of artificial intelligence which is placed on a par with human intelligence (Wiener, 2003 [1954]). Science historian George Dyson claims that the digital evolution of computers is analogous to the natural evolution of life, drawing biology parallel with technology in the matter of ‘tendencies toward collective, hierarchical processes based on information exchange’ (Dyson, 1997, p.7).
According to Dyson, information is distributed and encoded in various forms.
Among them, the most meaningful representations survive. This evolutionary process is undertaken in systems of plants, animals, humans, and computers (Dyson,
1997, p.8). Given that natural selection in biology is akin to a principle operated in technology, particularly the computing area, machines are considered as life in the
Darwinian fashion.
Instead of revealing a similarity between machine and nature in terms of an operation system, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg (1993) calls into question how nature is defined. Through history, the natural world has been viewed as something eternal, fixed, opposite to human civilization. Rothenberg points out that this notion of nature reduces technologies to tools which either destroy nature, as the deep ecologists contend, or which solve the ecological crisis, according to technophiles. For Rothenberg, how we experience and define nature is dependent upon technology which offers us fundamental ways of configuring nature and ourselves. Moreover, the development of technology continuously reconfigures nature and changes our views of nature and ourselves. In other words, technology extends humanity into nature. Reflecting the aforementioned perspectives on machines as creatures which emerge out of the evolutionary process and which
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transform our definition of nature, Demers’s robots with zoomorphic behaviours are not viewed as demonic, ominous or harmful beings to the natural.
Rather than the mechanisation of the human and the anthropomorphisation of the machine, Stewart and Demers devise the animalisation of the human and the machine by accentuating the human’s animal instincts and the machine’s kinship with the animal. Consequently, the relationship between the human dancers and the robots deviates from Hollywood science fiction clichés of human beings’ battle against robots. In point of fact, in the work there is little obvious collision between dancers and robots.
The dancers take violent movements to extremes and the robots have their overwhelming presence, but they do not attempt to attack or take control over each other. Each of them occupies a discrete space, having fraternal relationships with the other. Above the dancers are a set of huge metallic rectangular cuboids with two small spotlights that slide from the left and the right side of the stage. The cubes are slowly collapsed and expanded while swinging. Even though the machines do not approach close to the dancers below, their massive size and clunky sounds are enough to attract the dancers’ attentions. Yet, the dancers do not express their impressions of the robots, whether interest or fear, and instead focus on what happens around them. A similar kind of human-machine relationships occurs with six lamppost-like machines standing rooted to the spot at the rear of the stage. A female dancer turns over her body, supported on two arms and two legs. Her back becomes strikingly curved like a bended bow and her sight is inverted. Behind her, the machines repeatedly sway back and forth and flash their glaring headlights at the dancer. Although they are unavoidably perceptible, she seems to be only aware of her bodily sensations and embodiment without regard for the robotic presence.
In the middle of the work, the dancers and the robots start to encounter each other:
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sometimes a dancer scans a robot with curiosity and wariness and vice versa; other times they have intense and dangerously close contacts. For instance, a mob of screeching and splashing metallic spiders approach a naked man standing in the centre of the stage. The dancer twists his body and limbs and strikes grotesque poses. He is not horrified by the spiders, but rather tries to get near to one of the spiders although he soon stops peeping at them. The moment to bring the tension to the surface is when a male dancer’s body is lifted up and tugged by a gigantic metallic monster. The monster with six movable legs emerges from one side of the stage and moves towards a male-female couple whose limbs have become entangled. The machine gets closer to the couple and lowers its headlight, flashing at the dancers lying on the ground. It appears like a dinosaur staring at the tiny living beings out of curiosity. Underneath the bright eyes of the machine, the male takes his female partner by the throat and she eventually fails in her attempt to escape from him. Afterwards, the man’s target moves into the machine and then attempts to grab the head of the machine. His body is then flatly pulled, dragged across the floor, and thrown down. The gigantic machine soon becomes disinterested in him and put him down. The unforeseen situation of these encounters between the human dancers and the robots does not signify a riotous fight between the human and the machine, but instead it is construed as attractions between separate species that coexist within the animal kingdom.
Toward the end of the work Devolution , robots go beyond having a discrete relationship with dancers and become integrated into dancers whose bodies are attached with metallic appendages, which is presumed as Stewart’s choreographic embodiment of the confluence of human and machine. The dancers are primarily
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animalised not only through their zoomorphic representations but also their cyborgisation through metallic prostheses. In the work, two female dancers appear with a prosthesis worn on chest or back respectively. Their prosthesis resembles a long insect antenna which wiggles wildly thanks to its flexibility. A man whose legs are extended by elongated poles crawls onto the stage and turns upside down. The upstretched poles slowly whirl. Two male dancers wearing an additional metallic arm strapped to their chests walk across the stage and control the wiggling arm as though it is part of their bodies. Three men lean on the floor and wriggle their way out from the left side of the stage. As a short metallic rod on their arm jerks, the dancers have to squeeze their arm with the other hand. Later on, a man appears with the rods on both of his arms while struggling to clutch the rods that jolt violently. All of the prosthetic appendages are connected to electrical cables. The dancers’ movements have to be arranged due to the machines’ impulsive movements so as to avoid crashing into each other. Because of the parasitic robots fastened to the dancers’ bodies, the dancers can hardly move in an erect and bipedal manner, thus looking like aliens or unidentified creatures.
According to Parker-Starbuck, cyborgian figures tend to lay weight on the humantechnology coupling and overlook the human-animal relationship, since in the age of capitalism and commercialism technological artefacts and systems are primarily rated more highly than animals (Parker-Starbuck, 2006, p.652). However, absurdly enough, the animal figure is originally the foundation of cyborgian ontology (Parker-Starbuck,
2006, p.649). Haraway employs the cyborg as the political metaphor to challenge the
Western ontological dualisms not only between the organic and the mechanical but also between human and animal, pointing out that ‘the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed’ (Haraway,
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1991, p.152). Also, the invention of literal cyborgs in science, as indicated above, was driven by the human’s desire to adapt animals’ physiological functions to human bodies so as to optimise their bodily systems within certain environments. The literal cyborg as cybernetic organism, so to speak, originates from scientific ideas that humans can acquire animals’ physiological abilities through technological devices.
The merging of the dancers and the prostheses recalls the bizarre image of a therianthrope or an imaginative creature, which has been previously represented in other performances, for example, Stelarc’s metamorphosis into the half-human and half-spider figure in Exoskeleton (1998). In Exoskeleton , Stelarc stands on a huge sixlegged robot pneumatically operated and controls this locomotor via his arm gesture.
This information is translated into leg motions that are made by the robot. Through the complex cybernetic system, the Exoskeleton becomes Stelarc’s extended and enhanced legs when he is in control of the robot. To compare the operational relations between a performer and an artificial prosthetics, Exoskeleton allows the performer to mechanically control the prosthetics. In Devolution , by contrast, Demers’s prostheses are incapable of translating the dancers’ behaviours into their own behaviours. The peculiar behaviours of the robotic appendages are prescribed by Demers and electronically activated by a robotic operator during a performance. Instead of controlling the appendages’ behaviours on their own during the performance, the dancers learn how they move through their prosthesis during rehearsals by combining their corporeal movement and the prosthesis’s peculiar movement so as to make the metallic appendages part of their bodies.
To explicate the dancers’ experience of their prosthesis which becomes part of themselves, I reflect upon the American philosopher Don Ihde’s concept of the human-technology ‘embodiment relation’ (1990). Ihde explores the role of technology
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in shaping human experiences and interpretations of reality. From a phenomenological perspective, reality is only understood through relations between humans and the world, and in the technological era, many of the relations humans make with the world are mediated by technological artefacts. Ihde discerns several relationships that humans make with technological artefacts to experience the world
(see Chapter 3). As one category of human-technology relations, the ‘embodiment relation’ occurs when technologies become part of the human embodiment. In an embodiment relation, human beings perceive the world through technological artefacts, which are not objects of the perception but semi-transparent mediums positioned in between the human beings and the world. Embodied technologies transform our perceptual and bodily sense in a reflexive way (Ihde, 1990, p.27). Eye glasses, telescopes and dentist’s probes are the prototypes of technologies making embodiment relations with humans. Subsequently, he claims that human relations with cyborg technologies, in particular, prosthetic devices, come within his concept of embodied relations (Ihde, 2008, p.398).
In terms of the human-technology relation associated with ‘bionic’ or cyborg bodies, the Dutch philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek, who expands Ihde’s analysis (see
Chapter 3), defines a difference between his new concept of the cyborg relation and
Ihde’s embodiment relation (Verbeek, 2011, pp.144-145). Verbeek formulates the
‘cyborg relation’ in which technologies actually merge with the human body instead of being embodied. In a cyborg relation, technological associations with humans do not mediate the human experiences, but they physically alter the human and create a new hybrid entity which is beyond human or transhuman. According to Verbeek, in an embodiment relation, technologies and human beings are intimately associated to constitute the human experience, but they can still be physically divided into two
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different entities in the mediated experience. In a cyborg relation, by contrast, a technological artefact and a human being fuse into a new physical entity, and in this new entity’s experience, the human and the technological artefact cannot be separated in a physical way. Cyborg relations are established in the case of brain implants, psychopharmacological drugs, artificial heart valves or heart pacemakers.
In Devolution
, dancers’ prostheses are detachable and visibly distinguishable from their own bodies. In Verbeek’s sense, the dancers remain as humans who use and embody prosthetics, not cyborgs who cannot exist without technological incorporation of the body. Accordingly, the dancers’ relation with their prostheses is close to embodied relation, rather than cyborg relation. According to Ihde, when prosthetic devices ― one of the oldest forms of cyborgisation ― replace one’s lost arms or legs in order to restore their sensory-motor capacities, they become part of one’s embodiment after some period of time to adjust to the prostheses. However, he points out that even cutting-edge technologies of prosthetics are not able to get to ‘ total transparency, total embodiment, for the technology to truly “become me”…my body and sense’ (Ihde 1990, p.75). Even for highly skilled amputee sprinters with hi-tech prostheses, like Jami Goldman, who has lived with prostheses after undergoing an amputation at age one, the prostheses are not entirely transparent in their experience of the world. They still remain quasi-transparent at the minimal degree (Ihde, 2008, p.399). Ihde quotes American film and media theorist Vivian Sobchack’s description of her experience of living with a high-tech prosthetic limb, which helps to explain
ADT dancers’ experiences of moving with prosthetics.
I want to embody [my prosthetic leg] subjectively. I do not want to regard it as and object to think about it as I use it to walk. Indeed, in learning to use the
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prosthesis, I found that looking objectively at my leg in the mirror as an exteriorized thing — a piece of technology — to be thought about and manipulated did not help me to improve my balance and gait so much as did subjectively feeling through all of my body the weight and rhythm of the leg in a gestalt of intentional motor activity… So, of course, I want the leg to become totally transparent. However the desired transparency here involves my incorporation of the prosthetic — and not the prosthetic’s incorporation of me.
(Sobchack, 2004, p.172, original italics)
Sobchack’s statement explicitly shows that although she wants to experience the world without awareness of her prosthetic leg, her prosthetic leg remains quasitransparent. That is, the prosthesis still does not become part of her body due to the impossibility of her knowing how the prosthesis perceives the world. The same situation occurs in ADT dancers’ experiences. The dancers struggle with a prosthesis in the process of rehearsals in order to get accustomed to the weight of their prosthetics and its movement range and patterns. The prosthetic’s own idiosyncratic behaviour, its awkward locations within the dancers’ bodies and its cumbersome electronic cable make it difficult for the dancers to embody the prosthetic’s behaviour, as described in a comment from one of the ADT dancers: ‘It’s hard… It’s just more movement. I forget the chore[ography]… Ah, those fucking cables!’ (quoted in Bollen,
2009, p.14).
As a result of learning how to adjust their bodily perceptual-motor system to the prosthetic’s movement, it is unlikely that during performances the dancers perceive their prosthetics as an exteriorised thing out of their bodies. For example, a female dancer with a metallic antenna which is longer than her height is not seen as a biped any more since she has to lower the centre of gravity so as to balance her body with
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the unwieldy prosthesis. Her four limbs mostly remain planted on the ground and control the upper body’s movement in accord with the shape, weight and movement of the antenna. She does not directly gaze at her antenna as she moves, as she feels what happens with the antenna, without having to see it. Nevertheless, it is presumable that she would not feel the metallic antenna as her body part because the antenna is not fully transparent in her embodied experience, which is almost impossible as even hi-tech prostheses of highly skilled amputee sprinters do not remain absolutely transparent. The dancer embodies her prosthesis subjectively and the machine functions as her extended body, and she neither feels the antenna as her own body nor an external object. As her extended body, the prosthetic and its quasitransparency in use reveal that the dancers’ relations with the embodied prosthetics cannot be accounted for as the subject/object dichotomy since the parasite-prosthetics plays a role in mediating the dancers’ perceptions of the environment and themselves in it.
Here, I argue that even though total transparency of prosthetics may not be attained yet, this does not mean that prosthetics cannot be conceived as part of bodies.
This is well exemplified by Oscar Pistorius, the first double amputee sprinter, who competed in the 2012 London Olympics. His carbon-fibre legs, which he has lived with since he was 11 month olds, became a matter of contention about whether they gave him an advantage in speed. The International Olympic Committee overthrew its previous decision on blocking his entrance and allowed him to compete with ablebodied athletes under the condition of using the same prostheses pre-examined by the
IOC. This decision implies that the prosthetic limbs are authorised as his body parts, not technical aids, blurring a distinction between the body and technology. Pistorius is a cyborg, given that his body part is a machine. This example shows that total
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transparency does not qualify the prosthetic as someone’s body or someone as a cyborg. In this sense, I conceive ADT dancers as cyborgs. The prostheses allow the dancers not to enhance but rather to transform human capacities. Subsequently, they become therianthropes, rather than transhuman, new creatures that have an antenna, an additional arm or elongated limbs. The dancers’ metamorphoses into therianthropic beings entail not only the change in the dancers’ appearances but also the rearrangement of the dancers’ bodily senses and motility. ADT dancers as therianthropic cyborgs are located beyond the borders of human, animal and technology.
As the performance approaches the end, machines and dancers go to extremes. An electronic cylinder descends from the ceiling nearly to the floor. A female dancer comes and confronts the machine. The machine starts to squirm, which make it look like an anaconda that opens its mouth wide, while the dancer twitches and flaps her limbs. Soon the stage gets dark and all the machines are simultaneously activated.
Below the flickering lights of the machine, dancers run around wildly and roll over the stage. They head bang excessively with the roaring sounds of the machines, then all stop at once and the stage is swallowed up in the darkness. The scrim comes down and shows a clustering of intertwined humans in the nude, which gradually diminishes and fades out. The work Devolution reveals that humans have inextricable relations with nature and machines, challenging ontological boundaries between human beings, nature, machines. It rejects the dramatisation of human beings versus machines and instead manifests human dancers and metallic robots as equal living beings coexisting within an ecosystem. The zoomorphic behaviours of the industrial robots
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transform the robots into creatures while the human dancers evoke animalistic images through their primitive appearances and instinctive and brutal movements. The human dancers’ animalistic characteristics and the robots’ organic potentials defy an anthropocentric bias toward the human’s superior status to the nonhuman (animal and machine).
In spite of the artists’ effort to bridge a gap between the human beings and the robots through the zoomorphic manifestations, it is no wonder that the relationship between the dancers and the robots can be easily deemed as corporeal/organic beings versus metallic/artificial beings. This is because throughout Western history, nonhuman or technological beings ranging from automata and robots to cyborgs have been pictured as Other, monsters, or something to control. Technology, whether as the dystopian or utopian potential, has been considered to be outside the realm of humanity. However, radical developments of technologies and their encroachments on the human life give rise to new perspectives on technologies which primarily explore technological impacts on shaping the human subject and morality. The cyborg is then suggested as a symbol of contesting ontological dichotomies of the human and the animal, the biological and the mechanical, and the natural and the artificial, by reason of its metaphorical implication of resisting social and political hierarchical systems, as well as its literal meaning of technologically intervening in the human body. The relationship between the human dancers and the robots in Devolution moves beyond the two separate entities. The dancers with prosthetic robots show the literal sense of the cyborg, given that in the dancers’ embodiments, the metallic prosthetics becomes the extension of their bodies, thereby blurring the distinction between the human as a subject and the prosthetics as an object. In this chapter, the entanglement of technologies into humans is actualised through the organic/robotic interface where
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human embodiment is extended through metallic appendages. In the next chapter, it will occur at the physical/virtual interface where the human body is doubled with its computer-generated representation. In the physical/virtual interface, an issue pertaining to the human body is shifted from mechanisation and dehumanisation to disembodiment and transcendence.
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22
The Six Million Dollar Man (1974-78); The Bionic Woman (1976-8); X-Men (2000);
Iron Man (2008); Transformers (2007); Pacific Rim (2013), to name a few.
23
Acquainted with a range of human-machine couplings, Chris Hables Gray, Steven
Mentor, and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera attempt to categorise cyborgian technologies into four types: ‘restorative’, ‘normalising’, ‘reconfiguring’ and ‘enhancing’, which offers a way of distinguishing between types of cyborgs (Gray et al., 1995, pp.2-4).
The first category, ‘restorative’, aims to replace body parts and restore their lost functions, and the second, ‘normalising’, to make people return to their normal appearance. The third, ‘reconfiguring’ cyborgs, means humans becoming another creature genetically modified. As the fourth, the ‘enhancing’ cyborgs identify military men whose bodily ability is improved for battle. Gray and his colleagues’ four types of cyborgs delineate literal or future literal cyborgs (Wilkie, 2012, p.10). They contend that although the cyborg evolves out of the human-tool relationships in our history, the figure of the cyborg stands for the new relationship (Gray et al., 1995, p.6).
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Katherine Hayles describes the cyborg as the interconnected being of the organic body and its prosthetic extensions which operate as a single entity through information. She points out that to become posthuman does not mean to be biologically altered and come to be a cyborg (Hayles, 1999, pp.2-4).
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Stelarc, the groundbreaking yet controversial cyborgian performance artist, utilises cybernetics to connect his body with prosthetic devices, often confusing which is controlling and controlled. In doing so, he refers to the body as ‘obsolete’ which implies that the human body and its functions cannot contend with technology’s capacity due to its physiological limitations. Sterlac’s body with sensors is remotely
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stimulated and involuntarily actuated with electronic signals sent from the Internet in
Fractal Flesh (1995), Ping Body (1996), and ParaSite (1997). On the other hand, his body is also metallically enhanced with an additional mechanical human-like hand in
Third Hand (1980) and a six-legged robot in Exoskeleton (1999).
Significantly,
Stelarc does not intend to say that we can discard the body through the use of technology in order to transcend corporeality, as with Gibsonian approaches to a disembodied consciousness in cyberspace. Rather, he claims that the body can be modified, extended and enhanced through technology so as to operate effectively in the technological environment. On the one hand, in Stelarc’s Internet-based performances where his body is mercilessly forced to move like a puppet, the technological displacement of the human agent arouses disturbances and misgivings about the dehumanisation of the human and the objectification of the body (Dixon,
2007, pp.317-318). On the other hand, Stelarc can be seen as a visionary who pictures the actual evolution and transmutation of the corporeal body’s capacities in the face of the technological impingement on the human (Scheer, 2002, p.88).
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Since 1990, the French performance artist Orlan has undergone a series of plastic operations as parts of her long-term project The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan . Her surgical operations were intended to transform herself into features from famous female characters from art history, such as Venus, Diana, Mona Lisa and Psyche, so as to reflect on cultural ideals of female beauty.
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Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca, a Catalan performance artist, experiments on the viewers’ empowerment to control Roca’ body parts through a pneumatically-movable automaton that responds to the viewers’ sounds in
JoAn, The Man of Flesh (1992-3) or through touch-screen computers that activate metallic devices attached to his head
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and body in Epizoo (1994).
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Parker-Starbuck asserts that although fictive cyborg characters in television and cinema envisage the construction of the cyborg through embodied technologies, they primarily do not accord with Haraway’s sense of the cyborg as the metaphor of the subversion of traditional identity politics. From feminist perspectives, she argues that the visual and fictive cyborgs still persist with patriarchal and heterosexual models.
As Anne Marie Balsamo points out, ‘cinematic imaging of cyborgs might suggest new visions of unstable identity, but often do so by upholding gender stereotypes’
(Balsamo, 2000, p.156). I acknowledge this limitation of filmic representations of cyborgs, but intend to focus more on posthumanist accounts of them rather than those that explore the issue of gender identities.
29
For Descartes, an external object that we sense is perceived and comprehended by the mind which exerts ideas and controls the body within the brain. Vision is considered as the most spiritual sense among the all senses since it lets the mind apply thoughts to objects without any physical stimulation (Wolf-Devine, 2000, p.506).
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Contemporary dance performances are often involved with the technologicallymediated representation of a human body. A performer is present to audiences not only through the corporeal body but also its technological counterparts, such as recorded, telematic or animated bodies or even non-anthropomorphic digital images and sounds having real-time interactivity with the physical movement. According to
Andy Lavender, when the technological double of a performer is framed as part of the mise en scène of a live performance, it is distinct from that which is seen in film, television, or computer monitor contexts since the mediated representation in the live performance is not the ‘self-sufficient’ but the relational presence that is subject to its physical referent (Lavender, 2007, p.55). Furthermore, with the development of interactive technologies, a performer and his/her digital double become more entangled and confuse a sense of the presence of the performing subject. This chapter contends that in the context of digital performance the virtual double absent from the corporeal body is the re-embodiment of the human subject. This interminglement between the physical and the virtual brings about the doubled embodiment of the subject.
In order to argue my case, I will undertake an exploration of Australian dance company Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine (2008). The work choreographed by Gideon
Obarzanek is a live dance performance associated with emergent digital images, sounds and laser in real-time response to dancers’ movements. In the analysis of
Mortal Engine , I draw attention to how the choreographer and his collaborators represent the dancers’ virtual double, in consideration of the choreographic structure
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of interplay between the physical and the virtual presence. I will then provide a phenomenological account of the virtual double and its autonomy, with specific reference to Mark Hansen’s concept of bodies-in-code. I will argue that the dancers’ doubled embodiment manifests their unified subjectivities, in light of Drew Leder’s theory of bodily dis-/dys-appearance. Before doing that, this chapter will begin by elucidating the concept of the virtual double as an alternative version of the digital double, drawing upon social and cultural connotations of virtuality where a physical and virtual binary is deeply embedded, which often results in the transcendence or the prioritisation of the corporeal body.
In contemporary performances, a digital image manifesting its physical referent is put on the stage through various forms. Performers coexist with their recorded images which are repetitions of their past actions; performers’ bodies on stage are transmitted and appear as digital images so that they can synchronously inhabit the two different locations, the live and the mediated space. The digital image as the double self of a performer does not always feature the reproduction or the duplication of the performer.
It is often represented as the animated avatar in the virtual world, whose body is not made of flesh, blood and bones and instead stands outside the law of nature that belongs to the physical world. Furthermore, the computer-generated images do not necessarily resemble human-like figures and instead metamorphose into ghosts or immaterial beings that emanate from performers’ bodies. Moving particles, liquid and gaseous forms, or twinkling lights are constantly changed and re-shaped while responding to performers’ kinaesthetic sensations. Likewise, in
Mortal Engine , dancers’ bodies are outlined, surrounded, engulfed and extended by moving with or
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intermingling with kaleidoscopic, liquid, ghostly and geometrical images. During the performance, a cluster of the dancers become giant tarantulas when their bodies completely merge with a black nimbus that sneaks onto the stage; a female dancer is painfully shaken by electronic currents (see Figure 11); maze-like patterns and
Figure 11 A female dancer with an electronic shock (still image from video)
Figure 12 A duet with diagonal bars of light (still image from video)
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thousands of roach-like black dots pour out of dancers’ bodies; at some points, a duet’s movements are invisible but only exposed through short bars of light spreading over the stage, which are muddled, reformed and restored in response to the traces of the dancers’ movements (see Figure 12). In this piece, the digital image is neither a backdrop nor separate from the dancers since the dancers’ kinaesthetic sensations relentlessly metamorphose from the corporeal figure into the digital images.
The choreographer Obarzanek reveals that his intention is to depict that the human body gets out of its biological substrate and evolves in the constant state of flux. The ever-changing projected images are represented as the Other within the self or ‘the most perfect or sinister of souls’ that collides with the self (Obarzanek, www.chunkymove.com). Obarzanek’s digital graphic projections as a visual metaphor of the spiritual other of a self are analogous to what Steve Dixon calls ‘the digital double as a soul or spiritual emanations’ (Dixon, 2007, p.258). Dixon formulates ‘the digital double’, the mediatised or virtualised representation of a performer’s body through computer technologies, borrowing from Antonin Artaud’s concept of theatre’s ‘double’ (1958 [1938]) and Sigmund Freud’s notion of the ‘uncanny’ (1959
[1919]). He draws upon a range of digital performance works and classifies them into four types of the digital double – the reflection, the alter-ego, the spiritual emanation and the manipulable mannequin – which have distinct forms and themes (Dixon, 2004, pp.241
270). The reflection double implies a technological figure which mirrors the duplicate image of the performer who is aware of her/his self-reflexive figure. The alter-ego double represents the dark doppelganger of the performer as the split consciousness, and the self and alter-ego double are often neither synchronised with nor acknowledged by one another. The spiritual emanation double presents the technological mutating body by dematerialising a performer’s body and
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rematerialising it in non-anthropomorphic visionary forms. The mannequin designates the computer-generated body like an avatar, the prosthetic body like a cyborg, and the metallic body like a humanoid robot.
In elaborating the third type of the digital double, Dixon traces back to performance’s engagement with ‘ideas of human spirit, of mysticism and transcendence’ (Dixon, 2007, p.253). Performance as physical incarnations of spirits and performers’ role in channeling spiritual forces have been manifested in the history of performance, ranging from sacred rituals in the West and shamanic rites in the East, to Greek theatre’s honouring of gods and Asian theatre’s trance experience, and to post-Renaissance theatre’s actors’ conveyance of the spirit of characters. For Dixon, a performer’s body’s metamorphosis into moving particles or liquid-like or aerial forms can be seen as a contemporary version of out-of-body experiences in which the computer system incarnates souls or spirits emanating from the performer’s body. As
Dixon indicates, social and performance discourses on virtuality and disembodiment of the human subject have long been haunted by dichotomies of body and mind, real and virtual (Dixon, 2007, pp.258-259). I find that within this Cartesian dualistic paradigm, Obazarnek’s non-anthropomorphic images, which represent the spiritual other of the self, run into the danger of being misconstrued as immaterial beings incarnated by the mind and transcending the body. By delving into polarised debates on virtuality in cultural discourses, I will reveal that the dualistic paradigm has been deeply embedded in cultural connotations of the virtual, which are resisted and revised in the virtual double of Mortal Engine where dancers’ bodies are never absent in the virtual, as in the physical environment.
Since computer technologies permeated society, the virtual has been mostly used to refer to something simulated or mediated by computer, implying ‘not existing in
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reality but made by computer software to appear to do so’ or ‘carried out, accessed, or stored by means of a computer, especially over a network’ (Waite, 2012, p.824).
Virtual environments, virtual worlds, virtual reality and cyberspace are subcategories of the virtual.
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In comparison with virtual environments, virtual worlds and virtual reality, ‘cyberspace’ neither designates any particular technologies nor derives from technological innovation. Rather it is a generic term embracing cultural visions of computer technologies and environments made of constellations of binary codes
(Gunkel, 2000, p.804). William Gibson, a pioneer of cyberpunk 31 , coins the term
‘cyberspace’ in his ground-breaking novel
Neuromancer (1984). He defines cyberspace as an imaginary electronic space where disembodied computer users experience and share an illusory perception, which is called ‘consensual hallucination’
(Gibson, 1984, p.51). The protagonist of the novel is a cyberspace hacker who enters into the matrix and manipulates and destroys information by means of electrodes attached to his brain and computers connecting his mind with the artificially generated space.
Although cyberspace is a fictional concept in Gibson’s cyberpunk novel, the neologism has been rapidly adopted by computer science, popular culture and the arts.
Gibsonian cyberspace is popularised, as often depicted in Hollywood science fiction films such as Tron (Lisberger, USA, 1982), The Matrix (Wachowski, USA, 1999) and many others. At the same time, it is taken up as a key reference for social and cultural theories in understanding the concept of the virtual while producing contentious and conflicting ideas about disembodiment in cyberspace. In his fiction, cyberspace is constituted by layered codes and accessed only through the mind incarnated as pure data, rather than as the ‘meat’ body. It allows computer users to free the mind from the body so that disembodied users can transcend the physical world, which is a hopeless
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and contaminated world. Therefore, Gibson’s representation of cyberspace reinscribes the Cartesian split of mind and body and makes clear distinctions between information/virtuality and materiality/actuality. Some of the key cyber theory figures take Gibson’s underlying dualistic concept a step further. Michael Heim points to the constraints and defeats of physical reality and physical body, highlighting that ‘in cyberspace minds are connected to minds, existing in perfect concord without the limitations or necessities of the physical body’ (Heim, 1993, p.24). Like Heim, Jaron
Lanier commends the boundlessness of virtual reality that ‘is just an open world where your mind is the only limitation’ (Lanier in Woolley, 1992, p.14).
Allucquere Roseanne Stone points out that Gibsonian cyberspace is ‘a radicalising of Cartesian Dualism’ (Stone, 1995, p.34).
While Cartesian metaphysics requires the body, even though the body is treated as a container of the human mind or subject,
Gibson and his followers do not acknowledge the necessity of the body. This is because, for them, in cyberspace the body is substituted with, or surpassed by information. Moreover, Stone doubts the belief of the Cartesian cyber-enthusiasts that disembodiment enables computer users to deviate from male-dominated structures of society, as she is sceptical about whose desires are operated and represented in a virtual system. A restructuring of power relations does not take place in response to absent bodies, but the absence of bodies results in the exclusion of certain bodies and voices, usually women and minorities, in hierarchical cyberspace (Stone, 1991). She thus concludes that virtual community originates in, and must return to, the physical… Even in the age of the technosocial subject, life is lived through bodies… Forgetting about the body is an old Cartesian trick.
(Stone, 1991, p.113)
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The impossibility of detaching the body from the virtual is also asserted by Vivian
Sobchak who considers that the technological mediation of the body ‘ reclaim[s] experience through the flesh
’, rather than ‘beat[s] the meat’ (Sobchak, 1996, p.212, original italics).
The aforementioned contradictory discussions reveal the cultural connotations of the virtual, which lead to different interpretations of disembodiment of the performing body. In the contexts of dance and performance, technological engagements with human embodiment evoke fear, but at the same time, excitement, in terms of presence and absence of the corporeal body. In fact, before it is accessed through computer technologies, the notion of virtuality in opposition to physicality takes root in dance.
American philosopher Susan Langer proposes virtual gestures that transform actual gestures into dancing. Virtual gesture is distinct from actual gesture in that it signifies not how a performer physically moves but rather what imaginative thought process makes the performer move. For Langer, the virtual encompasses illusory or imagined symbols, not actual feelings or physical movements. They are vital impulses of dance to express feelings and emotions through physical movements, that is to say, ‘the primary illusion of dance is a virtual realm of Power – not actual, physically exerted power, but appearances of influence and agency created by virtual gesture’ (Langer,
1953, p.175). She tends to understate the lived experience of a performer and instead suggests the virtual as an invisible force of dance.
The distinction between the virtual and the physical becomes more apparent and deepens as the term ‘virtual’ is used to refer to computational representations of physical reality as well as the physical body. Reflecting our general accounts of the material and the immaterial, in which Cartesian dualism is perpetuated, in dance and
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performance the digital double can be easily construed as disembodied experience.
According to Drew Leder, ‘ the body’s own tendency towards self-concealment ’ is responsible for buttressing Cartesian dualism (Leder, 1990, p.69, original italics), which misleads us into positing the body (either in a physical or virtual space) as opposed to the incorporeal mind and neglecting cognitive and intellectual activities in a perceiving and acting body. As Susan Kozel reconceptualises virtuality as the
‘reworking of materiality’ (Kozel, 2006b, p.137), kinaesthetic sensations and embodiments are translated and re-configured through interfaces like a keyboardmouse, a motions sensor or a multimodal device, and then enacted in virtual space through digital images and sounds. In this sense, the virtual comes from dynamic and consistent intersections between the corporeal and computer agents. This notion of the virtual as the re-embodiment of physicality challenges the orthodox division of the virtual and the physical and suggests the multiplicity of the embodiment of a performing subject. As Kozel points out, performing bodies and their virtual double in technologically-mediated environments have a ‘vantage point’ from which to assess the diverse interpretations of virtuality (Kozel, 2006b, p.139). In this chapter I will examine dancers’ phenomenological experience of the virtual double, revealing that in the work Mortal Engine the virtual double goes beyond the dualistic notion of it as a disembodied being.
5.3.1 The Coexistence of the Physical and the Virtual
As artistic director of Chunky Move (1995-2012), the choreographer Gideon
Obazanek built the company’s national and international reputation for the range and variety of his choreographic works. Challenging forms and contents of contemporary
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dance performance, his works are often associated with other genres or media, such as theatre, site-specific work, film, digital art and installation art. One of his critically acclaimed works is Mortal Engine, a collaboration with interactive system engineer
Frieder Weiss, Laser and Sound artist Robin Fox and Composer Ben Frost. The work is labelled as a ‘dance-video-music-laser performance’ where dancers’ movement triggers or transforms visual images, sounds and lasers by means of motion-tracking sensors, cameras, projections and an interactive system. The performance environment then becomes a perpetual state of conflict and flux. As the title of the work suggests, the human dancer, who is empowered to activate visual and auditory effects, plays a role as an engine, part of the organic-mechanical machine.
After Obarzanek and Berlin-based engineer Weiss first met at the 2004 Monaco
Dance Forum, they experimented with possible relationships between the moving body and video projections. As a result, Glow (2006), a 30 minute-long female solo work, became Obazanek’s first venture into the intersection of choreography and digital technologies. Mortal Engine , as an upgraded version of Glow , is performed by an ensemble of six dancers for approximately 60 minutes. For the new work, Fox joins the creative team of Glow , designing oscilloscope projections and lasers which not only have direct relationships to sound strands but also respond to the dancers’ movements. Another significant change in Mortal Engine is the performance space. In
Glow , the audience seating is supposed to overlook a white-floor stage where not only the dancer performs but also digital images are projected. Due to the limited performance venues that can provide this audience overview, for Mortal Engine , the choreographer and the company’s production manager Richard Dinnen devised a steeply-raked white square platform which serves as a stage floor as well as a projection screen (Gallasch, 2007). Two lower portions of this raked stage are
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designed to be lifted to create a vertical wall that the dancers can lean and move against.
The show begins with the canvas-like platform displaying luminous geometrical shapes such as whorls, lines, ellipses or waves, filled with electronic sounds like beeping, beating and pulsating. The large oval gradually shrinks and merges into a hand of a female dancer who is suddenly seen lying on the platform. The fuzzy grey nimbus enlarges more and more and gets spread out over the floor. It then encases her as she crouches, contorts and stretches out her four limbs, like a four-legged creature.
Other performers soon roll onto the platform while getting entangled with each other and forming one giant tarantula-like shape (see Figure 13). They slink toward the dancer lying on the cloudy white space and subsequently fall on her. There is a different scenic situation where in the utter darkness the audience can pick out dim figures of three couples rolling and tumbling about, through squiggling lines of light
Figure 13 A cluster of dancers as a giant spider (still image from video)
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which swiftly appear underneath the dancers. In the piece, the contrast of lightness and darkness is accentuated through not only a conflict between the dancer and the light projection but also a dispute between two dancers. The woman’s luminous body adheres to the man’s murky body which appears like her shadow. She writhes away to detach from him. They cling to each other, but never become one.
Although performing on the steeply raked stage demands a huge amount of physical strength, the dancers are capable of adjusting themselves to the set and attracting the audience’s attention to their grotesque and virtuosic movements. They tussle, jerk, and wrench while staying low and hardly shifting from one spot to another. On the contrary, when the bottom panels of the slanted platform are transformed into the vertical wall, the dancers stand against the wall and tend to expose their natural but vulnerable bodies in front of the audience rather than their contorted and deformed bodies. For the most part, the dancers’ movements overlap or coexist with visual projections used as monochrome lights. The light patterns are exhibited in diverse and dynamic relationships with the performers: the bodies are outlined, drowned, or imprinted on the floor by shadows; geometric shapes rain upon, swarm, or scatter around in reaction to the bodies.
The light, in all its variations, combines with Ben Frost’s soundtrack to create an otherworldly environment. In Frost’s composition, abrasive and harsh noises are well balanced with hushed and melancholy sounds. Although Obarzanek indicates that to some extent the dancers’ movements activate Frost’s pre-composed sequences
(Obarzanek, www.chunkymove.com), the connections between the movements and the music sequences are rarely perceptible. Instead, the movements trigger various audio effects ranging from crackling and sparking noises from electricity, to slow flowing viscous liquids. For instance, about midway through the performance, a male
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and a female performer stand against the wall, which is folded out of the platform and takes on a greyish-green colour (See Figure 14). The couple, who look like they are lying on the bed, lean on, roll over, and overlap with each other. They keep having
Figure 14 A duet with the smoky trace (still image from video)
Figure 15 A man controlling the lasers © Andrew Curtis
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physical contact so that they can never separate. Their movement triggers not only the shadowy image but also the suctioning sound. It is tracked by a dark moving shadow imprinted on the wall and generates sounds like stretching gooey dough. When the couple suddenly freeze after a quick move, the dark trace slowly disappears and the sound drifts into silence.
This performance ends with green laser beams that bring the audience into a matrix-like world of tunnels of light (see Figure 15). A haze abruptly surges into the auditorium, and soon the laser radiates out from the upper stage, passes overhead and pierces the auditorium. As the laser crosses through the billowing haze, it makes a straight and smooth line, which gives audiences a sense of being in the cloud. As the vibrant laser radically changes in its speed, direction, and size, disturbing and earsplitting noises burst out. The dancer stands in the light and generates the tunnel and wall of green light at his will. At last, the female and male dancer move back toward where the laser emanates from, as if they are entering the vortex of the virtual tunnel.
5.3.2 The Virtual Double and its Agency
To shed light on choreographic ways of structuring the human-computer interface in
Mortal Engine , the behaviours of the digital images, sound effects and lasers are neither fixed nor pre-determined. They are generated in response to the dancers’ movement as soon as the physical data is transmitted into the computer system. In the middle of the performance, there is a scene in which Fox’s oscilloscopic images are projected onto the empty stage devoid of the dancers. Synchronised with agitating and sometimes deafening sounds, the dazzling and staggering images flash and swiftly change, as do the lasers’ behaviours. It is by virtue of Weiss’s interactive system
Kalypso that Fox’s video images and lasers extend to their interrelationships with the
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physical movements as well as with sounds. The former industrial engineer Weiss invented motion tracking software such as Eyecon and Kalypso, which are especially designed for dance performance works.
32 In Mortal Engine , the dancers’ movements are captured by infrared video cameras installed at the front of the stage. Through computational algorithms of the Kalypso software, their body outlines morph into visual images, which are then simultaneously projected back onto their bodies. The
Kalypso software transforms kinetic sensations into binary information so that it can provide a universal language through which the body, lighting, video, sound and laser can respond to each other in real time.
Obarzanek conceives digital technology as another instrument, equivalent to the human body. His choreography is closely bound up with interactive technologies, focusing on ‘movement of unformed beings’ (Obarzanek, www.chunkymove.com) which continuously evolves from the physical body into the virtual counterparts and vice versa. Accordingly, the virtual presence and its behaviour patterns becomes part of his choreography. In terms of ways of intersecting between the corporeal bodies and the digital elements, Obarzanek and Weiss concur that interrelationships between the two entities are needed to go beyond the direct or causal approaches of Glow .
They then envisage that in this production, the virtual ‘will most certainly have a life of its own’ (Obarzanek, cited in Gallasch, 2007). The visual images displayed in
Mortal Engine are spontaneously rearranged in a self-organised manner, rather than mimicking the dancing bodies or passively reacting to them. According to Weiss, too precise and obvious relationships between the physical and the virtual render the virtual behaviours easily predictable and, consequently, they lose tension and excitement. Weiss insists that the virtual representations need to feature fluid, disorderly, and uncertain elements which are controlled by their own agent (Weiss,
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cited in Clark, 2012, www.wired.co.uk).
The digital images and their chaotic behaviours have aesthetic value in terms of their representation of the dynamic metamorphosis of the dancers’ bodies, but they also have an ontological implication by calling into question the relationship between the human and the nonhuman entities. The digital images perceive and act upon the world in their own way while responding to the dancers’ movements. They emanate from the human subject, but at the same time they exist as the Other that has their own autonomy or agency. The chaotic behaviours of mechanical entities in the humancomputer interface show not only that the human’s embodiment deviates from its body boundary and its representational image, but also that in being in the virtual environment, a type of embodied agency is no longer confined to the corporeal being.
I will examine an ontological implication of the virtual double and its autonomy in terms of the construction of human embodiment and agency, primarily relying on
Mark Hansen’s concept of ‘bodies in code’.
In his book Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (2006), Hansen claims that all reality is mixed reality as the body takes a primordial role in perceptual experiences in any type of reality. When we enter into a space of virtuality, we neither lose our bodies nor are disembodied since the sensory-motor functioning of our bodies enacts upon virtual realms. For Hansen, ‘the expanded scope’ of ‘embodied human agency’ (Hansen, 2006, p.3), rather than ‘representationalist verisimilitude’ or advanced simulation, is needed to create ‘fluid and functional crossings between virtual and physical realms’ (Hansen, 2006, p.2). In
Mortal Engine , the digital images are not visually identical with the dancers, but the dancers’ embodied agency is performed in the virtual environment because their motor activities resonate within the digital image. The physical intensity, flow and sensation, which emanate from the
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dancers’ experience, are metamorphosed into kaleidoscopic, flowing, spectral and geometrical images. I argue that these digital images materialise as what Hansen refers to as ‘bodies in code’; more specifically, the dancers’ bodies are deterritorialised through technical modifications. The virtual double is the dancers’ embodiment which can only be actualised in association with technics. Also, the dancers’ ways of perceiving and acting upon the world is unavoidably changed, since the way in which their corporeal bodies experience the virtual environment is not the same as how the computer system experiences it.
To explicate how technologies alter the nature of our sensory experiences, Hansen refers to the philosopher Shaun Gallagher’s differentiation of the body schema and the body image, which are doubled systems for the body (Gallagher, 1995, p.228).
According to Gallagher, a body image consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one’s own body. In contrast, a body schema is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring.
(Gallagher, 2005, p. 24)
The body schema is characterised as an operational system for monitoring and governing posture and movement, independently of the conscious awareness of our bodies. Operating coherently and holistically as a single unified system, the body schema carries out a sensory-motor process which is a pre-reflective condition for our interactions with the world. By contrast, the body image is designated as a representational object, or content, under the control of consciousness. It is a primarily visual apprehension of the body, physically and conceptually through our
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own eyes or conceptually through others’ eyes. The body image may partially appear or disappear if our attention is drawn to specific parts of the body or away from the body, even though sensory-motor functions keep working without consciousness by virtue of the body schema.
Gallagher also accounts for the difference between the unconscious body schema and the consciously perceptual body image in a case of prosthetics. Since the body image often appears as distinguished from its environment, its boundary is relatively explicitly identified. In contradistinction, as the sensory-motor functioning of the body schema operates in interaction with the environment, the scope of the body schema is not fixed or bounded. When one uses a hand-held object, the object is encompassed within one’s body schema’s operation. Then, the body schema is extended to the object while the body image boundary is defined by one’s fingertips
(Gallagher and Cole, 1995, p.372). Gallagher’s idea concerning expandable body schema as enabled through an incorporation of tools into the body is initially proposed by Merleau-Ponty, who indicates that the body schema is rearranged and renewed by appropriating technological artefacts (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [1945], pp.142-145). In his analysis of a blind man’s stick, the stick is used without conscious control, and his sensory-motor activity is enacted with the stick. Or, to state it differently, the stick becomes a part of the blind man’s body schema. By means of the stick, the scope and capacity of the man’s body’s coupling with an environment is expanded.
My phenomenological interpretations of dancers’ bodies-in-code in Mortal Engine are grounded upon Merleau-Ponty and his follower Gallagher’s ideas on the distinction between the visual body image and the motile body schema, as well as the expansion of the body schema through the incorporation of objects.
33
However, I find
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that their ideas are inadequate to appropriately account for what happens in the dancers’ bodies for two reasons. First, not only the corporeal schema but also the technologically-generated schema work in the dancers’ embodied experiences in the virtual environment. As discussed above, Weiss’s interactive system possesses selfautonomy, which means that it is capable of creating its own way of sensing and acting upon the virtual environment. To put differently, it is not just incorporated within the dancers’ corporeal schema, but rather reconfigures it. The second reason is that the dancers’ body image does not retain the representational image. Unlike a blind man whose visual body image appears within its epidermal boundary even though his body schema encompasses the stick, the dancers in the virtual deviate from their representational body image and instead take the form of digital images.
This is why Hansen contends that a body-in-code calls for ‘a crucial break with the (restricted) vision of technics central to Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology’ (Hansen, 2006, p.48). Hansen’s sense of ‘the technical
(re)deployment of the body schema’ (2006, p.48) radicalises Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘a rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal body schema’ (1962, p.142) since
Hansen argues that in virtual environment
… the difference between them [body image and body schema] − and with it, the role of representation − has been entirely effaced.
Put another way, in such environments, whatever experience one has of one’s body proper does not take the form of a (representational) image, but rather emerges through the representative function of the data of body movement, the way these data… represent one’s body.
(Hansen, 2006, p.49, original italics)
For Hansen, when our body accesses a virtual realm, the visual body image that we
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consciously apprehend in the experience of our body proper appears through the ways that technics reconfigure the data of our body movement. Subsequently, the way in which the computer system functions in the sensory-motor process is the same as how the data represents our body movement.
Dancers’ embodied experiences in Mortal Engine manifest the breakdown of the distinction between the body image and the body schema and further the ‘possibility for the creative deployment of the technically enactive body schema’ (Hansen, 2006, p.49). Throughout the work, monochrome light projections submissively trace the dancers’ movement while outlining or swallowing their body shapes or leaving shadows of their bodies behind which they gradually disappear; geometric shapes, including a giant maze, short bars or squiggles of light, are deformed in response to the dancers’ movements; thousands of roach-like black dots pour out of dancers’ bodies, move independently and draw back round the dancers. The dancers’ body schema, the system to enter into a space of virtuality, is deterritorialised and reterritorialised by the interactive system and its sensory-motor functions, which simply modulate (or re-arrange in Merleau-Ponty’s sense) the corporeal schema or radically redeploy it. The digital images, the reconfigured data of the dancers’ movements, appear as the body image that the dancers consciously perceive and conceive as their own bodies in the virtual environment.
To return to my question about the ontological implication of the virtual double and its autonomy in Mortal Engine , the virtual double as bodies–in-code indicates that technologies take a constitutive role in dancers’ experiences. Dancers expand their embodied agency to access a new performative reality, which is able to be experienced only in conjunction with the interactive system. Moreover, in this work, the expansion of the scope of the dancers’ bodily agency implies that the dancers’
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body boundary is not just extended, but their body image takes the form out of the body proper and the autonomy of the interactive system fundamentally redeploys the dancers’ body schema through the enaction of its own body schema. Given that the dancers’ experiences are co-constituted by their corporeal bodies and the interactive system, the dancers exist as posthuman; their agency is distributed across the physical and the virtual while embodiment is doubled.
5.3.3 Doubled Embodiment of Posthuman Subjectivity
The dancers’ re-embodiment in the virtual environment is brought about through the co-presence and intersection of the physical and the virtual. This process is what
Gabriella Giannanchi calls ‘hypersurface’ where humans ‘can double their presence and be in both the [physical] and the virtual environments simultaneously’ (Giannachi,
2004, p.95, original italics). In this sense, the doubled presence through ‘fluid and functional crossings’ (Hansen, 2006, p.2) is more appropriately conceived as the embodiment of unified subjectivity than a split one. This perspective is initially proposed by Steve Dixon who argues that the digital double is one representation of unified subjectivity of the posthuman, rather than its split subjectivity which is interpreted through a psychoanalytic approach to the digital double (Dixon, 2004, pp.241
270).
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Obarzanek and Weiss do not announce their intention of representing the unified subjectivity of dancers through the mutual relationship between the physical and the virtual embodiment, but it can be inferred from their expression of feeling an
‘aversion to vertical screens’ (Gallasch, 2007). For them, a spatial division between a performance space and screens seems to cause an audience to experience a sense of disjunction between the physical and the virtual. The tilted stage is suggested as a
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suitable site for merging the corporeal body with its digital double. When the physical and the virtual self get close to each other or even overlapped on the stage, the audience’s attention is attracted to entanglement between the two. In the work, there are some scenes in which the dancer’s moving body is completely covered by her shadowy self. The audience is then rarely able to discern the boundary of his/her body and gets confused about whether the movement is enacted by the physical body or the shadow other. According to Weiss, the synthesis of the dancers and the projected images is not generated by the sameness of the two, but it is brought into being through the audience’s perception and understanding of the differentiation and interplay between the two (Weiss, cited in Clark, 2012, www.wired.co.uk).
Nevertheless, it could be easily construed that the virtual double represents the split subjectivity of the dancers or that the physical referent and virtual double are the two divided entities, due to the dancers’ apparent disengagement with their virtual double during a performance. The virtual images are generated from the dancers’ movements and immediately respond to them, but the dancers are seen as unaware of their virtual counterparts and not directly affected by them. As the choreographer mentions, the dancers’ movement sequences are fixed, so there is unlikely room for improvisations with unpredictable and chaotic behaviours of digital outputs of the interactive system. The dancers seem only conscious of their self-representations while not engaging with the virtual image as part of their experiences. In the next section, I will disclose that the dancers and their virtual double embody the dancers’ unified subjectivities, rather than split ones by elaborating on the dancers’ bodies and their perceptual and cognitive activities when they encounter the virtual double, particularly during rehearsals which can be different to what happens in live performances. In order to examine how the dancers sense, cognise and embody their
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corporeal bodies as well as the digital images, I primarily refer to Drew Leder’s notion of ‘disappearing’ and ‘dys-appearing body’ (Leder, 1990, p.84).
In his book The Absent Body (1990), Leder proposes that the body as a ground of human experience tends to be experientially absent in a normal condition. He draws upon Heidegger’s notion of ecstasis (Heidegger, 1962 [1927], p.377), which signifies the ‘standing out’, in order to develop the ecstatic nature of the lived body as the fundamental logic of bodily engagement with the world. According to Leder, ‘the very nature of the body is to project outward from its place of standing. From the
“here” arises a perceptual world of near and far distances. From the “now” we inhabit a meaningful past and a futural realm of projects and goals’ (Lede, 1990, pp.21-22).
When we are engaged in physical or cognitive activities, our body is directed outwards to perceive something of the world. The body then recedes from selfawareness and becomes absent in our embodied experience. For example, a reader fastens her attention on ideas of a book, not her physical sensation or posture. A sport player dwells on his opponent’s movement, rather than his own movement, even though his body promptly and accurately reacts to the opponent’s movement (Leder,
1990, p.1). Importantly, corporeal absence does not correspond to ‘a simply void’ or
‘a sheer nullity’ since the body cannot be obliterated in experience. Corporeal absence rather implies that the body operates as the centre point from which the perceptual field generates but remains ‘indirectly or marginally’ in the midst of the perceived
(Leder, 1990, p.22).
Leder proposes two complementary forms of the self-concealment of the surface body: ‘focal disappearance’ and ‘background appearance’ (Leder, 1990, p.26). Leder illustrates that when he walks around countryside and gazes into a tree, his eyes are
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the focal origin from which their visual field radiates. His eyes never appear within the visual field. The self-effacement of the eyes is what Leder calls focal disappearance. At the same moment, much of his body is also engaged in his embodied experience, including his feet extending between fence posts, his head shifting and so on. However, these corporeal regions and powers disappear from explicit awareness. Leder regards his body as background disappearance, indicating that his body is backgrounded not because it is not engaged in sensorimotor activities, but because it is not bodily foci in the given experience.
As another mode of absence as the ‘being-away’, Leder suggests dys-appearance to denote a troubling moment, that is to say, being-away from the body’s ordinary functions, which make our body ‘present’. When our body itself or a way of addressing the body, deviates from the ordinary, we become aware of the body, which then appears as the ‘Other’ (Leder, 1990, p.70). The dys-appearing body occurs in its dysfunction and problematic states, which make people thematise their bodies. Dysappearance is brought into being not only by pathological and physiological problems but also by affective disturbance, perceptual and motor difficulty (Leder, 1990, pp.84-
54). Leder points out that although ‘not only painful but neutral or pleasurable coenesthesias’ draw our attention to the body, not all modes of thematising the body accompany bodily dys-appearance (Leder, 1990, p.91). Neutral or pleasurable kinaesthetic, visual and tactile self-experience is enacted out of people’s own volition, hinging on individual and cultural difference. On the contrary, bodily dys-appearance demands unavoidable heightened body awareness that encompasses the sensory force, the reorganisation of world relations, self-interpretation and problem solving, and even raises existential questions about embodiment.
Leder’s understanding of the disappearing and dys-appearing body provide a
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valuable perspective from which to interpret dancers’ experiences of their virtual double in Mortal Engine . Weiss observed that during live performances, the dancers tended to not directly confront digital projected images, but, by contrast, in the choreographic process they fully engaged in experiencing the projected images so as to comprehend the potential embodied enactment of the interactive system in relation to the dancers’ movements (Weiss, cited in Clark, 2012, www.wired.co.uk). The dancers’ corporeal presences may momentarily disappear from self-awareness during rehearsals since they draw their attention to how the digital images behave and reflect their movements. This is what Leder explains when he states, ‘the body conceals itself precisely in the act of revealing what is Other’ (Leder, 1990, p.22). The digital image is experienced as the Other to which the dancers’ attentions are drawn. However, significantly, at the same time it is a de-/re-territorialised form of their bodies through the interactive system, which is part of the dancers’ extended embodiment, as indicated above. Here, I argue that the virtual double can be described as what Leder identifies as the dys-appearing body, since it generates a sense of dysfunction or disturbing states and demands the self-awareness of the body.
When a dancer’s virtual double is conceived as the dys-appearing body, it is natural to assume that problematic states in the virtualisation of her body are triggered by the computer system’s potential for dysfunctions like viruses, glitches and breakdown and human errors in the setup process. However, even if the operation of the interactive system functions unproblematically, dys-appearance can occur by reason of the dancer’s unfamiliarity with the interactive system and the chaotic pattern of the emerging virtual double. As indicated by Weiss, during rehearsals of Mortal
Engine , dancers concentrate explicitly on constantly changing digital images so as to bodily learn the operational system of the human-computer interface. It is what Leder
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identifies as ‘the initial acquisition of motor schemas’ that provoke bodily dysappearance (Leder, 1990, p.85). As discussed above, since the interactive system fundamentally redeploys the dancers’ motile body schema, dancers need time and practice to become accustomed to the interactive system’s sensory-motor functioning in the virtual environment.
Another reason to perceive the virtual self as the dys-appearance body comes from the chaotic pattern of the virtual double due to the complexity of the interactive system. The work embraces a variety of digital images having distinct movement qualities and behaviour patterns, which are not entirely controlled by the dancers and instead behave in their own ways at certain points. The autonomy of the interactive system produces unexpected and accidental behaviours which may not be intended or desired to occur by the dancers. Accordingly, the digital projection can evoke a sense of upset and distraction in the dancers’ bodily states. Its chaotic behaviours then lead the dancers to reflect back upon and adjust their corporeal behaviours, as Leder points out that ‘dysfunction in the motor sphere…gives rise to bodily self-consciousness’
(Leder, 1990, p.85). The dancers’ attentions are directed to the virtual embodiment, and simultaneously the dancer becomes aware of their corporeal embodiment. To put it another way, in the experience of the virtual environment, both the corporeal and the virtual self do not disappear in self-awareness. Instead, they constantly interact and contaminate each other, which gives rise to the combination of the sensory-motor function of the corporeal body and the interactive system.
As stated above, unlike in the process of rehearsals, during live performances dancers appear to be performing independently of the projected images without giving explicit attention to their virtual double. Reflecting on Leder’s perspective, I conceive that this phenomenon is brought about by the interminglement of the physical and
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virtual double, which enables the dancers to inhabit the virtual double without the experience of bodily dys-appearance. It is similar to learning a new technique which requires heightened awareness of the body, but after long-term and intensive training, a dancer can perform the technique without conscious control of his/her own body
(Sutton, 2005, p.52). When a set of certain movements associated with the skill are embodied in the dancer’s motor sphere as fully as possible, they are dismissed from attention and become ‘tacit’ (Leder, 1990, p.85). In Mortal Engine , after long-term and intensive practices of interacting with emergent digital images, the dancers’ thematisation of the virtual double and its attendant self-awareness of the corporeal body no longer occur as the dancers master ― not necessarily control ― chaotic patterns of the virtual double. In other words, when the dancers sufficiently relearn their technologically reconfigured body schema, the interactive system is shifted from the ‘present-at-hand’ to the ‘ready-to-hand’ in Heidegger’s term (Heidegger, 1962, pp.95-107).
Heidegger elaborates upon the functions of equipment as ‘connections’ between humans and reality, distinguishing the notion of ‘ready-to-hand’ artefacts from
‘present-at-hand’ ones. For Heidegger, when a tool is used for doing something, a person’s attention is withdrawn from the tool itself and instead drawn to doing something. For instance, as a highly-skilled carpenter hammers a nail, the hammer is no longer present-at-hand and instead becomes ready-to-hand. In this sense, when the dancers’ corporeal body schema is fully combined with the technological enactive body schema, the interactive system becomes ready-to-hand for the dancers. What happens during the performances is that the virtual double becomes background disappearance, rather than remaining separated from the corporeal self. The virtual regions and actions belong to the dancers’ body schema, but they are not central
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points of our sensorimotor engagements and instead present themselves as part of the background in the bodily gestalt.
The ostensible disengagement of the dancers and their virtual double may derive from Obazarnek’s choreographic intention to visualise the inner turmoil of the self which one wants to escape and deny but which inevitably remains inside. As
Obazarnek states, ‘ Mortal Engine looks at… conflicts between the self and the shadowy other – the other within as well as the other as the other. Duets are seen as both couples and as singular selves struggling to escape inner darkness – mortality, sexuality, desire’ (Obarzanek, www.chunkymove.com). However, both the dancers’ corporeal and virtual movements are generated through contaminating each other in the process of the dancers’ re-embodiment. In the work, the dancers exist between the physical and the virtual while having doubling body image through the integration of the corporeal and technological motile body schema. In this sense, their doubled, although non-identical, presences are the embodiment of the posthuman’s unified subjectivity rather than its split subjectivity, as one is not replaced another but instead becomes intermingled.
According to Obarzanek, when choreography merges with digital technologies, human movements can be extended through interactions with other mediums such as lighting, music and lasers on which kinetic sensibilities are projected. This integration of the body and technology facilitates reconciliations between the tangible and intangible world (Obarzanek, 2012). His vision of the potential of virtuality is seen as neither utopian as a field of mind unleashed from the restriction of the flesh of the body nor dystopian as an insubstantial simulacrum and a self-contained delusive
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world. Rather, he reveals that virtuality is simply one more realm of the world which is interconnected with the physical realm through the expanded human embodied agency. In this sense, he seems to eschew the humanist preoccupation with the physical body and physical reality, distinct from the virtual.
However, the ending scene of the work suggests that he may be reluctant or unprepared to unify human beings and technology. After the extravagant green laser beam finale, two dancers are left on the stage and the video-laser system is in the off mode. In the spotlight, their semi-naked bodies get entangled and care for each other.
After a short time, their bodies gradually get separated and disappear in the dark, other than their fingers pointing to each other, which recalls Michelangelo’s painting
The Creation of Adam and a notable scene from the film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982). This intense and sensual physical contact represents a longing for love, warmth, and humanity, bringing up the image of Hollywood science fiction films which illustrate that ‘the residues of the human self struggles to assert themselves against the invasion of the technological body or artificial reality’ (Featherstones and
Burrows, 1995, p.4). In the end, the work can be described as addressing the separation between the human body and technologies. In fact, the choreographer admitted that ‘I had the extreme kind of reaction to technologies after the second piece [which is Mortal Engine ]. The anxiety that was produced in me in making this work was overwhelming. As a reaction to that, I don’t want to work on technologies for a long time afterwards’ (Obarzanek, 2012). That is to say, he pursues the intermingling of physical and virtual bodies as the extended embodied experience, but paradoxically alludes to a return to corporeal bodies in his anxiety about technology.
Obarzanek’s hostile reaction to technologies is certainly not surprising since technologies have been often construed as a threat to humanity and corporeality. This
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oppositional relation between the human and the technological and between the physical and the virtual is based upon Cartesian dualism which has been deeply embedded in Western society and ironically has been contested with such vehemence in dance and performance fields. As Leder argues, the body’s inclination to disappear in our ordinary experiences and to appear at times of dysfunction or disturbance gives rise to slanted perceptions of the body and upholds the mind/body dualism. Cartesian assumptions are responsible for attributing virtuality to disembodiment, which gives rise to utopian or dystopian visions of absence of the corporeal body. This chapter points out that as the corporeal body tends to be absent from our attention, the virtual cannot be relegated to disembodiment by reason of the lack of corporeal presence. I rather insist that virtuality is the re-embodiment of physicality by investigating a real time interface between dancers and digital images in Mortal Engine .
A dancer’s embodied agency is expanded to a space of virtuality and brings into being her virtual double, which is a body-in-code, whose embodiment is realised only with technical deterritorialisation of the body. The dancer’s physical and virtual body images affect each other as operated by her technological deployed body schema. The dancer’s doubled embodiment represents her posthuman unified subjectivity. In the following chapter, audiences in two interactive installation works also embody themselves in a physical and a virtual realm, constructing their posthuman unified subjectivity through interplays of the corporeal and the digital self. However, unlike the dancers in Mortal Engine , the audiences have an immersive experience in a virtual realm which is coupled with a physical realm. Once again, by drawing upon the notions of bodily disappearance and dys-appearance, I will investigate how the installation works bring the audiences into the state of immersion and how they engage in a physical and virtual space in their immersive experience.
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According to Harrison et al (2011), virtual environments are computer-generated environments where people gather and distribute information, communicate and socialise, such as the Internet which connects between computers and allows people to send emails, transfer files and navigate the network through the World Wide Web.
Virtual worlds indicate 3D computer-generated environments in which online users, who are represented on monitor as themselves or avatars, interact in real time with others. The largest and most well-known form of virtual world is Second Life. Second
Life is an online 3D world invented by Linden Lab in 2003. To become residents in
Second Life, Users have to create their own digital persona, or avatars.
Through avatars, they can meet other residents, do individual and social activities and exchange virtual property. While virtual environments and virtual worlds are reached via keyboard and mouse and viewed through the 2D computer monitor, virtual reality is a more expensive and extensive form through which users enter and explore a highly visual 3D world. By means of a head-mounted display, a data glove, a console or a joystick, the users have immersive and perceptual experiences, fully engaging in the simulated environment and experiencing the environment as ‘real’.
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The term ‘cyberpunk’ was first used as the title of a book written by Bruce Bethke in 1983 and then widely accepted to name a science fiction genre in the 1980s and
1990s, which was initiated by Gibson and developed by Bruce Sterling, Neal
Stephenson, Pat Cadigan and others. Cyberpunk is considered to be ‘a massive textual presence’ (Stone, 1991, p.95) since its utopian and dystopian vision of cyberculture has a strong influence not only on social, cultural and philosophical discourses on the technology-dominant world, but also technological innovations themselves
(Featherstone and Burrows, 1995, pp.7-8).
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While the main function of the software Eyecon and Kalypso is to trigger various mediated representations by tracking a dancer’s movement, they are devised for distinct interfaces with the movement. To briefly introduce the operational process of the two interactive systems, Eyecon transfers a dancer’s movement onto the computer so that the movement can appear within a frame drawn by an operator. As the dancer’s body part comes into contact with the drawn lines, panels and other elements, certain sounds are generated. In addition, this system can analyse the movement data appearing, such as the position, size, and height within the marked frame. While Eyecon connects to the physical movement space with computergenerated sounds, Kalypso focuses on visual evolutions of the physical movement.
The Kalypso software allows the dancer’s body outline to morph into visual images which are projected back onto the body. Through computational algorithms of the system, the video information fed from the body outline generates a variety of visual images, which are close to, or merge into, the body image.
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To revisit my second-person phenomenological methodology, my phenomenological interpretation of audiences’ experiences of their virtual double is undertaken through my lived embodied experience. My knowledge about the dancers’ subjective experience does not come from interviewing the dancers to hear their own voices, but by trying to imagine myself to be in their bodies. My sensation and perception of the dancers’ experiences evoke some degree of empathy, which is grounded on my interpretation which employs an array of phenomenological concepts.
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As an advocate of posthumanism as a theoretical standpoint for digital performance, Dixon remarks that doubled embodiment of a human performer does not signal the divided and fragmented subjectivity, but rather, on the contrary, it manifests
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the united subjectivity (Dixon, 2007, pp.154-155). Dixon opposes Matthew Causey’s psychoanalytic reading of the co-presence of the human and its technological reproduction as ‘a visual metaphor of split subjectivity’ (Causey, 1999, p.390). French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan defines the nature of the subject as being split and divided since the subject is involved with ‘a privileged object’ that separates from the self, captures the gaze and enacts ‘self-mutilation’ caused by the approach of the real
(1981 [1964], p.83). Reflecting Lacan’s notion, Causey argues that a performer’s confrontation with his/her technological representation is an experience of the self as other, which he calls ‘an uncanny experience’ (Causey, 1999, p.385) Although this
Lacanian interpretation of the presence of the double as the revelation of split subjectivity has been widely accepted in cyberculture, digital arts, and performance studies, Dixon points out that the notion of a wholly divided self runs into the danger of considering the virtual body as an ‘uncontrollable chimera’. For Dixon, cybernetic and posthumanist perspectives on the virtual embodiment of the human subject, which is inextricably interwoven with its corporeal embodiment, are more compatible with digital performance works that are oriented toward the ‘unified subjectivity’ of the posthuman, rather than its ‘split subjectivity’ (Dixon, 2007, p.155).
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It is not a new phenomenon that choreographers break down a boundary between a work and an audience and get away from conventional theatre spaces. Since the 1960s, choreographers have not only taken non-theatre indoor and outdoor spaces as the site for performance, but also employed their choreographic thoughts and methods in creating an object or an installation environment rather than in forming and organising human movements (see Chapter 2). The expanded choreographic practices entail the shift of spectatorship from distanced contemplation, to close proximity to performer, and to bodily engagement in the works. In particular, choreographic objects and installations provoke viewers into perceiving, moving and thinking through them. The viewers’ bodily experiences attribute ‘the coexistence of the static and the mobile’ to the artworks (Morris, 1995, p.139).
The use of digital technologies prompts choreographers to foreground the actual involvement of audiences with various modes and levels of interactivity,
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which leads to the transformation of the role of audiences from viewers or spectators to participants, performers or even co-authors (Dixon, 2007, p.595). In interactive works facilitated by digital technologies, the audiences’ kinaesthetic and affective inputs activate and alter constituent elements of the works that are often composed of digital images and sounds. The installation/performance environments built by the choreographers are constantly transformed and re-inscribed through continuous interchanges of materiality and information. Moreover, by means of recent developments in digital technologies and their intimate association with the human body, the interactive installation environments are able to bring the audiences into the
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state of immersion and place their embodiment at the heart of the work.
This chapter looks into a multi-user installation Sensuous Geographies (2003), created by British choreographer Sarah Rubidge in collaboration with composer
Alistair MacDonald, and a 3-D computer graphic installation SwanQuake: House
(2005/08), created by London-based artist duo Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli ― known as igloo. I will investigate how audiences of the works perceive a computergenerated environment and embody themselves within it through bodily disappearance or dys-appearance. Also, I will shed light on their experiences of immersion into the virtual environment which is combined with the physical environment. For the analyses of the works, I take phenomenological approaches to addressing the relationship between the audience’s physical and virtual presence as well as the hybrid nature of the environment in which the audience is immersed.
In terms of methodological matters, as I have had no opportunity to experience these two installations works as an audience participant, I rely on video clips of the works and testimonies of audiences who take part in the works. Accordingly, this analysis is the phenomenological account of the works themselves, that is, how audience interactivity and immersion occur in the works, rather than how I bodily interact with the works and immerse myself in the virtual environments that the works generate. According to Klich and Scheer, immersion is inherently such a subjective experience that it can only be accessed by an audience who has a cognitive and sensory experience of the work (Klich and Scheer, 2012, p.136). In this chapter I do not intend to determine how effectively the works provoke a sense of immersion in the audiences’ experiences. Instead I will focus on how their experiences of immersion are constructed in the interactive installation environments. For that, I occasionally refer to some audiences’ written descriptions of their own subjective
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experiences, which are not generalised but interpreted within the phenomenological framework.
In both of the installation works Sensuous Geographies and SwanQuake: House , audiences are immersed into a computer-generated sonic and visual environment respectively, through the doubling of their embodied presence. These works bring about the audiences’ sensory engagement in not only the virtual environment but also their immediate physical environment. In this chapter I will investigate how the audiences’ sensory engagement in the physical environment is combined with the virtual environment in order to assist in their immersive experience. Before doing that,
I will outline what ‘immersive’ means in the field of performance, as it is considered one of the key characteristics in the field of contemporary performance, particularly time-based media art, although it is still a contestable and under-theorised concept
(Klich and Scheer, 2012, p.127).
In digital culture, ‘immersive’ refers to the act of calling upon digital technologies or images which place the viewer at the heart of the environment and bring about deep involvement by promoting sensory engagement and psychological absorption.
The adjective ‘immersive’ was initially developed in computer disciplines and applied to digital technologies (Machon, 2013, p.58) in connection with a computer display or system ‘generating a three-dimensional image which appears to surround the user’
(Waite, 2012). It is also more generally understood as the sensory engagement of being absorbed in a digitally-mediated environment (Vanhoutte and Wynants, 2010, p.47). In his book Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2003), Oliver Grau, a media art historian, indicates that in immersive experiences, viewers become
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unconscious of the illusion of inhabiting a virtual environment and have a sense of being actually there as the technological apparatus of the illusion are withdrawn from the viewers’ perception (Grau, 2003, pp.348-349).
The term ‘immersive’, however, is not exclusively used to delineate specific engagements with digital media practice. The imprecise application of the term causes confusion about what immersive means and what particular impacts digital technologies or digital images have upon immersive experiences. In his study on digital games and their varied range of engaging experiences, Gordon Calleja argues that the term ‘immersive’ has to be understood differently within varied media since the different media give rise to distinct forms of engagement with immersion (Calleja,
2011, pp.17-18). For Calleja, the immersive experience of ergodic media, like game, is fundamentally distinguished from that of non-ergodic media such as painting, literature, and cinema (Calleja, 2011, pp.33-34). In the case of a game, a player perceives herself within a virtual world and is authorised to alter the event or the environment. On the contrary, in a book or a movie, although a viewer can feel like being in an imagined scene, the characters or events represented in these media are by no means affected by and responsive to the viewer’s presence.
Grau also differentiates immersion in virtual reality from that in paintings, theatre, drama and television. According to Grau, unlike virtual reality, these image media situate viewers outside the work on account of the perceptible medium which sets the image spaces apart from the viewers. Virtual reality attempts to convey to the viewers the illusion of being completely in an artificial world through ‘the most exact adaptation of illusionary information to the physiological disposition of the human senses’ (Grau, 2003, p.14). Virtual reality requires the intimate involvement with the entire sensorium, which withdraws the viewer’s distant experience and combines
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‘mind-expanding’ perception with sensory-assailing experience of images (Grau,
2003, p.200). Scenographer and media artist Mark Reaney also points out that both virtual reality and theatre bring about a suspension of disbelief for audiences and immerse them in a fictive world. What is different between immersive experiences in these two media is that the former accentuates audiences’ sensory involvements with the world while the latter attracts the audiences’ attention to storytelling (Reaney,
1999, p.184). To acknowledge different forms of immersion and avoid misunderstanding, immersion in theatre has often been called by alternative terms such as ‘engagement’ (Reaney, 1999, p.184) or ‘dramatic immersion’ (Packer and
Jordan, 2001, p.xxxi) perceived by a cognitive process with a limited range of sensory engagement.
However, in point of fact, it was before the development of virtual reality technologies that artistic experiments with sensory experience for an audience had been attempted in the contexts of visual art and performing arts. The lineage of immersive practice in the arts can be traced back to Antonin Artaud’s total theatre in the era of Modernism. In his seminal book The Theatre and its Double (1958 [1938]),
Artaud, one of the most influential theatre theorists in the twentieth century, objects to theatre which is bound to scripts and appeals to the intellect. Instead, he proposes the concept of total theatre which underlines expressive and spectacular elements so as to provoke spectators to unleash raw and real qualities of the human condition, such as fear, pain and panic. Artaud’s total theatre also embraces the disruption of the stage and auditorium by bringing the audiences into the performance space. For Artaud, to experience total theatre implies the full immersion of the audience. Allan Kaprow’s
Happening (see Chapter 2) and Richard Schechner’s manifesto for Environmental theatre in the 1960s are descended from Artaud’s concept of total theatre.
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From 1970 onwards, installation art, which is often considered to be ‘theatrical’,
‘immersive’ or ‘experiential’, presents a situation where the viewer physically enters and is prompted to go beyond distant contemplation and experience the work not only through eyes but also touch, smell and sound (Bishop, 2005, pp.6-11).
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Since the
1990s, visual and performance artists have employed digital technologies which make it possible to connect viewers/audiences to the work through real-time interfaces and accentuate the viewers’ sensory involvement. The exploitation of the sensory capacity of digital technologies led to recent advances in immersive technologies, such as haptic technologies, wearable sensors, holography, surround-sound and head-mounted displays which intimately engage with the human’s entire sensorium (Machon, 2013, pp.34-35). Based upon the discourses concerning immersive experience, I claim that in either computing or visual and performing arts, immersive does not only connote the state of being mentally absorbed, but it also embraces the sensory and corporeal involvement with a created world.
6.3.1 The Emergent Digital Sound as the Dys-appearing Body
Rubidge and MacDonald create an immersive interactive installation Sensuous
Geographies where audiences explore a soundscape while creating sonic outputs through their corporeal movements. In her earlier works, Rubidge employs visual images more prominently than sounds, as she collaborates with media artists. In her installation work Halo…in Performance (1998), for instance, she creates a responsive architectural environment in which digital images featuring anthropomorphous forms are initiated by visitors’ behaviours in real-time. Rubidge explicates that the work
Sensuous Geographies tackles two issues which are raised in her previous multi-user
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installation works (Rubidge and MacDonald, 2004, pp.246-247). The first concern is that when audiences engage in the gesture-visual interface, they tend to consciously think and then move, rather than listen to the inner sensation responding to external stimuli which makes them move. For Rubidge, this problem results from the representational forms of the visual image that stimulate the audiences to understand and then behave intentionally. Secondly, technological systems used in her early works are not capable of discerning individual participants, which often causes a lack in the legibility of the interactive system, especially when the works have exceeded their capacity in term of the number of participants. In the case of
Halo…in
Performance , when more than six audience members enter into the installation space, they are barely able to read and control their images on the screen.
In Sensuous Geographies , which addresses the two issues above, Rubidge and
MacDonald intend to create a soundscape which encourages audiences to orient themselves to the inner sensations of their bodies. The audience participants’ behaviours generate sounds, and the spatialised sounds give rise to affective and bodily sensations. Also, the artists use a video camera hung from the top and a colour tracking software for identifying what colour of the costume each participant dons, so as to make it possible to recognise the individuals’ behaviours and their emergent sounds (Rubidge and MacDonald, 2004, p.247). The audiences can choose to either observe or participate in the work. Before stepping into the central interactive space of four square metres, which is enclosed with transparent banners hung from the ceiling, the participants are guided to don one of the four coloured silk robes (red, yellow, green and blue) and take off their shoes. The richly coloured costumes fully cover their bodies and heads. Interestingly, costume designer Margaret Moffatt is asked to create two seemingly different versions of the costumes, which are prepared for the
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inexperienced and experienced participants, separately. The two distinct designs of the costume reveal the individual’s capacity for comprehending the physical-sonic interface so that MacDonald as a technical operator can apply the appropriate level of complexity of the interactive system, whether for novices or more expert participants
(Rubidge and MacDonald, 2004, pp.250-251).
Diverse substances such as cotton, sawdust, bubble wrap and sand are spread under the black floor of the interactive space, stimulating the haptic sense of the participants’ bare feet. After having had enough time to feel the atmosphere, the individuals begin to move spontaneously while finding their own sound characteristic.
They can enter the central area and leave for the periphery area at their will. At a certain point in time, they are asked to wear a blindfold which helps them weaken the visual sense and enhance the aural and haptic sense as they respond to the space. The nine shimmering banners surrounding the interactive space function not only as the spatial boundary but also as distributed projection screens where digital imagery constantly resonates with the colourful moving figures of the audience participants.
The traces and colours of the participants’ figures are captured and manipulated through Troika Ranch’s Isadora software.
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Between four and nine images of the lucent and aerial figures simultaneously appear, disappear and reappear from time to time around the surrounding banners. Since the participants in the interactive space are blindfolded for most of time, even though the digital imagery is activated by the participants’ motion, the participants are not directly aware of the visual projection.
Instead, they concentrate more on relationships between their bodies and digital sounds.
To illustrate how the corporeal sensations affect digital sounds and vice versa, the behaviours of the participants are detected individually through the video camera and
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Figure 16 The installation space (still image from video)
Figure 17 Audience participants’ behaviours (still image from video)
Figure 18 Audience participants’ behaviours © Sarah Rubidge colour recognition software, as stated above. The transmitted bodily information is modulated through the computer software Max/MSP
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, which generates the polyphonic sonic environment. The strands of the sounds differ from moment to moment, depending on the direction, location and velocity of the individual behaviour as well as the proximity with other participants. The individual participants are
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spurred to create distinct sonic outputs by using a variety of sound layers and a range of levels of complexity of the interactive system (Rubidge and MacDonald, 2004, pp.249-250). MacDonald, who sits outside the space, chooses a sound layer for each participant at random. He also applies the different levels of complexity of the interactive system to novices and experienced participants respectively, by controlling parameters in the mapping process. Inexperienced participants trigger sounds by changing their location in the installation environment. Conversely, for more experienced participants, the velocity, direction and proximity to other participants are assigned to modulate abundant elements of the sound, including its pitch and volume.
The individual sound layers are diffused throughout the space, with ‘contextual layers of sounds’ (Rubidge, 2004, p.249). As Dixon describes, there is a moment to switch the ambience of the space, which affects the perception and emotion of the participants (Dixon, 2007, p.404). This is intended by MacDonald who sets a range of the contextual sound layers that produces the entire atmosphere. When he changes the contextual sound layer from one to another, the participants are encouraged to engage in sonic interface in a different way. As the human agent of the interactive system,
MacDonald randomly chooses individual sound layers for each participant and irregularly changes the contextual layers from moment to moment. By means of
MacDonald’s random choice of the sound materials as well as the complex model of the interactive system, audiences are given new experiences every time they participate in the work.
In their experiences, significantly, the sound is an extended part of the audiences’ embodiment in which their sensory information is reconfigured through the interactive system, even though the emergent digital sound often occurs unexpectedly and uncontrollably due to the complexity of the interactive system. In this sense, the
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emergent sounds in Sensuous Geographies are ontologically analogous to the visual images of Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine in that both of them can be understood as
Drew Leder’s conception of the ‘dys-appearing body’. As discussed in Chapter 5,
Leder insists that in situations of ‘being-in-the-world’, the body normally disappears from attention and action as we forget about ourselves and project ourselves into the world so as to ‘reveal what is Other’ (Leder, 1990, p.2). In Sensuous Geographies, however, the audience’s body deviates from the ‘self-concealment’ (Leder, 1990, p.69) because the Other the audience experiences is a part of the doubled embodiment of the audience in the computer-generated sonic environment. The emergent sounds are
‘bodies-in-code’, the data which represent the body image outside the human skin while actualised through the technical incorporation, in Hansen’s term (Hansen, 2006, p.49). In other words, the audience’s experience of being-in-the-world is re-embodied in the form of digital sound as another body image.
The digital sound is the object the audience perceives and interacts with. However, at same time it is part of the embodied subject that exists in distance from its physical referent and emerges as the Other, foreign to the self. At this moment, the emergent digital sound is identified as the dys-appearing body, which is ‘a mode… through which the body appears to explicit awareness’ (Leder, 1990, p.84, original italics). As
Leder indicates, when our bodies emerge in a dysfunctional and problematic state, we become aware of our own bodies, which are experienced as being away from the self or our habitual bodies. In this installation work, the sound as another embodied self brings about a sense of disturbance for the audience, appearing as Other, that is the dys-appearing body. In particular, for experienced audiences, a range of parameters of the interactive system are programmed, which generate undesirable or unexpected sonic output from their corporeal inputs. Some audience participants commented as
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follows:
I was confused - trying to determine my sound from the underlying sound.
Then when I determined the voice that was mine, wanted to control it (not successful). from REDCAT, Los Angeles, January 2004
Tried different colours, found it difficult to track, but put me in a different state (of consciousness?). from Chichester, June 2004
It was definitely a new experience; at first it felt strange but once you get over the initial shock of your first experience it becomes a part of you! You can play with the sound and experiment to all of your heart's content! I enjoyed becoming lost in the movement, distancing myself from reality! The more advanced you get from being involved, the more experience you get from it! from Winchester, 7 - 11 November 2005
(quoted in Rubidge and MacDonald, http://www.sensuousgeographies.co.uk/)
Dysfunction in the motor schema initially arouses confusion and some participants may be unable to comprehend the interactive system’s sensory-motor function.
However, the complexity of the interactive system leads them to concentrate on their body and have unusual perceptual experiences, which the artists conceive as ‘listening with the body’ (Rubidge and MacDonald, 2004, p.250). Later I will discuss how the self-awareness of the corporeal presence in the physical environment helps transport audiences to the digitally-generated sonic world. Prior to that, I need to examine the implications of emergent sounds in more detail, since in the work the participants generate their own sounds through their individual behaviours and also have group interactions through their sounds. In other words, the sound is not only initiated and
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modulated by an individual participant but also created through ‘collaborative interactivity’ with other participants.
6.3.2 The Re-embodiment of Inter-/subjectivity
Although Mortal Engine
’s visual projection and
Sensuous Geographies
’s sonic environment have similarities with the dys-appearing body, the key difference between the two is that, Sensuous Geographies , unlike Mortal Engine , underlines the intersubjective nature of the human’s embodiment by virtue of collaborative interactivity. Sensuous Geographies is a multi-user interactive installation work in which individual participants communicate with other participants’ presences through the composite sounds which depend on the degree of proximity between two, three or four of the participants. That is to say, the sound is the re-embodiment of not only the individual’s subjectivity but also intersubjectivity ― the relationship between the self and others. To elaborate on the emergent sound as the re-embodiment of intersubjectivity, I will give an outline of phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity that centre on the subjective experience of others.
In the phenomenological tradition, intersubjectivity is inevitably associated with subjectivity since the self, the world and others are mutually related (Zahavi, 2001, p.151). In his ontological study of Being, Martin Heidegger claims that a human subject exists in the world primordially, apart from which the subject is never given.
He designates the human existence and its engaged being-in-the-world as Dasein . In the state of being-in-the-world , we cannot extricate ourselves from others because the surrounding from which our perception and experience emerge is not private but public and communal (Heidegger, 1985 [1927], p.246). Every entity we encounter in daily life contains reference to others, regardless of others’ literal presence. For
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instance, tools we use are made by others, or the purpose of using the tools is assigned by others. Dasein
’s fundamental nature of being-with denotes that, as Dasein , we are essentially social as we inhabit the world which we share with others (Heidegger,
1962 [1927], p.154).
Prior to Heidegger, Edmund Husserl also casts light on the social nature of the world where we belong, indicating that we determine, understand, and interpret the world in inherited ways which have already been established by others and which we learn from others (Husserl, cited in Zahavi, 2001, p.155). More significantly, Husserl points out that the subject’s experience is intentionally directed toward objects, which are accessible for other subjects. Before ‘I’ encounter an object, the object is always there for others. Due to its potential of being given in a horizontal manifold, the object may be perceived by other subjects, but momentarily not by me. Yet, everything I experience outwardly can be experienced by other subjects in the same manner. This means that the subject’s experience of the world outside the self, that is, the objective world, is inherently intersubjective. Husserl’s analysis of intersubjectivity in a subject’s experience of an objective world is grounded upon the double sensation of the body. Husserl argues that when a subject experiences an object, simultaneously the object would experience the subject, which is illustrated by an example of touching one’s own hand. The subject’s body has the dual status of the experiencing/experienced or the subject/object. The intersubjective nature of the body-awareness is the condition for experiencing the objective world and attaining the transcendental validity of everything one experiences (Husserl, 1989 [1952], p.86).
Husserl’s proposition of the subject-object correlation and the constitution of intersubjectivity is adapted and radicalised by Maurice Merleau-Ponty who accounts for subjective experience as an aspect of intersubjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty, we live
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in the world through perception, which is a process of connecting between a subject and the world, rather than that of representing the outer world in the subject’s mind.
To give a detailed account of the exchange between the two, Merleau-Ponty claims that we discover ourselves in relation to the other’s perspective on ourselves, which is the exteriorised look. Also, we recognise the other through a reflection of our own bodily constitution. By virtue of this two-fold way of perception, one’s subjectivity always embraces a dimension of otherness, not self-contained and completely remote from the world. A perceptual openness towards others endows subjectivity with intersubjective nature since the self is co-constituted with others. That is to say,
‘intersubjectivity is our primordial experience and individual subjectivity develops out of this’ (Madison, 2008, p.59). For Merleau-Ponty, as the body is an orienting centre of perception, the intertwinement of self and other is essentially embodied. The embodied self is neither a transparent subject nor a pure object, but exists in a way that connects the two entities, which concedes intersubjectivity to the self. In other words, embodied subjectivity includes self-alterity which enables the subject to be capable of experiencing the self and others (Merleau-Ponty, 1968 [1964], p.83).
Composite digital sounds created through collaborative interactivity in Sensuous
Geographies manifest the phenomenological concept of posthuman intersubjectivity as an intrinsic nature of the human’s subjective experience of a virtual environment.
Audience participants inhabit the digital sounds in the virtual environment. Their perception of the virtual environment and themselves is generated through their virtual bodies, that is, the digital sounds, as addressed in Husserl’s concept of the double status of the subjective experience and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intertwining of the body and the world. Significantly, the computer-generated sonic environment in which the audience is present is shared with others. The intersubjective nature of
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being-in-the-world is epitomised by the digital sound through which each audience participant perceives not only the self but also others within the participant. As stated above, for novices, the emergent digital sounds are changed according to their movement direction only. Although their proximity to others does not account for mapping physical inputs to sonic outputs, the participants sense others’ presences and communicate with others through their sounds, which impacts on how they embody their presence in the virtual environment. Contrastingly, the sounds of the experienced participants are more prominent as the re-embodiment of intersubjectivity because the metamorphoses of the sounds directly result from the spatial relationships with others.
When one perceives another’s presence near her, she may try to hover around so as to discover the other through a reflection of her sounds. Or, she may stay still and listen to the other’s sound and its reflection of her presence so as to recognise herself.
Although there are different degrees of revealing the intersubjective nature of audiences’ experiences of the sonic environment, the concept of the intertwinement of the self and others within the virtual body conveys Merleau-Ponty’s argument that
‘subjectivity is not motionless identity with itself; as with time, it is of its essence, in order to be genuine subjectivity, to open itself to an Other and to go forth from itself’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [1945], p.495). In Sensuous Geographies , an audience’s virtual body always embraces an aspect of otherness. The sound as part of his/her doubled presence is not transparent for him/herself since its constitution is related to others’ presences. Simultaneously, when the participant recognises the sound as another subject’s embodied subjectivity, the sound does not exist as a pure object outside him/herself because it reflects his/her bodily presence. The sound embodies the audience’s posthuman subjectivity which comes out of intersubjectivity, entailing the self-experience and the experience of the other. In the work, therefore, the sound
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exists as the self-otherness for two reasons: it emerges as the subject’s dys-appearing body in the virtual environment and at the same time this dys-appearing body comes out of its intertwinement with others’ virtual bodies.
6.3.3 The Merging of Physical and Virtual Space
The implication of the emergent digital sounds as the ‘dys-appearing body’ leads to the question of what happens with the corporeal body when the dys-appearing body appears. As indicated above, when audiences generate digital sounds through their individual and social behaviour, they come to reflect back upon their bodily states and take action on their bodies. This state accords with Leder argument that the dysappearing body engenders the self-awareness of the corporeal body. In Sensuous
Geographies
, during interactions with the digital sound, the participant’s corporeal body does not disappear in her attention. It is because the presence of the digital sound as the dys-appearing body brings about the self-awareness of the subject’s body.
This phenomenon is revealed in one of the participants’ comments that ‘with the mysterious environment I listened to your sounds and opened an ear to my body’
(quoted in Rubidge and MacDonald, http://www.sensuousgeographies.co.uk/). For the work, Rubidge and MacDonald design not only the sonic environment but also the physical environment with the use of a range of materials that stimulate the audiences’ tactile and kinaesthetic sensations so as to provide them with more sensual engagements with the virtual environment.
The coloured costumes are arranged for identifying individual participants, but the donning of the costume also serves to awaken the participants to a sense of participating in a ritualistic event. In addition, the luminous images projected on the banners surround the interactive space, soaking the participants in ethereal ambience.
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These elements do not explicitly affect the participants’ bodily states of being-invirtual-world since the participants are mostly blindfolded. Yet, they give the participants a sense of stepping into an otherworldly environment. Facial veils, which the participants are guided to wear as they move within the active space, take a key role in their sensory engagement in the sonic environment. The veils let the participants hide themselves from others. The participants extricate themselves from the others’ gazes and possibly are allowed more ‘freedom’ in their behaviour, which may be different from everyday behaviours. The anonymity that the veils confer is explored in Anna Wilson’s research upon democratisation in Punchdrunkʼs Masque of the Red Death
. She points out that in Punchdrunk’s work, the donning of masks serves as a means of giving audiences freedom to fashion their own journey without fear of being identified and rebuked (Wilson, 2013). The use of masks gives rise to the subversion of moral and habitual behaviors bound to ‘conventional relations of obedience or deference’ (Hallward, 2006, p.118). In Sensuous Geographies , the veiled subject is encouraged to get out of his/her habitual behaviors in a society, but it also helps deviate from his/her habitual way of perceiving an environment and others.
The veils obstruct participants’ vision, which prompts them to call forward haptic senses for perceiving the installation environment. Rubidge reveals that during their experimental workshops, there was a tendency for participants to highly rely on sight for exploring the space and not fully exploit the physiological sensibilities (Rubidge and MacDonald, 2004). In fact, it is widely believed that vision is the most influential sense, providing approximately 80% of all the information we receive about the world.
According to scientific and also Western epistemological understanding, sight is privileged as the noblest and most trustful sense while touch is the least trusted
(Kambaskovic and Wolfe, 2013). Recently, neuroscientists discovered that early blind
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humans develop perceptual abilities in the remaining senses as the visual part of the brain is functioning and processing non-visual stimuli such as touching, hearing and smelling (Cuevas et al, 2009; Renier et al, 2010). It cannot be said that in Sensuous
Geographies
, participants’ perceptual abilities in other senses are enhanced more than normal since the functional reorganisation of the visual brain area occurs to those who become blind at an early age. The lack of sight, however, prompts the participants to function and process only the remaining senses, in particular, the tactile and kinesthetic sense, and to perceive something within the sonic environment that might be overlooked in a field of vision. Some of the audience participants describe their own experiences of the work, stating that:
I suddenly got ears and feet again. A good experience and new thoughts about consciousness. from New Territories, Glasgow, February 2003
Wonderful rediscovery of attachment to floor - liberates movement and encourages sensory focus, more on tactile sensation that sound, feet still tingling!
from Chichester, June 2004
(quoted in Rubidge and MacDonald, http://www.sensuousgeographies.co.uk/)
The first comment implies that their tactile and auditory perception, which they would have in a normal condition, disappears in attention, but reappears as they go out of an ordinary situation. The second comment reveals that tactile and auditory sensations are so enhanced that they break out of the habitual way of embodying the self. Their enhanced senses are facilitated with haptic materials laid under the black fabric of the active space, such as cotton, sawdust, bubble wrap and sand, which gives rise to
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tactile as well as kinaesthetic perceptions. The participants initially receive information on the materials from the tactile receptors in the skin of their feet. As the participants feel the materials, kinaesthetic perception also comes into play while acquiring information on the motions of their bodies. The tactile and kinaesthetic feedbacks are stimulated by the haptic texture of the materials and used for navigating the sonic environment.
The constituent elements of the work including digital imagery, costumes, facial veils and tactile materials are arranged to accentuate participants’ physical sensations, in particular, tactility and kinesthesia. The heightened perception of their corporeal presence in the immediate physical space helps the participants embody the virtual presence out of habitual ways and in more intuitive ways. Therefore, to explore the virtual environment neither removes their presence in the physical nor makes their body disappear. Rather, in their sensual engagement with the virtual environment, the virtual merges with the physical through the self-awareness and embodiment of the corporeal body, caused by emergent digital sounds as the participants’ dys-appearing bodies and accentuated by haptic materials.
6.4.1 Embodied Experience through the First-person Point of View Avatar
In contrast to Sensuous Geographies , igloo’s SwanQuake: House invites audiences to enter into the virtual world, offering the experience of the disappearing body rather than the dys-appearing body. Since the mid-1990s, Bruno Martelli and Ruth Gibson, under the name of igloo, have created visual representations and simulations of the world and presented juxtaposed layers of physicality and virtuality, by using computer technologies and choreographic knowledge. As indicated by its title, with its
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combination of a classical ballet Swan Lake and a first shooter video game Quake , the project SwanQuake draws together game structure and contemporary choreography.
As the first work in a series of the on-going project, SwanQuake: House is exhibited as an interactive installation for gallery display, which involves a 3-D computer game environment where motion-capture driven avatars occasionally emerge. When a viewer physically enters into a gallery space, s/he has an opportunity to play her/his own avatar and navigate a virtual East End underworld. The player can choose where to go and what to do, and these actions are performed without goals, weapons or enemies. Even though it uses the Unreal Engine ― a game engine initially developed for first-person shooter ― SwanQuake: House incorporates but repurposes the game structure and system, by substituting battle with journey and encountering spectral dancers rather than enemies.
It is important to recognise that SwanQuake: House is not merely a computer game work, but a site-responsive installation equipped with remodelled domestic objects and a computer game environment. Given SwanQuake: House
’s siteresponsive nature, each of the exhibitions reveals distinct features at different locations. When the work was presented in 2011 as part of an extensive exhibition called Watch Me Move: The Animation Show at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, it was shown within a small room which was transformed from a white empty chamber to a dark and dreary room illuminated by a naked light bulb, where the four walls and the floor were overlaid with brick and wooden floorboard printed graphics (see Figure
19). The room was furnished with a wide HD display screen, a trackball and two button controllers set into a customised dressing-table, and a chair.
This room with the dressing table console was a scaled-down version of House
’s first solo exhibition three years ago at V22 Gallery, London. This epic exhibition took
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Figure 19 Inside igloo’s installation at the Barbican Art Gallery, London © igloo
Figure 20 The dressing table console located in the basement room at V22, London
© igloo
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place at the gallery’s basement which is made up of four chambers and a corridor. In this chapter, I intend to focus on V22’s version of the installation because some parts of the computer-generated game environment reflect and visualise the actual feature and atmosphere of V22’s basement. To outline the structure of the installation, when audiences walk down into the basement, they immediately enter into a room with the dressing table console (see Figure 20), which is the same one as that which is located at the Barbican Art Gallery. Unlike the room at the Barbican, the walls and floor of the first room in the basement are real. The walls are brickwork, bare concrete, or sheathed in peeling paint while some areas of the concrete floor are carpeted. Due to the dim lighting in the basement, it is difficult for the audiences to detect that the walls of the first room are partly overlaid with panels displaying bitmaps of bricks, which resemble the original bricks (Myers, 2009).
The audiences can choose not to sit on the console and instead roam through the rest of the basement. Or, they can explore the virtual game by using the console as long as they want. When they leave the console, they are led to a darkened corridor, at the end of which an oval mirror frame is hung on the wall (see Figure 21). What audiences can see in the mirror is not themselves present in the corridor, but the computer generated reflection of the corridor that displays a naked light bulb which actually suspends from the ceiling at the other end. The blending of the real and the virtual are brought into play in the other rooms as well. For instance, in one of the rooms, the entire walls are covered with full-size printed bitmap panels, the colours and textures of which are nearly identical to the original walls of the basement, but oddly smoothed and blurry due to the low resolution printing. The overlaying of the real and virtual elements and the subsequent disconcerting perception of reality in the installation environment will be addressed later in terms of the audiences’ immersive
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Figure 21 The oval mirror frame at the end of the corridor at V22, London © igloo experience of the installation. Before that, I will explore audiences’ embodied experience of the virtual world through the first-person point of view avatar and its phenomenological implications in terms of bodily disappearance in the virtual world.
SwanQuake: House comes into existence only through interactive relations between a player and the game environment. By using a trackball and two buttons embedded in the customised dressing table, the player inhabits and navigates the virtual world from the perspective of an avatar. The trackball changes the avatar’s viewpoints in combination with two buttons that carry out forward movement and jumping respectively. The control operation through the trackball and buttons is so simple that a wide range of audiences can easily learn how to control the avatar’s actions regardless of their gaming experiences (Popat, 2012, p.20). The virtual world in House features various themed locations of a penthouse, from the basement to the roof, such as a virtual London underground station which leads to a tunnel and a
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volcanic valley, dimly lit corridors and stairwells connecting to rooms, and the roof that overlooks a rainy street of the East End. When the player virtually wanders through the mysterious and uncanny world, s/he walks to other places through the corridors and stairways or is all of a sudden teleported from one to another place, where the player makes a new start.
As the piece is created by using a first-person shooter game engine, the Unreal
Engine, the player sees the virtual world through the eyes of the avatar whose body is not represented. According to Martelli, the first-person avatar perspective facilitates a player’s ‘more embodying’ experience than the third-person one, stating that:
When you go to the cinema you see the film – you don’t sit behind yourself looking at yourself watching the film. I’ve always found that third person perspective doesn’t make any sense to me, and I feel disembodied. I’m not in there, I’m watching some little person in there.
(Martelli, cited in Popat, 2012, p.16)
In Martelli’s gaming experience, seeing the avatar as his represented presence in the virtual world gives him a sense of alienation from the virtual world (Martelli, cited in
Popat, 2012, p.17). For Martelli, seeing the screen through an avatar’s eyes rather than behind the avatar fosters a sense of feeling as if the fleshly and binary body come from a single entity as well as a sense of being in the virtual world through the avatar as part of his subjectivity.
A perceptual difference in gaming experiences between the first-person and thirdperson point of view has been pointed out in game studies. According to Laurie Taylor, in order to enter into the game space, a player needs to go through identification, which implies the process of perceiving common aspects with the player-character in
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the game space (Taylor, 2003). As the player incorporates and internalises the playercharacter, this identification involves more than empathy with the character since it comes into play through ‘the extension of ability to access objects within the screen’ or the narcissistic connection to ‘the role and position within the other space’ (Taylor,
2003). This process of identification takes place differently, depending on in-game perspectives.
In a third-person point of view game, a player sees his/her in-game character, which is the mirror reflection of the player. His/her avatar in the virtual space is an objective appearance of the subject which is integrated with the subject’s perception of the avatar and then identified with the subject and her/his experience of the game space. Denise Doyle also claims that in avatar-based virtual worlds, when a player identifies herself through an avatar, she perceives the avatar and simultaneously has a disembodied experience through the body of the avatar (Doyle, 2009). It means that in the process of identification, the avatar functions as the gaze which causes the subject to experience herself as an object to be seen. Simultaneously, the gaze is embraced by the subject who makes certain characteristics of the avatar part of herself.
It is important to acknowledge that in a third-person game, a player’s own perception of the self in the image of an avatar produces a sense of uncanniness, which may rupture the seamless relationship between the player and the in-game avatar, if the third-person game fails to have a certain level of intricacy and consistency in its representation of the virtual space and the avatar’s embodiment and perspective within the space (Taylor, 2003).
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The uncanny effect of the gaze results in the ambiguity of the player’s position and the misidentification between the player and the in-game character (Taylor, 2003), which connotes Martelli’s feeling of separation of himself from the game space in a third-person point of view game.
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Taylor proposes that first-person perspective games diminish the uncanny effect of the gaze, by removing the image of the in-game character and instead putting the player in its position only (Taylor, 2003). In contrast with third-person games where a player incorporates the characteristics of the avatar into herself, in first-person games a player exists as herself in the position of the avatar. Accordingly, the player identifies herself with the character through her actions upon the game space, rather than through its avatar’s image and characteristics. The first-person avatar perspectives evade the disruptive and uncanny effect of the gaze upon the player’s identification with the in-game character so as to provide the player with a more intuitive experience and produce a smooth transition to the virtual world (Taylor,
2003).
Interestingly, in SwanQuake: House there are exceptional scenes where a player can see his avatar in the virtual world, which is the shadow of his avatar’s body. When the avatar goes downstairs or is transported to another location, it can see its own shadow on the staircase or the floor. The shadow is a kind of self-representation without specifically featuring the individual’s face and body. Although the original artists’ intention of showing this shadow is not ascertained, I discover that the shadow helps avoid disrupting the player’s identification with his avatar in the world and rather enhances the player’s first-person point of view avatar. As we cannot see our face and body parts out of our visual field, when the player sees the virtual world through the avatar’s vision, s/he cannot see the avatar’s face but can see its shadow, which will be discussed later in conjunction with phenomenological concepts of the lived body as nullity.
Throughout the building, the player occasionally bumps into ghostly female dancers who amble around, begin dancing, disappear and reappear in another location.
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The dancers do not acknowledge the player’s action or have direct interaction with the player. For example, when the player approaches close to a female dancer, her opaque appearance becomes transparent and then fades away. She looks like a ghost living in this building while the player’s avatar is the real person. All of the female virtual dancers have the same appearance that is characteristic of the choreographer Gibson, but their movements are taken from six dancers’ movements including Gibson. Their movement sequences, which are captured through an optical motion capture system
Vicon , are selected and recombined for each dancer in different locations. The prescripted movement sequence is triggered by a player’s approach to the virtual dancer.
In the choreographic process of building and selecting movement data and visualising and mapping them into the game engine, Gibson and her collaborator John
McCormick put stress on ‘the experience of the player/viewer and on “relationships and encounters” in the space and less on specific movements’ (deLahunta, 2007, p.24).
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They employ choreographic sensibilities in determining how and what movement each virtual dancer carries out when a player approaches them.
In one scene, when a player goes down and arrives on the underground, a female avatar standing in front of the escalator takes the player’s eyes. She slowly walks, turns, lifts a leg high and does a plié. As the player gets close to her, she fades away.
When the player passes through where she was and turns around, she reappears and keeps moving at the same spot. The virtual dancers perform distinct movement sequences in different locations: one virtual avatar seen in the rooftop moves as if she is standing on the edge of the roof and trying to balance her body; another dancer stuck in a small room with a view of the road repetitively advances and retreats at speed. In the scene of a grey gymnasium in the basement, the female virtual dancers haunting the house are gathered and stand in a different direction to each other (see
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Figure 22) . They simultaneously enact fragmented movement sequences ― which may already be seen in other locations ― having a twitch or a pause in transition.
In addition to choreographic design, Adam Nash brings into play sound composition for each location, feeding a different soundtrack to each location. Beside the platform, a carriage of the derailed tube train is burning out. From the end of the
Figure 22 The female dancing avatars in the underground warehouses © igloo
Figure 23 Street view from the roof of the building in the virtual world © igloo
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stationary train, a player walks along the tracks in the dark and empty tunnel. Eerie sounds like whistling and laughing begin echoing around the tunnel. The player then stops walking and gazes around to find where the sounds come from. As another example, when the player looks down the street from the rooftop, the sound of a heavy ambulance siren is heard (see Figure 23) . The orchestration of choreography, sound composition and 3-D computer graphic design creates an unsettling atmosphere which stimulates the player’s desire for exploration and invokes mixed feelings of strangeness and familiarity, vulnerability and wonder. Next, I will explore how the player experiences a sense of being in the game environment, through the first-person perspective avatar, in terms of the absence of the player’s physical presence in awareness.
6.4.2 The Player’s Disappearing Body
In SwanQuake: House , a player’s corporeal body disappears in the game space and exists as the avatar’s body. It is unlikely that the player perceives either her/his digital avatar’s body in the game or the physical self through the avatar. It is the virtual world that the player perceives through the eyes of the avatar. In this section, I will insist that a disappearing mode of the corporeal body in the experience of the virtual world does not result in the separation of the player’s mind (the avatar) and body because when the player stands out of her/his corporeal body, s/he still has the perceptual and embodied experience through the avatar’s binary code body. What the player sees is identical to what the avatar sees, which brings about a sense of inhabiting and navigating the virtual house. Moreover, through the first-person point of view avatar, a player identifies with her invisible avatar through her control over, not only its viewpoint, but also its actions. Here, I will investigate how the player’s body engages
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in the embodied experience of the virtual world via the invisible avatar.
In a phenomenological point of view, perceptual organs are absent in perceiving the world. The perceptual organs intrinsically open up upon the world and recede from the perceived world that they reveal. That is to say, we never perceive our organs themselves, just as we do not see our eyes, smell our nasal tissues, hear our ears, or taste our taste buds. Sartre observes that ‘I cannot “see the seeing”; that is, I can not apprehend it in the process of revealing an aspect of the world to me’ (Sartre, 1966
[1943], p.402). Merleau-Ponty also notes that ‘to be situated within a certain point of view necessarily involves not seeing that point of view itself’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1963, p.217). For them, our eyes act as an implicit ubiquitous presence that is nowhere to be present, while operating as the focal origin of sensorimotor engagement in the world
(Leder, 1990, p.12). Drew Leder refers to Husserl’s concept of the lived body as
‘nullity’ which signifies the experiential centre that the body and its sensory modalities constitute, proposing that ‘precisely as the center point from which the perceptual field radiates, the perceptual organ remains an absence or nullity in the midst of the perceived’ (Leder, 1990, p.13). For Leder, the lived body as nullity maintains its dual status of absence and presence in experience.
As our being-in-the-world necessitates our body’s self-effacing, in SwanQuake:
House a player’s body is a nullpoint: receding from the perception of the virtual world but orienting his/her embodied experience in the virtual world. Reflecting the phenomenological accounts of the nullity of the body, the player’s corporeal absence in being-in-the-virtual-world does not reveal the separation of the player’s mind and body, but rather the connection of the physical body and the virtual world through the body’s function.
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The important point is that unlike a third-person game, in a firstperson game a screen takes the role of a player’s eyes into a virtual world. In
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SwanQuake: House the screen is considered as a visual nullpoint of the avatar’s body, as the screen does not present the avatar’s body and only reveals what is Other in the virtual world, as, similarly, our eyes never appear within our visual field and disclose perceptual objects. The screen as the player’s visual nullpoint of the perception in the virtual world might be construed as the replacement of the player’s vision with the avatar’s vision (Popat, 2012, p.17). However, I instead propose that the player’s vision is coupled with the avatar’s vision. The avatar’s sensing ‘there’ is connected to the player’s sensation ‘here’. The player’s unified subjectivity, rather than split subjectivity, and doubled embodiment in the physical and virtual world is confirmed in the following descriptions of researchers who experienced the installation work.
A teleporter takes my avatar to a high ledge over a lava-filled valley, and I experience sudden vertigo… I find my way back to the bridge, and look down into the red burning river far below. I am filled with a sudden urge to leap into the abyss – so I jump!
(Popat, 2012, p.18)
Taking my own journey through the house, I find I am momentarily trapped in windowless rooms… I am eager to find my way to a ‘safe’ place. I am aware of my own embodied presence; still ‘me’ but in a world where I can get close to characters who emerge in different spaces…
(Whatley, 2012, p.271)
Sita Popat has vertigo when her avatar gazes down on a lava valley, or feels an impulse to jump into the lava flow. Sarah Whatley depicts her desire to escape from the walled rooms where her avatar is stuck, characterising the avatar as the self in the virtual house. Both dance researchers note that they have physical sensations which
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are associated with their avatars’ sensing as if they are in the virtual world. The range of physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects that the avatars are supposed to be experiencing is not the same as what they experience, because they are not directly exposed to the danger of falling into the lava. Nonetheless, their avatars’ situations have effects upon their physical bodies. Popat states that to experience a feeling in her chest while watching the avatar leaping off the bridge is not an exceptional event since increased heart rates and skin conductance or breathless suspense happens to audiences watching a movie in an IMAX auditorium. She, then, emphasises that in
SwanQuake: House , players not only have physical and emotional responses to the avatar’s positions and actions but also control the avatar, as in the case of Popat who chooses to let the avatar jump into the lava flow.
The players are given agency to manipulate their avatar in conjunction with their sensations of the avatar’s situation in the virtual realm. The players’ motor activities are considered to be an essential part of being-in-the-virtual-world in that ‘motor activity – not representationalist verisimilitude – holds the key to fluid and functional crossings between virtual and physical realms’ (Hansen, 2006, p.2). In her research on the identification of ‘the game apparatus’ in first-person shooters, Sue Morris also explicates that in the FPS games, a player’s identification is attained by authoring him/her to more directly control on-screen events, and the invisible image of the ingame character enhances a sense of being actually ‘in there’, as, similarly, our bodies are invisible from our perceptual point of view in the real world (Morris, 2002, p.89).
In SwanQuake: House , a player’s perceptual and embodied experience of the virtual is heightened through her/his sensations of the invisible avatar’s situation and actions which trigger effects in the virtual realm.
In this work, the players’ motor activity in the physical space is engaged in the
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manipulation of the trackball and two buttons. In doing so, they do not act ‘with their hands but with their whole body’ (Swallwell, 2008, p.90). A player’s hands are more intensively involved in the playing of the game, and other parts of her body also trail behind them. As she learns how the controller operates upon the avatar’s action, she can operate upon the virtual world via the avatar, in response to her physical and emotional sensation. According to Merleau-Ponty, certain parts of the body are more actively involved in a specific action than its other parts. For example, when one is leaning on a table with one’s hands, the hands are more stressed than one’s feet.
However, the feet never cease to exist in the perceptual field, but just taper off ‘like a comet’s tail’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [1945], p.115). In a Merleau-Pontian sense, in
SwanQuake: House the player’s whole body rearranges itself in relation to the operation of the controller.
In watching video clips of the work, I find that there are odd moments when the player’s double presence breaks down. When the avatar is teleported from one to another location in the building, the screen turns completely red or white as if the screen is suddenly dead, and a new environment in the building comes into view. This experience of discontinuity generates the separation of the player and the player’s position within the virtual space. The player’s position is shifted from the avatar inhabiting the virtual space to the player seeing the screen in the physical space, by losing the shared nullpoint of the avatar’s eyes and the player’s agency to controlling the avatar’s action. The failure to bridge the player with the virtual space proves that the avatar’s perceptual function is an associated part of the player’s embodied experience. The avatar’s nullpoint and motor activity is integrated into the player’s sensorimotor function. The player’s corporeal body disappears and orients the self into the virtual through its function incorporated with the avatar’s nullpoint and motor
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response. The player causes physical and emotional sensations through the avatar’s sensing and simultaneously acts upon the virtual world through the avatar’s action.
Through those crossings, the player is re-embodied, having a sense of presence in the virtual realm. The avatar as the doubled self enables the player to extend her embodied experience from ‘here’ to ‘there’, making the virtual world ‘real’ in her perception.
6.4.3 The Juxtaposition of Physical and Virtual Space
In terms of facilitating an audience’s immersion in the virtual environment, while
Sensuous Geographies enhances the self-awareness of an audience’s presence in the physical environment which merges with the virtual environment, SwanQuake: House deliberately evokes the obscurity of an audience’s presence in the physical environment which takes place adjacent to the virtual environment. The virtual house displays re presentations of the real world. It pictures igloo’s own building, Bethnal
Green studio, and the rainy street of the East End around the building as well as V22’s gallery space. As a result, the players undergo bizarre experiences when they realise not only that the dark and damp basement that they physically occupy is the identical place where their avatars explore in the game, but also that the graphic bitmaps mounted on panels in the rooms of the basement come from the digital reproduction of the gallery space in the game. In other words, the virtual image models the physical place and the physical place takes forms of the virtual world in turn. Furthermore, the virtual Underground station under the name of ‘Fackin' 'ell’, which is shown as located next to Liverpool Street on the Central Line, also depicts the realistic image of the London Underground station. However, the station cannot be inhabited corporeally because it does not exist in a material space.
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The digital visualisation of the physical locations obviously imparts realism to the virtual space, but this is not the only effect. The player gets disoriented when she recognises the similarity between the virtual room where her avatar wanders and the humid and dark basement room she physically occupies. In her article, Popat reveals that she finds herself disconcerted by this situation, describing that ‘in that flick of my eyes, the visual nullpoint of the avatar is compared with the visual, tactile and olfactory experience of my sensate body, and the sensory data matches’ (Popat, 2012, p.23). The likeness between the physical and virtual space leads to the correspondence of the tactile and olfactory sensory information from the physical realm with that from the virtual realm. The player may consider her physical sensation identical to the avatar’s sensation, feeling as if she situates herself in the virtual world.
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In the first room with the dressing table console, the virtual space reproduces the physical space, but the reverse situation occurs in the next room. The physical walls of the room are taken from the digital reproduction of the wall images seen in the virtual world. The fake walls are calculated to excite suspicion about the reality of the physical realm and confuse the boundary between the physical and the virtual. After playing with their avatar in the virtual world at the first room of the basement, audiences wander over the basement and get to encounter with the walls, which look like real ones, but are actually bitmaps of bricks mounted on panels. The unreality of the physical space arouses a sense of strangeness, making the audiences feel like they are not of the physical world, but still present in the virtual world as the avatar, even though they know that it is illusion. Through corresponding to the sensory information from the physical world, the virtual world is perceived as more real while the physical world is perceived as unreal due to the fusion with its digital reproduction.
The audiences’ perception of reality is constituted through the adjoining of the
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physical and the virtual.
A distinction between Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality experience helps explain the disappearing state of a player’s physical body in the virtual house and her/his confusion of reality in the physical house. Virtual reality is generally used to refer to a three-dimensional visual world that a viewer can step into, navigate throughout and interact with, so as to engender a willing suspension of disbelief (Tice and Laurel,
1992, p.280; Robins, 1996, p.44; Dixon, 2007, p.364).
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SwanQuake: House may be considered as a desktop virtual reality, which refers to a type of virtual reality that involves a three-dimensional digital world on a desktop screen, which is less than fully immersive due to the lack of peripheral vision (Robertson et al., 1997) and is navigated by using a mouse, joystick, or sensor ball controller. However, although virtual reality leads a subject to a doubling existence in a virtual simulation and a material world, a Virtual Reality system fundamentally focuses on structuring a virtual space in itself, not in relation to a physical space (Manovich, 2002).
In this sense, it is more appropriate to conceive of SwanQuake: House as a work of ‘mixed reality’ which is coined to refer to a field that encompasses both physical and virtual elements. In mixed reality, the combination of physical and virtual objects can be produced by overlaying them on a single display (Milgram and Kishino,
1994)
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or by placing them adjacent to each other and joining them together through
‘transparent boundaries’ 46
(Benford et al, 1998, p.205). The work SwanQuake: House places the audience’s immediate physical space and the game space in juxtaposition to each other, rather than presenting the two spaces within a single display. The player’s sensory engagement in his/her immediate physical space, adjacent to the virtual space, complements the disappearance of the subject’s corporeal body in the perception of the virtual world, rather than impeding it. To put it simply, the juxtaposition of the
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physical and virtual realms promotes a blurred boundary between a player’s physical space and her/his avatar’s virtual space, which enhances the player’s experience of immersion into a created world.
Rubidge and MacDonald’s
Sensuous Geographies and igloo’s SwanQuake: House both employ choreographic sensibilities in designing a performative context where participants or players expand their embodied agency into a virtual environment and double their presence. Their embodiments are placed at the heart of the works while they become mentally and sensuously submerged in the sonic and the visual environment respectively. In both of the installation works, the audiences’ experience of immersion into the virtual world embraces sensory and corporeal engagements in their immediate physical world, which affect and are affected by their relationship with the virtual world.
In Sensuous Geographies , audience participants create their own sonic signature through their physical behaviours and have group interactions through the sound. The emergent sound embodies the participant’s subjectivity, which comes out of intersubjectivity, as generated through the self-experience and the experience of the Other.
The digital sound as the re-embodiment of the subject can be considered as the dysappearing body, which exists as the self-otherness. While encountering with the virtual self, the participants cease their self-effacement and concomitantly become aware of their corporeal self. The self-perception of their corporeal body is heightened through the constituent elements of the work including digital imagery, costumes, facial veils, and tactile materials, which provide the participants with more intuitive and embodying experiences of the sonic environment.
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In contrast with Sensuous Geographies , in SwanQuake: House the digital avatar does not appear as the dys-appearing body since an audience player stands out of the self and exists as the avatar’s body while navigating the virtual world. The audience perceives the virtual world through the eyes of the avatar, whose invisible representation contributes to the absence of the corporeal body and the layering of the avatar’s visual nullpoint and action onto the audience’s sensation and motor activity.
The audience’s experience of reality in the virtual world via the avatar is enhanced by its juxtaposition with the physical space. The combination of the real and digital elements of the physical space and its likeness to the virtual space obscures the boundary between the physical and the virtual realm.
Although audiences’ experience of immersion into the virtual environment in the two installation works builds on the different modes of the subject’s corporeal body, the dys-appearing body in the former and the disappearing body in the latter, both of the works affirm that the virtual presence is part of the doubled subject. Given that the absence of the corporeal body defines the fundamental nature of the human’s perceptual experience of the world, the virtual presence does not indicate the exclusion of the human’s embodiment. Rather, it enables the subject to extend its embodiment into virtual worlds through the doubling of sensorimotor functions of its physical and virtual presence. The subject’s perception of the self and the world is thus constituted through the crossing between the physical and the virtual, so the distinction between the two realms becomes blurred in the subject’s experience.
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35
Dixon suggests four types of interactivity － navigation, participation, conversation and collaboration － which depend on the extent of audiences’ engagement in interactive artworks (Dixon, 2007, p.563). Through interactive technologies, audiences are able to assist the path of a performance (navigation), to trigger sensory features in an environment (participation), to communicate with a computer system or other participants through virtual entities (conversation) or to get involved in a creative process (collaboration).
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The American theatre director/theorist Richard Schechner (1968) refers to the new theatre movement of the 1960s as ‘environmental theater’ which addresses the interrelationship between theatre and its environment. By defying the conventional proscenium setting and mixing actor and audience space, environmental theatre attempts to heighten an audience’s awareness of the theatre and blur the distinction between social life and theatre.
37 The key characteristic of installation art is an emphasis on the viewer’s sensory perception and embodiment of the work (Bishop, 2005, p.6). In this sense, it is inherently distinct from traditional forms of visual art, such as sculpture, painting, photography, and video, which are works of art with self-contained meaning.
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Created by Coniglio, Isadora is the most popular software used by dance artists due to its flexibility and the ease with which it can be learned. The visual programming occupying various sensory devices allows dancers to control digital images in real time (Troika Ranch, http://www.troikaranch.org).
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Max/MSP is a graphical and audio programme for music and multimedia, facilitating interactive computer music, real-time image processing and 3-D (Dixon,
2007, p.195).
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40
Taylor elaborates on ‘the paradox of the subject’s own perception of self’ (Taylor,
2003) in third-person games, pointing out that if third-person games acquire coherent qualities of the virtual space and spatial presence, the uncanny effect of the gaze can impart a sense of existing within the gaze to players so as to enhance a sense of embodiment to a greater degree than first-person games.
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I acknowledge that the motion capturing process is still a significant issue in terms of the digitalisation of corporeality. Nevertheless, in this chapter, I draw greater attention to the audiences’ experience of the game environment and the avatar within it, than the qualities, shapes, and gestures of the avatar’s movement, corresponding to the artists’ choreographic focus moving away from its conventional approach to physical movement itself.
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A player’s disappearing body and its function in the perception of a game space occurs, irrespective of whether the avatar’s point of view is the first-person or the third-person.
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In her analysis of her embodied experience of SwanQuake: House , Popat confesses that the Cartesian ontology prevents her from accepting the doubling of her physical and virtual experience, noting that her state of discomfort is caused by her embodied experience in the virtual realm. She senses simultaneously being in the physical and the virtual, that is, the unification of the two realms. Nonetheless, the failure of the disconnection between being-in-the-physical-world and being-in-the-virtual-world makes her feel uncanny, leading her to think of herself as ‘a split subject’ rather than
‘a doubled subject’. She attributes her inherent refusal of the doubled subject to
Cartesian dualism which she intends to resist, while she remains in her embodied experience, stating that she is not prepared for being a cyborg yet (Popat, 2012, p.24).
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Her anthropocentric view is also clearly revealed in the following sentence: ‘it is not our bodies that have become cyborg, but the world in which we live’ (Popat, 2012, p.25). From my posthumanist point of view, however, we already became cyborg as our bodies became entangled with technologies; otherwise, we cannot live in the world that has become mixed reality.
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Since Jaron Lanier first coined the term ‘virtual reality’ in 1986, many researchers have developed its meaning, using the term in diverse ways. For Lanier, virtual reality as wholly immersive digital worlds is distinguished from traditional computer simulations. Unlike its initial definition as a navigable 360-degree digital environment, the term has been loosely applied to environments that do not necessitate highly specialised technologies, such as head-mounted display devices or semi-spherical screens. Howard Rheingold points out three characteristics of virtual reality: to be surrounded by a three-dimensional visual world; to be able to step into the world; to be able to reach and affect the world (Rheingold, 1994, p.34). Steve Tice and Brenda Laurel insist upon three methods of virtual reality: an ‘immersive’ or
‘inclusive’ system through high-tech devices, such as a head-mounted display or a data glove or suit; a three-dimensional display on a desktop-screen, which is called
‘desktop VR’; ‘third-person VR’ that involves a digital representation of a player’s self via which s/he navigate throughout the virtual world (Tice and Laurel, 1992, p.281).
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In the field of computer science, Paul Milgram and Furnio Koshino propose a taxonomy of mixed reality displays that involves the merging of real and virtual worlds. Mixed reality is placed somewhere along the ‘virtuality continuum’ between two extremes ― completely real environments and virtual environments. It ranges
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from augmented reality, which refers to physical environments on which digital information is superimposed, to augmented virtuality, which signifies virtual environments that are overlaid with physical information (Milgram and Kishino,
1994).
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Steve Benford and other researchers broaden Milgram and Koshino’s concept of mixed reality, proposing a different approach for the merging of physical and virtual worlds, which is not to superimpose the two elements in a single space, but to juxtapose them in multiple spaces and create ‘transparent boundaries’ for interconnecting them (Benford et al. 1998, p.205).
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My conclusion begins with Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her as its posthumanist vision of the near future and viewers’ conflicting responses to this vision well demonstrate how different points of view give rise to such contrary interpretations. The film is about a man named Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his Siri-like Operating System (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). The man, who ghostwrites others’ love letters, is tormented with loneliness after his recent divorce.
By accident, he purchases the first artificial intelligence operating system, which is called Samantha, who has an attractive voice, attitude and intelligence. Theodore shares an emotional bond with Samantha, who becomes his girlfriend. Her is a
Science Fiction film, but does not adopt Science Fiction (hereafter abbreviated to
SF)’s usual vision of a future. As Jeffrey Sconce, a professor of film and media studies at Northwestern University, points out, Her deviates from SF’s orthodox pictures of ‘a Star Trek utopia of democratic empowerment or a Terminator-esque hellscape of sentient machines stomping us into dust’ (Sconce, cited in Schou, 2014).
In the film, near future Los Angeles is not depicted as a barren post-apocalypse world, but crowded with automobiles and skyscrapers, which is not far different to urban cities in the present day. Theodore wears high-waisted woollen trousers, has a blind date in an Asian fusion restaurant and lives in an apartment featuring large windows and leather and hardwood modern furniture.
While in many SF films Artificial Intelligence machines are typecasted as servants like Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet and droids in Star Wars or slayers like
HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Skynet in The Terminator , Her portrays
Samantha as a kind of sentient being that evolves on its own by learning, seeking
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selfhood and fostering her curiosity. Jonze’s vision of a future is not an alien and dystopian world, but the natural extension of our omnipresent-technology life in which an intimate relationship between a human and nonhuman being is seen as genuine, as comparable with that between human beings in the real world. It is explicitly expressed in one scene when Theodore discloses to his friend Amy (Amy
Adams) that he has been falling in love with Samantha and asks her whether he is a freak. Amy answers that ‘I think anyone who falls in love is a freak. It’s a crazy thing to do. It’s like a socially acceptable form of insanity.’
We will have an opportunity to purchase the earliest version of Her . The Japanese telecom giant SoftBank unveiled a humanoid robot called Pepper which was invented by French robotics company Aldebaran, which announced their plan to put it up for sale to the public for £1,150 next year. Originally built for communication and companionship with humans, this robot has an ‘emotion engine’ so that it can recognise people’s speech, facial expressions and body language and react appropriately. It (or s/he) continuously collects data on interactions with people from which it learns independently how to behave more appropriately next time. The proliferation of technologies not only comes into being with nonhuman entities coexisting with human entities, but also enters into the human body. Twenty-nineyear-old Juliano Pinto, who had complete paralysis of the lower trunk, made the kickoff of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil by wearing a brain-controlled robotic skeleton.
Electrodes of an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap he wore picked up his brain signals and sent them to the "Iron Man"-esque suit, thus enabling it to move. In the United
Kingdom, anyone over eighteen can buy a Google Glass headset for £1,000. This wearable device comprises the head-up display, a camera, microphone and GPS, enabling users to carry out various tasks − taking photos and videos, navigating, doing
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a Google search, dictating voice and so on − which are very similar to what a smartphone does. These examples prove that the film Her envisages not a groundless or absurd future, but just a slight overstatement of our present world where the human and the nonhuman become entangled.
Nonetheless, certainly, not everyone is ready to live with and concede autonomy to nonhuman beings. One of the reviewers of Her , calls the film ‘the scariest movie of
2013’, stating that ‘Samantha, or the thing we call Samantha, does not enslave
Theodore; but Element Software does, via the deception that such a being as
“Samantha” exists, that it is in fact a her
. Just because there aren’t any killer robots around doesn’t mean you’re free’ (Farago, 2013, original italics). According to this reviewer, the dual perception that Samantha is a living entity who can love Theodore and Theodore’s feeling for Samantha constitutes genuine love is false and an illusion created by its corporation. The reviewer’s anxiety about Her is based upon his rejection of the non-human’s capability to have autonomy, conscience, moral judgment or responsibility ― which he regards as the exclusive property of human beings ― as well as his critique of technological determination that results in a violation of human morality and free will. The superiority of the human over the nonhuman and technological phobia on account of lack of rationality and morality have been long assumed and deeply embedded in Western society. However, emerging technologies in computer science, advanced robotics, nanotechnology and bioethics have begun undermining an ontological distinction between human beings and machines, instigating either a protest against a collapse of the human’s ontological status and epistemological knowledge or a challenge to the existing paradigm of it.
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There has been another reviewer who applauds the film’s creative and clever imagination and puts forth an interpretation that is diametrically opposed to the aforementioned reviewer’s scepticism about Jonze’s vision of future. According to
Christopher Orr, the film does not cast doubt on the veracity of Theodore and
Samatha’s love, but it rather questions whether we can presume that real love is attributed to the human race alone. What is at stake in the film is not about ‘whether machines might one day be capable of love’ but ‘whether machines might one day be more capable of love… than the human beings who created them’ (Orr, 2013, original italics). In this sense, Jonze’s depiction of ‘her’ as an autonomous entity who can learn and love takes a posthumanist attitude as the director addresses a posthumanist question of technology in terms of its capability of feeling, thinking, practicing ethics and constructing its own subjectivity, rather than of its good or bad role in relation to human beings.
The film Her
’s posthumanist vision of the near future is considered to be an ‘all too plausible dystopia’ (Farago, 2013) or ‘a work of sincere and forceful humanism’
(Orr, 2013), depending on how one views a machine that is capable of thinking and feeling. These opposite reviews demonstrate that a reader’s point of view gives rise to totally different interpretations of a work. The former reviewer makes a humanist claim for maintaining the human’s ontological and epistemological transcendence and shielding the human’s free will and morality from technological penetration into the human life. On the contrary, the latter accepts Jonze’s posthumanist attitude that undermines hierarchical binaries of the human self and technological others, recognising that the film proposes the possibility of making human beings compatible with nonhuman beings, which is considered to be a new form of humanism.
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In realms of mediated and digital performance, choreographers’ experiments with technologies are presumably the most natural phenomenon as they are fundamentally engaged with bodies by thinking and substantiating their embodied knowledge of the bodies as the whole entity of mind and body (Remshardt, 2008, pp.48-49).
Choreographers incorporate technologies as essential elements of performance, not subsidiary ones, redressing orthodox notions of dance performance by defying its prerequisite condition, the physical co-presence of human performers and audiences.
They not only expand a substance for incarnating choreographic knowledge from a body to an object and a (material or immaterial) space, but also reframe choreographic knowledge itself by reflecting on how a human subject’s corporeal and technological self are entangled to embody the world and the self within the world.
As the case studies of this thesis have shown, contemporary choreographic practices involve the disembodiment of the corporeal body in a virtual world and the dehumanisation/mechanisation of the human through cyborgian technologies. From an anthropocentric humanist perspective that treats technology and its increasing physical and cognitive ability as a potential threat to the human, or from a popular posthumanist/transhumanist perspective that pursues the transcendence of the body, technologically generated presence of the human subject in choreographic practices may be conceived as an apocalyptic future for the human body. However, this pessimistic view of virtual and cyborgian bodies perpetuates a dualistic assumption that primarily relegates the body to its sensorimotor surface separated from its abstract cognition and affords the privilege of the human’s inherent nature and its univocal perspective on the world, which is not how the choreographers address and conceptualise to the human body in my case studies. In this thesis, I have argued that the choreographers resist an anthropocentric dualism and hierarchy between the
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human and the nonhuman and re-instate the body’s doubled condition of presence and absence in the process of constructing and embodying posthuman subjectivity. I have examined what relationship between human and machine the choreographers form, and how their choreographic practices reconceptualise technology as integral to human subjectivity and its embodiment. For the critical analyses of the case studies, I have drawn upon critical posthumanism and post-Merleau-Pontian phenomenology as a theoretical and methodological lens which enabled me to escape from a humanist bias toward the human body’s exclusive perspective on the world and from a dualistic view of the posthuman as disembodied.
In the case studies, human beings represent animals, become cyborgs, have the virtual double or immerse into a virtual space. Devolution overthrows cultural hostility to robots through ADT dancers and robots’ metamorphoses into zoomorphic and therianthropic beings. The dancers resist erect positions and vision-oriented movements and instead move like quadrupeds with extremely fast, energetic, offensive and feral qualities. Their instinctive and brutal movements are compatible with the robots’ zoomorphic behaviours, so they metaphorically represent equal living beings co-existing within an ecosystem. Devolution rejects a humanistic bias toward distinctions between human beings and animals and between the organic and the artificial, by embodying animality within the human being and portraying robots as a new living organism.
The work’s posthumanist attitude is further undergirded by the dancers’ cyborgisation through robotic prostheses fastened onto their bodies. As an extension of the dancers’ embodiment, the prosthesis does not replace or enhance their body part, but radically rearranges their bodies’ normal sensorimotor operation system while deforming their bodily appearances. As the dancers perceive the prosthesis as neither their own body part in entirety nor an external object, they
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become therianthropic cyborgs that connote the collapse of social hierarchy between human, animal and machine.
An integration of the human body and machine occurs not only through prosthetic extension of the body, but also through the virtual double, which is spatially separated from the human subject but entwined with its corporeal body. In Mortal Engine ,
Chunky Move’s dancers expand their embodied agency to a space of virtuality, generating their virtual double. In a virtual environment, their bodily operation system is not just rearranged, but fundamentally redeployed in conjunction with an interactive system’s agent. The virtual double is brought into being by the combination of sensory-motor functions of the corporeal body and the interactive system. In the dancers’ re-embodiment in the virtual space, their physical and virtual body images contaminate each other, as the self-autonomy of the virtual body image makes the dancers reflect back upon their corporeal self. Accordingly, the dancers’ double presence in the physical and the virtual embodies their posthuman unified subjectivity, not the split one.
When choreographers and their collaborators design a physical/virtual interface which allows human beings to inhabit a virtual space, they reckon with a physical space which corporeal bodies occupy. Both of the works Sensuous Geographies and
SwanQuake: House are designed to enhance audience experience of immersion into a virtual space by merging and juxtaposing a virtual space with a physical space respectively. In Sensuous Geographies, audience participants explore a digitally generated sonic environment where their corporeal behaviour is reconfigured into binary information through an interactive system and re-materialised as a digital sound. The emergent sound embodies the participants’ inter-subjectivities as it is born upon by their own corporeal behaviour in relation to other participants’ behaviour.
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The artists display haptic materials in a physical environment, which stimulate the participants to be self-aware of their own corporeal sensations, thereby enabling them to engage with their emergent digital sounds in more intuitive and embodying ways.
By contrast, in SwanQuake: House audience participants are encouraged to stand out of themselves but exist as their own avatar’s bodies while they navigate a computergenerated game world and have control over the avatar’s actions. The participants’ self-effacement is instigated by the avatars’ invisible representation that helps the identification of the selves’ vision with their avatar’s one. By juxtaposing the virtual world with the physical world that features a combination of physical and digital elements and has similar appearance to the game world, the boundary between the physical and the virtual realm is perceived as tenuous and the audience’s experience of the virtual world via the avatar as more real.
Although my case studies embrace different forms of human-machine relations, they shed light on some of the essential features of current choreographic practices in the context of digital performance ― human beings (professional performers and audience) and their technological counterparts, addressing the presence and absence of corporeality in a digital age. In the case studies, dancers or audiences’ bodies are not represented as entities ontologically distinct from robotic and virtual presences, as technologies become constitutive parts of their embodied experience of the self, the world and others. The choreographers and their collaborators manifest the posthuman as an alternative and affirmative vision of the human. They reveal the change of ways of perceiving and embodying the self and the world through the entwinement of the body and technology. Despite the advent of technological agency that is capable of sensing and cognising the world, and the construction of a new reality which can be experienced only in conjunction with a technological system, the human body is never
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replaced or eradicated by technology, but the body and technologies make a reconciled and dynamic partnerships, not a hostile or hierarchical relationship, for the construction and embodiment of human subjectivity.
This research ultimately argues that these choreographic practices offer a space for consideration of technology as integral part of self, for concepts of the posthuman that transform anthropocentric concerns. The choreographic works analysed in this thesis redirect our attention outside an exclusively human realm, to alter anthropocentric perspectives. New possibility for posthuman subjectivity investigated by the choreographers urge us to question who and what we are in the process of coevolving with nonhuman others. Also, the choreographic works remind us that the human body in a posthuman age is still valued as a conduit for our embodied mode of being-in-the-world, in conjunction with a technological system. In other words, the choreographic practices present the posthuman as the possibility of “us” that can be rehumanised, reminded and recreated.
Moreover, this research reveals the validity of choreographic embodied knowledge in a digital age and the possibilities for expanding its knowledge into more various domains. Choreographers are evidently eligible experts who are able to provide new, hidden, or unrecognised knowledge and sensibilities for designing a human-computer interface, since the understanding of the human being’s bodily ways of perceiving, feeling, thinking and communicating with others is the key element of a human-computer interface. This prospect for dance and its somatic value in the future is corroborated by Susan Kozel who characterises virtuality as ‘a “field of possibility” where what can emerge is not pre-formed or pre-determined.’ She claims that, given that ‘we understand more about how our bodies express, remember, move and touch in technologically mediated environments, we can expand the performative, cultural
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and philosophical implications of the virtual’ (Kozel, 2006, p.139). Given this statement, choreographers have an advantage over other fields due to their bodycentred practices, which is ironically the cause of marginalising dance in the Western socio-cultural context. Rather than feeling lost in their momentum, choreographers have to challenge themselves by expanding a locus for inculcating their choreographic sensibilities and methods, as well as by broadening the scope of choreographic knowledge into the posthuman’s bodily way of being. In so doing, dance artists will have opportunities to share their unique knowledge of the body in more different domains while overthrowing their long-lasting marginal position in the arts and society.
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