forum: Intimacy: Feedback and Reportage
This thread has been set up to facilitate a focussed discussion on the partcipants and events taking place at Intimacy.
Intimacy is packed full of events. Kicking off today, Friday 7th December, with workshops, seminars and performances leading to the FREE LAUNCH EVENT tonight at 6.30pm - Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths.
Seminars
THE TIME IT TAKES TO TRUE
10:00-14:00 Goldsmiths Graduate School, Seminar Room
Leader: MINE KAYLAN, Goldsmiths/University of Brighton
"The seminar will investigate a poetics of live interaction with particular attention to time as a significant vector in 'meaningful' exchange. Within the context of proximal and of telematic /virtual environments, how does the play of time work in what we might identify as poetic exchange, which we yearn for, recognize as precious, pay good money to experience? What is 'intimacy' within these terms? What can we learn from cinema makers about structures of time and visual rhythm in interactions through telemotion? These are some questions I am sucking on, still."
AT RISK
14:00-18:00 Goldsmiths Graduate School, Seminar Room
Leader: TRACEY WARR
Body Art puts another human body in your lap in live performance, photographic document or on screen image. It has often struggled to find an audience. It asks what it is to be human and what is it to be humane. In this workshop we will examine our own responses, responsibilities and complicities in relation to a range of historical and contemporary artists' work, including Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Bruce Gilchrist, Marcus Coates, He Yun Chang and Mark Raidpere. We will consider our responses in relation to differing modes of proximity as viewers of live performances, photographic documents and on screen images.
We will examine a range of theoretical positions on the issues of empathy and responsibility. In the 1930s psychologist Paul Schilder argued for a shared ontology between bodies, claiming that ‘the laws of identification and of communication between images of the body make one’s suffering and pain everybody’s affair’. Does Rosalind Krauss’ contention of an aesthetics of narcissism which she applied to video in the 1970s apply to the digital now? Kathy O’Dell’s critical work explores the notion of a contract of complicity between artist and audience. For Nelly Richard the body is ‘the meeting place between the individual and the collective … the boundary between biology and society, between drives and discourses’. Philosopher Elaine Scarry has demonstrated how the body has the status of being our most definite material reference point and is therefore used to give substance to ideologies or to take it away. The body has been the site of both ideological control and resistance.
Digital technologies have been a key influence in bringing the embodied consciousness and a metaphysics of the body back into focus. What qualities of human interaction are enabled or disabled by digital technologies? If our contemporary co-existence in both real and digital habitats is increasingly removing the distinction between real and fictional or simulated, fantasy and fact, how is that affecting our values? The computer or TV screen turns the live human into a digital object, an avatar. The digital tends to the specular, the solitary, the pornographic, the onanistic, the commodity. Can we play responsibly with each other in the digital domain?
Workshops
BODIES OF COLOUR
11:00-17:00 Laban Studio at Goldsmiths Campus
Leader: PROF. JOHANNES BIRRINGER, (DAP-Lab) Brunel University of West London with Michele Danjoux
For this workshop, Birringer suggests a reflection on the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica(shown at Tate Modern, June-September 2007): "Oiticica moved from abstraction and 2D work to increasingly 3D works, sculptures, then boxes, installations, architectural models and social projects. His work of the 60s and 70s culminates in the Penetraveis and Perangolés series. In the late 70s, just prior to his premature death while in exile in New York, he created several installations called 'Quasi-Cinema' (audio visual installations for the audience-participants, based on his utopian and metaphysical principles of Vivencia and the Supra-Sensorial).
"The Perangolés have always attracted my attention, as they are 'wearables' (inhabitable fabrics, colours-in-action). I see them as extraordinary forerunners of our contemporary experiments with wearables and close-to-the-skin interfaces."
For INTIMACY we will invite the participants to explore the contemporary (technologically augmented and supported) wearable sensorial interface for performance, by playing with fabrics and cameras, self-portraits and animations of others, wearing cloth and special garments with sensors, touching upon the erotics of materials and feedbacks, interacting in a tactile sensorial manner within the mediated environment (images, sounds, colours).
INTIMATE DETAILS ONLY
10:00-18:00 Laban Studio at Goldsmiths Campus
Leader: KIRA O'REILLY
Dispersed, elaborated and localised intimacies cluster and move between the complex webs of you and I.
Drag lines and spindles of utterances.
Radical tangos.
Scalpels teasing tissue apart.
Peculiar occurrences of confidence and trust, wonderment and astonishment manifest, unannounced from our reassembling and disassembling of events that unfold, processes that cascade in our designed moments of actions, performances, makings and unmakings.
Sometimes it means that someone thinks I love them. Or that they have love me. It gets all mixed up.
Perhaps we can figure out how to occupy some of the pauses, lapses and moments within this conflicting and confusing concept of intimacy.
Perhaps not.
Perhaps we initiate wilful failures and radical dissociations.
Perhaps we will break our hearts in some disastrous dissasemblage.
Performances
HOME LONDON
Held by Adrian Howells (UK)
Hot Soak by Helena Goldwater (UK)
GOLDSMITHS LAUNCH
FREE LAUNCH with LIVE PERFORMANCES:
7 December, Goldsmiths, 6:30-11pm
Lots of FREE performances, presentations, screenings
Wine Gums 2.0 (Love Hearts) by Joe Stevens (UK)
Eudaimonia – A performed installation by Blind Ditch (UK /Germany)
Portrait of the Artist as a Life Model by Ernesto Sarezale (UK)
OneSmallStep: a Myspace LuvStory by Mark Cooley (UK)
DTN3 Belonging by Avatar Body Collision
tranSfera by SUKA OFF (Poland)
I Want to Suck Your Bones by Léonore Easton and Boris Hoogeveen (UK /Switzerland)
The Voice by Nicolas Maigret & Nicolas Montgremont (France)
Four Images by Adam Overton (USA)
From Anger to Sadness by Frank Millward (UK)
13 Volts and 1 Carrot by Eva Sjuve (UK)
WebAffairs by Chantal Zakari (USA/ Turkey)
Concrete Corps by Atau Tanaka (Japan/ UK)
Tracey Warr
I attended the seminar led by Tracey Warr yesterday ‘At Risk’. This was a really fascinating discussion and introduced me to a number of artists and performers whom I have not consciously come across before. Amongst these were Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Bruce Gilchrist, Marcus Coates, He Yun Chang and Mark Raidpere – if anyone is able to give me further details on these artists it would be much appreciated.
I have found myself particularly taken by the questions around responsibility, empathy and complicity that Tracey raised. One point particularly struck me, that is the intervention of audience members in performances where the artist is, or is perceived to be, putting themselves at ‘too much’ risk. A discussion which was interestingly countered by one on the culture of institutionally ‘preventing risk’ – as highlighted by the health and safety regs that have become central to planning and curating live art events.
Having thought about these discussions further I wanted to raise a couple of questions, which I am not certain were addressed in the seminar.
i) There was a lot of discussion surrounding empathy and the audiences ‘responsibility’ to intervene in an art-work if levels of risk were perceived to be too high. This seemed to implicitly link back to a question of ‘humanity’ and the humane – a natural instinct to prevent harm being done to others. I wanted to ask, perhaps provocatively, how much this is governed by cultural and experiential context? And secondly, whether there really is a ‘human instinct’ to stop another’s suffering. One aspect I was drawn to was how different reactions were to these very visceral art works – where cutting and bleeding seemed to be a site of abjection for some, for others, including myself, there seemed to be an acknowledgement of a (certain) level of pleasure in cutting, bleeding and piercing. One person’s perception of suffering is another’s perception of pleasure.
ii) Secondly, I was interested in the distinction between an institutional responsibility to prevent risk and an individual responsibility. There seemed to be a universal frustration at the part ‘Health and Safety’ regulations seem to play in planning live arts events. The Tate Modern and the curating of the ‘Live Culture’ show in 2003 was presented as an example of this – and yet, at the same time a recognition that we as an audience are complicit in a performance and are responsible for any harm that may come to the artist (or audience). Is there a feeling that if (without institutional regulation) the ultimate consequence of a performance could be severe injury, even death, then audience is forced into a questioning relationship with themselves, their own ‘morality’? Calling on them to intervene, to honestly question in themselves ‘when is enough, enough’ – effectively removing the safety net of ‘well, of course, it wouldn’t go that far – they would never allow it’.
These were just a couple of responses – any input would be great – I am not sure where I stand on it!!
Ben
I wanted to ask, perhaps
I wanted to ask, perhaps provocatively, how much this is governed by cultural and experiential context? And secondly, whether there really is a ‘human instinct’ to stop another’s suffering. One aspect I was drawn to was how different reactions were to these very visceral art works – where cutting and bleeding seemed to be a site of abjection for some, for others, including myself, there seemed to be an acknowledgement of a (certain) level of pleasure in cutting, bleeding and piercing. One person’s perception of suffering is another’s perception of pleasure.
I'm not sure there's actually a human instinct to stop another's suffering. Perhaps there's an instinct to protect ourselves from looking at something that can deeply disturbe us. Or the instinct to stop something that we perceive as going far beyond what we think should be boundaries to human dignity.
Before coming across those kind of works and some forms of self-injury I'd actually never thought about the pleasure someone can derive from cutting, bleeding and piercing. And that's true, I think I wouldn't stop a performance if I'd perceive the artist is deriving a form of pleasure from it or stop something which is what he's trying to express. I mean, since that form of art is what he has chosen to express himself, why should I stop it?
(provocative answers/questions as well..)
Intimacy: Saturday Line Up
Submitted by bencraggs on Sat, 08/12/2007 - 11:03.
This thread has been set up to facilitate a focussed discussion on the partcipants and events taking place at Intimacy.
After a hugely successful first day of seminars and workshops and of course the Launch event yesterday evening, Intimacy is promising to stir up even more fascinating discussion as we move into Saturday. On today's line up:
INTIMACY SHOW & TELL MARATHON
11am -7pm
Goldsmiths Small Hall Cinema
This series of performances, screenings and lectures promises to offer in an insight into current practices that explore notions of the body, embodiment and intimacy. The full programme can be found on our main site Intimate Performance
Seminars
PERFORMANCE AND PORNOGRAPHY
10:00-14:00 Goldsmiths Graduate School, Seminar Room
Leader: DR. DOMINIC JOHNSON, Queen Mary University of London
This seminar will address representations of erotic and sexual intimacy in performance. Performance will be explored as a staging of forbidden or otherwise troubled intimacies, thinking through works that figure intimacy between queers, intimacy with animals, and intimacy with children. Works for discussion may include Ron Athey and Lee Adam's Revisions of Excess event, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Porcile and Salo, Kira O'Reilly's Inthewrongplaceness, Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer, and the photography of Slava Mogutin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Kern.
In approaching these diverse performances of difficult intimacies, critical frameworks will be set up, deploying Emmanuel Levinas's idea of the infinite intimacy that is the epiphany of the face-to-face encounter; William Haver's imagining of "the pornographic life" lived within the proximate horror of intimate risk; and Georges Bataille's writings on the threat of intimate interiors as a "scandalous eruption". In exploring these varied cultural practitioners, odd contiguities, favourable mutations and unfamiliar critical intimacies may hopefully arise.
(DIS)EMBODIMENT
14:30-18:30 Goldsmiths Graduate School, Seminar Room
Leader: PROF. PAUL SERMON, University of Salford
This seminar will identify and question the notions of embodiment and disembodiment in relation to the interacting performer in telematic and telepresent art installations.
At what point is performer embodying the virtual performer in front of them? And have they therefore become disembodied by doing so? A number of interactive telematic artworks will be looked at in detail during the seminar, establishing case-study examples to answer these questions. Stemming from Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz seminal work Hole-in-Space to Paul Sermon's telepresent experiments with Telematic Dreaming and to the current immerging creative/critical discourse in 'Second Life' that polarizes fundamental existential questions concerning identity, the self, the ego and the (dis)embodied avatar.
Workshops
INTIMACY AND RECORDED PRESENCE
10:30-14:30 Goldsmiths George Wood Theatre
Leader: KELLI DIPPLE, Tate
This workshop will explore intimacy and presence within the context of the recorded image, using this as a basis for form, instruction-based action and one-to-one performance. The camera is often the interface between performer, action and technology. It is a key element in the relationships between kinaesthetic forms and digital outputs. It is an important starting point and often under estimated. The relationship between performer and camera operator, whether working towards a pre-recorded or live output can be a creative and conversational partnership. With attention and development it can be a complex dialogue involving the intimate exchange of much knowledge. Participants will explore the power of cinematography in the creation of intimacy and presence. Sound will also be discussed as an integral element.
AVATAR PASTE AND CODE SOUP IN FIRST AND SECOND LIFE
14:00-18:00 www.secondlife.com
Leaders: ASS. PROF. SANDY BALDWIN, West Virginia University & ALAN SONDHEIM
This workshop will take place in the virtual world Second Life, and will be conducted by Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin, with participation by other artists and performers in Second Life.
Participants from the Intimacy conference will be supplied with location and others details within Second Life. The workshop emerges from Sondheim and Baldwin's ongoing exploration of analog and digital bodies, using a range of technologies to remap the solid and obdurate real of bodies into the dispersions and virtualities of the digital, and then back again into real physical spaces. The "avatar paste" of the title means at least three things.
Firstly, the pasting of viewpoints together, the suturing of the subject into the avatar. Secondly, paste as glue, as half-liquid and half solid, as a materiality of renewable and
infinite pliability. This is the chora of the avatar, the body matrix that is less a framework than a smearing of paste. And thirdly, paste as pasty and dis/comfortable substance, paste as slimy and dripping. While this abjection is already implicit in paste as glue, the pastiness of paste involves the projection and dreaming through of the avatar, the inhabitation of avatar bodies and the emptying of real bodies into the avatar.
"Avatar paste" comes out in avatar motions and behaviors. Firstly, these are formed by symbolic orders, presenting surfaces to read in terms of sexuality, power, emotion, and other projections. At the same time, the pasty avatar body tends towards collapse and abjection. Work on the avatar becomes a choreography of exposure and rupture, modeling and presenting inconceivable and untenable data, within which tensions and relationships are immediate and intimate. One might imagine, then, this inconceivable data as a form of organism itself: as part of a natural world or a world
already given; out of this we might think through new ideas of landscape, wilderness, hard ecology, the earth itself.
The workshop will theorize and demonstrate these topics. The first part discusses theoretical frameworks. Alan Sondheim will introduce the topic of dismemberment and telepresence in terms of the presence or appearance of abjection in Second Life avatars. He will connect this to the epistemology of emptiness vis-a-vis sheave theory and Buddhist philosophy, and then to the problems of motion and behavior of avatars. Sandy Baldwin will discuss the topography of limits in Second Life, both body limits and spatial limits, an connect this to issues of the hunt and animal display.
He will also discuss the dynamics of performance and audience in Second Life. The second part of the workshop will show off Sondheim and Baldwin's approach to re-mapping live bodies into Second Life performances, including: video and other
examples of motion capture and scanning; intermediate processing of files (e.g. editing .bvh data or working with Blender); and then the resulting works, including documents of Second Life performances and re-mappings back into "first life" spaces with dancers and other live performers. The final part of the workshop will include avatar performance by Sondheim, Baldwin, and other participants in Second Life.
Performances
The 4th Project by Fran Cottell (UK)
Post-workshop Performance by Pierre Bongiovanni, Camille Renarhd, and Gaël Guyon (France / Canada)
Goldilocks Peep Show by Leena Kela (Finland)
The Seal of Confession: A One to One Encounter in a Confessional by Martina Von Holn (UK)
Tea and Sympathy by Michelle Browne (UK)
Wednesday Wednesday by Mary Oliver (UK)
How to Wax by Rachelle Beaudoin (USA)
Spank by Caroline Smith (UK)
Intimacy as Event by Lauren Goode (UK)
MOM – Marks of Motherlands by Helena Walsh (UK /Ireland)
Between One and Another: 'Melting Point' by Sam Rose (UK)
This is How it Was by Chris Johnston (UK)
Fee for Service by Jess Dobkin (Canada)
Microdances: An Intimate Post-post-porn Performance by Jaime del Val (Spain)
Suna No Onna by Dans Sans Joux (Japan /Germany /UK)
World Première: SUNA NO ONNA (Woman of the Dunes)
‹ Interview with Rachel Zerihan Intimacy: Friday Line Up ›
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* Art and Design
* Dance
* Drama and Theatre
* Intimacy general discussion
* Media and Film Studies
* Philosophy
* Avatars
* Embodiment
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* The body
Call for Feedback
Submitted by bencraggs on Tue, 11/12/2007 - 18:01.
Submitted by mvonholn on Tue, 11/12/2007 - 13:19.
This is Martina who performed the one to one encounter
The Seal of Confession on Saturday at the Albany Theatre
between 4 and 7 pm.
I am wondering whether anyone who has seen the piece is interested in giving their constructive feedback on their perception of the approach to Intimacy taken.
All the Best
Martina
www.martinavonholn.com
Martina,
I hope you don't mind, I have copied your post over to this forum to promote it amongst this discussion.
Blog Post
http://www.arts-humanities.net/blog/mvonholn/intimacy_perfor......
Ben
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VIdeo Footage
Video footage from the Friday Launch event can now be viewed here:
http://www.arts-humanities.net/video/intimacy_launch_night_l...
And from Saturday, here:
http://www.arts-humanities.net/video/intimacy_day_two