IiM 2007 > conference details	Wednesday ,

Saturday April 21

Day One, Session One: 2pm
Physical Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, and Augmented Bodies
Keynote address
Johannes Birringer

Over-viewing contemporary performance and its relation to technology and science, this presentation will take a broad critical and historical approach to exhilarating hybrid dance and digital artistic and research developments over the past decade. Ideas of "augmented bodies" and the design of alternate physical/artificial architectures are examined in regard to the conference theme (Ideas in Motion: The Body's Limit), but also reviewed critically in view of larger political and aesthetic debates on digital culture and continuities of tradition.

Contemporary postchoreographic practices and interface designs (interactive installations, telematic and mixed reality works), along with experimental multimedia performance and Konzepttanz, are then explored across a range of areas such as indirect interfaces and neuroaesthetics, tactile augmentation and telepresence, intelligent agents and simulation, gesture analysis and visualization, sonic spatialization and audio rendering, choreography and gaming systems. Opening up avenues for discussion, the talks ends by raising questions about how current choreographic and dance practices relate to the digital (and vice versa), how artists use hybrid and digital tools of creation for engaging in new collaborative, cross-disciplinary research, and how our audiences respond to the new digital creativity and the invitations to move (implicit in interactive installations).

Palinopsia re-imagines the perception of movement in a responsive environment of sound, animation, and visuals. The dance is named for a medical condition in which perceived images persist and recur, an extreme case of an optical phenomenon that cause Aristotle to rethink sense itself. Mixing "analog" techniques of light and shadow, cues taken from puppetry, and live digital imagery and sound, the dancer and musician slip through the spaces just beyond the threshold of what we can see and hear.

The work was developed collaboratively, with the three artists working across disciplines to produce dance theater that combines digital and non-digital techniques. Sound and visuals are provided via custom software developed for the project, built in Max/MSP/Jitter.

Barbara M. Bickart

eVokability: The Walking Project
(Presentation/documentation)
Sarah Drury

eVokability: The Walking Project is a performance piece that explores ideas and images surrounding “the body with disabilities”. Four performers wear costumes embedded with sensors that track the shape and force of physical gesture, using these dynamics to generate live media projections that amplify their movement. Interactive media artist Sarah Drury collaborates with performance artists including Cathy Weis, Shelley Barry, Lezlie Frye and Lisa Bufano, and directs this ensemble of four solo pieces that transpose movement to media. Each Costume functions as an instrument that the performer plays, a visual extension of her body and its lived context.

Performers approach the subject of walking from the standpoint of a question: what does it mean to walk—and how is it accomplished by those with different bodies? Each performer’s solo piece evokes both the act and concept of “walking”, exploring the projection of the self into theatrical and social space. Where steps and stairways can be insuperable barriers to the world’s most serious institutions and harmless pleasures alike, these performers address their individual relationships to this basic emblem of human mobility and empowerment. “Walking” unfolds as one of our culture’s symbols of autonomy and progress, a paradigm of wandering, experience and discovery, while the inability to walk is linked with cultural exclusion from these human potentials.

eVokability engages a dialogue between an intimate physical performance and a media amplification of that performance. The result is a body-based narrative form that speaks from and about the body. It brings issues of representation and the body forward, challenging an esthetics of conformity in regard to how bodies should look, function and participate in everyday life. The use of augmentative media devices speaks to our current state of human extension through technology. These devices serve as props that performers use to confront the cultural distortion and erasure of different bodies.

This Just Happens to be Dance and Other Stories on the Road to Communicating William Forsythe’s Choreographic Thinking Through Visual Media
(Presentation/documentation)
Norah Zuniga Shaw

Beginning in 2005 somewhere in the transnational spaces between Frankfurt, Ohio, Amsterdam, and New York, the Forsythe Foundation, the Ohio State University Department of Dance, and the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, began collaborating to discover “the next level of imaginary trace” in dance and visual media. Focusing on Forsythe’s complex and dynamic work, One Flat Thing, reproduced the project seeks to create a living score that leaves something behind and also elicits new information and new creativity. This is not a preservation project. It is not for reconstruction or repertory. Instead the dance is approached as a richly specific research resource. We are conducting the project from within dance and without. The process of locating and defining the component parts of the piece (what we call the data of the dance) has unearthed significant questions about the nature of choreographic thinking in relationship to scientific thinking and technology. In our working process, “this just happens to be dance.” It could be mathematics, or architecture, complexity theory or a demonstration of human event perception. It is ballet as information aesthetics. It is an expression of a way of thinking that is shared among many forms of knowledge and at the same time is unlike any other. Finally, the discourse generated by the project engages dance as a site of knowledge in a manner that is particularly significant for dance and technology as a field.

Followed by Q & A/Roundtable discussion with artists
End Session

5:30pm: Intermission/Break

Day One, Session Two: 7:30pm
Evening Performances and Screening

Shake Off
(screening)
Hans Beenhakker

A male dancer dances a 2 minute solo. This solo is recorded in one shot with a remote control camera. The same take is three times assembled to originate a film of 8 minutes (including intro/end shot). The shot has each time another piece of music and different background or character added. The three scenes flow smoothly in one another. For the music is composed with the use of live instrument and singing recording.

Excerpt from MURDER is a habit that REMORSE cannot cure, a DAGGER-in-progress
(performance)
Clarinda Mac Low

MURDER is a habit that REMORSE cannot cure was an in-progress version of DAGGER originally performed in New York City in January 2007. Based loosely on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, DAGGER uses the language and the situations of the play as a fractured mirror of our own times of unsettled political interventions, explosive backlash and impotent demagoguery. DAGGER is a live suspense film, a series of questions, a collection of forces and resolutions—a solo with one body and many voices that digs into the inner life of tyrants and the tyrants inside us, investigating the motivations and consequences of the human lust for political power. In MURDER… the space is haunted by the conscience of an unsuccessful tyrant who wanted too much and got it, but "played most foully for't." MURDER… uses a variety of video surveillance media to incorporate the entire performing space, as watchers become watched, and viewers are kept on their toes by video ghosts and an eerie soundtrack.  In a rich atmosphere of menace and the seductions of authority, Clarinda Mac Low gets up close and personal with the audience in person and on screen, spinning out an intimate multi-media spectacle that seeks to reveal the states of being that lie behind the various masks of physical and temporal power, encouraging viewers to question what’s said to them, how it’s said and where it’s said. In the original version of MURDER… the mobile audience moved through the space as Mac Low appeared in unexpected places on video and in person. In this excerpt, Mac Low will be mobile in the space, and throughout the show there will be intimate video views of both performer and audience, using surveillance cameras embedded in Mac Low’s costume and live cameras placed in secret locations.

MURDER is a habit that REMORSE cannot cure uses a variety of video surveillance media to incorporate the entire performing space, as watchers become watched, and viewers are kept on their toes by video ghosts and an eerie soundtrack.  In a rich atmosphere of menace and the seductions of authority, Clarinda Mac Low gets up close and personal with the audience in person and on screen, spinning out an intimate multi-media spectacle that seeks to reveal the states of being that lie behind the various masks of physical and temporal power.

Excerpts from Wonderland
(performance)
Stefanie Nelson Dance Group and Nell Breyer

Inspired by the zany antics of a fictional girl named Alice, Stefanie Nelson Dance Group , in collaboration with Nell Breyer , create a fantastical world where dancers immerse themselves in full-scale video projections and time-based technologies, blurring the lines between reality and illusion. Based on raw, explosive solo performances, Out of Wonderland investigates feelings of fragmentation and dislocation.

Lostwax makes multimedia dance theater works.  Currently we are developing a new piece Melt to be premiered in September of 2007. Terma is a work-in-progress showing representing one part of the larger work. Melt couples movement with large- scale interactive ice sculpture, tiny wireless video cameras, moving video projection, motion tracking and a visual pallet of footage shot on the glaciers of Juneau, Alaska, to explore iconographic ideas from Tibetan Buddhism.

Every Body Tells a Story
(performance)
Antony Rizzi and Inma Rubio Tomas

Featuring Antony Rizzi and his long time collaborator Inma Rubio Tomas, Every Body Tells a Story explores what defines our individuality.  It is a duet that compares the differences and similarities of the two performers to music by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The work will also continue in a multi media work using film, text and dance to create a reflective piece of the artists view on his life and the things surrounding him and that have created him in his 22 years as an artist in Europe.
NOTE: The work contains adult language and content.

Followed by Q & A/Roundtable discussion with artists
End Session

Sunday, April 22

Day Two, Session One: 11am
Boston Cyberarts @ SHARE Consulate of Switzerland, 420 Broadway Cambridge MA 02138 USA (see map here)
LET'S TAKE A SEAT!
(performance conference)
Andrea Haenggi/AMDaT

LET'S TAKE A SEAT! is about the audience controlling the dancers' actions, and those actions, in turn, controlling the audience. In this exploratory new project, choreographer/visual artist Andrea Haenggi collaborates with her Dance Company AMDaT and media artist Marlon Barrios-Solano.

The audience joins the performers around a conference table. Snippets of global and personal issues expressed through the dancers bizarre movement dialogues combine with text and video projections to provoke audience reactions. Through technology tools such as cell phones, the audience is invited to join the discussion by giving instructions that shift the performers between preset choreography and improvisation.

The performance is not just a place for entertainment. It is a playful yet serious and physically challenging commentary on the notion that in today's fragmented world, people increasingly feel controlled by outside institutions and find it more and more difficult to negotiate their way towards consensus.

Followed by Q & A/Roundtable discussion with artists
End Session

Day Two, SessionTwo: 2pm (at Green Street Studios)

Self Unfinished (1998)
(performance)
Xavier Le Roy

"A chair, a desk, a soundtrack, that doesn't start. A dancer in a shirt uses strong sound effects to imitate a robot. Indeed an understandable, even conventional idea, that is until Xavier Le Roy' s (1963, France) play turns into a gripping mental space. Head over heels, the dancer' s body is transformed in real time into a series of hallucinogenic morphological aberrations, representing images of a body that reconfigures itself based to unwritten laws and a disquieting, inhuman rhythm. It undergoes long stases, makes infinite movements and begins to crawl abruptly. In addition to the torsion carried out in the "spectacle de danse" (dance performance), Xavier Le Roy taps into a new field where scientific and social data is transferred and imprinted in imaginary representations of the body."

- Francois Piron in the journal des arts of Connivence, 6th Biennale de Lyon

Followed by Q & A/Roundtable discussion with artists
End Session

3:45pm: Intermission/Break

Day Two, SessionThree: 4pm

Physical Intelligence: A roundtable discussion on the body’s body of knowledge
Panel Discussion featuring artists and engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Moderated by Noah Riskin, Head Men's Gymnastics Coach and Physical Intelligence Program Director, MIT

And featuring:
Jonathan Bachrach, Artist and Research Scientist CSAIL, MIT and Tommy DeFrantz, Professor of Dance, MIT
Mia Keinanen, Lecturer of New Dance, Theater Academy in Helsinki, Finland
Martha Mason, Snappy Dance
Joe Paradiso, Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab
Hayes Raffle, MIT Media Lab, Tangible Media Group

Panel Overview: Long before we employ cognitive models or systems of thought, we think, learn and understand in terms of touching, seeing, movement and play—physical, bodily interactions with the world that begin the structuring of mind. The body, then—though generally unrecognized as an important dimension of our experience and intelligence--is the basis of our experience in the world; it is the very foundation on which cognitive intelligence is built. Recently, there’s been a surge of interest in the relationship between bodily action and cognition as science recognizes the importance of physical experience as a basis for cognitive development and processes.

The Physical Intelligence roundtable brings together scientists, researchers, philosophers and artists to discuss and better define the physical intelligence of the human organism, and what it has to say to both the arts and sciences.

5pm: Q & A and Wrap-up by Johannes Birringer

Click here for tickets

Artists, program details and order subject to change