Autopoiesis, Creativity and Dance

For many years three key aspects of creative processes have been glossed over by theorists eager to avoid the mystery of consciousness and instead embrace an implicitly more formal, computational vision: autonomy, phenomenality and the temporally embedded and bounded nature of creative processes. In this paper we will discuss autopoiesis and creativity; an alternative metaphor which we suggest offers new insight into these long overlooked aspects of the creative processes in humans and the machine, and examine the metaphor in the context of dance choreography

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Autopoiesis and Dance

Este artigo oferece um compromisso conceitual com o processo de criatividade em movimento. No trabalho implantamos uma visão a partir da noção de autopoiese - um termo que engloba “autonomia”, "self" e "poiesis" (que significa "criação" e “produção”) - que foi introduzida pelos biólogos teóricos, Humberto Maturana e Francisco Varela , em 1972, para definir a química de manutenção do self de células vivas e foi, posteriormente, também aplicada aos campos da teoria dos sistemas e sociologia. Neste trabalho, empregaremos a formalização para sugerir como o processo de engajamento de um dançarino com o movimento é capaz de reproduzir e manter-se; explorando, teoricamente, como essa atenção é mantida e como, inevitavelmente, a vontade do dançarino deve esgotar, eventualmente, e como seus movimentos desaparecerem de volta à quietude

The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Conception of Mind, Matter, and Life

Over the last thirty years, a new systemic understanding of life has emerged at the forefront of science. It integrates four dimensions of life: the biological, the cognitive, the social, and the ecological dimension. At the core of this new understanding we find a fundamental change of metaphors: from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network. One of the most radical philosophical implications of the systems view of life is a new conception of mind and consciousness which, for the first time, overcomes the Cartesian division between mind and matter

Alchemical Rubedo in Jill Mellick's "The Red Book Hours": Ecosophy on the Spirit

  According to the biocultural partnership-dominator lens as expounded by Riane Eisler, this article studies the echoes and analogies between the opus alchymicum and the instruments of self-growth and transformation found in Jung’s The Red Book and Jill Mellick’s profound, insightful and exquisite The Red Book Hours. Eisler’s method is significantly interrelational and systemic, it supersedes traditional binary oppositions and offers an interesting correlation with alchemy. Mellick’s monumental The Red Book Hours is not only a profound scholarly study of Jung’s own extraordinary Red Book, but also a multifaceted, dynamic and living work which sheds light on the process of Self-analysis as a breakthrough towards wholeness.   &nbsp

Autopoiesis through agency in virtual reality nonfiction

Documentary filmmakers are gradually embracing immersive media to create novel Virtual Reality Nonfiction (VRNF) content. Over the past twenty years initial experimentation in this new medium has brought forward numerous linearly structured 360° documentaries that maintain a close link to traditional documentary modes. More recently, we have observed a shift from the relatively passive 360° cinema towards more open-world, non-linear, game-like interactive experiences that challenge traditional definitions of the documentary genre. Volumetric world-building techniques provide nonfiction creators with additional tools that afford ‘viewer-users’ spatial and interactive agency, leading to a heightened autopoietic realisation of the storyworld. VRNF creators have the potential to allow their viewer-users enhanced control over framing, temporal ordering of the plot and spatial unfolding of the diegetic world, thus inviting them to become actual co-creators of a deeply personal and personalized experience. This article addresses how VRNF may go beyond the mere ‘documentation’ of people, places or past events that existed in a pre-filmic reality and provide viewer-users through augmented agency a unique present-tense autopoietic experience that pushes the boundaries of traditional 2D documentary.<br/

Interactive Art and the Action of Behavioral Aesthetics in Embodied Philosophy

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Baby Becomings: Towards a Dramaturgy of Sympoietic Worlding

The article proposes new concepts of dramaturgical thinking for baby theatre productions. With an arts-based research approach, allowing insiderperspectives of the artmaking process to come forth, the authors, who are the director and dramaturge of the performance Baby Becomings by Teater Fot, discuss different concepts of postdramatic dramaturgical aspects in relation to the work. By adapting Donna Haraway’s theories of sympoiesis and science art worldings as a theoretical framework, the article explores how Haraway’s philosophy serves both as artistic inspiration and provides new concepts for dramaturgical reflection. The authors ask how posthumanist and sympoietic perspectives connect to postdramatic dramaturgy and wish to propose a posthumanist dramaturgy of sympoietic worlding in theatre for babies

Amantes (Lovers): Investigating autonomy, autopoiesis, and polyrhythm with horses

This visual essay with moving image explores a practice between the artist and three horses who are brought together by their shared response to the Afro-Cuban son clave: A rhythmic pattern that is ostensibly neither from the artist’s nor the horses’ cultural backgrounds. The essay investigates autonomy, autopoiesis, and polyrhythm with horses; and it considers the role of the change and stability paradox in potentially leading to more rhythmic attraction the less this is imposed or managed by the artist. The artist speculatively compares her practice with horses to the creative learning pedagogy developing in Wales in contrast to England’s prescriptive teaching