Exploring Choreographers’ Conceptions of Motion Capture for Full Body Interaction

We present the results of a group interview of choreographers aimed at understanding their conceptions of how movement can be used to in live performance. This understanding intended to inform research into full body interaction for live performance and other more general full body interfaces. The results of the interview suggest a new way of conceiving of interaction with digital technology, neither as a representation of movement, not as an interface that responds to movement but as a means of transforming movement. This transformed movement can then serve as a starting point for a dancers responses to transformations of their own movement thus setting up an improvisational feedback loop

Bad Feelings

"[...] Bad Feelings aims itself towards existing discussions on negation, negativity, and a bottomless catalogue of negative emotions. Assembled therein is a set of materials for conflict and commonality. Despite some clear thematic concerns and constellations around which the contributions coalesce – hate, struggle, rage, anger, revenge, resistance, destruction, and so on – it forgoes asserting any coherent narrative, manifesto, or position on the subjects. Authors, whether collective, individual, or transmutable identities, flow from start to finish in a sequence determined by their emotion and subject of contestation. The texts, the contributors, the ideas, the aesthetics, and the arguments disagree, and so do we. Ordered against order, Bad Feelings attempts to manifest an experimental negativity, pushing beyond a mimetic economy bound to the targets it seeks to oppose. It may not work as intended, though no more sleep will be lost over it." -- Publisher's website

Roland Barthes's Party

The Roland Barthes Reading Group is Emma Bolland, Julia Calver, Daniela Cascella, Helen Clarke, Louise Finney, Susannah Gent, Sharon Kivland, Debbie Michaels, Hestia Peppé, Rachel Smith. For four years we have been reading The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes, the collection of the series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1980, completed shortly before his death in 1981. He declared his intention to write a novel, and in this pedagogical experiment, explores the trial of novel writing. In this book the authors riff on a tiny remark Barthes makes: a. Example (from personal experience) –> I want to narrate a party: as a rule, anecdotal material: people I’d not met before, particular characters, conversations, rituals, etc. But when I set about telling the story, I find myself weighed down by the ‘necessary’ details (necessary for the logic of the narrative) that I personally find it too tiresome to recount. I only need ‘retain’ two notations from the party: the yellow dress worn by the hostess (a kaftan) and the sleepiness of the host’s eyes, the droopiness of his eyelids, sorts of realistic haiku that exhaust the saying and don’t belong to narrative discourse (at least not my practice of it) because they’re: not functional. b. Conversely, I can find something in a story that jumps out at me, like a film jumping, a sliver flying off, something that has all the spirit of haiku but is in fact no way related to the story: something that sets a bell ringing, that brings with it all the particular features of haiku I’ve tried to articulate [...] The Short Form is its own necessity and suffices in itself: it can’t be stretched. Roland Barthes, Session of March 3, 197