Soft thought (in architecture and choreography)

This article is an introduction to and exploration of the concept of ‘soft thought’. What we want to propose through the definition of this concept is an aesthetic of digital code that does not necessarily presuppose a relation with the generative aspects of coding, nor with its sensorial perception and evaluation. Numbers do not have to produce something, and do not need to be transduced into colours and sounds, in order to be considered as aesthetic objects. Starting from this assumption, our main aim will be to reconnect the numerical aesthetic of code with a more ‘abstract’ kind of feeling, the feeling of numbers indirectly felt as conceptual contagions’, that are ‘conceptually felt but not directly sensed. The following pages will be dedicated to the explication and exemplification of this particular mode of feeling, and to its possible definition as ‘soft thought’

La misura del desiderio: corpi danza movimento nell’era digitale

Intervista a Stamatia Portanova, che espone gli esiti della sua ricerca, in cui ha indagato il rapporto tra le nuove tecnologie e la danza, per mostrare come le più recenti sperimentazioni delle tecnologie digitali dischiudano nuovi orizzonti in campo coreografico

Rhythm in Economic Space

The question of rhythm is a social, a cultural, and a political question. How to find a rhythm? And, more importantly, how can the economy find a rhythm, without tending towards the mastering of chaos and the prediction of unexpected events

Putting Identity on Hold: Motion Capture and the Mystery of a Disappearing Blackness

The movement of black bodies has often been captured by motion-tracking/sensing technologies in different contexts and situations, from animation cinema to facial recognition, from art to police preemptive profiling. As often argued by critical and media theorists, digital technologies of this kind operate an interesting ambiguous datafication of the black body, by filtering data along a subtle and shifting border between the invisibility of the captured body and the visibility of its movement. This article will discuss the motion capture of Savion Glover’s tap dance performance for the animation movie Happy Feet. Applying an interdisciplinary perspective given by the encounter between dance and movement studies, philosophy and cultural studies, the article tries to move the discussion beyond the simple critique of digital technologies as neutralizing forms of representation, and beyond the theoretical and practical attempts to preserve a ‘lived-in’ and ‘body-specific’ experience of the racially identifiable body. Instead, a different theoretical perspective is given, through which the motion capture apparatus can be defined as a differential marker, a machine that allows for an ‘immediated calculation’ of movement and race. Amplifying the humanly and digitally limited understanding of experience as data elaboration (datum as object of perception and knowledge), and putting data in relation to feelings, it is possible to understand the digital capture as a way to preserve movement, its singularity or its ‘datum of difference’, from a universal sameness of movements without bodies

Dance, technology and the material mutations of rhythm

The object of this thesis is the relation between dance and technology in all its different aspects, i. e. video-dance. Motion Capture, the Dance Forms choreographic software, interactive and Internet dance. The aim of the project is to take the analysis of the dance/technology relation beyond the notions of conscious imitation, resemblance and representation presupposed by structuralist and post-structuralist readings of the `mediatised' dance-text, and beyond the subjective perceptual/performative mechanisms explained by phenomenology. In order to avoid this textual/phenomenological impasse, I will move the analytical focus on the materiality of the body, perception and movement, as a common and undifferentiated field of emergence in which specific corpo-realities and positions emerge. This thesis will deploy a new methodology for the exploration of the dance/technology link, mapping the processes of rhythmic material transmission which link dancing human bodies and technical machines. Drawing on the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. this project will challenge the centrality attributed by phenomenology to the human body. by considering it as only one of the different components of a material process of rhythmic interchange in which all elements (human bodies of dancers and spectators. computers, screens and other technical machines) share the same rhythmic dimension. The trans-codification of rhythm and dance will be explored at three different levels: physical, cultural, technical. Nevertheless, the three analytical levels will not be considered as separate, autonomous and hierarchical fields but as coexistent layers interconnected by a common ground. The purpose of this process of stratification can be identified then with the conceptualisation of a material and abstract rhythmicity (a field of emergence in scientific, physical terms, or an immanent plane in philosophical terms) which is at the basis of all different dance/technology formations