technology and the body

At the intersection of the arts and technology is where I want to be. Looking back on my life and looking at myself now, this has been at the heart of all of my deepest questions about how I want to live and who I want to be. I go through phases where I am fascinated by and deeply engaged in all things technology; movies, the internet, Iphone, theatrical technologies, etc etc etc..... and then when I feel like I've lost a sense of who I am as a person, I shun technology; meditate, dance, go out into nature, experiment with food, pay attention to what I'm thinking, how I'm feeling, how external things affect me. I know that I can't only be into one or the other because that is the nature of life these days and to forgo one or the other would be to either reject society which would be lonely or reject myself which is equally as lonely.......... So that space - that crevice where technology meets the human body, is where I want to be, is where I want to ask questions, is where I want to experiment......

I reread my master's thesis and decided that it is deeply personal..... so personal that it probably doesn't make sense... but the best writing is the most honest, the most personal writing..... i can sense the ways in which this is dishonest because I had to write it for school and had limited time and blah blah other reasons, but I can also sense that, in it's entirety, it says something about me and the questions that i am most interested in. It is demonstrative of what i care about most... of navigating that space between being part of the whole, which really means engaging with technology since it is such a huge part of life, and being an individual, which means rejecting anything external.....

Dance, Digital Technology, and the Human Condition;

 New Ways of Seeing, Being, and Belonging

The one inescapable condition surrounding the choreographer in his chosen art is the hard realism of "now." All other arts can wait for the verdict of history if they are rebuffed by the contemporary world--the choreographer not so. To keep faith with himself, he cannot pander to popular taste; he must choose his subject and the means to body it forth from his total convictions about values in art and life. If his work happens to be stimulating to audiences in their current state of development, he is very lucky indeed; but if not, he must resign himself to abandoning his dream child. Not for him the consolation of hanging his creation on the wall in all its original freshness, and waiting hopefully for perhaps posthumous appreciation. There must be hundreds, possibly thousands of dances--some of which were probably masterpieces--completely lost because of this tragic ephemerality. In contrast, one only has to think of painting and music, so often savagely rejected in their day, which a grateful world finally comes to accept and admire. This painful reality of the choreographer's "now" is a powerful temptation to abandon conviction and the most extreme flights of fancy in the interest of survival and prosperity. The wonder is that there are still so many choreographers who will not compromise, and who hug their ideals to their hearts in spite of failure and adversity.

Doris Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances

When writing first emerged, Socrates voiced concerns that this new way of cataloguing thoughts was “taking the soul out of an exchange" (Phaedrus). Likewise, media critics today argue that Google is killing memory. In the Dance world, critics fret over the insurgence of digital technology on what has traditionally been a primarily kinesthetic artform. The present resonates with the past and history continues to expose trends and patterns in the way we conceive, perceive, and receive new forms of existence. According to Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the paradigms that both shape our world and allow us to acquire knowledge about and within it fluctuate according to their capacity to meet our needs at any given point in time. Each new social, political, artistic, scientific, and cultural paradigm must therefore be evaluated with regard to its positioning amongst other explanatory paradigms, rather than for its ability to elucidate the world we live in today. “What must the world be like in order that (wo)man may know it?" (Kuhn) is the question that drives (wo)man to create. New languages and ways of being and seeing are constantly being created. These new languages reorder our senses, allowing us to discover life anew and reminding us that identity is contestable, porous, and variable. In the performance arts, the recent fusion of new media technologies and dance offers us new ways of communicating through which we might reinvent, reimagine, and reconceptualize the social world.

New media technologies are reconfiguring the way we create, disseminate, document, and present performance art. Likewise, the discipline of Dance, like all forms of art, has a distinct way of speaking. A uniquely kinesthetic artform, dance has the capacity to ask specific questions about, with, and through the use of technology and its relationship to the body. Ultimately, dance performance has specific properties and characteristics that allow digital technology to coexist with the body in a way that other artforms are incapable of establishing. The fear of new media technologies threatening to subsume human beings under cyborgic regimes is widespread. Beyond ethical critiques of the fusion of dance and new media technologies, we might take a more socio-evolutionary perspective and ask how a new language is being created through the synthesis of the roving body and the digital world and how this new language engages our perception and reception of the world in new ways. To familiarize our inherently unknowable world is at the heart of all creation. What the relationship between dance and digital technology and the fears about this new way of speaking ultimately point to are the “necessary fictions” that form the foundation upon which the human sensorium can perceive and ‘know’ its inherently unknowable world. What paradigms about the human condition, identity formation, socialization, politics, religion, nationalism, ethics, art, and other modes of belonging are in place and how does the new language of dance and new media technologies offer insight into these spaces of social construction and imagined utopias?

The nature of communication is constantly changing. The radio rendered communication one-way and enabled mass messages to be dispersed without any feedback. The telephone birthed two-way communication, a built in response system that allowed messages to be sent back and forth. The Internet serves as a portal to and through all of these worlds. Cinema communicates through visual images set in frames, poetry by aestheticizing semantics, music through tonality. Each of these mediums speak to and with each other. Collaboration between different communicative mediums is not a new phenomenon. While merging dance with digital technology creates a new aesthetics, it can also be situated and studied in the context of other patterns of artistic and technological collaboration. How does dance speak? How does technology speak? Both have something to say, a particular way of speaking that is unique unto each of them and new modes of communicating that are created when these two forms of expression merge.

Meaning is relayed in many different ways through many different channels of communication. Marshall McLuhan, speaking about technology, writes that

the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology (McLuhan, 15).

To think of dance as a medium of expression and an extension of ourselves is to reinforce

in the human subject his/her capacity to communicate kinesthetically and to reaffirm

his/her fundamental position as a corporeal being. In this sense, dance introduces a new scale or way of communicating, perceiving, and experiencing both ourselves and the social world. Likewise, new media technologies, while widespread and multifaceted, can be deconstructed in accordance with the laws of digital media. Digital technologies have certain properties that enable them to be studied, categorized, and labeled as such. Both digital technologies and dance performance are the message, yet at the same time, to claim that the human subject of whom they serve as an extension has no agency is to deny the fact that our relationship between art and new media is indeed symbiotic.  In order not to fall prey to the reductive and incarcerating perspective of technological determinism, we might first determine how dance and new media technologies speak, respectively, and then survey the new landscape and forms that are created through the merging of both in order to reaffirm the symbiotic relationship that exists between ourselves and these communicative mediums. Identifying the potentialities that are created when the forms of our existence collide highlights the fluid and porous nature of culture and society. 

Choreographers create and dancers dance for many different reasons. The multifaceted spectrum of motivations that inspires the creation of art is as far reaching as the human catalogue of personalities and identity. Art is a way to represent life, to aestheticize life, and to politicize life and the discipline of dance is one such form of expression through which such prerogatives can be articulated. Dance speaks in a very particular way. While dance choreographers cite dramatically different motives for choreographing and communicating their work, the common element in each creation is the human body being employed as a communicative tool. Dance speaks kinesthetically. Ann Daly writes, “dance, although it has a visual component, is fundamentally a kinesthetic art whose apperception is grounded not just in the eye but in the entire body” (Daly 2002). According to Daly’s conception of dance as a kinesthetic artform, the audience not only sees a dance, but also feels a dance in a way that employs the entire human sensorium. The roving body is the object and the primary medium of communication in a dance performance. How the body is manipulated, perceived, and experienced by audiences may vary, yet at the heart of all dance is the human body. Mary M. Smyth, in Kinesthetic Communication in Dance, discusses how dance has a special way of communicating and the many ways in which audiences sensually experience movement. She uses the notion of ‘kinesthesis,’ “which relates to movement of one’s own body while the movement of another’s body must be perceived by one or more of the five exteroceptive systems” (Smyth, 19). How one can experience kinesthesis in one’s own body while not actually dancing, but rather by viewing a dance is thus a product of our five senses, which act as channels of input. Smyth, however, leaves her work inconclusive, pointing to directions and avenues of inquiry down which we might look to gain a better understanding of how, exactly, kinesthesis gets communicated. She leaves the potentiality for determining how kinesthesia works open, arguing that “investigation of the processes involved in perception does not take the magic from the experience itself, but magic should always be part of the experience” (Smyth, 22). The mystique with which we regard kinesthetic communication is illustrative of the mystical quality of dance, the imperative of the elusively ephemeral “now” that mystifies those who wish to capture and know it, yet that intrigues those who wish to be constantly reminded of that which they don’t know. Lee Reynolds, in Glitz and Glamor or Atomic Rearrangement contrasts the response of experienced audiences who can read dance more effortlessly versus inexperienced audiences to whom it is less accessible. She writes that

contemporary dance can appear particularly intimidating because it frequently lacks a narrative framework and its movement vocabulary is often unfamiliar to audiences. Aficionados of contemporary dance often seek precisely this unfamiliar and even experimental quality – the shock of the new – whereas spectators without specialist knowledge can be attracted to dance in its more popular forms – notably on screen – because it is presented in contexts which are more familiar to them, such as well-known narratives or music (Reynolds, 20).

This ‘shock of the new’ makes the live dance performance seem inaccessible

to inexperienced viewers because of their presumption that there is a movement

vocabulary necessary to read a dance performance. Reynolds goes on to juxtapose

popular dance movements and dances formatted into narrative structures and set to

music versus more contemporary and ambiguous choreography such as that of William

Forsythe and Twyla Tharp. If we create art and media in as much as they create us, then

the very fact that mass culture has incorporated dance into more readable forms of art that

follow a narrative structure such as theater, film, and television is indicative of the fact

that dance has been rendered illegible and as a form of ‘high art’ that requires

specific knowledge in order to be viewed. As shall be argued, digital media provides

one outlet through which dance might be demystified for the ‘common’ viewer.

In as much as dance speaks in primarily kinesthetic terms, digital technology also has way of communicating all its own. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich outlines the evolution of media technologies and shows how today’s digital media uses the techniques used in print and analog media in order to represent and simulate images. Manovich asks “how do conventions and techniques of old media – such as the rectangular frame, mobile viewpoint, and montage – operate in new media? If we construct an archaeology connecting new computer-based techniques of media creation with previous techniques of representation and simulation, where should we locate the essential historical breaks?”(Manovich, 9). The very fact that these ‘historical breaks’ need be called into question is indicative of the abstractness of history itself. Manovich demonstrates how new media operate according to five principles; numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. These five principles are the elements that allow digital media to speak. An important characteristic of digital media is that is can be broken down into discrete, fractal-like units (the first two principles). This enables the media to be manipulated at the will of the user (the last three principles). The evolution from old media forms into new ones can be thought of as “analog media converted to a digital representation. In contrast to analog media, which is continuous, digitally encoded media is discrete” (Manovich, 50). The ability of new media to be broken down into units is a fundamental aspect of this new generation of media forms. It is this characteristic of digital media, its capacity to be broken down into discrete units, that makes its collaboration with the discipline of dance the subject of so much criticism.

An attempt to demystify the respective communication strategies of new media technologies and dance cannot help but evoke notions of linguistics. While the internet and digital technologies are readily accessible and decipherable for both the commonplace and experienced interface user, dance performance remains largely out of reach. One important distinction to bear in mind is that while digital technology can be broken down into elements that are analogous to spoken or written language (ie. Manovich’s five principles), a dance performance derives its meaning from being experienced as a whole. In Understanding Dance, McFee uses the Wittgenstein slogan “meaning is what the explanation of meaning explains” (McFee, 113) to suggest that meaning in dance cannot be deciphered in the same way as meaning in linguistics or, by extension, digital technology. On the contrary, “the meaning of dances is identified with, roughly, the sum of criticism of these dances” (McFee, 114). We might broaden this perspective to say that everyone is a critic and, thus, to derive meaning out of a dance is not to search, in vain, for nonexistent discrete units, but rather to allow the explanation of the meaning of the dance to speak for itself.  Is digital technology trying futilely to reconcile the necessarily ‘tragic ephemerality’ of dance? What does it mean that new media technologies that can be broken down into discrete units, easily accessed, and essentially provide a way of ‘knowing’ the object at hand can collaborate with a medium of expression that derives its value in large part from its ephemerality? In a Benjaminian reading of this trend, the motivation behind applying new media technologies to dance is “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get-closer’ to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness…” (255, Benjamin).  Our insatiable desire to know the object at hand can be determined to be one reason for the new landscapes that are being created through the intersection of dance and new media technologies.

The intersection of digital technology and live dance performance is itself a performative act. The coexistence of the two not only serves as a new form of artistic expression, but also as a testament to our capacity to create new life, new ways of communicating and expressing, and new ways of being in the world. The relationship between dance and digital technology presents audiences with new ways of seeing. It serves as a catalyst for the emergence of other new forms of expression and ways of being which include, but are not limited to, new ways of directing, rehearsing, presenting, reproducing, educating, choreographing, and critiquing performance art. To apply digital technology to dance is to create an entirely new artistic discipline that speaks to other forms of life and community. Current evolutions that have spawned from these new ways of presenting, representing, and disseminating performance art point to human agency and dispels notions of technological and kinesthetic determinism.

Using digital technology to somehow alter a dance performance is a new trend whose reverberations echo far beyond itself. Digital technology is being used in innovative ways to aestheticize, politicize, and serve a representative function in dance performances. Currently, the University of California at Berkeley runs a theater camp entitled Dance and New Media where high schools students are afforded the opportunity to experiment with using digital media in dance choreography. The Northern European Kedja project recently held a conference called Dance and New Media where scholars from the disciplines of Dance and Design, as well as artists and choreographers were invited to discuss and display ideas about the new landscape of live dance performance. Universities such as the University of Leeds offer research in performance technologies and the intersection of dance with digital media. The British Film and Television Academy is in the process of creating a new awards category called 'interactive multimedia.’ Dance practitioners such as David Forsythe are investigating the potentialities of making choreography more legible by fusing dance performance with digital media. ChoreoPro recently released Dance Designs, a digital choreographic tool that allows dance practitioners to digitally catalogue, create, and disseminate their dances. The trends are multifaceted and far-reaching. Digital technology is not only creating a new aesthetics, but also new opportunities for collaboration between different disciplines. New art precipitates new life and vice versa. The reverberations of one new way of speaking inspire many others. What ultimately ensues are entirely new ways of belonging and being and new landscapes through which we can derive and negotiate meaning.  

             From their inception and wildfire-like dispersion, new media technologies have been the source of a wide variety of fears about the human subject being confined by them. Tim Lenoir reminds us that

“from the very beginning of critical engagement with computer technology, concern has been voiced about the potential, feared by many, celebrated by some, of the end of humanity. The fear that technological developments associated with computer technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and more recently nanotechnology will succeed in displacing humanity through an evolutionary process leading first to cyborg/human assemblage and ultimately to the extinction and replacement of the human altogether” (Hansen, 2)

This fear is echoed by many others. Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, in an articled in Wired Magazine writes that  "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech — are threatening to make humans an endangered species." Baudrillard claimed that "the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it….It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself." (166). The ethical dimension of digital technology’s widespread influence is clearly a hot topic. However, the fact remains that the human being is unavoidably the source both from which and about which these concerns both emanate and are concerned. To deny this fact is to deny human agency and to reduce the human subject to what cybertheorist humdog claims we are destined to become; “a community of signs, nicely boxed, categorized and inventoried, ready for consumption” (humdog, Pandora’s Vox). To deny human agency is to embrace technological determinism and deny the fact that the relationship between human beings and their forms of existence is indeed symbiotic. "Technology [in its everyday sense] is not equivalent to the essence of technology." (Heidegger, 9). It is this essence that we must discover and to which we must defer our awe if we are to begin to understand our relationship with digital media.  

The human body, like digital technology, can be though of in terms of the physical elements that make it up. Like digital technology, it can be analyzed in terms of the discrete units that comprise it; cells, genes, organs, muscles, bones. We are, in one sense, a holistic composition of all of these elements working together to create a physical body. However, the human body, unlike digital technology, exists in real time and cannot be separated into accessibly manipulable frames. It is this body that is always the object of dance.

The material of the dance as an art form consists in human bodies and their movements. Ever since the discovery was made that a given man is mortal, and that his mortality could be inferred from the mortality of all human beings… the material of the art of dance has been recognized as a thing which comes into being and soon passes away (Feibleman, 1).

Whether or not and how it is reproduced, represented, or simulated by, though, and with digital media, what is always at stake as both object and subject of dance is the human being and his/her relationship with the world. Doris Humphrey writes of the “tragic ephemerality” of dance, a fleetingness of the mobile body that lies always just outside the grasp of digital media’s attempts to represent and simulate. Benjamin’s warning that what is lost in the age of technological reproducibility is the aura of the work of art here bears consideration. It is the necessarily ephemeral aura of dance that gives it its definitive quality and the very characteristic that digital media attempts, in naïve, to capture. It is the ephemeral nature of dance that makes it notoriously elusive and allegorically able to speak about the forms of existence and communicablity (politics, art, religion, socialization, culture) through human beings commune. In this sense, dance performance might be one of the only forms about which, when speaking about the human condition, we can say the medium is the message. The new forms of communicability and expression that exist when digital technology and dance merge can inspire us to imagine the infinite possibilities that such collaborative efforts between such forms of existence might inspire. New ways of seeing and perceiving the world inspire us to reimagine what we think of as irrelevant. The act of rendering relevant the irrelevant is the catalyst through which we can reimagine and subsequently reshape the landscape of human interactions.