words … communication ………..

One of the challenges  we face (often a factor in communicating experience ) is the imprecision of  language.  It seem then that one of the first steps is a glossary – a common understanding of what the terms being used actually refer to – the problem is of course cyclical, in that the use of a singular communication modality is nearly always limiting.

Most sensing systems have been moving towards multi-modal approaches for this same reason.

One example of this is a difference between David Roekeby’s VNS installation and the tracking systems utilized in the installation Fish Bird. In Fish Bird, 4 video cameras mounted in the roof are used to generate a blob at x,y position for each person in the active space, however as an adjunct to this, laser systems are used to check the presence of a human – that is a solid body, and to cross correlate that information with the video data in order to authenticate each set of data as cogent.  By contrast David Roekeby’s VNS installation utilises a single camera view divided into a grid of rows and colums – the presence of the body in a standing posture caused sound mapped to different rows in the camera view to be played simultaneously – lying on the floor and moving the hand up and down through the rows (higher and lower from the ground) elicited quite different and much more differentiated sonic outcomes that allowed for more intentionality in the performance of the work.

Further considerations over the last 24 hrs have included a contemplation of semantics – for instance when undertaking a Feldenkrais session, it seemed to me that the words  Awareness and Attention were being used interchangabl.  I wanted to think though the difference and where these perceptual conditions reside – for instance, possible not in the rational mind… possible in an extended consiousness … within the skin or the muscle …..

some of the words and concepts I have been focused on include:
Awareness  →  Attention ? What’s the difference – where do they reside?

Constraints….. Probabilities.  The semantics of choice… does usage/language form differing affordances, opportunities, expectations and perspectives on what happens?  Can happen?

Intention … function …  in  Feldenkrais, movement seems to be considered/categorised by function.  How does the fiunation and the intentionallity of the gesture relate/inter-relate?

About Garth Paine

Garth Paine is a senior lecturer in Music Technology and Researcher at the MARCS Auditory labs, University of Western Sydney, where he leads the Virtual, Interactive performance research project (VIPRe). He is internationally regarded as an innovator in the field of interactivity in new media arts. He was awarded The RMIT Innovation Research Award in 2002. He is a member of the advisory panel for the Electronic Music Foundation, New York and one of 17 advisors to the UNESCO funded Symposium on the Future. His immersive interactive environments have been exhibited in Australia, Europe, Japan, USA, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He has been part of the organising and peer review panels for the International Conference On New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) since it’s inception and invited as guest editor of Organised Sound, a pre-eminent international journal on music technology published by Cambridge University Press. Dr Paine is the holder of a number of ARC research grants focusing on interactivity for musical performance and realtime interactive systems for interactive dance and theatre performances. He was the Australia Council for the Arts, New Media Arts Fellowship at RMIT University in 2000.

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