Materialisation of concept for Surging Verticality

Video of Catherine having her movement initiated and supported by the tensioned cloth attached to her heels, after being guided by Maggie through a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement of lifting her heels and arms.

surging-verticality-catherine-001

Care is a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – and its absence in so much of what we experience in the worlds around us (I get so sad when I see people littering in the street or on trains and busses – dont they care about the spaces they live in – are they so numb to their environment that they couldn’t give a f#%ck?).

We could think of the art experience as an extension of this idea of care (not disimilar to concepts of  ‘conviviality’ or hospitality that circulated around discussion on ‘rellational aestheics’) – coupled perhaps with some flirtation (thinking here about the careful touch of two people dancing) – or the uncontainable  of an experienced enthusiast as they share the source of their joy to a new commer or fellow affcionado (look at THIS! and THAT!). Through this contact we bring something otherwise hidden – out from eachother – and that we together bear witness to for a breif moment that we may or may not call an ‘art’ experience, a lesson, a workshop, a meeting of friends etc.

The question then changes from what we as artists are ‘interested’ in – to what specifically we care about, and how we manifest this care through our actions and foci, through the situations and exchanges we create for other people.

So for me – with this project – I’m trying to articulate how I can extend a caring and enlivening touch to other people (and myself!) through experiences that allow us to become sensitive and aroused by subtle and not so subtle qulaities of touch, movement and proprioception. To this end – I have to temper my habitual impulse towards large intense experience – with the knowledge that its not via extreme, cathartic actions that we learn to refine our capacity for sensitivy and discernment

- but on the contrary -

its only by learning to be still, and attentive to small actions/sensations that we can start to gain a deeper awareness of where we are opperating FROM.

This blog has been written fresh after listening to a wonderful concert presented as part of Liquid Architecture, and in particular – an amzing set by Asmus Tietchens that featured a truely sensual use of dynamic volumes, sounds that caressesed and wove in and our of audibility, with lilting forms that had me swaying on the edge of my seat like a snake charmer’s cobra! The delicacy of this sound was supported by the strength of the sound system (occasional use of deep bass – confidently hinting at its full potential), and the improved listening acoustics (huge curtains drawn around the space at the start of his set). This experience left me deeply touched, and determined to acheive a more considered use of sound and volume dynamics in my forthcomming interactive art show at St. Vincent’s Hospital. To create a situation where to use an analogy – the snail feels safe to venture out of it’s shell – and to extend its ommatophores (eye stalks) out of its head – and into its surrounds (in this instance – a biofeedback system that is an environment that is both inside and outside). To extend this metaphor a little further – one doesn’t get the snail to extend its eye stalks by poking them with your fingers!

As I’ve been thinking about what physical structures I’d like to explore in the upcomming workshop – its become clear to me that most of it is all to do with tilt sensing, and to a lesser extent, accelerometers, and that these sensor could be added to any number of physical actions or objects that we could be interacting with: inversion tables, swinging ropes, hoops, high-heeled shoes etc.

Garth has discussed his work on creating an open and flexible sensor-data routing system, that could allow any one connected to access whichever stream of sensor data they want, in a flexible and dynamic way.

Given the collaborative nature of our project and the workshop at Performance Space in particular – I’d like to find some ways to implement this idea, and perhaps extend it in some other ways, so we dont end up just working away in isolation th eentire time. My focus here is on having gestural/movement data  available to the entire ensemble for comment and extension/transformation – for those of us (Garth, Somaya, myself) who work with software that can use OpenSoundControl (OSC) i.e. Max, PD etc.

The idea is to have an infrastructure for us to ‘jam’  with eachother on sonification,  visualisation and analyis work:

• A central router would enable all the senor data to be shared accros the studio;
• I have a Max object that enables you to receive OSC sensor data via simple drop down menu – that’s automatically populated by the incoming data;
• I have fuzzy logic graphic interfaces for max that enable you to build fuzzy rules to track complex movements, or just map activity within specific ranges to specific sounds or whatever; and
• I’d like to build some graphing interfaces that would enable us to observe patterns in the sensor data (i.e. body movement/orientation) – and have this data projected onto the wall so its very big (4 meters high) and easy to observe, and point at, touch, etc.

Maggie got us to draw a representation of our brains, and then to map onto them how our brain works, what it does, what it doesn’t do… A big task.  While we did this she reminded us, gently, to pay attention to how we were doing it.  As with all of our work here, the point of the task was not the map we were creating (though these were all lovely) but the process of making it, and what that tells us about ourselves and our habits. We were drawing a picture of our brain to help us identify our brain’s preferences, and its limitations.

I drew a mass of neural pathways and connections, then i began to identify things my brain can’t do (maths, map reading, drawing – general spatial and practical tasks), then i  drew the things my brain can do; write, explain, argue…then i wanted to draw love and relationships, family, friendships, general social interaction, then the animals i have relationships with (ruben cropped up in there), i drew listening and art, and money, then my relationship to the buildings i live and work in, the trees and rivers, the birds, sport… on and on it went.  Finally we stopped for a tea break.  I realised that i had begun to draw the whole world.  Then i looked at my picture.  Had I drawn the way the world exists in my brain, or had i drawn the way my brain exists in the world?  This picture reminds me of the wonderful reversibility of these two statements and ways of seeing our relationship to the world.
Look at the difference between my way of drawing my brain and Catherine’s.  She drew the way her brain feels.  I tried to analyse, categorise, and represent everything in it.  Guess who’s having more fun.

my brain

catherine's brain

When we took our blind folds off we saw that almost all of us had sculpted ourselves lying on our sides.  We had also all got our proportions almost exactly right.

The power of the blindfold is very inetersting to me right now.  Our visual sense so dominates our experience of the world – and it feels to me today that it is also linked firmly to my own analytical stance.  I appraise things with my eyes, i judge them.  Unable to see, I felt my way through the clay – i explored its properties, I worked with it and did not try to impose my version of the world on it. What would be the equivalent of a blindfold when I write?  What would help me work with the words and feel my way through them rather than trying to wrangle them into a form that I expect to be pleased with?

Can aspects of Awareness through Movement® be applied in the creation of interactive artworks to broaden the scope of the artwork and expand the individual participant’s experience of the work?

In our initial discussions about TTTB, fellow Feldenkrais practitioner Maggie Slattery and I decided that engaging with attention to sensation was something we valued.

As practitioners and participants we’re being asked to feel something and then articulate it. We’re not necessarily interested in the outcome, more in how and why the participant in an interactive artwork engages with the process. However, we do feel there needs to be an acknowledgment of Quantum Physics here – that any phenomenon being observed is changed by the observation.

As practitioners of the Feldenkrais Method we normally remove as many external agents that will interfere with one’s engagement/relationship with oneself. The student becomes both the external and external agent and the boundaries in between.

I’m now at Riversdale. Such a breath-taking view from here. Breath-taking. I’m wrestling with my desire to just stare down the length of the Shoalhaven River as I sit here now and blog….
Today I began experimenting with a workshop I’ve developed over a number of years called “the Distinct Body”. The TTTB project allows me the luxurious opportunity of stretching it further, turning it upside down and inside out with the other participants.

Specifically the experiment of the Distinct Body is aimed at an exploration of felt experience and perceived notions of the familiar and unfamiliar body through themes of internal structure, volume and outline. I’m curious to extend the relationship between Feldenkrais and self-definition.
And so on day one of this two-day Distinct Body workshop the participants of TTTB are sharing in this experiment with me.  The level of attention each participant contributed today was so fruitful. Rich.

How clearly can we define and express the nature of our own bodies to ourselves and others?
Clear distinctions were injected into the language during this first part of the workshop: Draw an outline of a body and fill it with a skeleton .
Participants’ drawings were highly individual, yet similar at this stage.
Then they were led through a Feldenkrais-based session focussed on specific aspects of their own bodies- in stillness, in movement, in balance. Bones in relation to outlines, form and volumes.
Again they were asked to draw and this time the scale was more specific- 1:1.
However it was stressed that they now draw their own bodies- their own outline and skeleton.
During this drawing session I asked them many questions focussed upon translation of the direct experiences from the lesson as opposed to the drive for anatomical accuracy and the role of self-judgement. Participants were encouraged to stop regularly and stand on a chair, placed in different positions to view their drawings.
Following this they worked in pairs – one lying directly on top of their drawing whilst the other traced around their actual outline.
In most cases the traced outline was very close in scale and proportion to the outline drawn freehand.
Was it the Feldenkrais, the guided attention, the growth of awareness?
Tomorrow we’ll experiment more with volume, with making bodies in three dimensions.
More to follow….

Attending to the sounds in the landscape, and realising I could bring the same quaity of openended attentivness to sensations inside my body. Observing breath (something I’ve been interested in with a previous interactive artwork ‘Drawing Breath’), listing to ‘the wind’ in the ladscape – realising that the wind it self has no sound – what I can hear is the sound of surfaces being moved by the wind: the leaves, the grass, a stand of trees, etc. Applying this insight to my experience of studying breath – not the air moving in and out of me per se, but feeling how this movement of air influences, and is influenced by various details of my body: stomach, pelvis, trachea, nostrils, tongue, ribs, diaphragm. Sensations weaving in and out of eachother, like my eyes and ears wander through details of the landscape around me.

Seeing if I could attend to both landscape and body at the same time: in counterpoint.

Turbulence, flutter, ebb and flow.

Reflecting on the passage of seasons, multiple time frames, from minutes, to hours, days, years, centuries: in a landscape, in a body, in a succesion of bodies (familly).

Drawing a life-size outline of my body, then filling it in with bones as they felt to me.

We were instructed to focus on drawing from experience, and not worry about what what we think it ’should’ look like i.e. a picture of a skeleton.

Easier said than done, and I immediately started to literally trace my body with the marker, only realizing 10 minutes later that the task was to draw this outline from FELT experience. A beautiful drawing that helped to connect me to an experience pf my self as organized energy; a set of energetic flows and radiations.

While creating this drawing, I was struck by how difficult it was to translate between my felt internal experience of my bones and the outline of my body, and the external, two-dimensional image that was accumulating on the paper before my eyes – a seemingly vast gap or language barrier. Later Catherine remarked that this issue of translation was fundamental to many forms of creative practice: how to articulate a feeling, or to reproduce something so radically internal, by way of an external media (i.e. clay, wood, paint, pixels etc.).

My felt experience of my skeleton was fragmentary, details fading in an out of focus, followed by blank spots of total mystery: what is that shape inside me? Some clues as to a general volume, but few specifics.

I think a complete skeleton mapping would take me a day or two, such was the difficulty I experienced – both in the articulation of the feelings, and in their description by way of a series of marks on paper. Its incredible that form of something so fundamental as the bones upon which we live should be so mysterious and elusive.

Looking at the skeleton Maggie had created, I was struck by the way that the bones in her skeleton seemed to describe lines of force and energy, rather than inert pieces of bone.

This process of articulation and translation: systematically feeling something inside your body, and then describing that feeling by way of some external representation, also raises questions for me about what’s happening on the other side of the process: the task requires a shift in point of view, in a way that you wouldn’t generally experience when drawing something external to yourself, i.e. a landscape before you, a bowl of fruit, another person’s body.

I assumed that this translation requires a shift in point of view from an experience of containment and extension, towards a third-person, externalized perspective, but there was nothing in Catherine’s request that required this – but it could just as well have been a seemingly abstract collection of swirls and knobbly things spread out across the sheet of paper – which makes me want to attempt this exercise again, with a different set of assumptions around what constitutes a ‘drawing’ of a (MY) skeleton, irrespective of whether anyone else recognizes it or not – the emphasis being on the lines and volumes of the drawing communicating my felt sense of various aspects of my body experience.

This workshop struck me as a very connected to the idea of ‘making strange’ – rendering something so fundamental, but taken for granted as our own skeletal system, and generating representations that seem bizzare and fantastic in rellation to how these structures are conventionally represented.

Looking at these drawings, I feel these skeletons inside me – I put on the artwork, and feel my self inside the body represented on the sheet of paper. I feel the peculiar distortions of volume, length and depth decribed through the marks on the paper – this is a big part of their charm and attraction for me, much like the experience maps created by participants in my ‘Heart Library Project’.

Today I made two self portraits.  Catherine ran a workshop that made me reflect on the question of how well I know my own body from the inside, and how able I am to represent that from the outside.  We lay for a long time on our backs imagining someone tracing around our body with a marker.  Then we tried to draw an outline of our own body and draw our skeletons within the outline. When we had finished we teamed up with a partner and drew round each others bodies. You learn alot about being a body from doing this – though i’m not sure I can say exactly what i learnt yet. One of the interesting challenges was to get the proportions right. I kept trying to compress myself.  I couldn’t believe how far my knees are from my waist.  I was struck by how much space my body takes up in a room.  How long my limbs and neck are, how long my whole body is.

Later Jonathan took us into the great outdoors and asked us to think about the relationship between our bodies and our surroundings.  Out on the side of a hill, with bush all around me i suddenly felt very small.  The feeling of my largeness vanished. I was drawn to a little hut – because the hut was built at human scale and seemed to help me modulate between me and everything else.  Sitting on the verandah of the hut I thought – i wish i could fly up and see what size i appear to be from the outside, and compare it to what size i feel .  I went looking for sticks that would be the same length as my bones so that I could get some perspective on the relationship of scale between me and the world.  I gathered and measured and gathered and measured and slowly built a copy of my skeleton in sticks on the ground. My vertebrae were made of wombat poo (the driest poo of any mammal! – that’s a true fact). It was so comforting to be able to measure sticks against myself and then arrange them, rather than having to draw the way i imagined myself to be.  When i’d finished my self portrait in sticks i walked up the hill and looked down at it from above.  I am very very small.  Jonathan took a photo of me and my portrait together so that i could check if i’d got the scale right.  Not bad at all.

I worried that to anyone coming along it would look macabre – a stick skeleton by an old hut. But Jonathan thought it would be ok to leave it there.

self portrait with textas

Self portrait with sticks

This video from Tom Tlalim and Paola Tognazzi shows a nice wearable design that uses clip on (or velco) neoprene bands that allow the participant to wear up to six (or more) wii controllers.

W_space: the fully wearable Wiimote audio controller. Photo Courtesy Tom Tlalim

W_space: On the Wall: The Wiimotes and Nunchuk attachments fit into elastic sleeves. Photo courtesy of Tom Tlalim

Its interesting to look at the quality of the movement in this video. Seems to me there is common set of movement patterns that people engage in in this type of movement-based interactive sound design.

This reminds me that I’d very much like to do a video-based survey of what movements should/could correlate to different types of electronic sound – a reverse engineering research approach – to survey categories of movement as they relate to peoples experience of sound – I suspect its not as individual as we might assume. At the very least, it will make for some very cute interpretive dance video!