IMF 2014

Open source Bodies-Spaces

International METABODY Forum 2014 proposes on the one hand a redefinition of both space and the body as processes open to permanent and critical reinvention, on the other the inseparability of space and body as co-constitutive elements of a relational process: the metabody.

It is generally taken for granted that body and space are material entities that preexist movement and change: this is part of a long platonic tradition that attempts to fix the movement of reality in traceable patterns, a foundation of contemporary control society.

Metabody proposes to rethink both space and body as process of becoming that emerge from movement relations thus placing the emphasis in the plasticity of the world and our own capacity to intervene in how certain power operations craft our field of relations.

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INTERNACIONAL METABODY FORUM GENOA 2014

Metahuman/Metaformance Studies 2014/MetamediaLab

7-9 March in Genoa in Casa Paganini

The third Metabody Forum takes place in Genoa, Italy, hosted by Co-organizer Infomus from Universitá degli Studii di Genova.

It is a joit event with the Eyesweb Week and ISSSM (International School on Systematic Musicology and Sound and Music Computing) organised by Infomus, and takes place at the historical building of Casa Paganini in the ols town.

INTERNACIONAL METABODY FORUM MADRID 2014

International Metabody Forum, IMF 2014 Madrid has programmed over two weeks, from 7 to 20 july, transdisciplinary activities in varied formats, from performances in open public spaces and in private homes to presentations, workshops, installations, an international conference and a gathering, in several main cultural venues of Madrid including: Medialab Prado, La Casa Encendida, Universidad Autónoma and Dance Conservatory.[leer +]

The forum is the dissemination, education event and creation and research meeting of the european project METABODY, which critically and creatively explores the relation between information technologies and non verbal, corporeal expression. METABODY is a european project that goes in coutercurrent to the mainstream research financed worldwide, oriented to the increase of social control, homogenisation, standardisation and prediction. METABODY proposes the need to facilitate environments and behaviours where indeterinacy and unpredictability are fostered, and not captured or capitalized, as foundation for cutural diversity and sustainability.

International Metabody Forum, IMF 2014 Madrid proposes to reinvent space, not as a static reality, but as a dynamic process open to critical reinvention, an “open source” space that reconfigures and emerges from the movements of bodies in all their diversity, across dance and differently abled bodies. IMF 2014 Madrid proposes to redefine the notion of space as an open process of critical and creative reconfiguration and emergence. IMF 2014 Madrid proposes to rethink the notion of space as emerging from the movements and bodies that dynamicaly configure it.

IMF 2014 Madrid proposes a transversal move across dance and differently abled bodies in which to rethink plurality from movement: a dynamic, plural space that emerges from the plurality of movements and expressions, a space that expresses the dynamic plurality of bodies. A plural space will be one that is openended, and open to reconfiguration, with regard to the movements and bodies that constitute it.

SUMMARY

International Metabody Forum, IMF 2014 Madrid has programmed over two weeks, from 7 to 20 july, transdisciplinary activities in varied formats, from performances in open public spaces and in private homes to presentations, workshops, installations, an international conference and a gathering, in several main cultural venues of Madrid including: Medialab Prado, La Casa Encendida, Universidad Autónoma and Dance Conservatory.

The forum is the dissemination, education event and creation and research meeting of the european project METABODY, which critically and creatively explores the relation between information technologies and non verbal, corporeal expression. METABODY is a european project that goes in coutercurrent to the mainstream research financed worldwide, oriented to the increase of social control, homogenisation, standardisation and prediction. METABODY proposes the need to facilitate environments and behaviours where indeterinacy and unpredictability are fostered, and not captured or capitalized, as foundation for cutural diversity and sustainability.

International Metabody Forum, IMF 2014 Madrid proposes to reinvent space, not as a static reality, but as a dynamic process open to critical reinvention, an “open source” space that reconfigures and emerges from the movements of bodies in all their diversity, across dance and differently abled bodies. IMF 2014 Madrid proposes to redefine the notion of space as an open process of critical and creative reconfiguration and emergence. IMF 2014 Madrid proposes to rethink the notion of space as emerging from the movements and bodies that dynamicaly configure it.

IMF 2014 Madrid proposes a transversal move across dance and differently abled bodies in which to rethink plurality from movement: a dynamic, plural space that emerges from the plurality of movements and expressions, a space that expresses the dynamic plurality of bodies. A plural space will be one that is openended, and open to reconfiguration, with regard to the movements and bodies that constitute it.

The Forum has included varied formats and proposals including:

Urban interventions

Open source space – the Forum has included several interventions in urban space: from the performance/metaformance Metakinesphere by Jaime del Val, in which a naked body wears a tranlucent portable architecture that changes with the body’s movement while moving through the cityscape, tothe workshops Disalingments and Modes of percepotual interaction, which have included different modes of intervention in urban space aiming at new forms of openended perception and behaviour.

Sexual Minorities and performances in homes

Microsexes proposes an approach to minoritarian sexualities from the practice of Reverso – Jaime del Val, through a new format of one to one encounters, in private consultation and private homes. Microsexes proposes how, thorugh a radical redefintion of perception, beyond the dominance of centralized vision and perspective, the possibility for a new kind of body emerges, in which there is no possibility to categorise or formalise a binary sex conception: a body of infinite potential and indeterminate sexes that exceeds the dualistic formations of both gender, sex, sexulity and intimacy.

Functional diversity /disabilities

4 workshops, in collabration with ONCE Foundation, have been addressed to people with disabilities, including the Metabody Box workshop, an instrument for generating music with bodily gestures and micromovements that allows to give new expressive dimensions to gestures of peoples with and without disabilities, or the Microdances workshop, where canmeras on the skin become the eyes of a new body that moves in a new scale, micromovements become huge emergent landscapes regardless of form and functionality, as well as the workshops by Marta Leirado, Cristina Palmese and José Luis Carles.

Architecture prototypes

6 different physical and digital interactie/intra-active architecture prototypes have been presented in Medialab Prado, including the installation-performances-metaformances Amorphogenesis by Reverso and Ambiguous topologies by Hyperbody, the performance Integration04 by Dieter Vandoren, Reflectego and Robozoo, two projects by students from Technical University Delft in the Netherlands and the wearable architecture project Metakinesphere by Reverso, projects that propose new relations between body and space where both become inseparable aspects of emergent relational fields.

Dance and technology

Instituto Stocos has presented in La Casa Encendida, Neural Narratives 1:Phantom Limb, a new piece in which dancers interact with digital creatures that constitute extensions of the dancer’s body.

International Conference

In the Universidad Autónoma an international conference on the history and philosphy of movement and gesture has taken place including keynote presentations by philosophers Brian Massumi and Erin Manning and by historian Beatriz Pichel based in UK.

Seven Workshops

As part of the Metaformance Studies programme and of the Metamedialab of the Metabody Project 7 workshops have taken place, six of the in La Casa Encendida and one in the Dance Conservatory, two of them including sessions in public urban space, four of them for people with disabilities, embracing such varied topics as: history of gesture, sensors for the interactive stage, musical instruments for people with disabilities, sensory explorations of urban space, transformations of the body, perception and sexuality through placing cameras on the skin, and techniques of indeterminate movement.

International Gathering

During four days in Medialab Prdao the 4th international gathering of the METABODY partners has taken place, in which an overview of the first year of the project has been done as well as proposing the forthcoming lines of collaborative research and creation.

IMF – INTERNATIONAL METABODY FORUM

IMF is a unique transdisciplinary event in the convergence of arts, technosciences, humanities and social minorities that proposes a critical reinvention of communication technologies highlighting the importance of nonverbal and embodied expressions as substrate of cultural diversity, which is being undermined by the homogenising impact of current information technologies.

The forum embraces the numerous events and activities taking place over the 5 years of the METABODY project along two interconnected branches:

METAMEDIALAB

  • Presentations, exhibitions and performances of the artistic works, prototypes and devices developed in the project
  • International meeting of the project partners
  • Production, research and creation workshops.

METAFORMANCE STUDIES

  • Conference
  • Educational workshops

IMF 2014 – Open source bodies and spaces

The International Metabody Forum 2014 focuses on the relation of bodies and space as subject to creative and critical reinvention, therefore as an “opensource” approach to these categories often perceived as immobile, which are conceived here as dynamic.

  • Genoa – March 2014 – New interfaces of expressive movement
  • Madrid – July 2014- Open Source Space – Movement, Dance and Differently abled bodies
  • Amsterdam – December 2014.

Venues

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HIGHLIGHTS IN MADRID 2014

This year’s forum in Madrid explores the convergencies between architecture, dance and diverse abled bodies for the production of an “open source space”, i.e. a space that can be critically and creatively reconfigured and reinvented.

The results of the 1st year of the project will be presented, including:

Interactive architecture prototypes, performances and installations: in the auditorium of Medialab Prado

  • Amorphogenesis is an instrument and installation for digital interactive/intra-active architecture by Jaime del Val in which the movement of bodies transforms amorphous digital meshes in neverending emergence. Amorphogenesis is also a philosophical concept by Jaime del Val that points to an account of movement as not subjected to form nor poiting to it.
  • Ambiguous topologies is an immersive multi-modal spatial installation by Hyperbody – TUDelft exploring the tendencies of swarm systems to generate emergent geometric networks as a response to as well as a trigger for movement of multiple bodies in space and time.
  • Integrations.04 – Live performance by Dieter Vandoren. His instrument projects light and sound structures in fog-filled space, immersing both him and the audience in it.
  • Interperforming Environments – Embodied spatial instruments are developed as physical and digital prototypes, which evoke novel modes of interaction, movement and perception.
  • Reflectego (intra-active architecture project)
  • Robozoo (intra-active robotics project)

Interactive dance performance in La Casa Encendida

Neural Narratives 1: Phantom Limb – Instituto Stocos (Cantabria) Pablo Palacio and Muriel Romero. In Phantom Limb we’ll see how artificial neural networks could serve as an interface between real and imagined body parts. In this sense an audiovisual interactive neural body extension has been designed that may enter into different situations of co-determinacy with the physical body, so that both entities establish reciprocally their creative conditions via the simultaneity of their real time dynamic couplings.

Street performance / metaformance

Metakinesphere – Hommage to Loïe Fuller de Reverso – Jaime del Val & Cristian García – Metakinesphere is an analogue prototype for interactive/intra-active wearable architecture. A wearable structure made of flexible materials and translucent textiles that blurs the limits of the body and its legibility.

Metaformances in homes by appointment

Microsexes by Reverso is a Metaformance – ongoing process of transformation of perception in which surveillance cameras placed on the skin become the eyes of the body, undoing the usual perceptual framing and with it the conditions of possibility of form and identity.

Workshops

4 of them part of the Fofth Biennale of Contemporary Art of ONCE Foundation specific for people with disabilities / differently abled bodies.

ONCE Workshops:
  • Metabody Box – Robert Wechsler – Instrument that transforms movement into sound.
  • Microdanzas – Jaime del Val – technique that expands vision and amplifies scales of movement.
  • Alternative poetic movement – Marta Leirado – Highlight, and learn from, the expressiveness of movements and gestures of people with disabilities.
  • Modes of sensorial interaction with the environment: orientation, differently abled bodies and intersensorial perception – José Luis Carles y Cristina Palmese. Perceptual ecologies in the streets.
Practising the body

Redefining the look: the photographic construction of childhood and acting. Beatriz Pichel Pérez & Leticia Fernández Fontecha. History of gestures and emotions.

SenseStage

Marije Baalman – sensors for interactive stage.

Disalignments

Jaime del Val & Muriel Romero – Techniques of indeterminate movement.

International conference in the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid

History and ontologies of Movement-gesture.

PROGRAMME BY VENUES

PROGRAMME BY SECTIONS

MetaMedialab. Performances, metaformances, presentations and exhibitions

Performances & demos – prototype exhibition and demonstration

Medialab Prado – Auditorium

9 July 16’30 & 19’00 – 10 and 12 July at 19’00

  • Amorphogenesis 2.0 – Reverso – Jaime del Val – Dieter Vandoren
  • Integration.04 – dtr_lab – Dieter Vandoren
  • Ambiguous Topologies -Jia Rey Chang, Dr. Nimish Biloria, Dieter Vandoren
  • Interperforming Environments – Hyperbody MSc2 design studio – Tutor team: Ir. Kas Oosterhuis, Dr. Nimish Biloria, Dr. Henriette Bier, Jia Rey Chang, Dieter Vandoren
  • Reflectego (proyecto arquitectura intra-activa) – Oana Anghelache, Rob Moors, Guus Mostart, Eldin Fajkovic, Jacqueline Huang, Mick van Rooijen.
  • Robozoo (proyecto de robótica intra-activa) – Guang Yang, Jan Paclt, Krzysztof Pydo, Kasper Siderius, Mohammad Jooshesh, Radoslaw Flis.
  • Illegible Affects-Indeterminate Emotions / Dissapearing Dancer – Infomus-Reverso-KDanse
  • Metakinesphere – Reverso – Jaime del Val

Neural Narratives 1: Phantom Limb

La Casa Encendida – Patio

10 & 11 July at 22’30

Instituto Stocos – Pablo palacio and Muriel Romero

Choreography: Muriel Romero, Music : Pablo Palacio Interactuve visual simualtion: Daniel Bisig Dancers: Begoña Quiñones, Verónica Garzón, Alicia Narejos and Muriel Romero Lighting: Pablo Palacio Scenographic Assitance: Pablo Batista Production: Muriel Romero and Pablo Palacio Supports: Culture Programme of the European Union, Unterwegs Theater (Heidelberg, Germany), Teatros del Canal (Madrid), La Casa Encendida,El Graner Espacio de Creació (Barcelona), Teatro Paco Rabal (Madrid), Infomus-Casa Paganini- Universitá de Genova (Italia) and Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology of Zurich (Suiza)

Metakinesphere

Urban intervention – in the area of Medialab Prado – starting in Plaza de la Letras

12th July at 23’00

Reverso – Jaime del Val

Microsexes

One to one encounters in homes

16th-20th July on demand and every night at 23’00

Info and requests in www.elpredicador.orgcyborgdelval@gmail.com

International Meeting

Medialab Prado

10 – 13 July 10:00 to 19:00

International gathering of the Metabody partners and associates. The following projects will be presented and developed in a research-creation process.

Production Workshop – Call for Projects

Fall – date to be determined. Medialab Prado.

Metabody call for Projects:- Open Source Space – Interactive/Intra-active architecture

Metaformance Studies. Workshops

Practising the body, redefining the look: the photographic construction of childhood and acting.

9 July – La Casa Encendida -Torreón – 10’00-14’00

UAM – Beatriz Pichel Pérez & Leticia Fernández Fontecha

SenseStage

10 July – La Casa Encendida -Torreón – 10’00-14’00

Marije Baalman

Disalignments – Indeterminate Body

14-15 July – Conservatorio Superior de Danza María de Ávila and public spaces – 10’00-14’00

Jaime del Val y Muriel Romero

 

talleres@metabody.eu

Workshops part of the Fifth Biennale of Contemprary Arts of ONCE Foundation

Modes of sensorial interaction with the environment: orientation, differently abled bodies and intersensorial perception

7 July – La Casa Encendida – Torreón – 10’00-20’00

Cristina Palmese y José Luis Carles

Microdances – Afunctional diversity

8 July – La Casa Encendida – Torreón – 10’00-14’00

Jaime del Val

Alternative Poetic Movement

11 July – La Casa Encendida – Torreón – 10’00-20’00

Marta Leirado

Metabody Box

14-16 July – La Casa Encendida – Patio y Torreón – 10’15-18’00

Robert Wechsler (Palindrome), Marcello Lussana, Josepha Dietz, Pablo Palacio (Instituto Stocos)

Conference: HISTORY AND ONTOLOGIES OF MOVEMENT-GESTURE

11 July – Universidad Autónoma de Madrid – Campus de Cantoblanco

 

Language: Inglés | conference@metabody.eu

10’00Welcome and Presentation – Eva Botella Ordinas (UAM) and Jaime del Val (Reverso).

10’15Keynote: Beatriz Pichel – From facial expressions to bodily gestures: The question of movement in French photography (1862-1902).

11’00Jaime del Val – Gignestology: Ontologies of movement and becoming – A History of fixity and dualistic perceptions: Thinking-moving beyond metaphysics of identity.

11’30Panel – Situated Gesture

  • Inês Afonso Lopes – Controlling uncertainty through gesture: gestures of the Purgatory.
  • Katherine Mills – The Door to the Convent: Religious Life in the Convent of Las Descalzas Reales, Madrid (17th century).

13’00Lunch

14’00-14’50 Panel – Politics of gesture

  • Michèle Danjoux / Johannes Birringer (DAP-Lab, London) – Wearables, gestos coresónicos y los límites del control.
  • Dr Imogen Racz, Senior Lecturer in Art History, Coventry University – Social Choreographies of Woman and Self in Helen Chadwick’s Of Mutability and Ego Geometria Sum.

15’00-16’00Plenary Dialogue: Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in dialogue with Jaime del Val. Ontolopolitics of Movement: control and emergence in the era of affective capitalism.

16’15-17’30Panel – Ontologies of movement

  • Yvonne Foerster, Leuphana University Lüneburg – Dynamic Embodiment – A Non-Anthropocentric Approach.
  • Oscar Quejido Alonso and Laura Rodríguez Samperio – UCM – Movement, gesture and truth. Art as countermovement in Nietzsche’s thought.
  • Monika Jaeckel – Touch, absconding into gesture.

17’45-19’45Panel – Art and performance of gesture-movement

  • Angela Parker/Káiser – Translating into Movement: Receiving Language in Dissolving Form.
  • Marcello Lussana – Sound and Movement: a comparison between traditional Qigong and nowadays interactive technology.
  • Laura Lake Smith – Imaging the In-between: Movement and Difference in Richard Tuttle’s Wire Pieces.
  • Alicia Peñalba, María José Valles, Elena Partesotti, Mª Rosario Castañón, y Mª Ángeles Sevillano. – Universidad de Valladolid – Gestural diversity in the use of Metabody: a motion-sound interactive system.
  • Nuria Font – Brief historic revision of dance and technology.

19’45-20’00closing remarks

PROGRAMME METAMEDIALAB

9, 10, 12 JulY – Performances & demos prototype exhibition and demonstration

In several public sessions in the auditorium of Medialab Prado, interactive (physical and digital) architecture prototypes will be presented. They were developed during the first year of the METABODY project by Hyperbody-TUDelft, Reveros, and Infomus with K-danse, in hybrid formats of installation, demo, performance, exhibition and presentation.

Activity

Creator

Content

Illegible Affects:

Indeterminate Emotions / Dissapearing dancer

 

Medialab Prado / Auditorium
9 july – sessions: 16’30 19’00
10, 12 july – 19’00

Reverso-Infomus-K-Danse – Jaime del Val – Antonio Camurri – Jean Marc Matos – Eva Botella Ordinas – UAM

This project studies emotion and movement from an artistic perspective informed by science and technology, focusing on ambiguity and indeterminacy of expression as a necessary, unavoidable and creative substrate of human non verbal communication.

“Disappearing dancer” is an EyesWeb-based interactive environment for live experience of techniques for automated measures of “repetitiveness”, “saliency”, “unexpectedness” in human movement, A virtual mirror control the transparency of the human in fron of it, based on measures of her “predictability”: the more predictable, the more transparent (until “invisible”) the human becomes.

Ambiguous Topologies

 

Medialab Prado / Auditorium
9 july – sessions: 16’30 19’00
10, 12 july – 19’00

Jia Rey Chang, Dr. Nimish Biloria, Dieter Vandoren
Ambiguous topologies is an immersive multi-modal spatial installation exploring the tendencies of swarm systems to generate emergent geometric networks as a response to as well as a trigger for movement of multiple bodies in space and time. The installation operates on the subtle fusion of physical and digital media by means of harvesting and impacting the speed and frequency of movement of the participants body as a trigger for activating/disturbing a swarm of digital particles in space. Swarm systems, as a collection of autonomous dynamic particles operate on a tendency model wherein the particles in the immediate vicinity of the physical movement inherit the maximum velocity/charge and are thus displaced from their spatial coordinates to collide and dissipate this gained energy to neighbouring particles. The velocity/charge is thus differentially distributed throughout the entire particle swarm and has a behavioural attribute of generating geometric topological networks and sound values displaying variable densities of connections throughout the space. After reaching a critical mass (as regards the charge levels in the entire swarm) the system behaves pro-actively in order to alter/suggest and motivate the user to engage in novel movement in order to react and engage with this changing persona of the swarming networks. The usage of immersive light and sound projection media in order to visualise this dynamic behavioural scenario renders abstract three dimensional topological nuances within which the body navigates and experiences new states of ambiguity, dis-alignment and proactive behaviour.

Amorphogenesis 2.0

Antiplatonic Cave – Zarathustrian Cave / Anaximandrian Cave
Medialab Prado / Auditorium
9 july – sessions: 16’30 19’00
10, 12 july – 19’00

Conception, visuals and sound: Jaime del Val
Physical Structure: Jaime del Val and Cristian Garcia
Projection system: Dieter Vandoren
Digital meshes: Jia Rey Chang
Reverso in collaboration with Hyperbody – TUDelft

Amorphogenesis is an instrument and installation for digital interactive/intra-active architecture in which the movement of bodies transforms amorphous digital meshes in neverending emergence. Amorphogenesis is also a philosophical concept by Jaime del Val that points to an account of movement as not subjected to form nor poiting to it. The ongoing emergence of the amorphous is thus a new perceptual condition. The spaces generated in Amorphogenesis are not cartesian spaces that one can navigate, they are not a res extensa. They are intensive spaces that emerge with the movement. The architectures are part of an expanded metabody of the intra-acting body. The subject interacting is not in control of the meshes, no manual correlation is established. There is no representation of known spaces. Rather, there is a process of decentralized co-constitution in which perception itself is emerging: a metaformance, in which the interactor experiences the emergence of new kinds of perception, space-time, movement and ecological relation with an environment which is not preformed, nor subjected in its emergence to optimisation strategies: a machine for opening up perception to indeterminacy, an antiplatonic cave, a Zarathustrian-Anaximandrian cave in which there is no realm of representation. A world of becoming.

Integration.04

Medialab Prado / Auditorium
9 july – sessions: 16’30 19’00
10, 12 july – 19’00

Dieter Vandoren – dtr_lab
Live performance by Dieter Vandoren. His instrument projects light and sound structures in fog-filled space, immersing both him and the audience in it. He manipulates the ephemeral audiovisual shapes as if they were tangible materials, taking cues from the interaction between the human body and acoustic instruments. The abstract digital processes are thus integrated in the physical, experiential space and the emergent play becomes a strong embodied experience – for both performer and audience.

Metakinesphere – Hommage a Loïe Fuller

Medialab Prado / Auditorium
9 july – sessions: 16’30 19’00
10, 12 july – 19’00

Reverso
Jaime del Val & Cristian García
Metakinesphere is an analogue prototype for interactive/intra-active wearable architecture. A wearable structure made of flexible materials and translucent textiles that blurs the limits of the body and its legibility. A metabody, a body-space without recognisable form or function, that physically transforms in an elastic relation to bodily movement, bound by elastics to the “human” body which moves suspended in the relation to the architecture, while projecting its skin on the textiles through cameras placed on the skin and projecting the electronically processed voice. Metakinesphere challenges the reducibility of the body and its movement to any spherical or geometric form (Laban, Parmenides, or Leonardos Vitruvian man). Never aquiring a form, movement unfolds in indeterminate potentials. Hybrid of architecture, wearable and textile, this metabody is enacted as movement, metaformed and performed, an anti-object in permanent amorphogenesis. Alien bride and posthuman cocoon, it is also an hommage to the amorphogenetic multisensorial performances of dancescientist Loïe Fuller.

Interperforming Environmemts

Medialab Prado / Auditorium
9 july – sessions: 16’30 19’00
10, 12 july – 19’00

Hyperbody MSc2 design studio – Tutors: Ir. Kas Oosterhuis, Dr. Nimish Biloria, Dr. Henriette Bier, Jia Rey Chang, Dieter Vandoren
Reflectego Team: Oana Anghelache, Rob Moors, Guus Mostart, Eldin Fajkovic, Jacqueline Huang, Mick van Rooijen. Sponsored by Bleher r

 

Robozoo Team: Guang Yang, Jan Paclt, Krzysztof Pydo, Kasper Siderius, Mohammad Jooshesh, Radoslaw Flis./p>

The MSc 2 Design studio conducted at Hyperbody, TU Delft, Netherlands, operates on the premise that bodily motion and non-verbal communication can be understood as interfaces of emotional expression and cognition. The idea of creating a proactive behaviour loop between the body, the physical and ambient space it operates within, as well as the tools and techniques offered by contemporary new media technologies became a central operational logic driving the studio. The behavioural engagement of the body, with ambient parameters such as sound, light, tactility etc. and the physicality of architectural space, to create an inter-activating spatial system, thus, progressively created new modes of communication and perception within the studio. The resultant embodied spatial instruments are developed as physical and digital prototypes, which evoke novel modes of interaction, movement and perception. Rather than developing a subject-object perspective of architectural and interior space, the projects engage with the active creation of subject-subject relations, wherein ambiguity and diffused affordances take centre stage, thus provoking pro-active engagement opportunities for the spatial structures and the user’s alike.

Reflectego aims to discuss the balance of physical and imagery components in our brain’s construction of reality. The view and experience that we hold of space and our position in it consist of both actual objects and altered descriptions that we interpret to represent reality. By visually distorting the space in our surrounding and by unexpected repositioning of the self in relation to the environment through movement, awareness can be created of the proprioceptive determination and our self-perception in the twilight of the physical and virtual world. Our design derives from a kaleidoscopic composition of faceted mirrors. In a Kaleidoscope the constructed perceived image consists of actual physical objects and a multiplicity of reflections of this. Through small movements of the objects the constructed images change dramatically due to the amplification of change by visual multiplication of the movement. In our project the user will become the physical object inside a kaleidoscope in which he sees his image scattered and recomposed as a result of his behavior. The structure consists of a suspended faceted mirror-surface. It hovers and maneuvers above and as a reply to user behavior. The structure folds, flips and expands to create dynamic compositions of the real world objects by alternating angles of reflection. The user interacts with the structure as a piece of the puzzle whilst recomposing the total image.

Robozoo aims at establishing the artificial environment of the interactive swarm of robots. Synergistic integrity with such a substance is the subject of our interest. Investigation of models of behaviors plays a paramount role in the presented concept. The possibility of shaping the environment by artificial creatures bring about the potential for dynamic system and its adaptability to the outer and inner changes. Motion and visual expression of each independent robot evokes instantaneous response in the environment. People perceiving remodeled swarm of artificial creatures are forced to reestablish themselves in the space in real time.

10 y 11 de Julio – Performance de danza

Activity

Creator

Content

Neural Narratives 1: Phantom Limb

La Casa Encendida – Patio
22:30h

Instituto Stocos
(Pablo Palacio, Muriel Romero)

 

Choreography: Muriel Romero
Music : Pablo Palacio
Interactuve visual simuLAtion:
Daniel Bisig.
Dancers: Begoña Quiñones, Verónica Garzón, Alicia Narejos & Muriel Romero.
Lighting: Pablo Palacio & Carlos Casado
Scenographic Assitance: Pablo Batista
Production:
Muriel Romero & Pablo Palacio.
Supports: Culture Programme of the European Union, Unterwegs Theater (Heidelberg, Germany), Teatros del Canal (Madrid), La Casa Encendida,El Graner Espacio de Creació (Barcelona), Teatro Paco Rabal (Madrid), Infomus-Casa Paganini- Universitá de Genova (Italia) e Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology of Zurich (Suiza)

In Phantom Limb we’ll see How artificial neural networks could serve as an interface between real and imagined body parts. In this sense an audiovisual interactive neural body extension has been designed that may enter into different situations of co-determinacy with the physical body, so that both entities establish reciprocally their creative conditions via the simultaneity of their real time dynamic couplings.

Phantom Limb is a trans-disciplinary research project that combines mathematical models from cognitive neuroscience with choreography, music and visual arts in order to realise new creative approaches in the performing arts.

In particular, in this work we use artificial neural networks as a common substrate to establish algorithmic connections between cognitive neurosciences, dance, sound synthesis and generative video. These disciplines gather operationally and form a unity on the basis of their circular interactions.

In Phantom the bodily activity of the dancers play a prominent role in the evolution of the sonic and visual properties of the space, which behave as an extension to the body movement. A series of artificial audiovisual creatures animated by interactive artificial neural networks are projected as holograms in the performing space.

The form Phantom Limb is a mosaic of ephemeral micro-worlds and micro-identities that emerges from the initial chaos of the local interactions between the phantom limb the physical body. These ephimeral configurations or patterns in flux are in constant transition, each one trying to establish or impose itself through fast and cyclic oscillations.

The study and comprehension of this transition from local rules to a global coherence and plays a fundamental role in the evolutions of both the microscopic and macroscopic form of this study, unifying both levels of analysis.

Street intervention 12th July

Activity

Creator

Content

Metakinesphere – Hommage to Loïe Fuller

Urban intervention

 

Starting in Plaza de las Letras by Medialab Prado
23:00h

Reverso
Jaime del Val & Cristian García

Metakinesphere is an analogue prototype for interactive/intra-active wearable architecture. A wearable structure made of flexible materials and translucent textiles that blurs the limits of the body and its legibility. A metabody, a body-space without recognisable form or function, that physically transforms in an elastic relation to bodily movement, bound by elastics to the “human” body which moves suspended in the relation to the architecture, while projecting its skin on the textiles through cameras placed on the skin and projecting the electronically processed voice. Metakinesphere challenges the reducibility of the body and its movement to any spherical or geometric form (Laban, Parmenides, or Leonardos Vitruvian man). Never aquiring a form, movement unfolds in indeterminate potentials. Hybrid of architecture, wearable and textile, this metabody is enacted as movement, metaformed and performed, an anti-object in permanent amorphogenesis. Alien bride and posthuman cocoon, it is also an hommage to the amorphogenetic multisensorial performances of dancescientist Loïe Fuller.

METAFORMACES – home visits by appointment – 16 – 20 July

Activity

Creator

Content

Microsexes – The Preacher

Home visits
By appointment at every night at 23’00

Reverso
Jaime del Val & Cristian García

Microsexes is a Metaformance – ongoing process of transformation of perception in which surveillance cameras placed on the skin become the eyes of the body, undoing the usual perceptual framing and with it the conditions of possibility of form and identity. The body becomes an amorphogenetic process of becoming. In particular for diverse abled bodies, who may experience a new scale of movement and perception in which micromovements acquire new relevance.

JaiVal is an alien preacher, a microsex worker that disseminates posthuman affects.

  • Home visits, by appointment 16th-20th July.
  • In a location to be defined every night at 23’00 – 16th-20th July.

Info and bookings:
www.elpredicador.org | cyborgdelval@gmail.com | www.microsex.org | www.jaival.org

International Meeting

10 to 13 July MedialabPrado. 10:00 to 19:00h

International gathering of the Metabody partners and associates. The following projects will be presented and developed in a research-creation process.

Activity

Creator

Content

Metastudy

Jaime del Val de Reverso

Metamethodological study exploring the complexities of transdisicplinary research creation and the different ethical and philosohpical challenges faced by a project such as METABODY.

Neural Narratives 1: Phantom Limb

Instituto Stocos (Cantabria)

In Phantom Limb we’ll see how artificial neural networks could serve as an interface between real and imagined body parts. In this sense an audiovisual interactive neural body extension has been designed that may enter into different situations of co-determinacy with the physical body, so that both entities establish reciprocally their creative conditions via the simultaneity of their real time dynamic couplings.

Monster

KDanse (Toulouse, Francia)

Choreography by K-Danse based on a story by Borges, happening in a labyrinth of projections.

Sense of the Body

STEIM (Amsterdam, Holanda)

Development of new wireless sensor interfaces for the body.

Microdances

REVERSO

An artistic project bringing together gender/sexual minorities and people with disabilities in which surveillance cameras are placed on the skin while the closeup images of the body captures by the cameras are projected life. The images generate a displaced and amplified perception of the body, as if the eyes were disseminated on the skin, allowing for a new scale of movement in which small gestures are amplified, and a new perception of the body that exceeds gender distinctions. Different stages of this artistic work will be presented in the different Fora, where creation workshops and public presentations will also take place.

Emergent Proprioceptions

Jaime del Val de Reverso

How to generate a new perception of movement as multisensorial selfreferential emergent system, irreducible to measurements?

Amorphogenesis

Jaime del Val de Reverso

Amorphogenesis is an instrument and installation for digital interactive/intra-active architecture in which the movement of bodies transforms amorphous digital meshes in neverending emergence. Amorphogensis is also a philosophical concept by Jaime del Val that points to an account of movement as not subjected to form nor poiting to it.

Illegible affects

Reverso e Infomus

This project studies emotion and movement from an artistic perspective informed by science and technology, focusing on ambiguity and indeterminacy of expression as a necessary, unavoidable and creative substrate of human non verbal communication.

Biometrics, movement, gestures and emotions: 1870-2014. A comparative approach

UAM – Eva Botella – De Montfor University Leicester Beatriz Pichel

Comparative Study of the history of biometrics and emotions.

Biometrics, movement, gestures and emotions: 1870-2014. A comparative approach

UAM – Eva Botella – De Montfor University Leicester Beatriz Pichel

Comparative Study of the history of biometrics and emotions.

Biometrics, movement, gestures and emotions: 1870-2014. A comparative approach

UAM – Eva Botella – De Montfor University Leicester Beatriz Pichel

Comparative Study of the history of biometrics and emotions.

Interperforming environments

Hyperbody MSc2 design studio – Tutors: Ir. Kas Oosterhuis, Dr. Nimish Biloria, Dr. Henriette Bier, Jia Rey Chang, Dieter Vandoren

The MSc 2 Design studio conducted at Hyperbody, TU Delft, Netherlands, operates on the premise that bodily motion and non-verbal communication can be understood as interfaces of emotional expression and cognition.

Integration.04

Dieter Vandoren

Live performance by Dieter Vandoren. His instrument projects light and sound structures in fog-filled space, immersing both him and the audience in it. He manipulates the ephemeral audiovisual shapes as if they were tangible materials, taking cues from the interaction between the human body and acoustic instruments. The abstract digital processes are thus integrated in the physical, experiential space and the emergent play becomes a strong embodied experience – for both performer and audience.

Ambiguous Topologies

TUDelft – Hyperbody – Jia Rey Chang, Dr. Nimish Biloria, Dieter Vandoren

Ambiguous topologies is an immersive multi-modal spatial installation exploring the tendencies of swarm systems to generate emergent geometric networks as a response to as well as a trigger for movement of multiple bodies in space and time.

Disalignments

Jaime del Val (Reverso) & Muriel Romero (Instituto Stocos)

Disalignments is an artistic project that proposes the development of movement and choreographic techniques that generate an awareness of the standard gestures and choreographies that are distributed worldwide by information technologies, while allowing to disalign oneself from these choreographies accounting for diversity of expressions. Different stages of this artistic work will be presented in the different Fora, where creation workshops and public presentations will also take place.

Bodynet

Trans-Media-Akademie hellerau – Reverso

Bodynet will be the first social network (physical and analogue) focusing on non verbal and embodied communication, and more specifically on facilitating novel forms of embodied expression that foreground openendeness.

Metabody Box

Palindrome Dance Company

Interactive instrument for people with disabilities that allows to generate sound thorugh movement.

Loïe Fuller as Dancescientistt

UAM – Eva Botella – De Montfor University Leicester Beatriz Pichel

Study of Loïe Fuller as an example of transdisciplinary researcher-creator bridging dance and sciences.

Production workshop – Call for projects

Date to determine in Fall

Activity

Creator

Content

Metabody call for Projects

Metabody

Open Source Space – Interactive/Intra-active architecture. The workshop will have as an aim the production of fully analogue or electronically-digitally mediated PHYSICAL prototypes for interactive/intra-active architecture that transform their physical structure through interaction/intra-action with bodies and environment. The prototypes will be studies for the future architecture of the Metabody Project.

PROGRAMme metaformance studies

WORKSHOP – Wednesday 9th July

Activity

Creator

Content

Practising the body, redefining the look: the photographic construction of childhood and acting.

La Casa Encendida -Torreón

10’00-14’00

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Portraying actors since 1840. Practical perspectives on photography, emotions and science.
Beatriz Pichel Pérez

Between innocence and pornography, the photographic construction of childhood.
Leticia Fernández-Fontecha
Inscriptions:
www.lacasaencendida.es/es/cursos | talleres@metabody.eu

Portraying actors since 1840. Practical perspectives on photography, emotions and science

Beatriz Pichel Pérez

Between innocence and pornography, the photographic construction of childhood

Leticia Fernández Fontecha

WORKSHOP – Thursday 10th July

Activity

Creator

Content

SenseStage

La Casa Encendida -Torreón

10’00-20’00

Marije Baalman STEIM

Wireless sensors for the body and the interactve stage.
Inscriptions:
www.lacasaencendida.es/es/cursos | talleres@metabody.eu

TALLERES 14-15 de Julio

Activity

Creator

Content

Disalignments – Indeterminate Body

Conservatorio Superior de Danza María de Ávila

10’00-14’00

Reverso & Instituto Stocos – Muriel Romero, Jaime del Val

Movement techniques for disaligning the body from its known trajectories.
Inscriptions:
talleres@metabody.eu

WORKSHOP – Fifth Biennale of Contemporary Art ONCE Foundation

WORKSHOP – Monday 7th July

Activity

Creator

Content

Modes of sensorial interaction with the environment: orientation, differently abled bodies and intersensorial perception

La Casa Encendida -Torreón

10’00-20’00

José Luis Carles & Cristina Palmese – Universidad Autónoma de Madrid – Taller UAM

Exploring new ecologies of perception in the city.
Inscriptions:
www.lacasaencendida.es/es/cursos | talleres@metabody.eu

WORKSHOP – Tuesday 8th July

Activity

Creator

Content

Microdances

La Casa Encendida -Torreón

10’00-14’00

Jaime del Val de REVERSO (Madrid)

Surveillance cameras on the skin become the eyes of the body amplifying small movements and transforming perception and proprioception.
Inscriptions:
www.lacasaencendida.es/es/cursos | talleres@metabody.eu

WORKSHOP – Friday 11th July

Activity

Creator

Content

Alternative Poetic Movement

La Casa Encendida -Torreón

10’00-20’00

Marta Leirado (Madrid)

Incorporating gestures of “disabled” or differently abled bodies in the languge of dance, and giving these gestures and expressive dimension of their own
Inscriptions:
www.lacasaencendida.es/es/cursos | talleres@metabody.eu

WORKSHOP – 14-16th July

Activity

Creator

Content

Metabody Box
Workshop

La Casa Encendida -Patio y Torreón

10’15 a 14’00 y de 16’00 a 20’00

Robert Wechsler (Palindrome),
Marcello Lussana, Josepha Dietz, Pablo Palacio (Instituto Stocos)

Interactive instrument for people with disabilities that allows to generate sound through movement.
Inscriptions:
www.lacasaencendida.es/es/cursos | talleres@metabody.eu

Conference HISTORY AND ONTOLOGIES OF MOVEMENT-GESTURE

11th July

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid – Campus de Cantoblanco
Auditorio de Filosofía y Letras

De 10’00 a 20’00h

Keynotes: Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Beatriz Pichel.
Chairing y coordinación: Jaime del Val (Reverso) and Eva Botella Ordinas (UAM)

In the 1990s, Jan Bremmer y Herman Roodenburg edited A Cultural History of Gesture, and in 2009 Past and Present issued a special supplement on the politics of gesture. During the last twenty years cultural history, history of science and of emotions devoted much of their efforts to contextualize gestures and movements, showing the cultural and temporal mutability of concepts, representations and practices of gestural and kinetic experiences. The study of the social codification of body choreographies is essential to understand modernity´s key concepts such as commerce, manners, politeness, emotions, normality, disability, rationality, liberty or agency.

On the other hand movement has been the subject of ontological inquiry in philosophy since the preplatonic philosophers. It is possible to say that philosophy started being philosophy of movement with the Milesian Philosophers (Tales, Anaximander and Anaximenes) and Heraclitus as well as in non western traditions, until the arrival of Permenides, Plato and the fixation of being as immobile that has pervaded western culture ever since, where Aristotle’s Physics laid down the foundations for thinking movement till mechanistic formulations took over, which pervade until today. Fixing movement through ideas, shapes, categories and numbers, reducing it to mechanistic and measurable causal relations has been a leitmotif of this dominant tradition, which is still at the epicenter of the current explosion of technologies of control. However, from Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, to Nietzsche and numerous XX and XXI century philosophers, notably Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze, one can trace a “counterhistory” of philosophy dealing with ontologies of movement and becoming (rather than of being), as in the recent work of Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, in Karen Barad’s Agential Realism, and in diverse currents of the “new materialisms”.

The history and ontology of movement and gesture is especially relevant to the history of science, helping to explain not only the social and political background and epistemology of the evolutionary theory, psychiatry or biology. More than two decades of historical and philosophical studies revealed that gestures and movements are socio-cultural practices, crucial to understand “actors” in “their environment” and the cultural codification of their interactions.

The social choreographies of movement-gestures not only affect our self-perception, the distinction between the human-non human and our interrelations, but also frame the political and legal systems shaping the way in which we live and move. They are central to concepts such as “individual”, “cultural heritage” or “human rights”. These choreographies increasingly delete the diversity of our gestures-movements and interactions, not only as part of our culture, but as part of ourselves.

Treatises about human and animal physiognomy, penal and international law, philosophy, medicine; books of etiquette, education of children or dogs ‘training; essays on biology, animal and human psychology, criminology; courtly or popular representations of manners, photography and engraving deployed by Darwin, films by Muybridge, old and new biometric tables, dances and experiments by Loie Fuller; handbooks to photographe brides, table manners, urban spaces ‘planning, social networks, catwalk shows, google-glasses, medicalization and treatment of autism or promotion of anorexia and just few examples of relevant case studies for this history and ontology.

The aim of this conference is to discuss about the past and present of the distinction between gesture and movement, the limits of their cultural intelligibility and scientific legibility, the analysis of the dismissed elements to define a gesture and the ontologies and historical epistemologies in which these definitions and practices are built. Likewise, it is our goal to open proposals for new ontologies and epistemologies of movement-gestures able to give alternatives to the current tendencies to control, fix or choreograph the movements of bodies at all scales, a paradigm of control which Jaime del Val has called the pan-choreographic.

Amongst other topics, we propose:

  • Studies on the history of movement and gesture control: mainstream technologies of production and diffusion of some movement-gestures both in humans and non-humans from ancient times to the present. Social media. Social Choreographies. Panoptic. Panchoreographic. Biometrics. Robotics. Simulation. Movement capture. Movement analysis. Biopolitics of gesture. Emotion analysis.
  • Ontology and history of movement and gesture. Distinction between movement and gesture. Western and non-western philosophies of movement. Performativity and metaformativity. Posthuman performativity. Intra-action. Agential realism. New materialisms.
  • Epistemology of movement. Cognitive Sciences. Physics. Proprioception. Premovement. Movement theories. Perception. Affordances. Enaction.
  • History and ontology of movement-gesture in relation to the concepts of human, individual, organism or community, their restrictions and overloading. Concepts such as heritage and cultural heritage restricting gestures-movement-relations and ecologies of relations transcending these concepts: naturcultural and subaltern perspectives understanding life as a relational process, breaking identity barriers of species, gender, class, etc. Postcolonialism and neocolonialism, subaltern cultures, hegemony of western gestures, aborigenal cultures, naturecultures, humanimals, animal gestures. Posthumanism and Metahumanism.
  • The history and ontology of abstract binaries such as nature-culture, ability-disability, human-animal-machine. Past and present conceptions of disabled, non-adult, non-rational, deviant, non-human bodies; their gestures-movements and their relation to definitions of rationality and agency, to social norms, law and ecology.
  • Identification of corporealities and emotions in relation to specific gestures-movements, and identity, politeness, development and civilization in relation to them.
  • Scientific conventions (notions and practices) and subaltern knowledges´alternatives on gestures-movement from historical, epistemological and ontological perspectives. Scientific performances of rationality, objectivity and authority, and analysis of observation and proof construction through history.

10’00

Welcome and Presentation – Eva Botella Ordinas (UAM) and Jaime del Val (Reverso).

10’15

Keynote: Beatriz Pichel – From facial expressions to bodily gestures: The question of movement in French photography (1862-1902).

11’00

Jaime del Val – Gignestology: Ontologies of movement and becoming – A History of fixity and dualistic perceptions: Thinking-moving beyond metaphysics of identity

11’30 – 12’45

Panel – Situated Gestures:

  • Dr Liz Watkins, University of Leeds – Gesture and Surveillance in Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006).
  • Inês Afonso Lopes – Controlling uncertainty through gesture: gestures of the Purgatory
  • Katherine Mills – The Door to the Convent: Religious Life in the Convent of Las Descalzas Reales, Madrid (17th century).

13’00

Lunch

14’00-14’50

Panel – Politics of gesture

  • Michèle Danjoux / Johannes Birringer (DAP-Lab, London) – Wearables, Choreosonic Gestures, and the Limits of Control.
  • Dr Imogen Racz, Senior Lecturer in Art History, Coventry University – Social Choreographies of Woman and Self in Helen Chadwick’s Of Mutability and Ego Geometria Sum.

15’00-16’00

Plenary Dialogue: Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in dialogue with Jaime del Val
Ontolopolitics of Movement: control and emergence in the era of affective capitalism.

 

Coffee break

 

16’15-17’30

Panel – Ontologies of movement

  • Yvonne Foerster, Leuphana University Lüneburg – Dynamic Embodiment – A Non-Anthropocentric Approach.
  • Oscar Quejido Alonso and Laura Rodríguez Samperio – UCM – Movement, gesture and truth. Art as countermovement in Nietzsche’s thought.
  • Monika Jaeckel – Touch, absconding into gesture.

17’45-19’45

Panel – Art and performance of gesture-movement

  • Angela Parker/Káiser – Translating into Movement: Receiving Language in Dissolving Form.
  • Marcello Lussana – Sound and Movement: a comparison between traditional Qigong and nowadays interactive technology.
  • Laura Lake Smith – Imaging the In-between: Movement and Difference in Richard Tuttle’s Wire Pieces.
  • Alicia Peñalba, María José Valles, Elena Partesotti, Mª Rosario Castañón, y Mª Ángeles Sevillano. – Universidad de Valladolid – Gestural diversity in the use of Metabody: a motion-sound interactive system.
  • Nuria Font – Brief historic revision of dance and technology.

19’45-20’00

closing remarks

PARTICIPANTS

Asociación Transdisciplinar REVERSO

Coordinator

Coordinator of the Metabody project, Reverso is a non profit organization working in the convergence of the arts (dance, performance, music, visual arts, architecture), technosciences, philosophy and (queer & environmental) activism.
Reverso promotes transidisciplinary projects that propose critical reinventions of technologies of the body and embodiment, sexuality and affects, highlighting indterminacy and plurality of expressions and communication, challenging the foundations of contemporary control society and outlining potentials for a social ecology to come.

Jaime del Val is a meta-media artist, philosopher, performer, researcher and director of Reverso Institute and coordinator of the METABODY Project www.metabody.eu. He develops transdisciplinary projects in the convergence of arts, technologies, critical theory and activism, that have been presented all over Europe, North and South America. His projects propose redefinitions of embodiment, perception and affects that challenge the ontological foundations of contemporary control society.

COORGANIZERS of the Forum in Madrid

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Eva Botella Ordinas – Associated Professor in the Early Modern History Department at Autonomous University in Madrid. She has been Senior Lecturer Ramón y Cajal, and visiting scholar and fellow of institutions such as European University Institute, Harvard University, the Folger Shakespeare Library or the John Carter Brown Library. She participates in several research projects on political, legal, cultural, intellectual history and history of science and of emotions, coorganizing the European Project METABODY. Her publications cover imperial ideologies, history of political languages, history of philosophy and science (especially about John Locke´s concepts and their reception), postcolonialism, and humanimal studies. Contact: eva.notella@uam.es

Jose Luis Carles – Composer and ecologist. Doctor in biology. Professor of the music department of the Universidad Autónoma. Director of the Narional Radio programme La Casa del Sonido. His works have been presented in numerous festivals and venues in Spain and internationally. He is co-organizer of the Metabody project.

Instituto STOCOS

Muriel Romero and Pablo Palacio collaborate since 2007 in a project focused on the analysis and development of the interaction between body gesture and sonic gesture. The trilogy Acusmatrix, Catexis and Stocos constitute so far the result of this investigation. In this series of pieces the dancer’s activity evolve in a three dimensional sound space interacting with sonic objects that are successively transformed according to their trajectory and dynamic morphology. These works integrate in a performative context abstractions taken from other disciplines such as artificial intelligence, biology, mathematics or experimental psychology.

Muriel Romero is a dancer and choreographer. Her work is currently focused on the investigation of generative choregraphic structures and the incorporation of abstractions taken from other disciplines such as music or mathematics. She has won several international prizes such as Moscow International Ballet Competition, Prix de la Fondation de Paris-Prix de Laussane and Premio Nacional de Danza. She’s been first soloist in some the most prestigious companies around the world including Deutsche Oper Berlin, Dresden Semper Oper Ballet, Bayerisches Staatsballet Munchen, Gran Théatre de Genéve o Compañia Nacional de Danza. During her trayectory she’s worked with some choregraphers of our time like W. Forsythe, J.Kylian, Ohad Naharin or Saburo Teshigawara. She teaches at the Professional Conservatory of Madrid.

Pablo Palacio is an independent composer currently living in Madrid. His work has been focused on the transformation an perceptual connections of sonic images. He has held residences in Spain, Switzerland, Germany and Libanon, and his pieces have been performed in many countries from Europe and United States to China, India, Brasil, Australia or North Africa. He is also an active composer for dance and performing arts receiving commissions from, Palindrome Inter Media Performance Group (Weimar, Germany), Staatstheater Mainz (Mainz, Germany), Maqamat Dance Theater (Beirut, Libanon) or Cisco Aznar (Switzerland) among others. He also collaborates with several conservatories, universities and institutions through publications, workshops, and talks divulging new perspectives and technologies in sound composition. He is invited lecturer of sound space at the Master in Performing Arts and Visual Culture (UAH-Madrid).

OTHER METABODY COORGANIZERS

HYPERBODY – TUDelft

Hyperbody is a research group at the Faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology directed by prof. ir. Kas Oosterhuis. The goals set for the group’s research are to explore techniques and methods for designing and building of non-standard, virtual and interactive architectures. Cutting edge techniques and methods are taught and applied by researchers and students. Designed and prototyped programmable buildings illustrate the paradigm shift from animation towards real-time behaviour. Hyperbody introduces interactivity not only in the process of collaborative design, but also during the use and maintenance of buildings. Hyperbody looks at all stages of the lifecycle of buildings and at the economical and ecological consequences, focusing on the development of new ideas and practical applications for interactive architecture. This leads to emergence of pro-active building bodies which act in a changing environment. Apart from various prototypical installations and many case study projects, Hyperbody developsprotoSPACE, a vehicle for transdisciplinary research, education and design in form of a virtually augmented transaction space. protoSPACE has been installed at the Delft University of Technology. In this research laboratory for collaborative design & engineering in real-time we explore the possibilities of multidisciplinary architectural and urban design in an ICT-driven environment, including new interaction modalities for intuitive control of the entire system.

Dr. Nimish Biloria is an Architect and an Assistant Professor at Hyperbody, Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft, The Netherlands. After being involved with investigating the inter-relation of Media and Architecture throughout his formative educational years at CEPT, Ahmadabad, India, he furthered his interests in the inter-disciplinary realm at the Architectural Association, London, UK, where he specialized in the field of Emergent Technologies and Design. He further attained a Doctorate at the TU Delft, Netherlands, with a focus on developing real time adaptive environments. He continues experimenting with the idea of formulating intelligence aided relational networks for the generation of performative morphologies.

InfoMus Lab

Founded in 1984, carries out scientific and technological research, development of multimedia systems, multimodal human-computer interfaces, and applications. A main research focus is on the understanding and development of computational models of non-verbal expressive and social behavior. Cross-fertilisation of scientific, humanistic, and artistic theories characterize the research methodology. From 1997 to 2004 InfoMus Lab had a contract with the Genoa Opera House – Teatro Carlo Felice which included a lab site at the theatre and joint activities.

Antonio Camurri (Genoa, 1959; ‘84 Master Degree in Electric Engineering; 1991 PhD in Computer Engineering) is Associate Professor at DIST-University of Genoa (Faculty of Engineering), where he teaches “Human Computer Interaction” and “Multimodal Systems” (Master Degree on Computer Engineering). His research interests include multimodal interfaces, computational models of non-verbal expressive gesture, emotion and KANSEI information processing, non-verbal social behavior, sound and music computing, multimodal interactive systems for theatre, music, dance, museums, and for therapy and rehabilitation. Founder and scientific director of InfoMus Lab and of Casa Paganini – InfoMus Research Centre of University of Genoa (www.casapaganini.org), he coordinates and is local project manager of several European Projects in FP5 IST, FP6, CRAFT, FP7 ICT, Culture 2007. Owner of patents on software and multimedia systems, he is responsible for University of Genoa of industry contracts. With collegues at InfoMus Lab, he conceived and designed the EyesWeb research project and software platform (www.eyesweb.org).

Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau e.V.

Founded in 2001, Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau e.V. (TMA Hellerau) is a Dresden based nonprofit association for interdisciplinary research on theoretical and practical level focused on how new technologies influence human body, behavior and creative expression. Main activities of the organization are based on two pillars, TMA laboratory (TMA lab) projects on the one side and CYNETART festival on the other. The focal point of TMA lab Hellerau is media education, reflection on media and interactive media art practice. Its philosophy is to create and provide space for creative exchange and coproduction in the field of arts based on new technologies. It is dedicated to mediation of various ways to perceive and to apply new media

K-Danse

Since 1983, K. Danse has been present in major festivals and cultural events in France and abroad: Festivals of Aix en Provence, Avignon, la Rochelle, Châteauvallon, Métafort d’Aubervilliers, American Center of Paris, Georges Pompidou Center, Grande Halle de la Villette, Maison des Arts de Créteil, Maison de la Danse de Lyon, Centre National Art et Technologie de Reims, Centre National de la Danse, ISEA 2000 à Paris, Monaco Dance Forum, Espace Odyssud de Blagnac, Cité de l’Espace de Toulouse, Digital Art Center Le Cube of Issy Les Moulineaux, Festival “Les Bains Numériques” of Enghien les Bains.

Jean-Marc MATOS – Dancer, choreographer and artistic director. Trained at the Cunningham Studio in New-York, he has performed with David Gordon (Judson Church). He is interested in the impact of digital technology on society, in order to develop a meaningful relationship between dance and new media. He has choreographed more than 45 pieces which have been presented extensively in France (Avignon Festival, the Pompidou Center, etc.) and in many countries (Europe, Central and South America, USA, Canada, North Africa, India, Pakistan).

STEIM

(the STudio for Electro-Instrumental Music) is an independent electronic music center unique in its dedication to live performance. The foundation’s artistic and technical departments support an international community of performers, musicians, and visual artists, to develop unique instruments for their work. STEIM maintains a vibrant residency program whereby artists are provided with an artistic and technical environment in which concepts can be given concrete form. Ideas are catalyzed by providing critical feedback grounded in professional experience. Finally, new creations are then exposed to a receptive responsive niche public at STEIM before being groomed for a larger audience.

Marije Baalman is an artist and researcher/developer working in the field of interactive sound art. She studied Applied Physics at the Technical University in Delft and graduated in February 2002 on the topic of Perceptual Acoustics. In 2001/2002 she followed the Sonology Course at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. She completed her Ph.D. on Wave Field Synthesis and electro-acoustic music in 2007 at the Electronic Studio of the Technical University of Berlin. Between 2007 and 2010 she was a post-doctoral researcher in Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. Since 2010 she works as a freelance artist and developer from Amsterdam and works as a hardware engineer at STEIM.

Fábrica de Movimentos

it’s a non-profit cultural association, that conceive and promote, in general, its own projects. Meanwhile, work as producer for other Entities. Started in 1998, and in 99 presents at Museu do Carro Eléctrico, a contemporary dance festival that lately become the Festival da Fábrica. A contemporary dance festival that presents artists, normally on their first performance on the city (and sometimes, on the country). Festival da Fábrica defines itself as an event that support and present new and emergent artists and artists that already have a recognizable corpus of work, but still unknown or never had been presented on the city and country. In this 11 years, a considerable wide range of artists had been presented on the festival. And the event itself continuously had been change in it strategy to reach the audience.

Design & Performance Lab

Michèle Danjoux and Johannes Birringer co-direct the Design & Performance Lab (London) and have created numerous dance-theatre works, installations, and digital projects. DAP-Lab’s cross-media work highlights convergences between fashion/wearable design, physical movement choreography, and real-time interactive data environments. Danjoux is a fashion designer whose artistic research centers on design-in-motion and the interactive potentials of wearables. Birringer is a choreographer/filmmaker whose work has explored the fusion of dance and technology. He has also published widely on the performing and media arts (e.g. Performance, Technology and Science, Dance and Cognition, and Dance and Choreomania). They are coorganizers of the METABODY project.

Palindrome

Palindrome Dance, Inc. (in the USA), and Palindrome, e.V. (in Germany) initiated the MotionComposer Project in 2012 with the motto, “Technology should serve people instead of the other way around.” Palindrome is a pioneer in the use of new technology for dance and has won the first prize at the Berlin Transmediale in the category “interactive art” among other prizes and awards. Palindrome is a founding member of the EU-consortium MetaBody.

Robert Wechsler – Director of the Palindrome Dance Company, Robert is a choreographer and dancer and was an early experimenter with interactive technology. Together with Palindrome, he has won numerous awards, include First Prize at the Berlin Transmediale for “best interactive art” in 2002. He is co-author of the book, “Assistive Technologies, Disability Informatics and Computer Access for Motor Limitations” and lives now in Weimar, Germany where he directs the MotionComposer project. He has been leading workshops with motion tracking since early 80’s all over the world, for persons with and without disabilities.

IMM

Is a corporate association consisting of six companies at eight locations in and around Mittweida (Germany, Saxony) with about 200 employees at the moment. IMM is a medium-sized electonic service provider with the core business development and production of prototypes and (small) serial production. The product portfolio reaches from small electronic parts to professional and complex components and whole devices. IMM Holding GmbH deals with coordination and centralised management of corporate services (project management, personnel management, marketing and sales). IMM foundation supports and accompany regional projects in the fields of Art/Culture by events (Talent-Show, music, dance), exhibitions etc. IMM deals with innovation management, R6D and product development with the objective to open rewarding business fields with the certain commitment to integrate regional, social and cultural tasks within the company policy.

METABODY ASSOCIATES

ICST – Daniel Bisig

Daniel Bisig was born in 1968 in Zürich, Switzerland. In 1994, he received a Master’s degree in Natural Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. In 1998, he received a PhD in Protein Crystallography at the same university. In 1999, he finished training in web-design with a diploma at the EB-Wolfbach, Zurich. In between 1999 and 2001, he was teaching web-design at the EB-Wolfbach and worked as designer and programmer at the web-company Ditoy. In 2001, he joined the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich as a senior researcher. He has also been working as a research associate at the Department of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences, Aargau in 2003 and at the Institute Cultural Studies, University of Art and Design, Zurich in 2004. Since 2006, he has an additional research position at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology in Zurich. Since 1996, he has been active as an artist in the fields of computer animation, experimental video and software art. He’s most recent works include BioSonics, an interactive Artificial Life installation, Ostrawa, an experimental video film and MediaFlies, a flocking based video and audio remixing tool.

Dieter Vandoren

(°1981, Belgium) is a media artist, performer and developer. Drawing from his diverse backgrounds in music, IT and experimental architecture, he is currently occupied with the development and performance of spatial, immersive audiovisual instruments with a strong focus on the embodied aspect of performance. He is a guest tutor and researcher at the Hyperbody and ID-StudioLab groups at the Delft University of Technology (departments of architecture and industrial design, respectively) and is founding member of the iii collective. He holds a master degree in ArtScience (Royal Academy of Art The Hague) and a bachelor in Digital Communication (University of Applied Sciences Utrecht). His works have been featured at Ars Electronica (AT), CTM (DE), TodaysArt (NL), STEIM (NL), STRP (NL), Electrochoc (FR), NIMk (NL) and others. He resides in Rotterdam (NL).

Beatriz Pichel Pérez

is Wellcome Trust Fellow in Medical Humanities, PHRC, de Montfort University holds a PhD in history and philosophy of sciences at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). Her work, at the crossroad of the history and theory of photography, the history emotions and the medical humanities, has examined the emergence of new meanings and experiences of death during the First World War in France, and it’s currently focused on the popularisation of psychological theories of emotions through photographs of theatrical actors at the turn of the nineteenth century. She is an associated partner of the METABODY project. Some of her publications can be found in: http://dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/academic-staff/art-design-humanities/beatriz-pichel/beatriz-pichel.aspx Contact: beatriz.pichel@dmu.ac.uk

SenseLab – Concordia U. – Erin Manning & Brian Massumi

Brian Massumi is professor of communication at the University of Montreal. He specializes in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. His most recent publications include What Animals Teach Us about Politics (forthcoming this September, Duke University Press) and Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (co-written with Erin Manning; University of Minnesota Press, 2014). With Erin Manning and the SenseLab he participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction, most recently in the frame of the “Immediations: Art, Media, Event” international partnership project. He is an associated partner and advisor of the METABODY project.

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Her current art practice is centred on large-scale textile installations that facilitate emergent collectivities. She presented Stitching Time at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012, Stitching Time – Traces at the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2013 and is currently preparing a work entitled The Knots of Time for the opening of the new Flax Museum in Kortrijk, Belgium in October 2014. Publications include Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). Her forthcoming co-written manuscript (with Brian Massumi) is entitled Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP). She is an associated partner and advisor of the METABODY project

Marcello Lussana

Is a composer and a software engineer, free thinker specialized in interactive systems. Focal point of his work is the interaction between music and human movement, where body and computer are connected through a complex understanding of the body perception and dedicated interfaces. He produces computer music for audio-visual performances, dance, theater and live electronics. He is co-founder of the Netlabel Fantomton and is based in Berlin. He led workshops with motion tracking in Spain, Italy and Czech Republic for persons with disabilities. He is collaborator with several partners of the METABODY project.

Yvonne Förster

Junior professor for Philosophy of Culture and Art at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. I received my PhD at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, on the topic: Experience and Ontology of Time. My research focuses on the relation of body and mind from an interdisciplinary perspective, on the cultural conditions of cognition and on the theory of fashion and art. She is an associated partner of the METABODY project.

Oscar Quejido Alonso

At the moment, he is working on his doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. The aim of his research is to emphasise the relevancy that has for the Nietzschean philosophy the “comparison” between different cultures and societies and since this one is articulated in the shape of the individuality.

Laura Rodríguez Samperio

Is graduated in Modern History and in Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. At the moment, she realizes a doctoral thesis on hermeneutics and the first Heidegger. She is a member of the seminario Nietzsche Complutense.

Alicia Peñalba Acitores

European PhD in Cognitive Sciences of Music with a work about the role of the body in music performance. She is a lecturer and researcher in University of Valladolid since 2006 in the department of didactics of muscial plastic and bodily expression. She has studied with relevant scholars in Sheffield University (Sheffield, UK), Université Rene Descartes (Paris, France) Casa Paganini (Genoa, Italy), Music Technology Lab (Montreal, Canada) during more than 9 months. She participates in many research project abouth embodiment and has several publications and conference participations. She is an associated partner and advisor of the METABODY project

COLLABORATORS AND WORKSHOP TEACHERS

Cristina Palmese

Architect, her professional career specialized in urban projects and fieldwork in specific sites dealing with heritage and perceptual ecology.

Marta Leirado

Performer specialised in inclusive artiditac creation, physical theatre, contemporary dance, Butoh, Contact Improvisation and arts of movement. Psicomotor Therapeut and psicodrama. Sign language interpreter.

Leticia Fernández-Fontecha

Has a degree in history of Art in the Complutense de Madrid. Since January 2013 she works on her thesis “Pain, Childhood and the Emotions: A Cultural History” thanks to a Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship in the history of childhood. Her research focuses on the history of chidlhood, history of emotions, and history of medicine.

Josepha Dietz

Josepha has an MA in Media Management from Bauhaus University and has specialized in marketing and finance. She was coordinator of the Dresden Innovation Fund for Art and Media Technology at the Trans-Media-Academy (TMA) and has led numerous workshop for persons with and without disabilities in Spain, Germany and Poland in movement, theater, expessivity in the use of new technology.

CONFERENCE SPEAKERS

Núria Font

Barcelona-based video maker and curator. Director of cultural projects related to dance films since 1984. On 2005 starts to direct the activities project of NU2’s, www.nu2s.org that organizes IDN festival- Image, Dance and New Medias at Mercat de les Flors (Barcelona), curates internacional programs on that feld and organizes and every year LAB research around the relationship between dance and new technology.

Leticia Fernández-Fontecha

Has a degree in history of Art in the Complutense de Madrid. Since January 2013 she works on her thesis “Pain, Childhood and the Emotions: A Cultural History” thanks to a Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship in the history of childhood. Her research focuses on the history of chidlhood, history of emotions, and history of medicine.

Liz Watkins

Is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include the significance of colour for film theories of subjectivity, perception, and sexual difference. She has published on feminism, film/philosophy, the materiality of film, and archive in parallax, Paragraph, and British Journal of Cinema and Television. She is co-editor of both Color and the Moving Image and British Colour Cinema and of a special issue on Gesture in Cinema for Journal of Cultural Research. She is currently working on a monograph, The Residual Image (Routledge, 2015).

Inês Afonso Lopes

Holds a master’s degree in History of the Art at Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Portugal. Currently, she is finishing her Phd in History of Religion, and History of Portuguese Art, in co-supervision at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and at Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto.

Katherine Mills

Attended Harvard University where she majored in History of Art and Architecture. Currently, she is pursuing a Master’s Degree in the History of Early Modern Spain at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, which she will complete this upcoming October. In 2014 she coorganized an international conference on Atlantic history in Madrid.

Angela Parker/Kaiser

Is a poet, dancer, and translator interested in transforming ways of knowing. She is currently working on translations of Georg Trakl’s poems into movement and color for her doctorate at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Laura Lake Smith

Is a PhD candidate in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. She currently lives in London, England. Her dissertation focuses on the career of Richard Tuttle (1965-present), an American artist who creates seemingly unfinished, temporal, and indeterminate objects. Her other research interests include filmic representations from early cinema culture to contemporary video art and photography from the 19th-century to present day. She also works on the renegotiations of conventional time and space and the problematic distinctions between the real and the representation.

Monika Jaeckel

Research oriented artist and writer in the fields of performance and theory; studied video/performance with J.Jonas, Stuttgart; 2002 MA European Media with O.Lialina, Merz-Akademie Stuttgart/University of Portsmouth. Current artistic research project of memacism centering around this self-invented acronym for the concept of motion embedded mind agency.

www.delegate-perception.net ; www.mindgap.org/portfolio

Imogen Racz

Is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at Coventry University. Her publications include Contemporary Crafts, (Berg, 2009), a forthcoming book Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday, (I. B. Tauris, 2014), and articles and book chapters on Cornelia Parker, Michael Landy and Tony Cragg.

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INTERNATIONAL METABODY FORUM AMSTERDAM 2014

INTERNATIONAL METABODY FORUM – IMF 2014 – AMSTERDAM

Crafting the Metabody:From Hands-on to Bodies-on, intra-action and transdisciplinary mappings.

From December 8 to 14, STEIM is hosting the international MetaBody Forum 2014, as part of the MetaBody project, a 5 years EU-funded project which started in July 2013.
In this week, the partners in the project will collaborate in a group residency, bringing together their
various concepts, knowledge and tools to produce a collaborative prototype for the eventual
outcome of the project – a transformative, mobile architecture, that will seek to open perceptions,
relations, movements and beahiours up to indeterminacy.

During the week, the partners will transform all of the STEIM studios into a space of
metaformances, bodily experiences and transformative architectures.

    The outcome of this week-long residency will be presented:

  • Saturday, December 13, from 14:00 to 17:00
  • Saturday, December 13, from 20:00 to 23:00
  • Sunday, December 14, from 14:00 to 17:00ç

    Location:

    STEIM Concertspace, Utrechtsedwarsstraat 134, Amsterdam.

    This presentation will include presentations on the theoretical background, as well as critiques on
    the technology used, and discussions between the partners and visitors.

    On Wednesday, December 10, from 20:00 we are hosting an evening on:
    Expression through Movement and Music – opportunities for other-abled bodies

    Location:

    Theater Perdu
    Contact
    Kloveniersburgwal, 86, 1012 CZ Amsterdam.

    The evening will present two projects from the MetaBody partners:
    Affording Difference – Different Bodies / Cultures / Expression / Abilities
    Working together to create electronic music instruments to improve quality of life.

    About the MetaBody project:

    MetaBody addresses the importance of non verbal communication and embodied
    expressions for cultural diversity as a fundamental form of cultural heritage.
    Current information technologies induce forms of homogenisation of non verbal
    expressions while subjecting people to an increasing control, thus undermining fundamental
    freedoms. This empoverishment of cultural expressions on a global scale is undermining
    diversity and civil rights while expanding the possibilities for ubiquitous and invisible
    surveillance worldwide.
    The MetaBody project seeks to address this problem, elaborate a critique and propose
    alternatives through the production of new kind of media that highlight the diversity of
    embodied expressions, bodies and contexts, foregrounding cultural diversity. New
    multidisciplinary or transdiciplinary communication platforms will be developed in the
    convergence of the arts (dance, music, architecture and visual arts), and social minorities with
    the mediation of technosciences and humanities.

    The core partners in the MetaBody project are:

    During the week we are joined by some of our associated partners:

SUPPORT

With the support of the Ministerio the Educacion, Cultura y Deporte
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PARTNERS

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COLLABORATORS

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