International Metabody Forum 2015

Intra-action and Metaformance

Embodied Heritage and Media for Diversity: Generating Transcultural and Transdisciplinary Creation and Critique.

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INTERNATIONAL METABODY FORUM 2015 WEIMAR

1st – 8th MARCH 2015 in Weimar/Mittweida , Bauhaus University

IMM-Gruppe and Palindrome, e.V. will host the 6th MetaBody Forum in Weimar and Mittweida, Germany from March 1-10, 2015.

In a different move, the Metabody Project proposes a new notion of Non-functional design through the production of diffuse affordances that provide multiple open-ended potentials of interaction/intra-action.

Affordances of Symbiosis
Rethinking interaction and the immeasurable potential of the body in the age of ubiquitous computing.

The Mouse has been in use for the last 50 years as the main interaction device of the computer. Although HCI has been well-established as a branch of study starting from 80’s, only lately did our relation to computers start changing with mobile devices’ touch screens. Meanwhile, computing has become ubiquitous and, while still imprecise, increasingly we are interacting with them based on bodily control, from public doors to TV control to interactive art works.

The teapot has a handle, the mouse has a shape that fits in the palm, books have pages to turn, while computer interaction is becoming increasingly based not only on physical objects that reduce movement to very discrete traceable parameters, but on bodily gestures captured by cameras and sensors.

How can we reinvent affordances of the body in its continuous motion while challenging the reductive approach of ubiquitous computing?

Software is re-shaping the 21st century’s concept of the body. It is converting it into an object of measurement and calculation, reducing it to numbers. At the same time, machine perception of the body may blur the boundary between “normal” and “abnormal”. Reflecting on disability, we question the premise of software. From this perspective, what is commonly referred to as disability, with all of its “negative” implications, becomes a positive quality of difference and plurality. It is an appreciation of the body for its yet unknown qualities; for what it can do, instead of what it is.

We are asking if a new definition of body -one which removes the boundaries between normal and abnormal, able and disabled, measurable and immeasurable- can be based on a redefinition of affordances. Affordance as the indeterminate potential of the body to move in yet unthinkable ways. Affordance as an open-ended potential of relation.

How can we facilitate such affordances in our deterministic and probabilistic world of ubiquitous control? “What can a body do?” becomes, “What can the affordances of the body become”, understood as motion and relation, as openended potential, as relational ecologies, in our symbiotic life.

 

Affording Difference: Workshop with composers and persons of other abilities

2 – 4 March.

with the team of 6 composers: Andreas Bergsland, Andrea Cera, Giacomo Lepri, Marcello Lussano, Pablo Palacio, Ives Schachtschabel.
See biografies.

Each composer will present their interactive environment and each will be available for persons with and without
disabilities to experience.
How can we remove barriers to expression, joy and inclusion? How can we expand gestural expression, range of movement, and emotional expression?
How can we promote a positive awareness of difference, away from normative expressions? This 3 days workshop will focus on applications of interactive technology with persons of other abilities and explore different ways to make music with movements. 6 composers, a workshop leader and a choreographer will propose different approaches of interaction, using motion tracking technology (including video-based and controller-based systems), dance and music.
This workshop is designed for persons with disabilities or without disabilities in collaboration with Lebenshilfewerk Apolda and Tröbsdorf.

Open Studio

1 – 6 Marzch.

Interactive multisensorial laboratories of perception and movement and on-going research on non-functional design through the production of diffuse affordances that provide multiple open-ended potentials of interaction.

Conference : Affordances of
Symbiosis

5 – 6 March 2015

Affordances of Symbiosis: Rethinking interaction and the immeasurable potential of the body in the age of ubiquitous computing.

Internal MetaBody meeting

7 – 8 March 2015

Reception

Seminar Raum 108
Bauhaus University
Geschwister-Scholl-Str 8
99423 Weimar?

Cordinacón e Información
Delphine Lavau
Delphine@palindrome.de
? 0176 8690 5299

PROGRAMA

Keynote Speaker

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Petra Kuppers
Petra is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a widely recognized author.She is a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she teaches performance studies and disability studies, and she is on the faculty of Goddard College MFA program in Interdisciplinary Arts. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an artists’ collective that creates collaborative, research-focused environments open to people with physical, emotional, sensory and cognitive differences and their allies. Her book about The Olimpias arts-based research practices, “Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape,” won the biennial Sally Banes Award from the American Association for Theatre Research.

Marlon Barrios Solano
Marlon Barrios Solano a Venezuelan artist, researcher, consultant, educator, on-line producer/curator, video broadcaster and blogger based between in USA and Germany. He is the creator/producer/curator of dance-techTV, a collaborative internet video channel dedicated to innovation and experimental performing arts and its social network dance-tech.net. He has also conceived and developed the on-line interdisciplinary co-learning platform meta-academy.org. Since 2008, he has produced and published more than 400 online video interviews known as the “dance-tech interviews and views.” With a hybrid background on cognitive science, dance improvisation and new media arts he researches and explores the network technologies as participatory systems and collaborative practices within cultural production and education environments.
He researches the affordances of the new internet for the development of open and collaborative models of knowledge production and distribution among trans-local artistic communities and organizational contexts. Currently, he is a guest lecturer and associated researcher at HZT Berlin, Germany. He has been research fellow at DanceDigitalUK and ICKAmsterdam (Holland).

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Compousers

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Andreas Bergsland – Noruega
Andreas is a post doctoral researcher at Norwegian University of Science and Technology with a project entitled “Live-electronics in a performativity perspective”. Bergsland studied Musicology at NTNU with jazz bass as his instrument. After working as a school principal for 4 years, he developed an interest in electroacoustic music. Bergsland then received a 4-year research fellow position, culminating in a PhD entitled “Experiencing voices in Electroacoustic Music”. Bergsland has also been involved in compositions for exhibitions, installations, large scale multi-media events, in addition to doing live-electronics performances and working with computer instrument design for motion capture systems.

Giacomo Lepri – Italia
Giacomo Lepri is a musician, sound designer and video artist. He studied piano and percussion specializing in the Afro-Cuban and Brazilian tradition as well as in Afro-American jazz practice. Since young age, he is also interested in electronics and informatics technologies applied to music. He was visiting student at the University of Edinburgh and he earned a BA degree in Electronic Music from the Conservatory of Genoa “N. Paganini”. His artistic activities mainly concern the interaction between music other arts and technologies, with particular regards to the sense of performativity, ensemble music practice and improvisation. As musician and performer he joined various projects related to musical theater, folk music, jazz and electroacoustic free improvisation. As composer and sound designer, among other activities, he collaborated with the international centre of research InfoMus in different cultural and scientific EU projects. As video artist, he presented his audiovisual compositions and installations in festivals around Europe. Currently his musical research focus on the development of multimedia systems, multimodal human-computer interfaces and applications for small ensemble performing free improvised music.

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Ives Schachtschabel – Alemania
Ives is a composer, musician and software engineer. He studies media art and electroacoustic composition at the SeaM/Bauhaus University Weimar in Germany. His interests ranges from algorithmic music and sonification to audio installation and sound design in general. His current work involves insect-controlled composition systems and he holds lectures and workshops for audio programming. He works in collaboration with several artists and is the cofounder of Hausdorf – a collective, netlabel and platform for experimental sound art.

Marcello Lussana – Alemania
Marcello is a composer, a software engineer and 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.

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INTERNATIONAL METABODY FORUM 2015 USA-CANADA

Reversing Cybernetics, Queering Control

  • Duke University – Durham – 7-9 April
  • Concordia University – SenseLab – Hexagram – Montreal – 11-15 April
  • Ney York Institute of technology – NY – 17-21 April
  • UC Berkeley – Berkeley – 7-9 May

3 symposiums – 4 workshops – 9 metaformances/performances – 1 installation

Durham
Montreal
New York
Berkeley

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INTERNATIONAL METABODY FORUM MADRID 2015

INTRA-ACTION
XXI Century Quixotes: politics of the multisensorial body in the era of expressive homogenisation.
Madrid – 1-25 July

  • METATOPIA 1.0 – Performances, concerts, installations – Medialab Prado – 22-25 July
  • Urban Interventions – 20-25 July
  • Call for participants in Medialab Prado 9-17 July
  • International Unconference – HACKING BIG DATA BROTHER – 21-22 July in La Casa Encendida
  • Workshops – 1-17 July in LCE and Conservatorio profesional de danza “Fortea”

Day 2 instalation17

Introduction
Venues
Programme Summary

PROGRAMME BY SECTION

METAMEDIALAB

Performances, (dis-)concerts, installations and metaformances

METATOPIA 1.0 -Occupy 2.0 - Medialab Prado
METATOPIA 1.0 -Occupy 2.0 - Urban Interventions
METATOPIA 1.0 -Occupy 2.0 - In Homes and online
METATOPIA 1.0 - Occupy 2.0 - Call for participants

METAFORMANCE STUDIES

Metaformance studies point to the reinvention of perception as political strategy in the midst of a control society in which politics itself has transposed to the laboratories of corporations that shape our affects and perceptions.

HACKING BIG DATA BROTHER - International Unconference
Workshops La Casa Encendida
Workshop - Conservatorio Profesional de Danza Fortea

PARTICIPANTS

Biographies
Logos imf2015 madrid

INTERNATIONAL METABODY FORUM 2015 PARIS

Metaformance – Politics of Perception

METABODY presentation at Le Cube
(Issy Les Moulineaux, près de Paris)

Public activities:

  • Workshops: 6th, 7th – 19:00-22:00
  • Talks and panel: 8th – 19:00-21:00
  • Performances: 8th – 21:30-22:30 (outdoors) and 9tth – 19:00-22:00
    Public presentations: projects by Reverso, TUDelft, Steim, K. Danse, Dap_Lab, Palindrome and other Metabody partners.

6th-7th October

19:00-22:00

Workshop and demos – Metabody / Metatopia – embodied media as response to surveillance culture.
The workshop will focus on experimentation with perception, movement, spatial and bodily affordances for researching into the way interfaces capture and reduce movement to traceable discreet units, at the same time the workshop will propose to reinvent the affordances of the interface by involving bodily motion in non-reductive ways that foreground the indeterminacy and unquantifiability of movement as experienced through proprioception and other sensing modalities. All the Metabody tools, technologies and techniques developed by Reverso, TUDelft, Steim and K. Danse will become a critical playground for reinventing the body, reversing cybernetics and queering Big Data Brother.
With Jaime del Val, Jean Marc Matos, Marije Baalman, Nicolo Merendino, Nimish Biloria, and other Metabody partners.
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Featuring Workshop by Palindrome on the 6th October 19:00-20:00
Human Body Tracking — Motion and Touch

Many artists and performers today are using interactive technology. In this one-hour workshop, participants will get a taste of the body interface using camera and electrode-based technologies. We will look at some of the places such interaction draws its expressivity, and how it can be amplified and contextualized.

Palindrome has been working with MetaBody on an project called Affording Differences. This refers to fundamental differences in bodies and their desires for movement, and particularly recognizes the beauty and artistic values of diversity and disalignment. We work with persons of other abilities.

The workshop is for anyone — of any body-type and of any ability.
It concerns movement, music and touch.
Participants should come at the beginning (not in the middle) of the hour.
Wear loose clothing.

Software: EyeCon, EyesWeb, MotionComposer
Hardware: Computers, video cameras, touch sensors
Workshop Leaders: Robert Wechsler and Delphine Lavau
Bios
Meta-Interview

8th October

19:00-21:00

Metabody introduction by Jaime del Val
Metabody Panel – Reversing cybernetics – Hacking Big Data Brother – Embodied media as response to surveillance culture.
Metabody is a European project that attempts to redefine the body in Media in less reductionist ways than is usual in current information technologies, thus counteracting technology’s increasing tendency to dampen differences by reducing bodies and movements to prescribed forms in current surveillance culture. Metabody proposes a reversal of cybernetics that highlights the indeterminacy of embodied expressions as a key factor for a sustainable society. This foregrounds the need for a new ethics, which we may call metamedia and biomedia ethics.

With Nimish Biloria, Marije Baalman, Nicolo Merendino, Jean Marc Matos, Jaime del Val, Johannes Birringer, Michele Danjoux, Pablo Palacio and other Metabody partners.

21:30-22:30

Performances
Metakinesphere-Microsexes
by Reverso (Jaime del Val and Cristian García)

Indoors (9th october) and/or outdoors (8th october)

A new series of wearable architectures by Reverso that become extensions of a body looking onto itself through surveillance cameras disseminated on the skin, proposing intimate one-to-one encounters with the audience.
Microsexes
Metakinesphere
metak-seul-028

9th October

19:00-22:00

Performances-Installations-Metaformances
several meta-scenes from Metatopia 1.1 will be presented

METATOPIA 1.1

Metatopia is a metaopera, metaformance, and metagaming platform, a laboratory of perception, embodiment and space that extends in a series of installations / dis-concerts / performances / metaformances / urban interventions and home performances.
In an apparent future that could be the present a planetary cyberorganism, or hipercyborg, called Big Data Brother, traces, cuantifies and modulates every movement of every human and non-human body and space. There is a diffuse guerilla of Metabody agents that aim at deprogramming the hipercyborg (Big Data Brother) through mobilizing unquantifiable movements, untraceable behaviors, emergent perceptions and illegible affects, in a counter-reductive move towards increasing diversity of bodies and behaviours, infusing indeterminacy into the system. Metatopia is the architectural, kinetic and perceptual laboratory of the Metabody agents (also called mutant bitches 2.0) who develop dynamic, intra-active spaces, illegible behaviors and unquantifiable affects that exceed reduction to data. Metabody agents are affecthackers and perception hackers that operate in theontological substrata of power and control, XXI century Quixotes that undo the invisible strata of power disseminating diffuse actions across all spaces, a metapolitics for a potential Occupy 2.0 movement in the era of global surveillance.
Day 2 instalation17

Amorphogenesis-Errance

by Reverso (Jaime del Val) and K. Danse (Jean-Marc Matos)

A Hybrid of the Errance project of K. Danse and the Amorphogenesis project by Reverso, in which the audience is invited to explore an immersive experiential space in which small gestures expand in an amorphous digital architecture disseminated in translucent structures and projections of an intra-active space where the audience occupies shifting positions.
Amorphogenesis
Errance-22

Interaction and choreography: Jean Marc Matos and Jaime del Val
Conception, visuals and sound: Jaime del Val and Jean Marc Matos
Physical Structure: Jaime del Val and Cristian Garcia
Projection system: Dieter Vandoren
Computer Programming: Dieter Vandoren
Digital meshes: Jia Rey Chang
(The original work on “Errance” alone has been done in collaboration with Emilie Villemagne, Arnaud Courcelle, Marianne Masson, Mario Garcia Saez and Emmanuel Mondolfo).
Performer: Marianne Masson

K. Danse will present a short recent video of the Errance project.
Based on the multiple meanings of the labyrinth, Errance is a hybrid project which combines an immersive interactive installation, live performance and physical involvement of the audience.
Project made by K. Danse in the context of Metabody, www.k-danse.net
Choreographers: Anne Holst & Jean-Marc Matos
Digital artists : Aurélie Dumaret & Emilie Villemagne, ww.1minute69.com
Dancers-performers : Marianne Masson & Mario Garcia Sáez
Multimedia artist : Arnaud Courcelle
Composer : Emmanuel Mondolfo
Full documentation: Here
Día 1 performance amorphogeneisis27

Metakinesphere-Microsexes

by Reverso (Jaime del Val and Cristian García)

Indoors (9th october) and/or outdoors (8th october)

A new series of wearable architectures by Reverso that become extensions of a body looking onto itself through surveillance cameras disseminated on the skin, proposing intimate one-to-one encounters with the audience.
Microsexes
Metakinesphere
Día 1 performance mircosexes08

STEIM Presentations

by Marije Baalman and “Chi Ha Ucciso il Conte?” – Nicoló Merendino

Within the METABODY project, STEIM is looking into the integration of sound and sensing into objects, wearables and the architecture, which may afford modes of body movement and awareness beyond the every-day-life experience in the digital age. Within this project we aim for distributed sound reproduction with custom made speakers – exploring the concept of soft speakers – both in its material, as in the loudness of sound reproduction. We explore the properties of the materials – the speaker is not a separate entity, but the malleable shape of the object determines the overall sound quality. The speakers are connected to small embedded microcontrollers or computers that synthesize and produce sound – thus moving away from centralized audio production and towards distributed sound production. Localized sensing connected to these microcontrollers and computers allow for additional interaction modalities with the objects, wearables and architecture – further eliciting bodily interactions with the objects, wearables, architecture and environment.
Soft speakers – sounding textiles – customized listening

DAP-Lab: Kimosphere

by Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux
DAP-Lab will present a short film and several portable objects from the Kimosphere developed in Madrid (July 2015) In collaboration with TUDelft and the [S]carngami prototype developed by the student team Anisa Nachett, Alessandro Giacomelli, Giulio Mariano, Emily Guo, Xiangting Meng under tutoring of Dr. Nimish Biloria (Hyperbody, Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment) and Jia Rey Chang (Hyperbody, Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment). Kimospheres are kinetic atmospheres created for dancers and receivers exploring an intimate sounding architecture which envelops and acts as a suspended transparent veil and encumbrance – hiding-revealing, folding-unfolding while allowing light and “graphic writing” to flow through. They afford variable tactile orientations, colors, tones, shapes and positions, bodies forming netabodies inside a cocoon-like changing gauze texture or physical-mobile interface. Kimosphere not only reflects on the mediating conditions of conception as such – how we can think such a wearable architecture – but works through energies of tactile, breathing atmosphere (known in Japanese philosophy as “ki” and “aidagara,” & in Chinese cosmology as “Qi”) that are an “in-between“ phenomenon, generating fluidity between subject and object which the DAP-Lab design envisions as a kind of inside-inside.
Metakimosphere

Illegible affects

Reverso and Casa Paganini-InfoMus Research Centre, DIBRIS, Univ of Genoa in collaboration with Marcello Lussana

Infomus team: Antonio Camurri, Corrado Canepa, Paolo Coletta, Simone Ghisio, Stefano Piana
Casa Paganini – InfoMus Research Centre, DIBRIS, University of Genoa

Illegible affects is an interactive installation that analysis expressive gesture inverting the traditional approach of biometrics and surveillance by focusing on an awareness of entropy and other complex and ambiguous features as a positive value thus inviting the participant to have more entropic and complex gestures.
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Neural Narratives

In the context of Metabody Instituto Stocos has developed a reserch called Neural Narratives that employs simulation-based techniques to extend and alter a dancer’s bodily characteristics and movement capabilities. In this reserach the dancer’s natural bodily properties are represented via the same computational abstractions that are employed for the simulation of artificial bodily structures. This abstraction integrates the structural and behavioral properties of natural and simulated body parts into a unified form of hybrid embodiment. So far the result of this reserch is exemplified in 3 artistic works, Neural Narratives1: Phantom Limb, and Neural Narratives2: Polytopya, and Neural Narratives3: Clinament currently in development, in which 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. In this works a series of artificial audiovisual creatures animated by interactive artificial neural networks are projected as holograms in the performatic space.
POLYTOPYA
PHANTOM_LIMB
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Participating METABODY partners:

Coordinator

  • Spain – Asociación Transdisciplinar REVERSO

Co-organisers

  • UK – DAP_Lab – Brunel University
  • France – K-Danse
  • Netherlands – STEIM
  • Germany – Palindrome
  • Spain – Instituto STOCOS
  • Netherlands – Hyperbody Research group

FORO INTERNACIONAL METABODY 2015
CHILE-COLOMBIA

¿DECOLONIZANDO CUERPOS?

Chile and Colombia – 15th to 27th November

COLOMBIA
CHILE