Prosthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic Body
Erin Manning
Concordia University, Montréal
Explorations of new technologies and dance, led by Mark Coniglio, Scott de
Lahunta, Antonio Camurri and others, focus on the difficulty of locating gesture-as-such.
One key to developing sensitive software is understanding — and embedding into
the software program — what a gesture is. In a recent paper, Scott de Lahunta
suggests that the best way of coming to an understanding of gesturality is to
work collaboratively with dancers such that 'the choreographic and computational
processes are both informed by having arrived at this shared understanding of
the constitution of movement.'[1] A similar tendency
is expressed by Mark Coniglio when he suggests that live performance work must
'delve beyond direct mapping and the metaphor of a musical instrument; to building
systems that could better sense qualities of movement; to represent something
of the "gestalt" of movement'[2]
An engagement with the technogenetic body demands an encounter with the syntax
of the moving body. For the practitioners of dance and technology the exploration
of movement is intrinsically related to how to locate where a movement begins
and ends in order to map its coordinates within a sensitive system. Yet, the
question “What is a gesture? (and how can the computer recognize one?)” may
not actually lead in the direction proposed by Coniglio and de Lahunta. Rather,
it may direct the techno-dance process toward establishing a kind of grammar
of movement that would — paradoxically — be more likely to tie the body to some
pre-established understanding of how it actualizes. “Mapping” gesture risks
breaking movement into bits of assimilable data, of replicating the very conformity
the computer software is seeking to get beyond. Instead of mapping gesture-as-such,
this paper therefore begins somewhere else. It seeks to explore the technogenetic
potential of the wholeness of movement, including its “unmappable” virtuality.
The unmappable — within a computer software program — is the aspect of movement
I call pre-acceleration, a virtual becoming — a tendency toward movement — through
which a displacement takes form.[3] If a vocabulary
of gesture is to be reclaimed as part of what can be stimulated in the encounter
between dance and new technology, it must be done through the continuum of movement,
through the body’s technogenetic emergence in the realm of the virtual becoming
of pre-acceleration. Gesture-as-such (defined as extensive displacement of body
parts divisible from a wholeness of movement) causes an imposed stability and
holds back the potential of a sensing body in movement’s capacity for innovation.
Scene 1: The Dance
A
dancer walks across the stage. She wears sensors on her arm. Behind
her is a large screen. Connected wirelessly is a software program that
orchestrates input and output according to a computational relationship
between displacement and its transformation into sound and video image.
As she moves, the software generates a reaction in the environment.
The movement has to extend beyond the body’s virtual center: the software
can more easily detect displacement that occurs at the body’s extension.
The displacement must be registered by the program as a gesture-in-itself.
An almost-virtual or pre-actual movement out of which a displacement
is born (a pre-acceleration of the movement) cannot be detected by the
software. A visible (fully actualized) movement is necessary for software
detection, usually a displacement either of a limb or of the whole body
across space. Depending on the software, this movement triggers an image
or recomposes a sound (slows it down, speeds it up, generates it). This
usually happens in the “real time” of the dancer’s movement. The
spectator is invited to participate in this intermedia experiment.
The
challenge is how to keep the participant’s attention on the quality
of the movement. In a situation where the dance modulates sound
and image in real time based on extrinsic movements of a dancing body,
attention shifts from the qualitative to the quantitative. Because of
the system’s prosthetic apparatus and its emphasis on subjecting the
dancing body to its parameters, the participant’s attention tends
to be drawn to the workings of the system rather than to the movement’s
qualities. We catch not the dancer’s preacceleration in its present-passing,
but the ways in which her movement stimulates a transformation of the
video image. We want to know when and how the music modulates and due
to which kind of movement. We watch the dancer for this shift, trying
to locate the specificities of the technology and its gestural syntax.
This concern for the technology soon situates the dancing body as a
pre-formed organism onto which the technology is grafted. The question
shifts from “what can a body do” to “what can technology do.”
The experience of the dance performance is directly related to the limits
of the system. The body movement is reduced to bits. Gestures are “pulled
out” (prehended) from the movement rather than contributing to its
experiential wholeless. Attention is distracted from the subtleties — the virtual pre-accelerations of the moving body — and what stands
out is actualized displacement in the service of the software. The dancer
responds by accentuating the extremity of the movement to help the system
catch on.
This dance-event is typical of many of those situated at the nexus of dance
and new technologies.[4] In such cases, technological
experimentation involves a body whose movements trigger a system that can read
certain kinds of displacements and translate them. These technological systems
operate prosthetically and are often attached to the human body. They operate
on the basis of the more-than, “enhancing” a dancing body’s capacity to create
spacetimes of experience. These dance/new technology experiments emphasize how
digital technology can foreground previously untapped dimensions to the moving
body, creating a body that is sensually emergent, alive with image and sound.
But are these new technologies really opening up the body to its technogenetic
potentiality? Can the vocabulary of the prosthetic actually re-generate the
moving body toward sense modalities otherwise untapped?
The prosthetic suggests a vocabulary of the more-than. Within this vocabulary,
the “than” — the body, usually — can only be thought as an already-formulated
entity. Concepts such as the machinic (Deleuze and Guattari[5]),
the Body without Organs (Artaud[6]), the posthuman
(Hayles[7]), and originary technicity (Derrida[8]),
explicitly challenge the notion that the body could be reduced to a than-ness
that would need to be supplemented to create a body that was more-than its organic
envelope. They suggest that a body is always already more-than, refuting the
logic of the “than” that would need to be prosthetically enhanced to reach its
“more than” state. Refuting the “than-ness” that supposedly becomes prosthetically
enhanced, these concepts suggest that the “more than” is the very condition
of the becoming-body.
What we “see” in dance/new-technology performances is often a prosthetically-enhanced
body. Such a body performs its improvisation supplementarily, contributing technologically
to the stage-space through a transformation of video and sound. This transformation
tends to occur at the level of representation. We see a change in space (the
image shifts), but do we feel space differently? The logic of the prosthesis
as it is mobilized in this kind of dance trend rarely moves beyond the limits
of interactivity.[9] It produces mediations between
different systems whereby one portion of the system is always already pre-constituted.
In most cases this means working with a stable body-concept. It is the than-ness
of a body that is supplemented by the shifting technologies. From stable to
unstable and back, but never really metastable. New ecologies of experience
are rarely created under these conditions.
Experiential
transformation is rare. It depends on the capacity to create events
that are “new” enough that they catch our attention and familiar
enough that we can relate to them. “Relate” is the key word
here: we must feel them in their eventness. To simply watch an event — to remain a passive spectator to its inner workings — does not
result in experiential transformation. Transformation must entail a
shift in affective tone such that the participating spectator feels
the performance, responding to it through an emphasis as much on its
duration — its capacity to create experiential spacetimes — as through
its content. New technology and dance performances do suggest the capacity
to produce platforms of interaction that can call forth new kinds of
process that will in turn create new kinds of events. Yet their “process”
is limited by the dimensions of the software which tends to call forth
a docile body, both in the software-conformist dancer and in the technologically-attentive
spectator. Affective transformation depends on evolution in the machinic
system such that both bodies and technological systems are altered.
Transduction: the process develops according to a dynamic not of interactivity
but of relation.
The
body-system reconstitutes itself as infinitely more-than, an n+1 that
is in excess always of what either the body or the software could do
alone. Transduction (a change not only of state but of dynamic) can
only occur through an embedding of a kind of analog process into the
dimensions of the technology’s potential. The shift is affective as
much as it is quantitative. The analog is key to this process because
unlike the digital, the analog always has chance embedded in its open
system. The body is always more-than. This more-than takes the form
of virtual effects contaminating the body’s actuality. This virtuality
is not available to digital computation, which must conform to actual
ones and zeros. By bringing the analog into the digital mix (by intermixing
new technologies with dancing bodies such that the dancing body is emergent
with the technology rather than simply added to it), the technical system
might tend toward ontogenesis, toward technogenetic evolution.
Evolutionary
systems that build on accumulation rather than on one-to-one effects
are still very rare in the dance world, where the analog continues to
pay tribute to the digital. The body is restricted to its “thanness.”
The complex analog body is reduced by the prosthetic system to a passive
interactivity, forced to conform to a pre-established definition of
what a body can do. The body must move for the software. Here’s the
paradox: moving for the software means learning to move the software.
The choreography is determined by the software, which qualitatively
limits what a body can do. Where technology was supposed to open the
body to a wider relational potential, it actually reduces its capacity
to move spacetime. The dancer learns to traverse space rather than creating
it. The dancer is moved to interact with the software in a closed system
of cause and effect. What tends to emerge: a pedagogical exercise in
moving software. For technogenesis to occur, the dance must surprise,
moving beyond a closed-circuit interactivity toward relational eventness.
For this to take place, recompositions of potential (movement taking-form
through virtual recombinations shape-shifting into displacements) are
necessary, activated not by an external source, but by the very ontogenetic
system that is the sensing body in movement.
This
is not a plea to return to a pre-technologized body, or to abandon a
technologically-enhanced dancing body, but, rather, to explore the potential
of technogenesis in relation to the sensing body in movement. To begin
to address this question, a vocabulary of process is necessary. Process
here means working with enabling constraints that create the conditions
for ontogenetic emergence. To experiment with a digitally enhanced post-technologized
body beyond the dichotomy of the organic/prosthetic is to ask what a
body can do such that it is not the prosthetic that enables it — as
a tool supplementing the imposed than-ness of the body — but the very
more-thanness of the body that comes to the fore. It is to move beyond
the prosthetic as an external category to the ways in which bodies make
sense: to ask how technogenesis creates new modalities of sense.
Technogenesis — ontogenesis of the bio-technological not as a technical additive
to the biological but as an emphasis on the originary technicity of
the human — suggests a working vocabulary where the body is posited
not as a stable category, but as a creative vector of experiential space-time.
This requires that we think the body in movement (that we never dissociate
bodies from the flux of micromovements of which they are composed),
that we conceive of bodies both as worlds and as creators of the worlds
that world them. To think a body in movement is not to locate the body
in a pre-formed world but to conceptualize moving worlds as instances
of interrelating bodies. Technogenesis defines bodies as nodes of potential
that qualitatively alter the interrelations of the rhizomatic networks
of spacetime in which they are ephemerally housed. These networks are
not distinct from the bodies they instantiate: they are themselves sensing
bodies in movement. Sensing bodies in movement are not discrete entities
but open systems that reach toward one another sensingly, becoming through
these relational matrices. As these bodies individuate relationally,
they evolve beyond their ontological status, becoming ontogenetic. Technogenesis
is the dynamic becoming of the sensing body in movement.
Scene 2: Whitehead begins to dance
To move is to create (with) sense. A body perceives through difference. A
change in environment provokes a sensory event. In Alfred North Whitehead, perception
is both sensuous (sensed) and non-sensuous (a direct perception of the past
in the present). To perceive is not simply to accumulate sense-data, it is to
directly sense relation as the virtual activity inherent in the taking-form
of objects and worlds. It is not that a “subject” perceives a world, but that
the world is pulled into subjectivity and vice versa. This activity of “pulling”
suggests that there is no subject-position that precedes experience. Without
an initial perceiving subject, a pre-formed body cannot exist. Worlding occurs
in the process of a world becoming subject or a subject becoming world. Or,
to extend the analysis, subjects are transitory individuations in a processual
worlding whereby certain actualities take form in a nexus of “contemporarily
independent” events.[10]
To understand the stakes in this argument, it is necessary to think actuality
in terms of the stop-gap of perception: about a half second. What we perceive,
we perceive always at a delay[11] such that this perception
is already composed of the holes of experience. I do not perceive an object
per se, the objectness is prehended (drawn out from a pastness in a way that
is qualitatively new) as an event that spacetimes me. Through the prehension,
“I” am subjectified as an instance of that particular object-event. This object-event
constructs me — individuates me — as much as it is individuated by me. This
experience is an actively creative one: “I” must assist the perception, fill
up its holes, give it form. This giving-form happens as “I” (as individuating
event) fill in the gaps of perception, giving the object a contour or a background
(that I may not directly have perceived), situating it in a worldness that cannot
be separated from it. As “I” do this, “I” am also individuating (moving beyond
any kind of discrete “I-ness” or “than-ness”) on a plane of becoming that Whitehead
calls an actual occasion. “I” am not detached from this process and yet “I”
am only composed by it to the extent that it will initiate my infinite re-composition.
To explain this strange refraction of experience, whereby “I” individuate
in direct engagement with the individuating world, Whitehead turns to two concepts
which sound very familiar — appearance and reality — , redefining them through
his vocabulary of process and event. He does this to attempt to dislocate the
notion that experience is a subset of an already formed body-world. For Whitehead,
the world only pre-exists in so far as its pastness (its virtuality) can be
activated in the present. To activate does not mean to conceive the past as
a world strangely available to an unsuspecting present. Activation here is much
closer to a Bergsonian concept of active recollection.[12] It suggests that the present — which, as I mentioned above, is composed of a
very short duration — is propelled by an experiential pastness. What we call
the present is composed of strands of pastness recomposing and perishing through
it. This does not mean that all presents are predetermined. Quite the contrary:
the present is always new, but its newness is compelled in large part by experience
as it is reactivated or re-collected from the past half-second of experience.
To reactivate is never simply to relive. There is no world that will remain
the same after reactivation. Reactivation will always, to some degree, mean
invention.
To arrive at the difference between appearance and reality, Whitehead turns
to the concept of “actual occasions.” The actual occasion is similar to the
Deleuzian concept of the event. It refers to 'drops of experience, complex and
interdependent' where each actual occasion is 'analyzable in an indefinite number
of ways' (1978: 18,19) and must be perceived as such. Focusing on perception
(prehension) as an activity allows Whitehead to by-pass the passivity
of a vocabulary of preformation (where perception is contained by a pre-formed
world). Prehension is perception as event.
An
actual occasion is the expression of a particular prehension — or
set of prehensions — that converge into what Whitehead calls a “subjective
form.” The “subjective form” is not the form of the object itself,
but the very ontogenetic process out of which its objectness — its
eventness — comes to the fore. We never prehend an object as such.
The objectness of the prehension forms in the eventness that is the
actual occasion. Objects emerge in relation as events of experience.
As an object begins to take form, its process “concresces” such
that it becomes more stable (and recognizable as such). This (meta)stability
(the object having reached its eventness or “subjective form”) is
the beginning of the perishing of the actual occasion, whereby an opening
is created for adjacent experience. As the actual occasion perishes,
it populates the nexus of pastness out of which new experiences will
emerge. The nexus as such cannot be perceived. But parts of it can (and
will) be reactivated in future-past actual occasions.
This
virtual nexus is how Whitehead defines reality. As the actual occasion
perishes to give way to the next actual occasion (having reached its
“concrescence” through the becoming of its “subjective form”)
the actual occasion melds into a reality virtually populated by all
of the positive (having been actualized) and negative (having remained
inactivated or virtual) prehensions that make up our experiential worlds.
This nexus of perished actual occasions — reality — can be thought
as a wealth of potential out of which possible worlds emerge. Reality
is therefore always more than and less than appearance: less than what
appearance can be, and more than appearance is. Reality must be activated
and can only actualize in the portions that appear. And even then, it
is not strictly “what it was” but “how it can become.”
To
think the body in these terms is to focus on the body’s unactualized
potential as an aspect of its becoming that cannot be realized as such,
but can be called forth, adding novelty to its open system. The taking-form
of an individuating body is an “appearance” of the body within a
vastness of unrealized potential. Technogenesis occurs at the threshold
of emergence of the becoming-body where reality is pulled into appearance
and something is added to the mix. This something is a movement-with
that provokes a body to become in excess of its organ-ization.
Novelty — or creativity — occurs always in the present. Because the present
takes form on the threshold of appearance and reality, the present must
be conceptualized as operating in the midst of virtual causality becoming
actualized. This virtual causality is the capacity to prehend that which
is not yet actual (the virtual, or pastness) such that this non-sensuous
perception emerges sensuously (in appearance). Novelty emerges through
the causal relation between reality and appearance. Reality contributes
to appearance by bringing experiential pastness into the present. This
experiential pastness transduced into the present brings a certain causal
(pre-experimented) element to the event of perception. Whitehead calls
this aspect of perception “causal efficacy” in order to remind us
that what we perceive first is not an object but its pastness or its
capacity to exist in relation. This causal aspect of perception is the
directly perceived relation between objectness and world. Activating
perception means activating the relation that underlies the object’s
very capacity to be perceived. To prehend an object is therefore first
and foremost to prehend how it fits into experience. Causal efficacy
is the active causal link between objectness and experience that allows
the object to take form experientially.
The
pastness of experience — reality — creates the potential for future
connections. This futurity-in-the-past assures an active linkage between
perception and event that makes prehension intelligible. The perception
of a chair, for instance, is a sitting perception. What is experienced
in the prehension “chair” is not first its sensuousness — its
woodness, its redness, its softness — but the causal relation between
chair and world. The “object” will initially be perceived as the
relational potential between chair and sitting whereby the sitability
will in fact become the object. Of course, the chair may not fulfill
this expectation: the chair may be missing a seat, may be purely decorative,
may be a mirage. The pastness that allows for perception’s intelligibility
can fail us, and when it does, new worlds — new actual occasions — will in turn make new kinds of activation — new kinds of appearance — possible.
In most organisms[13], to causally prehend is only
one aspect of perception. Whitehead describes a concurrent “second” process,
which he calls “presentational immediacy.” In this “second stage” (though never
quite second, since in higher organisms it can barely be thought separately
from causal efficacy), perception is enhanced by the quality of experience.
Now the redness of the chair emerges, a quality that is, strictly speaking,
completely unnecessary to the experience of sit-ability. Yet, presentational
immediacy is lost without causal efficacy [14]: despite
the heterogeneity of its experiential dimensions, “pure” presentational immediacy
cannot comprehend or delineate an event. Pure redness remains meaningless in
this context without the causality that constitutes chairness. Qualitative difference
must be associated with causal efficacy’s capacity to create a relation between
event and world. Pastness is necessary for perception, even if that pastness
does nothing but invite the creation of an object-world relation to be deformed
in the next prehension. Novelty emerges from the productive constraints of the
pastness of worldings in the present-passing. Presentational immediacy is what
adds nuance to the mix. Without presentational immediacy, the world loses a
key aspect of its potential subtlety. As with the intertwining of appearance
and reality, what we know as perception is similarly a complex intermixing of
causal efficacy and presentational immediacy.
Appearance
is the active pulling out of experience from reality, the “giving
form” of the nexus in the future-pastness that is worlding. Reality
must in a certain sense “precede” appearance: what appears is always
less complex that reality itself. Yet reality can never be prehended
as such, and, in that way, remains undifferentiated. Appearance and
reality thus exist on a continuum: perception happens always for the
first time through the duration of appearance, and yet this duration
is only possible because of the activation of reality. To experience
is always to exist durationally: it is to co-live the present as a pastness
of emergence that will only be known in its future-pastness-becoming-present.
There is no moment that precedes the prehension out of which perception
occurs: the future and the past co-exist through the present.
With
prehension foregrounded as the key to the eventness of experience, appearance
and reality can no longer be delineated as hierarchies of objectivity
and subjectivity. Rather, we begin to conceive the eventness of
an actual occasion as that which embodies different layers of duration
that lead toward nodes of perception. Sensing bodies in movement emerge
ontogenetically from such durational interweavings.
Scene 3: Dancing the Ground
A
dancing body is an example of a sensing body in movement. A dancer prehends
spacetime, actively perceiving and moving worlds such that new kinds
of experiential spacetimes are constituted. These worldings are pullings
out of an experiential ground that shifts with each of the dancer’s
movements. The dancer senses and creates spacetime in one and the same
movement, individuating with each shift in ground. The ground thus becomes
part of the shifting through which these individuations develop, emerging
as a key aspect of the actual occasion that is the taking-form of movement.
As it enters into movement, the ground is reconstituted as novelty,
intertwining with the capacities of what a gravitational body can do.
The ground emerges as an enabling constraint: the dancer will always
reach the ground again, but this reaching will be inflected by a towardness
that will continually change the dimensions of the space as the ground
emerges into a verticality, a vorticality, a hardness, a horizontality.
The ground moves (with) the dance. The ground in relation to movement
takes part in the creation of becoming-form (a curve, a spiral, an arabesque)
whereby movement achieves its subjective form, a subjective form always
intrinsically related to a moving ground. The ground thus contributes
to the dance as a form-finding element in the dancer’s shape-shifting
process, operating not as a stable entity but as an active determinant
in the process. The ground is a compositional aspect of a dancer’s
movement, reconstituting the ways in which spacetime potentializes the
moving body and vice versa. The ground does not simply ground, it dances.
A
dancing ground is a technogenetic element in the dance. A technique
of composition, the ground becomes a condition of emergence for the
ontogenetic body. Techniques conceived this way are technologies composed
with, for and through a dancing body. They foreground the more-thanness
of the body. A body is not a technique, but a technique can create a
body. The dancer’s body is qualitatively different from a body walking
to the bus stop because of the variety of techniques that make up the
dancing body. The dancer moves not toward a destination, but toward
her capacity to shapeshift. This is a key aspect of technique: the dancer
learns to continuously relocate the ground as an element of experimental
spacetime, creating momentum with and through the ground toward gravity-defying
revectorization.
To
ground, when dancing, is to alter the composition body-floor such that
the ground actively relocates in relation to dynamic movement. Movement
is never a movement-in-space. It is a movement-of-space that qualitatively
alters the durations of experience. To say that the ground is “beneath
her feet” is to misunderstand the very mobility of groundedness.
There is link to be made here
between the dancing and the walking-to-the-bus-stop body, even if the
same kinds of technique are not foregrounded. The shiftiness of ground
may be less palpable with respect to a walking body rushing to a bus-stop,
but is nonetheless virtually present: you might, for example,
experience a “loss of ground” due to a shift in the level of the
sidewalk that causes you to lose your balance. The dancer is trained
to defy the ground as stable surface, whereas the walker depends on
the ground’s stability. But that does not mean that the ground necessarily
conforms to the expectations of the walker.
Shifting grounds are but one way in which a body creates spacetime. Dancers — like all other movers, only more obviously — breathe space,[15] perhaps folding the space into the duration of a textured tactility felt on
the skin. Dancers walk space, such that the dimensions of spacetime seem to
compress. They sound space, such that the vectors inflect, curving experience.
By creating such occasions of experience, the sensing body in movement alters
experiential spacetime such that spacetime is felt in its emergence.
This emergence is already a technogenetic experience. It would be impossible
to speak of experiential spacetime if we confined ourselves to the envelope
of an organ-ized body. This emergent process is technogenetic because it recomposes
the body. This recomposition takes form through a multiplicity of techniques.[16] For Simondon, a technique is a technology of emergence (an ontogenetic technology
or a technogenesis) through which new complex systems are composed. These techniques
can be thought as associated milieus of potential. Associated milieus are in-between
environments — ecological becomings — that emerge through the very technogenesis
that gives them form. The associated milieu is the compositional matrix for
the machinic body, in-forming the body through transductions that open the body-becoming
to the metastability that provokes it to become in excess of its organism. Techniques
matter form such that bodies become experiments in the making.
Can digital technologies create techniques capable of such technogenetic transduction?
Transduction here is understood as a movement through and across systems of
emergence through which individuations occur. This is not strictly a horizontal
process, but a durational one whereby what is transformed becomes a worlding
rather than an effect on an already-constituted system. Transduction alters
the very conditions of a process. Can digital technologies create ontogenetic
conditions for emergent body-worlds? Is it possible for new technologies to
perceive the virtual effects of the taking-form from reality to appearance,
to feel the incipience of movement, to sense-with the sensing bodies in movement,
“catching” the body in its passing? Can new technology engage the virtuality
of pastness, making its effects felt? This is not simply a question 'of the
superiority of the analog'[17] but a question to technogenesis
itself. Can technology play the virtual?
The virtual — pastness — is played by a dancing body through the body’s pre-acceleration — the incipience of a becoming-movement that takes form when the body-world
relation is moved. This non-sensuous perception — a pre-displacement that is
felt like a movement on its way — is at the heart of the complexity of experience.
It is this complexity that challenges digital technologies. Technology becoming
technogenetic involves shifting the terms of prosthetic “more-thanness” such
that the “more than” becomes the experiential starting point for the sensing
body in movement. Rather than beginning with the “thanness” of the body, technology
must work at the level of perceptual (sensuous and non-sensuous) emergence.
Technology has to become body. By working ontogenetically — toward technogenetic
emergence — rather than prosthetically, technology must becomes capable of actively
making sense such that it creates new sensing bodies in movement. No longer
held back by the limits of the software, movement might then be able to make
the technological process appear rather than simply moving to its parameters.[18] To add nuance to these experiential experiments, technology must also make its
failures felt, its lagging behind, it system collapse, its loss of ground. Making
the digital analog need not be the goal: technogenesis becomes evocative when
its techniques make transduction felt, foregrounding the metastability of all
moving systems.
For
such technogenesis to take form, Whitehead’s distinction between appearance
and reality must be taken into account. The appearance of a technogenetic
body cannot be based on a body (an organic body, a dancing body) that
pre-exists its ontogenetic emergence. The body must not be danced and
then supplemented: it must dance its supplement. It must dance its novelty
such that it introduces within the movement the mutability of the body’s
rhyzomatic networks of actuality and virtuality. A body is never wholly
actual: it is always virtually what it will have become as it interweaves
the organic and the technogenetic, where the organic is as much a technology
of the senses as the senses are technologies of the organic.
A sensuous perception creates a novel extension that disturbs the machinic
assemblage that is a sensing body in movement. To sense — to experience the
world amodally [19] — activates the body’s relation
to the world and opens the body to its technogenetic potential. This occurs
in the dancing body when the movement causes the room to space differently through
an accumulation of tactile sensations coursing through the air. Felt affectively
as a change in the dynamics of the environment, this kind of movement takes
form with and through the dancer’s body as a molecular reorganization of duration
such that the dimensions of the felt are reexperienced in conjunction with the
reassembling of a dispersing, re-cognizing becoming-body.
To feel time is to create space in the present. This requires an activation
of pastness in the presentness of experience. It means we move spacetime into
a passing present such that duration becomes experience. Whitehead calls this
direct perception of “pastness” non-sensuous perception. [20] Non-sensuous perception underscores the fact that perception begins relationally
with an emphasis on the pastness that allows us to “know” the world. This pastness
(that can be durationally as immediate as the present moment passing) enables
us to form causal relations between past events and current circumstances such
that we feel the world ecologically before we know exactly what it is. To feel
ecologically is to directly perceive the relations out of which spacetime will
be composed. Once these relations perceptually begin to take form, objects can
be “pulled out” or prehended. Perceiving ecologically does not suggest giving
meaning to form, but forming environmentally. To say we perceive nonsensuously — or ecologically — is to emphasize how the world creates modalities of perception
even as our prehensions are creating worlds. Ecological durations are not linear — they are richly layered, their nexus ripe with reality, their environments
populated by appearances. Whitehead calls forth this notion of non-sensuous
perception in order to sidestep the tendency to think we make sense only with
sense-data, challenging the theory of sensory-reception whereby an impulse “out
there” is processed by a mediating brain/body function that makes sense of a
pre-existing world.
We perceive not an object-as-such but how the object merges with experience.
We feel its pastness even as we call it forth in its present appearance. This
is non-sensuous perception. As mentioned earlier, instead of perceiving the
chair-as-such, we perceive its sit-ability: the object becomes its sitability — the object is its experiential function. The sitability of the chair
is rendered more complex by the analogous perception (presentational immediacy)
that adds novelty to the concept of sitting by associating it with qualitative
difference. 'The creativity is the actualization of potentiality, and the process
of actualization is an occasion of experiencing' (Whitehead, 1933: 178). Objects
are novel because their conjunctions are new, not pre-existing the object, but
immanent to it. Objects, prehended, are individuations within an ecology of
practices wherein perception is key.
Yet,
perception is never limited to the perception of even such complex objects.
It is always also an activation of a virtuality — a conjunction or
a relation — out of which an event (an objectness, an individuating
body) is composed. Non-sensuous perception is an activity of relation
whereby the composition of an event takes place through a re-uptake
of the virtual (pastness) into the actual (appearance). Through non-sensuous
perception we directly perceive relation. In Whiteheadian terms, we
prehend the affective tone — the relational concernedness — of an
object.
A sensing body in movement is activated both sensuously and non-sensuously.
Perception occurs on a continuum of relation. To make sense technogenetically,
the coupling dance/new-technology must ask how a technology can make relation
felt. This may be done, for instance, by working with a delay through which
the room is durationally recomposed. Imagine, for instance, a dancer cutting
across the space, shifting spacetime’s tactile borders through a succession
of movement-layers that compile a thick database that eventually alters the
sound in the room. The sound is not altered by a given movement, but by an overload
in the system. The sound can now be perceived as a sensory experiment technogenetically
emergent with perception’s own half-second delay. Experience is overlaid rather
than delineated through a representation of movement=sound in a distinct one-to-one
relation. Now, the system recomposes the room even as the dancer composes with
the system. The coupling causes the room to shift, to move, to breathe. As this
happens, the intensity of a shift in spacetime is perhaps felt. This is felt
not through the sound shifting as such, but through a slight difference in affective
tone. The room reverberates around its colour, its sound, its becoming-form.
Now, the spectator feels a concern [21] for the space.
This concern provokes a new kind of attention: a perception of the in-between.
Relation is felt even if only in its effects. A new composition begins to unfold,
one that may be related to an ontogenetic shift in the participating body of
the spectator. Technogenesis. Two bodies recomposed at different durations in
the sensing spectrum.
If
technology can recompose a body beyond the level of sensuous perception — beyond the directness of an operation that makes something seen,
such as an arm movement translating into a video image — technology
becomes technogenesis. What is sensually transmitted — what the audience
knows it can see or feel — is the datum of the experience. This is
necessary to create an event, but limiting if restricted to its representation.
What is crucial is the capacity to make the non-sensuous as well as
the sensuous felt. The concern that comes with experience — its affective
tone — calls forth more than the bits moving through the program or
the movement becoming image, image becoming sound. In a technogenetic
event, more than displacement or representation must be perceived. What
must also be felt — by the dancer first and foremost, but also by
those participating in the performance as spectators — are the microperceptions
through which the displacement is activated. Many of these perceptions
are nonsensuous because they work at the level of the barely there,
below the threshold of sensuous perception. Rather than the sensory
perception itself, what we feel is the relation out of which it will
emerge. The perception thus exists chiefly as concern. This affective
experience cannot be separated from the creation of spacetimes the technogenetic
event calls forth. Technogenesis contributes concern to the event which
does not end with the performance: the affective tone’s residue lingers,
provoking adjacent forms of experience, many of which remain virtual.
Technogenesis always involves more that the datum, more than the sense-presentation,
more than the present. Technogenesis makes the process felt, foregrounding
the duration of the individuating machinic body.
Technogenesis
cannot be pre-mapped. How then can it work alongside a technological
system whose parameters are so often set? The ontogenetic coupling of
digital technology with the originary technicity of the individuating
body must take this into account. Rather than mapping the technology — as a prosthesis — onto a moving body, it is necessary to incite
the movement to appear out of the technological process that is the
machinic assemblage of individuation.
To make the movement appear does not mean to restrict the movement according
to the parameters of the technology. It does not mean to delimit gesture to
limbs moving (because the motion sensor can better detect a large extrinsic
movement, rather than a virtually invisible one). We require operations that
traverse the spectrum of the technology’s potential metastability in relation
to a becoming-body. When technology begins to operate along this spectrum it
forms an associated milieu [22] with the experiential
in-betweenness that is the becoming-body. Technology not mapped-onto but emergent-with
a body-becoming might make different durations felt along the strata that is
the sensing body in movement. This would happen first not at the level of reality
but through the presentness of appearance. The technology would have to function
not as a system that takes over the moving body, but as a complex interface
through which the technogenetic body can be moved to appear. The effect of this
(dis)appearing body would eventually populate the nexus such that certain aspects
of the technogenetic body could remain dormant, real yet virtual, embedded in
a pastness accessible through activation. There is no doubt this already happens — but still too rarely. Techniques for technogenetic emergence must become part
of the technology’s interface. These techniques would thereby create new associated
milieus never distinct from the ontogenetic body. For the associated milieu
is always also the becoming-body, a technogenetic recomposition. Technogenetic
technology would no longer be inserted into a body-system: it would be emergent
with it.
Scene 4: Bus-Stopping the Ground
Let me return to my example of walking to the bus stop where I suggested that
the ground’s recomposition of the dancing body was simply an extreme example
of the shiftiness of the everyday walking body’s relation to ground. Whereas
the dancing body specifically dances the ground, walking to the bus-stop is
usually conceived as an activity that presupposes a stable ground. Yet, even
walking to the bus-stop challenges the ground. It does so by immediately reconfiguring
the body-ground series into a transportational vector. In advance of the walking,
the bus-stop already appears as the propulsion for the walk. The ground-in-itself
is backgrounded in favour of transportational (bus-oriented) momentum. The perception
ground-body in this case is directly intertwined with the capacity for transportation.
The ground still “contributes” to the walking, despite the fact that the transduction
of ground into the steadiness of the walk involves a backgrounding of the ground
in this instance. The backgrounded ground thus becomes a participant (rather
than a coordinator) in the transportational vector that carries the movement.
The ground “appears” only insofar as it is expressed as something else (steadiness
of movement, for instance). This backgrounding does not mean that the ground
is not active, but rather than it is not felt as such in the prehension.
The
prehension “ground” is indissociably linked to the transportability
of its becoming-function. It is not that ground is transport:
it is that it appears in the function of transportability. As long as
nothing gets in the way of this focus, the ground will continue to be
backgrounded in the transportational vector ground-walk-bus-stop. But
things are bound to get in the way: you smell the garbage in the alley,
which causes you to lose your footing and trip. Through malfunction,
you lose your ground and the ground appears, foregrounded, horizontalizing
you, altering your sense of spacetime. Suddenly, ground no longer contributes
steadiness-in-movement. Face-down, you prehend hardness. The bus-stop
is momentarily backgrounded. The event has shifted and with it the ground.
Now you see your reflection in the puddle and this makes you feel self-conscious.
You prehend a selfness that was neither part of the transportational
vector nor of the appearing groundness. A new actual occasion
begins to take form where the ground is once more backgrounded. You
remember your lateness and you quickly rise and resume your walk. The
ground re-enters the transportational vector, contributing to the hurriedness
of the movement that will take you toward busness. The hurry is foregrounded
now, but this does not mean that the ground has remained stable.
Each
event creates a different ground. Spacetimes of experience are always
linked to shifts in ground. Ground is part of the technogenesis that
makes events felt. It is by adding new elements to the system that the
system becomes metastable. Every appearance grounds differently. And
every worlding makes sense: it creates sensory openings through which
we move, and opens the way for movements through which we technogenetically
invent worlds. These are not prosthetic openings, but the very making
sense of the more-than that is the ontogenetic body.
What is real and what appears exist in a complex network of movement that
senses, relays, organizes, discards, opens, closes. Each of these terms is relational.
And each of these terms involves a gesture toward appearance. The key is remembering
that gesture is never in-itself: it is relation, sensuous and non-sensuous,
equal to emergence. Every experience occurs because it is prehended from a nexus
that continually evolves, replete with potentiality. Beyond the current prehension
lies the potential for the creation of new ecologies of experience. What a body
can do is characterized by its capacity to make sense beyond a vocabulary of
the prosthetic. An ontogenetic body has an infinite potential for technogenesis.
New technologies must dance the body.
Author's Biography
Erin Manning is assistant professor in studio art and film studies at Concordia
University (Montreal, Canada) as well as director of The Sense Lab,
a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy
through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Her artwork is primarly
devoted to painting and scupture. She dances Argentine Tango professionally
and writes about it as relational movement. Her dance background includes classical
ballet and contemporary dance. Publications include Politics of Touch: Sense,
Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2006) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). Her current book-project is
called Moving the Relation: Sensing Across the Arts and deals with
technogenesis and movement.
Notes
[1] The quote continues: 'This means descriptions
(what we think of as co-descriptions) of movement that can exist in both its
own terms (as in physical) as well as in the symbolic abstractions that are
necessary in order to use these techniques of gesture modeling, simulating,
learning, following etc. with the computer' (deLahunta, Scott. 'co-descriptions
and collaborative composition', opening presentation at Choreographic Computations
(a NIME06/IRCAM workshop), Paris, France, 4 June, 2006). [back]
[2] In deLahunta, Scott. 'co-descriptions and collaborative
composition', opening presentation at Choreographic Computations (a NIME06/IRCAM
workshop), Paris, France, 4 June, 2006). [back]
[3] For a more detailed exploration of preacceleration,
please see Manning, Erin. 'Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet,' in Choreographesis Ed. Lynn Turner. (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2007). [back]
[4] This is not to suggest that thought has not been
given to these issues. Many very interesting and innovative software composers
are currently working with dancers and choreographers to explore the potential
of creative continuums between software and innovative dance. In his recent
dance/new-technology composing, Scott de Lahunta calls this “choreographic
compositions,” suggesting that the choreography of the dance is entwined
in the double process of composing software and creating movement. The exploration
of new technology with dance has a history that can be traced to the 1960s with
choreographer Jeanne Beaman and computer scientist Paul Le Vasseur who created
computer generated choreography using an IBM 7070. This platform randomly chose
a sequence of events from a list of movements. John Lansdown, an architect,
similarly explored the potential of using the computer as an autonomous composer,
rather than to support or augment the existing creative process. Merce Cunningham's
methods are also well-known: the 3-D human figure animation software LifeForms
continues to be used today and has been developed in innovative work by Trisha
Brown and William Forsythe. According to de Lahunta, what is new about the recent
current of dance and new technologies is how systems are being built in correspondence
to a choreographic creative process with an emphasis on the 'shared understanding
that emerges through the collaborative process. This is what we think to be
both technically and creatively innovative' (deLahunta, Scott. 2006. 'co-descriptions
and collaborative composition', opening presentation at Choreographic Computations
(a NIME06/IRCAM workshop), Paris, France, 4 June.). This paper does not seek
to deny this important research, but to ask how such a process can or does become
technogenetic. [back]
[5] For more on the machinic, see Deleuze,
Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus Trans.
Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987). See also, Guattari,
Felix. Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains, Julian Pefanis. (Indiana:
Indiana UP, 1995). [back]
[6] For more on Artaud’s
concept of the Body without Organs, see Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari,
Felix. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis:
Minnesota UP, 1987). [back]
[7] For a reading of the posthuman, see Hayles, Catherine. How we Became Posthuman (Chicago: Chicago Up, 2000). [back]
[8] Beardsworth is influenced by Jacques Derrida in
his usage of originary technicity. It comes up in many of Beardsworth’s
texts. For an example of how he uses the term, see http://tekhnema.free.fr/3editorial.htm . [back]
[9] For an analysis of interactivity, see Massumi,
B et Dove, T. 'The Interface and I: A Conversation Between Brian Massumi and
Toni Dove', Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Arts (É-U), 1:6
(February-march 1999), pp. 30-37. [back]
[10] For more on the ways in which actual occasions
are always contemporarily independent events, see Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures
of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1933). [back]
[11] On the half-second delay of perception, see Whitehead,
Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1933). See
also Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke UP, 2002). [back]
[12] For an evocative reading of active
recollection in Bergsonian thought, see Deleuze, Gilles. The
Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. (Minneapolis:
Minnesota UP, 1991). [back]
[13] Whitehead defines organisms according to the
perceptual capacities, making a difference here between what he calls “lower
grade” and “higher grade” organisms..An example of a lower
grade organism engaged in perception would be the causal relation between flower
and sun. See Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas (New York:
Free Press, 1933). [back]
[14] For a case study of perception without causal
efficacy, see Erin Manning 'Taking the Next Step: Touch as Technique', which
explores the complex perceptual disorder in patients who suffer from post-encephalitic
syndrome. Forthcoming in Mark Paterson Ed. 'Re-Mediating Touch' Special Issue
of The Senses and Society (Oxford: Berg Press, 2007). [back]
[15] The idea of breathing space was evocatively brought
forward by Michael Schumacher dancing in Christopher Salter’s new piece
entitled Thresholds. In this piece, Schumacher recomposes spacetime
through the tactility of breath. [back]
[16] See Simondon, Gilbert. Du Monde d’existence
des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier Montagne, 1969). [back]
[17] See the chapter of the same name in Massumi,
Brian. Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke UP, 2002). [back]
[18] Stelarc’s work is evocative in relation
to technogenesis. For a stimulating reading of his work, see 'The Evolutionary
Alchemy of Reason' in Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual (Durham:
Duke UP, 2002). [back]
[19] The amodal suggests that we sense across sense
modes. The concept of “amodal completion” is developed by Albert
Michotte. See his essay in Thines, Costall, Buttersworth Ed. Michotte’s
Experimental Phenomenology of Perception (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum,
1991). [back]
[20] See Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of
Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1933) pp. 180-181. [back]
[21] The concept of concern is central to Whitehead’s
work and connotes a capacity to feel the affective tone of the becoming-world
as a direct experiential perception. Whitehead writes: 'The occasion as subject
has a "concern" for the object. And the "concern" at once
places the object as a component in the experience of the subject, with an affective
tone drawn from this object and directed towards it' (1933: 176). [back]
[22] For a more in-depth analysis of the associated
milieu, see Simondon, Gilbert. Du Monde d’existence des objets techniques Paris : Aubier Montagne, 1969. [back]
References
deLahunta, Scott. 'co-descriptions and collaborative composition', Opening
Presentation at Choreographic Computations (a NIME06/IRCAM workshop), Paris,
France, 4 June, 2006 [unpublished].
Deleuze, Gilles. The Time-Image trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta. (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1991).
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus
trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987).
Hayles, Katherine. How we Became Posthuman (Chicago: Chicago
UP, 2000).
Manning, Erin. 'Taking the Next Step: Touch as Technique', in Mark Paterson
Ed. 'Re-Mediating Touch', Special Issue of The Senses and Society (Oxford:
Berg Press, forthcoming 2007).
____. 'Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet,' in Choreographesis
ed. Lynn Turner. (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2007).
Massumi, Brian and Dove, Tony. 'The Interface and I: A Conversation Between
Brian Massumi and Toni Dove', Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Arts (É-U), 1:6 (February-March 1999), pp. 30-37.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Affect, Movement,
Sensation (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).
Michotte, Albert. in Thines, Costall, Buttersworth Ed. Michotte’s Experimental
Phenomenology of Perception (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991).
Simondon, Gilbert. Du Monde d’existence des objets techniques
(Paris: Aubier Montagne, 1969).
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (New York:
The Free Press, 1978).
____. Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1933)
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