Two weeks ago I went to see the last production of Merce Cunningham at BAM, “Nearly Ninety”.

I liked the performance and I thought of two ways in which it relates to some of the discussions on this blog.

First of all, while the dancers were dancing videos of a rehearsal were projected … there were a few screens but many of the projected images “hang in the air” (as there were no screens) and it was as if the dancers were dancing with or better to say “in parallel” with these projected dancers. This created this dual space which reminded me of our attempt to create a hybrid space - virtual and physical.

Moreover, as I was reading about Merce Cunningham’s work (see for example, the NY Times article), I thought of John Weeks’ post and on the role of the “memory” of the blog. Here is a quote by Cunningham:

About Merce”: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.” (merce.org)

I was also very intrigued by his conception of collaboration and multi-disciplinarity. Indeed, he’s been working with composers - John Cage for many years - as well as with visual artists. Yet, while collaboration is often seen as a dialogue and we have indeed discussed this issue at length on the blog - how to build a shared understanding? - he seems to see it as different perspectives, that developed individually and are assembled only at the end. Hence, he  decided (since the 1950’s) to consider the dance as completely distinguished from the music. They are not coordinated. They just take place at the same time. The music, designs and choreography are made separately and they are assembled only on the first night.

He said in an interview to the BBC:

“(…) It’s at that time that we began to separate the music and the dance and that was so interesting to me.

Was that his suggestion? Cage’s suggestion?

Well his feeling was that not, one of the two elements should not support the other or be in charge, that they should be equal but separate. And I liked that idea.

Yes, the idea of going rumpety, tumpety tump and, and matching the music was awful.

Yes. Yes, well as he said it’s a form of slavery and so those first solos about three or four of them were made, were, we, given a kind of time structure between us as to how long, and certain divisions, we separated and he made the music to the structure and I made the dance. “

Yesterday we put down the installation after Milena’s last visit (a just-in-time impromptu visit to New York) and in fact, Milena who’s been so involved in the discussion, ended up helping us putting the installation down.It was nice to have one of our blog’s contributors involved as it was nice to see some of you at the opening or visiting afterward - a nice way to connect the blog and the physical installation, to reflect of how virtual and physical space are intertwined.It went so much faster: it took us two full weeks to put it up (without mentioning the previous months of visits, measuring, and prototyping) and in more or less two hours most of it was down and folded in different boxes. I realized how this was partly due to the whole process that was involved in the putting up the installation - the thinking with our hands process, the open ended nature of the work.It was a weird feeling to see the empty space back to its original “shape” and nice to hear people with neighboring offices telling us they will miss it.This being said the end of the installation only closes the visitor account door but it does not end our conversation which had evolved to become a thing of its own.Looking forward to more interesting discussions,al

Yesterday I was in the space and two visitors asked me “what’s next”.The first one coming from “the art world” (sorry for the simplification) asked: “what will happen to the installation? where will you present it next?”  The second one coming from “the business world” (once again, sorry for the simplification) asked: “what are the outputs of this project?”… I also heard although it was not explicit “Can you implement them?”These questions are in themselves interesting as they highlight the multitude of interpretations and understandings, but there is nothing new here. What is more interesting is that it made me realized that the installation had become something in itself. The second visitor saw it as a presentation of research ideas, innovative, different, but still with some potential outputs. One of my academic friends also asked me what papers will come out of this installation: once again the question of the outputs. These questions made me realized that the nature of the project has changed and if originally there was this idea to present my research ideas in a different way, this has slowly vanished in front of the “project itself” - which still draws on research ideas but which has become something of its own.This does not mean that there are no potential outputs (we are working on two papers) but these are not essential to the project, and there are more related to our reflection on the process than to the content of the project.  Back to the point raised by Aileen and Ben Rubin on the relationship between the form and the content, I am realizing how the heaviness of the content has vanished in the work with the material to reach a form, hopefully to get some kind of balance between both. al   

Hi Anne Laure,I wanted to (as always) continue talking about this. It is so interesting to me. I think we might be back around somewhere near the Sci/Art discussion we had recently right here on the blog. Both you and Milena (in her comments in response to you), talk about thinking imaginatively or thinking of new ways to present ideas. I am a firm supporter of this, of course, for many reasons, not least because of our shared interest in broadening the audience for research/academic work and we have often said this in any discussion of BSWW-as our reference by Foucault has suggested. But I think what is emerging here in these recent posts is distinct. What is coming up here are both questions of collaboration (and who is doing the collaborating) but also questions around the visual- to put simply when is something visual an illustration and when is it art? Whether interactive or not. And I think what is also important to consider, what does this mean when one collaborates with artists? Museum display, as in the case of the one Milena cited, has a visual, interactive and illustrative aspect-and may well be innovative in all those respects. I think those kinds of responses or thinking (and I am sure Milena would agree) are quite different from say what Rubin and Hansen do with their collaboration.Perhaps the key piece that is missing here is that in any collaboration with an artist, the project must move beyond the mere presenting of ideas. The project must in and of itself become a new idea. The question of the relationship of a form to it’s content (and the role of the viewer) is a long one in aesthetics. To impose the content on a form, the form dies (as Baldachinno, who is a blog member, said in a lecture). This, for example, has always been the difficulty of political art and I venture, collaborations with artists. This too was my fear of calling Building Space with Words, art. I felt that the obligation was, of our project and of our collaboration, to prove itself in the process of it’s making so to speak as to whether it was indeed becoming a ‘new idea’ or merely an illustration of an existing one.Given the kinds of response we have had and the richness of our discussions Anne Laure, I am excited.

Several people have asked me how this installation fits in my research, in my work.

I explain them how it was originally an attempt for me to present my ideas differently, and how it then became a way of “thinking with my hands”, with different media.

Linked to this I’d like to mention Bruno Latour’s work. Bruno has been a pioneer in curating exhibitions bringing together artists, sociologists, philosophers, scientists and historians - the first one was Iconoclash in 2002, the second one was Making Things Public in 2005. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/expositions/index.html

( Ben Rubin had a piece, Dark Source, in Making Things Public. http://www.earstudio.com/projects/darksource.html)

Milena also pointed to me an exhibition at the British library, Taking Liberties. The exhibition was about 900-year struggle for Britain’s freedoms and rights . There’s still an online exhibition: http://www.bl.uk/takingliberties

I found this format particularly powerful to present multidisciplinary perspectives and also to create opportunities (public venues?) for people to learn, experience, reflect and express themselves.

al

Yesterday was the opening night and things went very well… It was a great party, thanks to Liz DiNapoli…

It was very nice to see people going through the maze, to see the text reflecting on them, enveloping them, diffusing through the different layers of fabrics. Someone told me that it was hard to read and I agreed and replied that we did not aim people to be able to read. Text was for us  a material, a texture. The panels are not screens; they are support for diffusion… they are the invisible structure for the text to “materialize”.

A few people ask us about the structure and why we chose to use this “structure”: a maze “floating” from a web structure. Part of it was because of the experience we were trying to convey: we explored many materials; we thought at one point of having a stand alone structure (in plexiglass or glass) but we thought it would then become a form of its own - a sculpture - instead of just being the support for the words. We wanted the fabric to disappear behind the words. We also responded to the structure of the building: we could not touch the ceiling or the floor; there were symmetrical ledges…

Another thing that occurs to me yesterday listening to people was how the installation conveys an idea of lightness and of materiality. It made me think of the discussions we had about virtual space and the fact that virtual space is not immaterial, but in fact it is deeply material. In a similar manner, the light structure of the maze requires the wired structure.

As Laura’s noted in her post (thanks for the nice pictures!), it was amazing to see people constructing the space through their posts. One more step toward collaboration!

From a personal perspective, it was really neat to see an idea that I had a bit more than a year ago “materialized” and it was as I “wanted” it to be. Aileen and I had this big smile Tuesday night when we were nearly done and we stayed in the space with. Yet, the form could have been enacted differently (through different materials), but the experience could be the same.

And that’s the experience, the environment, that we created that mattered to us… and the questions it raised.

Thank you to all the members of this blog and for their great conversations and insights (and we hope this will continue) and thanks for all the visitors…

al

Multidisciplinary encounters on Complexity in Arts and Sciences: an interesting event at IRCAM in Paris (co-organized with Centre George Pompidou) IRCAM, June 10-12, 2009 (for more information, see description below.

In case you’re in Paris at that time, it sounds like a very interesting event and completely in line with some of our discussions on the collaboration between artists and scientists.  

The event comprises of a three-days scientific symposium and twoart-science encounters in the evening.The whole event takes place inside the Ircam Agora Festival<http://www.ircam.fr/85.html>, june 8-19 2009, a major milestone in the French cultural landscape. It is also coupled with a Lars von Trierretrospective organized by the Centre Pompidou.

While the symposium will focus on conferences by prestigious scientists or art theorists, the evening presentations will give the opportunity toleading artistic personalities to confront their practices and ideology on the ground of complexity.Physics, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, epistemology, architecture, music, painting, litterature, cinema, theatre … a greatvariety of topics will be explored in an interactive fashion.Participants will take advantage of a selection of concerts during the Agora Festival program that have a unique connection to the idea of complexity.

This post is a follow up to my post on thinking with fabrics, ladders and projectors (February 5th). It emerges from my reading of a text on ideational drawing (by Terry Rosenberg in an edited volume on Writing on Drawing).Rosenberg defines ideational drawing as a specific type of drawing, “a process and always in-process; thinking-in-action and action-as-thinking” (p. 109). Ideational drawing seems to me very close to what I describe as scaffolding and to the thinking space that building_space_with_words (blog and installation) is for me.”Ideational drawing  (as process and as artefact) is a thinking space - not a space in which thought is re-presented but rather a space where thinking is presenced.” (p. 109-110).Ideational drawing is a drafting process and it includes not only the output - the drawing - but also the act of drafting.  The description of ideational drawing for someone like me who does not draw is still meaningful because it evokes my notes taken in notebooks and small pieces of paper. It also reminds me the correspondences of intellectuals during the Republic of Letters which exchange ideas, challenge each other in their letters and thus develop their ideas and explore new ones. This is thinking with words, thinking with your hand holding the pen - taking notes, writing letters (or even typing on the keyboard).Yet, the current process with the installation makes this whole idea even more meaningful.More meaningful also became this quote from Heidegger:”Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet” ( Heidegger, 1999, What calls for thinking, quoted in Rosenberg, p. 110).Another version of it is the notion of distributed cognition (see Hutchins’s Cognition in the Wild): cognition does not only take place in the skull, but it is distributed across people and artifacts. I became very interested with this theory while studying air traffic controllers at work. It also provides a very relevant framework to describe our work with Aileen: drawing, prototyping and building an installation as a way of thinking out loud, sharing ideas… and for me at the end of the day, that’s what thinking is about - this ongoing process of drafting, scaffolding.al

For those based in New York and in line with our discussion about collaboration between science and art: an interesting public program will take place next week at BRICS Rotunda Gallery.

Applications of Medical Imaging Technology in Contemporary Artistic Practice

Tuesday, February 17 at 7 pm

Artists Robert de Saint Phalle and B.J. Vogt in discussion with curator Nina Horisaki-Christens.

Artists are pushing the limits of medical imaging technology through a range of practices that transcend the rigidity of current thinking, including: translating MRI reports into sculpture, applying form and color to standard procedural output, and manipulating data to create imagery. Robert de Saint Phalle and B.J. Vogt discuss the artistic applications of medical imaging technology in contemporary practice and in their own work with curator Nina Horisaki-Christens.
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Lucy here is a reply to your question: they are in Brooklyn!

There is at least one in Brooklyn, and the kind of person you are glad knocked at the door and you wish you would have invited.

Welcome to Leslie Alfin who is a Brooklyn based installation artist who investigates the paradoxical juxtopositions, contextual mutations, and transformations in meaning relevant to information that moves back and forth between virtual and physical space (More on the Who’s Who).

Thanks Leslie for joining us. Aileen and I were delighted when we saw your note. It was a few days after we read Lucy’s comment and we both smiled: “here is our gatecrasher!”

Cheers,

al