Abstracts - York St John University

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Sita Popat (University of Leeds) This paper considers how the use of screens within dance performances and installations affects the ways in which audiences and participants experience bodies in space. The discussion references mixed reality in recognition of how digital technologies are becoming increasingly embedded in our social and cultural experiences. The question is not what is virtual and what is physical, but rather how do combinations of light and flesh engage us in mixed reality experiences and what might be the inherent spatial narratives that underpin that engagement? Three dance or dance-‐related examples are examined in detail: Cunningham’s Biped (1999), igloo’s SwanQuake: House (2008) and Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (1994). In each case, the virtual reality of screen space is not independent of the physical reality of the dancer or the spectator. Biped presents a stage world in which physical and virtual dancers appear to co-‐exist in a single mixed reality space. In SwanQuake: House, the visitor is invited to explore virtual and physical environments that intersect and overlap. In the 1994 version of Telematic Dreaming, performer Susan Kozel extends her body in virtual form to dance with spectators via a projection onto a bed within a gallery space. These pieces use a range of approaches to the body and the screen that highlight particular relationships, employing and sometimes challenging Euclidean and relational space and Newtonian physics. It is proposed that there tend to be two ways of designing virtual reality – a realist perspective that aims for an environment that is comparable to the physical world and an alternative mode that highlights things that can only exist in the virtual world – yet both of these can easily create binaries that disrupt embodied experiences. The paper concludes by suggesting that dance has much to offer in developing understandings of how the body and technology can manage existing binaries to co-‐habit within a mixed reality environment. Sita Popat is Professor of Performance and Technology at the University of Leeds. She came into academia through dance, and her research focuses on the body and digital media in performance. She is the author of 'Invisible Connections: Dance, Choreography and Internet Communities' (Routledge 2006) and co-‐editor of 'Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction' (Palgrave 2011). She is Associate Editor of the 'International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media'. In her spare time, she enjoys playing World of Warcraft with her sons. Architectures of Youth: Visibility, Agency and the Technological Imaginings of Young People Helen Thornham (University of Leeds) Drawing on audio-‐visual data from a research project, this paper explores the constructions of a particular local environment by young people as it emerged in our research project, and how this relates to wider conceptions of youth as, and within, a particular kind of ‘space’. Utilising arguments from cultural geography, youth, education and media theory, we argue that the audio-‐visual material produced through our research plays a key role in the productive generation of meaning for the school. In turn, this introduces a further set of critical issues. First, the role of technology in generating meaning needs attention, specifically in terms of the forms/modes of intervention facilitated by audio-‐visual technology, and how we might interpret this in relation to young people. Second, the technology and the architecture of the school support and produce the visual as the powerful force that facilitates and curtails certain behaviours and performances. This has a range of wider social and cultural implications that need addressing, not least in relation to 3
how it constructs and produces certain modes of behaviour. Finally, the visual recordings produced by the research participants demonstrate that the behaviours and performances are part and parcel of complex, routine and routinised engagements with the building. These performances are shaped by a range of factors including place, space, mobility, agency, power and the visual, and are constantly rearticulated and reimagined in ways that suggests we understand such buildings and the relations within them, not as static or fixed, but as ‘events’ (Rose et al 2010: 346), as ‘mobile’ (Grosz 2001:7) or as ‘process’ (Burke & Grosvenor 2008: 185-‐6). Helen Thornham is Research Fellow at the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds. She is the author of Ethnographies of the Videogame: Narrative, Gender and Praxis (2011) and co-‐editor of two volumes out in 2013: Renewing Feminisms: Radical Narratives, Futures and Fantasies in Media Studies (with Elke Weissmann, Edgehill) and Content Cultures: Transformations of User Generated Content in Public Service Broadcasting (with Simon Popple, University of Leeds) Her research focuses on gender and mediations, narrative, discourse and power and she is currently leading a Network+ within the Digital Economy theme (EPSRC/RCUK) investigating the digital transformations of communities and culture. Performing Lost Space: discussing an exercise in recording architectural detail with the performing body Angela Bartram & Douglas Gittens (University of Lincoln) The interior of the contemporary art space provides its users with a sterilised laboratory for the placement and experience of art. Increasingly, its bleached interior presents an a priori condition for the legitimate assignment of artworks within the complex milieu of the contemporary city. Such interiors have become an architectural typology, a predetermined homogenous non-‐place within which artworks reside. In this sense we can look to Lefebvre to understand the condition of the gallery space for ‘inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences.’ (Lefebvre: 1991, 52) The work of the artist, by contrast, liberates difference. More specifically, the art of performance simultaneously generates and exposes marginal space within the gallery interior; a corporeal action that deposits residual stains and blemishes across the galleries internal skin, leaving marks and traces that resist homogeneity to create a temporary site of differential experience. The lost, forgotten or overlooked marginal zones and irregularities of a gallery space become a point of ephemeral spectacle and this paper addresses the impact of this spatial and corporeal collision. The research that informs and situates these phenomena traces the irregularities, blemishes and scars that resist conventional mapping; marks that exist within an alternative, unconventional and unbleached space before, during and after a performance act. Recorded through orthographic drawing conventions, the research generated a narrative cartography of corporeal intervention within the interior of X Church Slumgothic, a heavily used semi-‐decayed community art space in Gainsborough. The co-‐authors of this research formed a practical collaboration that fused the dynamics and complexities of the performer’s body with the fixed conventions of architectural drawings. The discussion in this paper between performer and draughtsman explores how the body becomes an instrument to record and describe an arts interior beyond, yet from within, traditional architectural systems of representation. Douglas Gittens is an architectural designer and senior lecturer in the School of 4
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Abstracts - York St John University

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