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Just Like That: William Forsythe – Between Movement and Language
... We believe that movement and its connection-making, relational potential is key to the becoming-body (bodying) of a robot and its capacity to relate to other bodies and the world. Alluding to the generative capacity of movement, according to Erin Manning, movement is bodying or becoming-body, rather than "something the body does" [17]. Our proposition is that it is movement from which the robot's body, with all its aective, intelligible qualities, emerges, rather than its physical appearance. ...
... Similar to the issue of giving lifelike characteristics to the robot, this would distract from our aim to better understand how movement can produce and activate connections and sensations that visual appearance alone cannot (also see Section 3). Hence, our objective is to foreground movement and how it 'bodies' [17], while eluding temptations to make analogies to known or living 'things'. The non-organic morphologies we experimented with were simple abstract forms, similar to a blank canvas and fullling our criteria of not having an obvious a front or back, head or face, or limb-like structures. ...
This paper explores movement and its capacity for meaning-making and eliciting affect in human-robot interaction. Bringing together creative robotics, dance and machine learning, our research project develops a novel relational approach that harnesses dancers' movement expertise to design a non-anthropomorphic robot, its potential to move and capacity to learn. The project challenges the common assumption that robots need to appear human or animal-like to enable people to form connections with them. Our performative body-mapping (PBM) approach, in contrast, embraces the difference of machinic embodiment and places movement and its connection-making, knowledge-generating potential at the center of our social encounters. The paper discusses the first stage of the project, in which we collaborated with dancers to study how movement propels the becoming-body of a robot, and outlines our embodied approach to machine learning, grounded in the robot's performative capacity.
Inspiration is a widely used concept in everyday speech, and it is used especially when people talk about what they do in their creative processes. This article presents a re-thinking of the notion of inspiration through a non-representational approach to challenge the assumption of dance as a mere stimulus to and representation of texts and vice versa when integrating creative dance into literacy education. Based on diffractive analytical engagements, this article proposes an understanding of inspiration as intra-active and rhizomatic in-betweens producing new-ness and other-ness. This understanding can produce rich and diverse opportunities that value and cherish writing and dancing non-hierarchically in the literacy classroom; both have pedagogical value, without either acting as a servant of the other. The article concludes with a discussion of the extent to which literacy education is prepared to take dance seriously, emphasizing that the proposed understanding of inspiration can contribute to that end.
Drawing on the contributions to this special issue, this article offers a synthetic description of the principles of ownership, sharing, and reward that guide and stimulate the creative practices of contemporary dance. Irish traditional music is also considered. The article aims to contextualize creative practices within a series of concerns around the protection and perpetuation of valuable cultural and artistic practices. This contextualization establishes the relevance and interest of the contemporary dance for other domains and attends to the contemporary conditions of cultural production, including those of intellectual property law, commercialization, and community/commons formation. I show how this work offers an illuminating model of social process in which value created in common is linked – through reputation, attribution, recognition, and innovation – to people, without private property becoming the dominant mode of ownership.
Ethnographic video requires the makers to grapple with the idea of 'constituting a compositional present' (Stewart 2007), rather than a static notion of truth or representation. This audio/video performance project sits at the intersection of affect theory, feminist and performance studies, and extends these discourses into new materialist considerations of the posthuman and more-than-human. The piece takes up Bennett's (2010) challenge to any distinction between dull and vibrant lifeforms through the project's attention to the ways in which both 'nature' and person-made objects play an agentic role in the everyday of living and travelling. Video and audio-informed research can be, in our view, themselves enactments of new materialist mappings of research spaces and practices, suggesting new paths for methodological and conceptual becoming. In this 'micro-making' (that is, a making practice built up out of brief video clips, flash performances and the brevity of poetry), the three co-authors enact notions of entanglement (Barad 2007; Ingold 2010) as a "meshwork of interwoven lines of growth and movement" (Ingold 2010: 3) by bodily engagement with machines and machine-bodies that propel us forward and intervene in everyday practices and performances. 2 Concrete River 1
Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing is a sharp, lively exploration of the connections between therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing as a method of inquiry; and of how these connections can be theorized through the author’s new concept: creative-relational inquiry. Engaging, often poignant, stories combine with rich scholarship to offer the reader provocative, original insights.
Wyatt writes about his work as a therapist with his client, Karl, as they meet and talk together. He tells stories of his experiences attending comedy shows in Edinburgh and of his own occasional performances. He brings alive the everyday profound through vignettes and poems of work, travel, visiting his mother, mourning his late father, and more. The book’s drive, however, is in bringing together therapy, stand-up, and writing as a method of inquiry to mobilise theory, drawing in particular from Deleuze and Guattari, the new materialisms, and affect theory. Through this diffractive work, the text formulates and develops creative-relational inquiry.
With its combination of fluent story-telling and smart, theoretical propositions, Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing offers compelling possibilities both for qualitative scholars who have an interest in narrative, performative, and embodied scholarship, and those who desire to bring current, complex, theories to bear upon their research practices.
This essay explores alternative notions of thinking to reimagine the nonhuman and, with it, our relationship with machines.
This is the final draft of a chapter published in: J. Bennett and M. Zournazi (eds) Thinking in the world. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
In this article we discuss the possibility of presenting the unique qualities of ‘the body’ in contemporary dance practice through tailored digital choreographic objects. We reflect on some implications of abstraction in cognitive science, and on ‘the body’ as a site of exploration and knowledge in the realm of social, moral, and relational being.
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