Examination room Beta
It is impossible for me to reflect on Dr. Kim Vincs guest lecture and not to think of my own “bodymemories” of dance and dancing. The parallels between her research on volumetric thinking and volumetric interaction gave a much needed shape and direction to my ongoing work on immersive imaginaries and helped to see all parts of my MAPS coursework portfolio as a collage that builds toward a untied whole. Hence, in the language of a dance class:
Un, deux, trois…
1. The space between the medium and the message
Kim Vincs’ presentation of short video films of ‘ghostly” dance performance recorded with volumetric capture technology brought to my mind a well-known phrase coined in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan. In “Skin to Skin: Performing Augmented Reality” (Vincs et al. 2014) McLuhan’s dictum is revisited and contrasted with Vilem Flusser’s assertion that “new media make new kinds of messages possible” (161). The authors argue that augmented reality technology must create a new ways of thinking and making; the focus of the new media scholar thus should be neither on the medium of the message but rather of the space between.
New media technologies such as volumetric motion capture or LIDAR imaging have created their own recognizable aesthetics that has made its way into urban public space art. Some of the recent works worth mentioning could be Garden of Ghost Flowers by Lundahl & Seitl and Untold Garden (2022) a mixed reality performative installation presented as STRP festival in Eindhoven and Utrecht Panorama installation by Jaco Schilp (2022) who used LIDAR data to create a ghostly image of the city etched in metal sheets. The aesthetics naturally lends itself to “hauntological” school of cultural analysis with their focus om “ghostly matters”: untold stories, unburied bodies, unserved justice and un(re)solved crimes, such as those featured in an award-winning AR installation by Ado Ato Pictures (2021).
2. “Flashing dynamosphere”.
I am extremely grateful to the guest speaker for bringing up some name not yet familiar to me but highly relevant to my research topic and the research directions that I am probing. One of these names is Laurence Louppe with her explorations of “spaciotemporal poetics of the body”. While I was not able to locate the source of the expression “flashing dynamosphere” attributed to Louppe, I put it down as an expression that makes in my mind a very vivid connection to the corporeality of VR experience. In “Virtual Reality and Kinaesthetic Connection” Vincs (2022) argues that “the concept of immersion in VR is complicated by its inescapable relationship with embodies experience” (108). In her autoethnographic account of The Walk experience, Vincs stresses out the fact that she did not experience her body as absent or missing (114).
My argument is that while the body indeed never goes “missing” in VR, it can certainly be “forgotten” in the same way we “forget” the clothes we are wearing as we go through our daily lives while certainly being aware of not being naked. Virtual reality experiences from a comfortable sitting position in a theatre auditorium is very different from the one where the body is challenged kinesthetically significantly more than visually. Here I am referring to a VR experience that I have visited last year as a part of family trip with my primary school aged children: a theme park ride based on Luc Besson’s sci-fi adventure film Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets (2017). In contrast to The Walk experience where the spectator is aware of being in the full control of their body position, Valerian ride is a journey into the unknown where drops twist and turns are sudden and cannot be foreseen or controlled. While the visual aesthetics of the experience barely add anything to Besson’s cinematic spectacle, the combination of VR with the body dynamics of an actual rollercoaster ride created a body response much more intense than expected, a state of “shock and awe”.
3. The volumetrics of age
The last but not the least point that I take from the session is Kim Vincs reflection of rediscovering her dancer body at the age of 61. The transformation processes that female bodies undergo throughout life stages and their social and psychological implications is an important subject spanning many fields of interdisciplinary research. When it comes to a female body, aging is more than often manifests as a change in both body volume and the body dynamics that come from the new set of relations between the body and the forces of gravity. Being an adult figure skater, I am well aware of the limitations that aging places on performers’ bodies, and the sense of loss and grieving for the nimbler, fitter version of self: a bodymemory that is not too different from the memory of a person - a good friend, a relative - gone for good and remaining only as an “archive”.
Vincs research into holobodies raises the question of the place in the emerging mixed reality dance narratives for different kinds of bodies and different kinds of relation with the forces of gravity. This question brought me towards the writings of Dutch architect and art theorist Wim Nijenhuis and his online essay “The Space of The Fall: On Dance, Architecture, Bodily Perspective and Gravity” (n.d.). Exploring the possible relation between dance and architecture, Nijenhuis turns to the works of the French philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio, who in a dialogue with Louppe develops a groundbreaking concept of gravitational space. Dancing, according to Nijenhuis, “is a mysterious incantation of inert elements that occurs somewhere between inanimate matter and animated action”, possibly in the space “between the medium and the message” that Vincs et al. (2014) talk about in “Skin to Skin”.