Workshop 5 . Body Weave: Contemporary mediated art and its relations to the concept of self-organization.

facilitated by Lali Krotoszynski

BODYWEAVE Project

Bodyweave is an interactive artistic interface produced in collaboration with Jônatas Manzolli (composer and mathematician) and Jarbas de Moraes Neto (mathematician and programmer). Its present version carries my own selection of sound samples and auto iconographic digitalized content. The version #2 has been developed in order to ³weave² or work with different input. The objective of the project is to promote its use as medium for an international collaborative dance/music project.

Motivation

I understand dance as a system that builds continuously shifting body relations within time and space.

The new possibilities of dealing with time and space provided by technology, as well as in progress exercises around artist¹s and spectator¹s roles in contemporary art have motivated me to create Bodyweave.

The interface is an environment in which dance can be a joint venture for creative experiences and reflection about them on an international scale with a collective of interested individuals.

What kinds of narratives can result or emerge from being able to try out many different possible arrangements of independent elements of dance, video and music manifestations?

The question addressed to different approaches in composition practices may result in video, installation, live presentation, interactive interfaces, DJ and VJ sessions, for example.

Concepts

We are living a time when science, technology and art fields are increasingly looking for common territories of knowledge and development. Bio and nano-engineering, wearable computing, communication and semiotics, consciousness studies and quantum physics are just a few examples of subjects that have played a major role in contemporary art.

It was in the course to this context that the idea of self-organization has emerged. The term "self-organizing" seems to have been first introduced in 1947 by the psychiatrist and engineer W. Ross Ashby. Self-organization as a word and concept was used by those associated with general systems theory in the 1960s, but did not become commonplace in the scientific literature until its adoption by physicists and researchers in the field of complex systems in the 1970s and 1980s.

Self-organization refers to a process in which the internal organization of a system increases automatically without being guided or managed by an outside source or any localized internal feature by itself. The system develops an autonomous dynamic in relation to its mean and within itself, being able to display emergent properties.

The idea of self-organization seems to be a fit paradigm to look at the various instances of Bodyweave´s proposal; from the reunion of visual and sonic independent elements, until the way each collaborator chooses to work and mend them.

Along with the self-organization thought, Bodyweave carries features from the I Ching, ancient Chinese divination system and the Haiku, Japanese traditional poetry stile.

In short, the I Ching system inspired the grid where the sound samples and visual elements are kept in the interface¹s code, as well as its chance procedure. While the Haiku has referenced Bodyweave with its nature matrix, spontaneous first sight aesthetic apprehension and its demanding of the reader¹s association skills.

Both references support Bodyweave´s interpretative or meaning generation possibilities that unfold from synthetic structures.

Descriptions Bodyweave 1.0

1.

Offers a pre-set option menu: from 36 color and sound given ball elements, one must choose three

2.

Each one of the three balls are part of a family of 16, any three chosen balls bring to the next screen their families, summing 48 balls that appear and shuffle in the screen space

3.

One must choose 6 balls from the 48, and then drag and drop each of them in one of the 6 empty slots in the screen space

4.

Each ball, as soon as it is placed in the empty slot shows the frame image it represents

5.

The six frames and sounds automatically mend and are shown in a loop

 

Launching of BODYWEAVE 2.0 International Mediated Collaborative Dance Project

The interface is going to be presented with the new especially developed features that supply a grid structure to organize the new visual and sound sample input (jpg and mp3 files) to be produced during the workshop by members of the lab group. Those can also be brought ready; in this case they should be at least 16 samples, 640x480 pixels jpg images and/or 16 MP3 sound samples ranging 0.300 seconds to 2.0 seconds recorded in CD (Mac format).

The material will be processed by the interface, which weaves the input content suggesting and/or provoking aesthetical-conceptual crises, interchange, new solutions or even the reinforcement of previously adopted approaches.

These experiences will be held during the workshop, its results discussed and the International Bodyweave project may or may not proceed accordingly to the group¹s interest. Arrangements such as a common theme or set of themes, schedule of on-line and physical meetings will be discussed during the workshop.

A Bodyweave address in the Internet is going to shelter the common database, provide the interface to experiment and record the experiences, and supply a forum area. Material supporting is welcome from any institution willing to be linked to the project.

 

RESEARCH LIBRARY