This article presents an overview of the motivations behind my artistic approach and a description of current research. My artistic process aims at a transformation of the body based on tactile, kinesthetic and experiential references. It takes the experiential as its raw material. This process inevitably opens up alternative gestural codes, performative modes and behaviours. As a result, it is possible to consider a new relationship between somatics and technology capable of engendering new aesthetic, cognitive and communicational paradigms. Here, technology activates a process that reconfigures sensory-perceptual activity and leads to a change of corporality (corporalité) that in turn generates corporeality (corporéité). This dynamic is based on developing a notion of corporeal potentiality – or interval – and introduces the notion of emergence through which an eventual organization of a new experiential form in the performing arts can appear. Christine Buci-Glucksmann speaks of the interval as the equivalent of the Japanese term Mâ (2003: 89), explaining it as a latent potentiality present within the virtual. I argue that the virtual is part of the physical body and show how these concepts can be linked as the foundations of a methodology that I have developed with dancers. This methodology is one of an evolutive nature and is based on strategies of destabilization of three components of somatics that I have experimented with in order to recreate what Hubert Godard calls ‘an ever fluctuating real’ (Godard in Kuypers 2006: 60).
The idea of considering the living as an element of risk-taking was first inspired by my interest in existentialist approaches in different fields – literature, philosophy, the performing arts, etc. – as well as in the experimental approach Roy Ascott proposes between the arts and technology. Ascott (2003b: 150) advances an interpretation of change that is of particular interest to me: ‘the act of changing becomes a vital part of the total aesthetic experience of the participant’. In his article ‘Biophotonic flux: Bridging virtual and vegetal realities’, Ascott (2003a) speaks of a digital paradigm whose ‘systems and processes become increasingly ubiquitous and invisible, [while provoking] many artists [to] seek new horizons – in the biological sciences, nanotechnology, and the study of consciousness, leading to the emergence of a “moistmedia” (incorporating digitally dry and biologically wet systems)’. From the outset, Ascott (2003b: 123) positions his concept of moistmedia within a dynamic of experimentation, stating ‘I use the word experimental to mean making an action the outcome of which is not foreseen’. I consider these ideas as being fundamental for my own research and for this article, in which I propose a re-evaluation of the relationship between the moving body and technology; more specifically, I suggest focusing on recent perspectives in the performing arts which inscribe new manifestations and dynamics of cross-pollination between the somatic and technology. Thus, my latest research-creation projects led me to the conception and experimentation of a new aesthetic paradigm, which takes the form of a proposition of collective physical and mediated bodies. My interest in conducting creative research involving technology concerns the fact it reveals previously unknown aspects of the body. This article therefore reflects on the experience and conception of the performative body in the link it entertains with technology; an evolutive relationship from which emerges a complexification of self. To do so, I will highlight sensorial and perceptual phenomena and strategies related to the transformation of the body through its contact with technology – lived as a physicality – and subjective experience. This article also introduces the idea of how a culture of flux – reality in flux and constant transformation – is responsible for the emergence of new performative models, and how the dynamics of a loss of bearings and personal risk are essential with respect to this emergence.
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This article examines the new and multiple relationships of the senses and related perceptual and cognitive processes that characterize contemporary performance integrating new technologies. Focusing on the corresponding effects on embodiment, corporeality and performativity, it considers the sensori-perceptual ‘re-creation’, reorganization, deconstruction and reconstruction involved when the body interacts with, is ‘touched’ by, and ‘incorporates’ the effects of technology. While taking into consideration a current context of research-creation and its conceptual prerogatives, the article centres on the question of technological intervention from the perspective of its encounter(s) with the sensate, somatic body. Based on the premise of the body as a living perceptual entity, adaptive biological phenomenon and indeed, technology in its own right, the author redefines a contemporary status of the body while analysing the artistic strategies employed to inscribe the mediated body and its manifestations within a contemporary artistic production. The article concludes by suggesting that the phenomenological mediation of the performative body is an evolutive form of the sensate, somatic body that could have the potential to bring about the emergence of another form of embodiment and intercorporeality, or even, another form of dance specific to the twenty-first century. Possibly an alternative to the concept of the post-human.
The mediation of the performative body raises the question of the re-evaluation of the lived body in relation to phenomena of re-creation or re-composition involving the sensible and somatic body when it is affected by technology and incorporates its effects. To understand this phenomenon, this essay examines the interrelation of the notions of corporality (a notion which concerns the physical body in its materiality, or the anthropomorphic body), corporeality, and embodiment through a transdisciplinary approach and as an anchoring to a dynamic of self-eco-organization. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy underpins the very foundations of this research and will allow us to reflect on the new status of the contemporary body in technological contexts. Two main notions will be used. “Corporeality”, as a form of the lived body and a transdisciplinary concept and embodiment as an act of integration by the body – here in a technological environment. In the evolution of the interrelation between the body and the changing environment, the two are in trans-relation, a trans-formation occurs. To conclude, we propose to analyze these new “realities” in a Merleau-Pontian and Nietzschean interconnected approach, that is, through a philosophy of becoming, a philosophy that flows through the body: being a body, doing, risking and creating – a philosophy that resonates with this trans-formation.
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