Saira Virous : Game Choreography in Multiplayer Online Performance Spaces

✲ Johannes Birringer concerns the dance which has moved into the telematic, networked terrain and shares the digital design technologies that underlie the creation of artificial environments. Performance interactivity refers to all programmed environments in which the interaction is emergent, dynamic; the interactive relationship generally involves the control of digital image and sound generation or animation, the mutation of media forms. There are various types of interactive environments; 1) sensory environment based on sensors or motion tracking and an evolving dialectic between artificial world and human agents 2) immersive environments which is virtual reality-based 3) networked environments allowing users to experience a dispersed body and to interact with tracts of other remote bodies, avatars and prostheses 4) derived environments which is motion-capture-based re-animations of bodily movement or liquid architecture 5) mixed reality environments which can be mixed with various types. The cultural and artistic rhetoric surrounding interactivity has been high-mined and often misleading. The myth of participation has to be measured against the notion of 'pleasure' that is used by games analysts who argue that genuine interactivity needs to meet some conditions for successful play and an increasing attachment to a game. A computer game can be described as ' a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome'. The immersive quality of gaming resides in the player activity. The telematic pleasure is based on very similar processes of socialisation and self-organisation. The plasticity in the telematic architecture distinctly intertwines numerous agencies along with the responding stream and the fluid images generated by the partner sites.

Truth-Seeker's Allowance : Digitising Artaud

In this chapter, Steve Dixon tries to think about two questions: 1) how the transformational capabilities of computers within theatrical can relate to and extend philosophical theories, Artaudian and surrealist conceptions of art, and, most crucially of all, notions of truth. 2) how do new media technologies affect the search, and the specific path of the media-theatre truth seeker? He as director of The Chameleons Group says that the form and style of The Chameleon Group's theatre owes much to the artistic conventions of postmodernism and deconstruction, but the underlying philosophies and intentions behind it are modernist. Here he is related to Artaud, the Director of Surrealist Investigations and Breton. Artaud is also related to Jacques Derrida, the most influential challenger and destabiliser of the notion of truth. But Derrida's linguistic plague darkens, divides, and undermines notions of meaning and truth, Artuad's plague is bright and transcendent, unfashionable universal truths. In the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton describes how the one thought or idea will treat the opposing idea as an enemy, through this confrontation the original idea becomes distorted, changes its very nature. In Breton's discussion, Dixon mentions the notion of 'confrontation'. And here he uses that notion of confrontation as metaphoric tension between the stage and the screen.
In conclusion, he summaries that Artaud's vision of truth was a theatre of cruelty , a doubled reality or 'virtuality' and it is this vision that The Chameleon Group attempts to embrace and update for the digital age. That is, the world's new technologies are incorporated into theatrical practice as a synthesis where two elements - stage and screen - are not Platonic or scientific dualisms, but make up a new 'one world' of conjoined 'mobile metaphors' capable of expressing nothing more, and nothing less, than 'truth'.

Bodies without Bodies

This title, Bodies without Bodies, definitely seems to be a nonsense like a riddle. At first I didn't understand what the question exactly is. What is bodies without bodies? What does Susan Melrose want to say through this title? After reading her article, I am not sure. Susan Melrose, here, introduces Spinoza, Deleuze and Zizek. All of these are famous philosophers. Deleuze first used the term, 'Body without Organs', and it was also from Spinoza's philosophy. Later Zizek renamed it as 'Organs without Bodies'. And here, Susan re-renamed it 'Bodies without Bodies'. These similar four have one common thing in thinking. They tried to escape the older and common meaning and make something new(maybe they think it's better). So Susan used in her article 'writing' instead of 'concept' that is already fixed and common, familiar to us. Throughout this article she refers to such processes that renames 'bodies' as 'new work'. That is, 'new work' is different with the olders, and the measure(judgement) of it is up to 'time'. I think this would be true for every work that makes something new and different. Her message that I got from this article is actually there are no bodies when we use the term 'bodies'. Maybe she wants us to think of 'a body(new, non-existed one)' not 'the body(old, existed one)'.