Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, exercises in composition

Grotowski p 142

“
Exercises in composition
…
1) blossoming and withering of the body. Walk rhythmically. As in a plant, the sap rises, starting from the feet and spread- ing upwards through the entire body, reaching the arms which burst into blossom as indeed does the whole body. In the second phase, the limbs-branches wither and die one by one. Finish the exercise on the same rhythmic step with which it began.
2) Animal image. This does not consist in the literal and realistic imitation of a four-legged animal. One does not "act" an animal but attacks one's subconscious, …

3) By means of association with people, situations, memories, metamorphose yourself into a tree. The muscles react, expressing the personal association. To begin with, one concentrates these associations on one particular part of the body. As the reactions increase in intensity, the rest of the body is included. The vitality of this tree, its tensions, relaxations, micro-movements are nourished by the association.

4) The flower. The feet are the roots, the body is the stem and the hands represent the corolla. The whole body lives, trembles, vibrates with the imperious process of bursting into flower, guided by one's associations. Give "the flower" a logical signification, one which is at the same time sad, tragic and dangerous. "The flower" is separated from the process which created it and that part of it expressed through the hands is used as a rhetorical gesture in a dialogue.
“

etc.


46. Theatre Laboratory. Here the producer always keeps in mind that he has two "ensembles" to direct: the actors and the spectators. The performance results from an Integration of these two "ensembles".



SCAS Talk by Sha Xin Wei, Oct 15: "Infrastructure clinics and navigating indeterminacy"

Professor Sha Xin Wei will give a talk in the Making Sense of Complexity SCAS lectures series:
Infrastructure clinics and navigating indeterminacy 
11:00 AM MST, Oct 15

ABSTRACT:
We recap basic limits on complexity models, information, data science and machine learning, and introduce  abductive heuristics, continuous topological dynamics, and performative techniques as supplements to those formalisms.   As a practical application we describe a clinic for prototyping alternative socio-technical infrastructures.

NOTE:
This responds to some observations by Sander van der Leeuw and Gary Dirks, presented by Sander in the SCAS lecture series September 17”Competence without Comprehension”.   Prof. Van der Leeuw considers how societies and organizations have moved from open systems to closed systems, from long-term to short term thinking.  Flipping the problem-solving paradigm, he observes how solutions generically create unanticipated problems.  Given the growth of competency without comprehension, he calls for  turning from modeling the present in terms of the past to making a place in our science and social technology for unexpected and unintended consequences.

infinity

Thanks to David Morris,

QUANTAMAGAZINE.ORG
How Many Numbers Exist? Infinity Proof Moves Math Closer to an Answer. | Quanta Magazine
For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable. A new proof suggests otherwise.
David: 
Noah Moss Brender, Peter Hill, Greg Recco, Mark Sentesy (Mark, there is something close to issues of change vs. motion here under the hood, here, I think, e.g. around determination vs. choice. All very strange and reassuring to know that there are still live questions re number….)
7You, David Morris, Noah Moss Brender and 4 others
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Zsuzsa Baross
"infinity" is a concept, not an existence, just as zero is not a number….

Sha Xin Wei
Mathematicians treat infinity not as a concept but as (Deleuzian) _problem_
What would be more interesting than the Quanta Magazine's fairly conventional metaphysical subtext is a genealogical and ontogenetic approach to the ever-evolving notion of "the real numbers". (compare this with Bitbol, Petitot et al's project) and even more, to recognize maths as a _speculative_ propositional adventure (cf Roy Wagner, after Whitehead, Stengers)

Muindi: Harper's art as a living


"Two articles from this month's Harper's, both US-centric, regarding the making of artistic livelihood.
The first article "Stages of Grief" takes a look at the difficulties of making an artistic livelihood pre- and post-pandemic.
The second article, "The Anxiety of Influencers", takes a closer look at the influencer economy, casting it as "a garish accentuation of the economy writ large". This statement is a bit too broad, and I would qualify it by saying that the influencer economy is only a garish accentuation of the arts and cultural sector of the economy writ large.”


Prototyping Social Forms: Summer Schedule: June 28th Meeting / July Hiatus / Reconvening in August

Forwarded from Muindi.

Hi PSF Team,

I hope this message finds you all as well as can be. We spent some time talking about summer scheduling at today's meeting. For those of you who couldn't make it today, here's what we are planning.

Next week, Monday, June 28th, we will be reconvening at our usual time (6pm CET / 12pm ET / 9am PT) to think further about a seminar and collective writings on "play". Here's some stuff to check out between now and then:
We will be on hiatus during July, but we will be keeping the regular Monday meetings on the calendar. Anyone who is available can hop on the zoom line for informal, open, unstructured chats.
We will pick up weekly PSF meetings starting the first week of August in preparation for Institute of Media Studies (GfM) conference.
Looking forward to the Fall: the GfM conference runs from September 22-25; following the GfM conference, Satinder has suggested that we consider how we might re-work our workshop at GfM for a L.A.S.E.R. (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendevouz) event. 

That's it for now. Remember: you are all welcome and encouraged share updates on works-in-progress and lines-of-flight over the PSF email list and Slack. 

Also, if there are any projects that you would like to pitch to the group, please don't hesitate to pitch them via email, Slack, and/or at an upcoming meeting.

Kind regards,

MUINDI FANUEL MUINDI

Synthesis Spring 2021

Here’s a summary of rich suite of research-creation projects that have been germinating this past half year (and more).’

Let’s have our Spring research-creation gathering in the coming week or two:
Proposed Hour  9:00 AZ / 12 noon Montreal / 16:00 Cyprus
Proposed Date: Tuesday May 11 | Thursday May 13 | Tuesday May 18

(0) PhD projects (more details from respective folks!)
Garrett: Diagrammatic
Yanjun: Affective, Enactive Experiential design 
Shomit: Sound installation, Living Systems, subjectification, performance and site
Emiddio: Sound, materiality, non-standard computation

(1) Transformation and Ontogenesis (XW)
Recognizing that the world is constantly in a state of change, process, evolution and flux means we have to face the fact that no fixed, finite description can tell the whole story or predict the future.  But can we understand how the world changes?   What are the motors of change, dynamic and transformation?  Life is full of surprises — not only can we not say exactly what’s going to happen, we cannot even say in advance what all the possible futures are.  How can we think about transformation and change in ways that are themselves supple and adaptive?

Ontogenetic Process, Emergence, Individuation research stream, with special volumes in Angelaki (2020), and AI & Society (forthcoming).


(2) Eco-Eco: Ecologies and Economies 
Ecosystems and economies exceed every special interest and discipline, whether cultural or technoscientific.  Blending biological life with social-economic life requires rethinking both economics and ecology.  It requires caring for both non-quantifiable value as well as quantified fact.  How can we develop fresh approaches to making sense of, navigating, and shaping alternate ecologies and economies, under the proposition that we are one species among many?

Alter-Eco Seminars and Studios, some of which have been prototyped at Synthesis / ASU, Building21 / McGill and the European Graduate School.

Spectral (Muindi)

(3) Prototyping Social Forms (XW)
How can we blend both custom-made and well-established methods of sketching and making from media arts, experimental performance, design, engineering, and conceptual studies to build working models of complex biosocial and sociotechnical systems in plausibly thick social settings?    How can we prototype, at lifescale, the lived, whole experience of social forms such as places: home, city, street; events: play, meal, learning; or infrastructures: finance, governance, energy to the degree needed to get a sense of what it would be like to actually live in or live with those social forms?  In collaboration with the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, and Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Process Germ Bank (Muindi)

CAS 547 Sense-making Complexity: Multimodally Presenting Complex Systems 
(proposed, original version: Brandon Mechtley)

(4) Telematic Tangible Embodied Experience  (Garrett)

See 

social science : alternative economies, special issue Macromarketing

Dear Alter-Eco folks and friends,

Here’s an article and a special issue about sociological aspects of alternative economies, a useful thickening from the usual computational reductions (blockchain, AI, IT) Mario Campana, Andreas Chatzidakis, Mikko Laamanen, (2017), Special Issue: A Macromarketing Perspective on Alternative Economies, Journal of Macromarketing.

Forrest Watson, and Ahmet Ekici (2020), Understanding the Dark Sides of Alternative Economies to Maximize Societal Benefit.

Xin Wei

augmented objects as boundary objects as cultural probes

References:


Yanjun Lyu, Brandon Mechtley, Lauren Hayes, Sha Xin Wei. "Tableware: Social Coordination through Computationally Augmented Everyday Objects Using Auditory Feedback.” HCII 2020

Moreover, we choose to augment objects so that they not only intermediate every day or canonicalized social activity in relation to ordinary use, but also to offer potentially extraordinary affordance [32] within a social scenario. For example, in our case, the ordinary glass and the wine within provides the affordance to drink or grab (habitual actions), while simultaneously affording the sonic responses caused by actions performed with the glass, actions that immediately transform it into an extra-ordinary object. Also, an empty glass may offer more possibilities for playful engagement than one containing liquid, where the sound feedback is caused by explorative actions. Boundary objects automatically register the relations between and among people in a social space. The objects we called instruments that regulate the relationship between the people and the sounds that are correlated to specific activities. By contrast, the way in which directly facilitating the participants’ role in the process may not be not as explicit as our observations suggest–this data can be misleading–especially from an affective/emotional perspective. 

We can also regard these boundary objects as “cultural probes” [29] that make tangible the enactment of social relations among a group of people. Cultural probes such as what we have built have been employed in design research since the 1990’s [30].  In our work, by augmenting ordinary tableware with motion sensors and gesturally modulated, computationally synthesized sound, we can precisely calibrate the extraordinariness of the ‘voicing’ of their movement and vary the mapping from movement or people’s relational activity to sound as extra-linguistic sonic field correlated to their activity. Most importantly, computational control allows experimentalists and the participants to repeat the effect in a reproducible way to gain experiential knowledge.  This approach is informed by Satinder Gill’s work on tacit engagement and collective, relational engagement via embodied skilled practices.

p 3-4

Jessica Rajko + John MacCallum + Teoma Naccarato: Provocation Discussion - May 3rd, 1:00-1:30pm EST

Subject: Provocation Discussion - May 3rd, 1:00-1:30pm EST
Date: April 27, 2021 at 1:03:45 PM GMT-4

Greetings!



First, thank you again for carving time out of your schedule to join us in conversation. The following information details how we’ll move through our discussion and how you can prepare. 



Discussion Details and Structure: The plan is to record and share a series of, 30-minute discussions between ‘provocateurs’---those who submitted provocations back in 2018 in response to the question: “What escapes computation in interactive performance?” Meetings will be hosted and recorded on Zoom (link provided in this meeting request). All three of the project facilitators (Teoma, John, and Jessica) will be present during the conversation to host and hold space. Our aim is to keep the discussion low-key, conversational, and open-ended. We are not trying to reach some sort of summary conclusion or solution within 30 minutes. Rather, we see these discussions as another way in which we continue the rich dialogue put forth in the provocations and currently buzzing on our SloMoCo Discord channel. To give you a sense of how we’ll structure the 30 minutes, here is a flexible outline:



Provocation Discussion


  • Brief introduction by facilitators and sharing of provocations by provocateurs - 10 min (2-3 min per provocation)


  • Provocateurs ask each other questions and discuss - 10 minutes 


  • Facilitators join in conversation - 10 minutes



For sharing your provocation, you can read or summarise, and comment on your current thinking about it. A link to your provocation will be posted alongside the video of the discussion.



Please feel free to join us 5 - 10 minutes early if you wish. We won’t start recording until everyone is settled in, but we also want to be respectful of your time and keep the entire session as close to 30 minutes as possible. 



Preparation: All we need you to do in advance is  i) revisit your own provocation, and those of the other two provocateurs; and ii) bring one question for each other person, based on their provocation. The purpose for this discussion is to collectively read your three provocations through one another, exploring connections and generative tension in perspectives.


 


Here are links to the three provocations for your session:


•              Fran & Javier:https://provocations.online/whatescapescomputation/jaimovitch-morand/


•              Fred:https://provocations.online/whatescapescomputation/bevilacqua/


•              Xin Wei: https://provocations.online/whatescapescomputation/xin-wei/