1. INTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE: real-time interaction with mediated environments.

2. SUSTAINABILITY: dancers (formal and informal) can afford class (see future)

3. DIVERSITY: 2.0-style bottom-up access to and authorship of class content

The dance field and what it can give the community will be stronger if it trickles up, enabling diverse appeal and thus economic sustainability.

-affordability:  VICKi is online and free.

-diverse appeal (mediated literacy): inclusion of diverse aesthetics

Kryder (1999) has suggested that as students’ use of computers at home and at school increases, they are becoming more “visually literate”, and are more collaborative.*

VICKi will be used with IP-t2.0 to focus on the skills of real-time interaction and adaptation in a changing, co-created mediated environment.

VICKi has 3 functions:
•    Interface for mixing media (audio, video, text, and lighting)
•    Kinetic instructor, for personalized pace and vocabulary
•    Choreographic Instructor that contains an interactive “phrase developer.”

VICKi has many implications:
For Dance:
•    Platform to build real-time interactive skills in dance and technology
•    Free software to help dancers train on their own
•    Compositional device for choreography
For Society:
•    Requested for use by teachers in public schools for creative projects
•  A way for diverse dance aesthetics to survive, thrive, and evolve within academe
•    Free software for anyone to use for media composition purposes

Public Education - implement VICKi in public schools to

1. Diversify Dance: increase the diversity of potential dance practitioners, and audiences
2. Facilitate Audience: facilitate interest and education through practice
3. Encourage Academic Inclusion: equality of dance to music and art in education

Movement Therapy

1. Promote Confidence
2. Promote Individual Expressiveness
3. Increase Group Sensitivity
4. Cultivate Self Awareness

Integrated… Interdisciplinary

1. Text: plays, poems, literature…etc.
2. Media: videos, images, educational media
3. Sound: live automated mixing

“changing the shape of a block of wood traveling through water, changing its ability to do so”

Aesthetics
determine and reflect valued dance techniques.  Popularized aesthetics, consequently, can marginalize some expressions and explorations.  Interactive Technique re-privileges excluded expression and exploration while respecting and including popular aesthetics.

Creativity / Technique
Improvisation or choreography is classically considered the place for the creative role of the dance student.  This segregation of creativity and technique reinforces elitism in dance practices. 

“Status-Body”**
The writing of the body is not unlike the writing of critics on dance.  In the studio, the author as teacher shapes how the dancer as subject is viewed, and therefore prioritized.  Ascribing bodies in a hierarchical regime of aesthetics separates dance from its birthright: creative impulse.  Interactive Technique 2.0 seeks to extend what dance has, as its greatest strength, at its core: the democratized body.

*Guthrie, Rand W., and Anna Carlin. “Waking the Dead: Using interactive technology to engage
passive listeners in the classroom.” Tenth Americas Conference on Information Systems. New York, 2004. 1-8.

**”Status-Body” is a term I am inventing for status or hierarchy determined by size, shape, race, gender, ability, culture, history, or class. Evaluation in dance education should be based on the individual student’s growth and effort.

Traditional techniques give you patterns, assuming you’ll be in a context where you can use those patterns.

“It draws the gamer’s attention not to the storyline but to the combinations of elements from which any given storyline might be selected.” [Wark, 070]

IP-t2 assumes emergent patterns.

IP-t2 is constructivist: students co-direct the course, building methodologies suited to their interests.

IP-t2 allows free flow attention, tangential movement. IT2 assumes tangential impulses reveal patterns of exertion and recuperation (lma). Impulse analysis is the class activity:

If we imagine that impulse is a load on a fulcrum (focus, intention), where the lever is the perception (multiplies the force – received information – applied to the load), then we can begin to calculate the variables of “critical mass.”

to refine our way of orientation within these, and to locate the effects of this orientation for creative or performative use.

for these types of situations

– Play often happens in rules, but the rules can be changed by the players. Play can be serious. Play expresses power. The rules of the game dictate the rewards, and penalties. IP-t2 = play, democratic rules, self-reflexive expression.

Student – Gamer, Performer, Designer
Teacher – Facilitator, Resource, Mediator

In work and play, it is not the novel, not cinema not television that offers the line within which to grasp the form of everyday life, it is the game. (Wark, 058)

An art that denies the role of play and its own game nature denies its very genetic makeup – is casting itself as a replication, an object on a conveyor belt, denied any role of play, the art becomes a slot waiting to be occupied, a pre-written script waiting to be played… where is the person? where is the art?

I try to bring this to the surface, that its contours may be wielded at the players will, desire, pleasure, fun.

*
*

“If it is free, it is valueless. Those odd lines within topology where anything goes are the ones of no consequence,” [Wark, 066].

The challenge is inherently present – to create and sustain the conflict that is necessary to engage dancers in play. It is the study of the mind-body topology and the forces that interest it, or don’t. It is the uniting of the life gamespace and the performance gamespace. What you’re seeing is not a preexisting aesthetic (or game) that students must gain the skills to play in, but an aesthetic that evolves out of the innate interactive creativity of the students – the “technique” is whatever is necessary to accomplish that.

There are already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture. All the names are already pre-programmed.

Its already the names that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One can’t say whatever one wants. One is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical discourse.

And so i believe in improvisation, and i fight for improvisation, but always with the belief that it’s impossible. And there where there is improvisation, i am not able to see myself. i am blind to myself.

And its what i will see… no, i won’t see it… its for others to see. The one who is improvised here, no i won’t ever see him.

Derrida, 1982 unpublished interview

We think that we shall be able to live happily, creatively, if we learn a method, a technique, a style; but

~ J. Krishnamurti  Education and the Significance of Life

“More than a paradigm, what we need is a mind capable of following the movement of life,” (Nava, 17). 

“Holistic education is not concerned with ‘cultural literacy’ (“what every American needs to know”) so much as with nurturing healthy, whole, curious persons who can learn whatever they need to know in any new context,” (Miller, 7).

**

**

The aims of The VICKi Project are to foster transdisciplinary dance artists that are responsible for growing in and contributing to an evolving world.  If the goal of technique class is to increase the facility of dancers, then technique education may benefit from taking into account the approach of holistic education. The VICKi Project is ultimately a technology built to enable a holistic learning environment in dance and technology systems, that incorporates past and present personal experience as a site of inquiry, which I am calling Interactive Performance “technique 2.0″.

**

**

It seems that current technique training relies on three things

1. consistency of interpretation among students of instructions

2. the repeatability of physical skills to “expertise” or “excellence”

3. “technique” is a separate entity that does not require the presence of a student’s creative dance culture

Nothing is repeatable exactly.  We create frames, refining and expanding our knowledge of what can occur within a frame through rigorous exploration.  This is the closest we can achieve of “repetition.”

The traditional concept of repetition accomplishes physical strength, endurance, flexibility, and a host of other enablers.  Repetition as I’ve described it may not be the best method for “training” – in my class, that would be revised to “cultivating” – “that something else” in dance.  I believe that something else is the self expression.  Then, getting to know oneself, mind-body (the “whole” dancing human being) in a changing world becomes the field of Interactive Performance “technique 2.0″.  A class where students can explore their own methods, and processes alongside one another, each as relevant to one another in the class as the teacher is as a guide.

~ VICKi’s It2 grants students the opportunity to shape their own games, to take agency in animating their creative artistic play ~

What is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm.  (Wark, 030)

*

The gamespace of dance is complex in its many-layered ideologies and expressions of value.

*

The gamer selects one sequence after another, and gradually learns what they do – that’s algorithm.  The gamer discovers a relationship between appearances and algorithm in the game, which is a double of the relation between appearances and a putative algorithm in gamespace – that’s allegorithm.  (Wark, 031)

The allegorithm by which the gamer relates to the algorithm produces a quite particular allegory by which gamer and algorithm together relate to gamespace. (Wark, 030)

*

Many dance techniques claim a neutral value system for culturally diverse bodies and ideologies, though dominant aesthetics (algorithms) in dance communities (gamers) and dance commodities (allegorithms) contradict this.

*

Allegorithmic perception is n-dimensional, it intuits behind appearances interactions of many variables. (Wark, 033)

*

Yes.  Imagine a technique based on the application of n-dimensional perception.  That’s It2.0.

The Web of Life – A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (p.303-304)

The flexibility of an ecosystem is a consequence of its multiple feedback loops, which tend to bring the system back into balance whenever ther is a deviation from the norm, due to changing environmental conditions.

*
VICKi will involve the exploration of multiple feedback loops between movement, media, and ideas.
*

All ecological fluctuations take place between tolerance limits.  There is always the danger that the whole system will collapse when a fluctuation goes beyond those limits and the system can no longer compensate for it.  The same is true of human communities.  Lack of flexibility manifests itself as stress.

The principle of flexibility also suggests a corresponding strategy of conflict resolution.  In every community there will invariably be contradictions and conflicts, which cannot be resolved in favor of one or the other side.  For example, the community will need stability and change, order  and freedom, tradition and innovation.  Rather than by rigid decisions, these unavoidable conflicts are much better resolved by establishing a dynamic balance.

A diverse ecosystem will be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another.  When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself, because other links in the network can at least partially fulfill the function of the destroyed species.

In human communities ethnic and cultural diversity may play the same role.  Diversity means many different relationships, many different approaches to the same problem.  A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations.

However, diversity is a strategic advantage only if there is a truly vibrant community, sustained by a web of relationships.  If the community is frangmented into isolated groups and individuals, diversity can easily become a source of prejudice and friction.

But if the community is aware of the interdependence of all its members, diversity will enrich all the relationships and thus enrich the community as a whole, as well as each individual member.  In such a community informationa nd ideas flow freely through the entire network, and the diversity of interpretations and learning styles – even the diversity of mistakes – will enrich the entire community.

- interdependence

- recycling

- partnership

- flexibility

- diversity

= sustainability

- The purpose of this investigation is to come to achieve a critical practical awareness of the ins and outs of power dynamics, and our dynamic position with them. = the space within art and within which art exists. Conceptual spaces are every bit as “real” as the physical actions they incite, in relational dialog.

Interfaced Performance Phenomenology unites life, art, practice, and scholarship. The systematic method of art scholarship has a valuable place, but neglects what is not so easily categorized or “measured.” Interfaced Performance Phenomenology is a tall order to provide a space for critical dialog in academic “dance” of a more broad and inclusive spectrum – performance, and popular culture.
*

ethical substance (material cause)

that part of oneself, whether it be, say one’s desires, feelings, sensations, or intentions, that requires one’s moral concern and hence functions as a matter or substance upon which one must bring to bear one’s formative energies.

mode of subjection (efficient cause)

“the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice,” (The Use of Pleasure, 27) whether in response to social conventions, the claims of reason, divine law, the aesthetics of a beautiful life, etc.

forms of elaboration (formal cause)

the self-shaping practices that guide ehtical work – those, for example, of an ascetic regime of sudden renunciations, a hermeneutics of continuous self-examination, an agon of relentless psychic combat, or a perpetual indulgence in therapies of self-expression and self-discovery.

telos (final cause)

the mode of being to which the ethical subject aspires, whether it be that of tranquility and detachment, mastery and autonomy, oneness with God, or some other moral ideal.

*
Yes to spectacle yes to virtuosity yes to transformations and magic and make believe yes to glamour and transcendency of the star image yes to the heroic yes to the anti-heroic yes to trash imagery yes to involvement of performer or spectator yes to style yes to camp yes to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer yes to eccentricity yes to moving or being moved. YES TO NO.

*

Testing the limits. This is the game we play.

Further Perspective:

ideas: conceptual interfaces
nature: energetic interfaces
interface: limits for behavioral formulas

idea+nature covalent bond expresses spigots of formulas of exertion and recuperation.

Golly, this sounds familiar…

Is “being” a case of perception more so than of experience?  Does including discourse in class threaten the body-based medium of dance?  Is this cartesian?!!!!

Does the digital divide us organically and therefor alienate us?  Is The VICKi Project’s individualistic, experiential, emergent community destructive to the “goal” of “technique”?