Jaime del Val - Reverso Institute for Metahuman Technologies
www.reverso.org

at

Dance Technology and Circulations of the Social, Version 2.0
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Boston - Massachussets - USA
April 22-23, 2011

presents

Metamedia Metaformance
Metahuman Technologies: Undoing anatomy in capitalism of affects

 

 

SHORT ABSTRACT:

I will propose a critique of the accounts of the moving body that pervade both classical-modern-contemporary dance traditions and information-communication-control society, in order to propose some possibilities for a radical redefinition of corporeality, aesthetics and politics both in relation to dance, the other arts and nature-culture at large, within a Metahumanistic project of resistance to capitalism of affects in which, through subversive reappropriations of control technologies, an amorphous, post-anatomical body is produced that exceeds cartesian-logocentric-humanistic paradigms, redefining the body as relational process and reworking all of its normative categories.

 

LONGER ABSTRACT:

I will propose a critique of the paradigms of the moving body that pervade both classical-modern-contemporary dance traditions and information-communication-control society, which reproduce specific cartesian-logocentric-humanistic conceptions that deal with framing-distance-exteriority for the production of the spectacular-hiperreal and of the dualism object-subject as well as fictional-objective. The parallelism between the stage and the ubiquitous camera-screens of media culture will aquire new light understood in terms of perceptual anatomies that reproduce the cartesian split between subject and object, thus producing both as political fictions. This becomes even more problematic in the field of HCI, where interfaces tend to assimilate bodies into a regime of affective production that we will call the Panchoreographic, where movement becomes a key paradigm for understanding its mechanisms. Dance-technology appears thus as a realm in which, rather than limitng us to use the given technologies, we may subvert them and the regime they perpetuate.

 

The body, understood as relational process, is subject to endless Amorphogenesis through a redefinition of the relational technologies that constitute it. This is part of a non-utopian Metahumanistic project for resistance to capitalism of affects' apparatuses of violence and assimilation. Metamedia Metaformance is the process of redefinition of relational technologies, which include perceptual anatomies, that redefine the given limits between disciplines and perceptual categories in a neverending process of emergence. Proposing the notion of Intrabodies rather than Interfaces and a Meta-kinetic art-research instead of dance-choreography, we propose to show the crucial role of relational movement for the radical redefinition of the entire humanistic-logocentric-cartesian conception, in a movement away from the stages (and audiences) of spectacular control society and from linear time-space.

 

Examples will be given of the Microsexes-Microdances projects of Reverso and other Metahuman Technologies in which through reappropriation of technologies of control society the sensory anatomy is transformed towards a Post-anatomical body, and with it the conditions of possibility of regimes that operate thorugh identification and form. A devisualisation and a politics of the amorphous where bodies move in ways that are irreducible to representation-mapping-identification-signification, undoing the constitutive limits of gender-sex-race-class-form-identity categories of control.