(6th) Nomad Workshop of the Technologies of
the Body
PANGENDER TECHNOPOLITICS
Beyond
the performative: Critical approaches to the body, art and technology.
in
Porto
(Portugal)–
14th-15th
November 2008
Directed
by: JaiVal (Jaime
del Val) - REVERSO
Duration:
12
hours
Number
of participants: max. 40 (Approx.)
Language:
English
Introduction
The Nomad Workshop of the Technologies of the Body
is a transdisciplinary initiative of education, production, exchange and debate
of REVERSO in the convergence of arts (performance, dance, video, electroacoustics,
architecture, urban interventions, internet) new technologies, critical thinking
and political action. From performance to interactive dance, from life electroacoustics
to virtual architecture, from software and hardware hacking to musical instruments
and vocal techniques, from posthuman amplified bodies to queer theory, from
postcolonial studies to cyberfeminism, from gay-lesbian politics to transgender
and intersex movements, from internet to urban interventions, from urban speculation
to ecology.
The workshop proposes a critical look into the ways
in which communication and information technologies craft our affects and
desire, our identity, sexuality and subjectivity, within specific regimes
of power and will explore ways to subvert such technologies in the context
of transdisciplinary performance & technology projects, in particular
through the use of surveillance cameras as interfaces on the naked body.
The workshop will explore transdisciplinary artistic
practice in the convergence of performance, installation, urban intervention
and other mixed media, with brief introductions to software Max-MSP-jitter
and the production of interactive systems with rare interfaces used as extensions
of the body and the subject. We will take a brief critical look at a number
of branches from contemporary critical theory and propose a number pf philosophical
tools with which to rethink technology, the body, the subject and social interaction.
The work of JaiVal—REVERSO will be introduced and practical demos will be
made. The participants will be able to experiment the “Microdances” technique
through improvisation with surveillance cameras on the body, and will also
be able to briefly present for discussion their own projects.
Pangender Technopolitics
Technology produces our identity, our gender, our status
as sovereign subjects or abject subalternities in terms of sexuality,
class, race, age, health and bodily form, produces the ways in which these
are socially articulated as political forms of differentiation and instruments
of power of a disciplinary and normative social framework that has become
merely instrumental in latecapitalist times.
Latecapitalism can be seen as a hidden form of totalitarian
society in which the market operates upon us through giving form to our affects
and desires, behind the façade of democracies, nation states and sovereign
subjects, inducing an unprecedented standardisation of bodies and affects,
through the dissemination of technologies of leisure and communication that,
behind their innocent aspect, are forming us and assimilating us as instruments
of the latecapitalist machine.
How does this crafting of affect and desire happen?
How can we counteract such power mechanisms? How can we invert and subvert
the ways in which technology forms our affect and desire? How can we articulate
consistent forms of resistance to such implicit and hidden forms of domination?
We will look into ways of destabilizing the modes of
affective production that operate on us through technology, in the context
of transmedia and metamedia performance projects, in the convergence of dance,
video, electroacoustics, architecture, internet, street interventions and
critical theory. Transdisciplinary techno-artistic-philosophical research
will thus become a political instrument to counteract the new secret forms
of domination in latecapitalist societies.
Media arts have produced a large diversity of possibilities
to redefine embodied experience altogether and offer an open framework for
the redefinition of technology, communication, relational architectures and
social articulations, yet the political and aesthetic potentials of this transdisciplinary
domain are largely unexplored. On the other hand cyberfeminist, queer, transgender
and postporn movements have generated a diversity of tactics for counteracting
gender normativity, which however show some limitations with regard to the
way in which they reify materialist and cartesian frameworks of representation.
The workshop will offer a diversity of philosophical,
technological and aesthetic tools for the reinvention of oneself as a body,
beyond conventions of subjectivity and identity. It will propose ways to undo
gender binary normativity and sexuality divides (male-female, heterosexual-homosexual,
private-public) through radical interventions in the technologies that constitute
our identities (the camera), and propose a pangender, post-anatomical, relational
metabody, as an architecture of intensities
that defies articulations of the social in terms of organism and fixed structure.
How I project myself into the world through intensities
(gestures, sounds...), how we project each onto one another constituting common
intensities (the city, the territory, sexuality, group or family relations)
is also what reproduces old forms of reality or produces new forms. We will
study radical interventions into non-verbal communication as means of producing
new reality, new forms of relationality that don’t rely upon the reproduction
of normative structures, that don’t attempt to represent, simulate or reproduce,
thus going beyond the concept of performance into the realm of metaformance
and metaformativity.
In particular the use of surveillance cameras on the naked
body will be proposed as example of ways for decomposing the anatomy of
the body, its representation, signification and structure, in the context
of interactive systems and performance, as well as diverse forms of intervention
that go beyond traditional disciplinary divides: in the streets, in the internet,
in private houses...
The work developed in recent years by JaiVal-REVERSO
will be an example from which to discuss technical, aesthetical, philosophical
and political questions as an instigation for the projects of the participants
(theoretical, artistic, technological or political), that will also be discussed
during the workshop.
The
workshop is addressed to:
professionals, students and wider audience interested in performance, dance
& technology, media arts, life electroacoustics, critical theory (queer,
posthuman, poscolonial, postporn, poststructuralist theories), social work,
communication theories and technologies, non verbal communication and other
related fields.
PROGRAMME (provisional):
1º DAY:
·
Introductions [30 min.]
·
Presentation of works by JaiVal_REVERSO [90 min.]
·
Critical
Theory - Pangender Technopolitics:
from post-queer, posthuman, postcolonial and postporn to intensive bodies
and the production of affect in latecapitalism – tecnopower – new empires
– neoliberal panacoustics and panoptics – post-anatomical bodies – politics
of affect and radical ecology of the body – READINGS
[2 hours]
·
Practice - How to build a Metabody
(1): performance & technology - the instrument-interactive system
and introduction to Max-MSP-jitter – video surveillance systems applied to
the body - image analysis and
processing – voice processing in real time, spatialisation and vocal techniques
– history of interfaces of gestural control of sound, from traditional instruments
to hyperinstruments [2 hours]
2º DAY:
·
Critical
Theory - Pangender Technopolitics:
from post-queer, posthuman, postcolonial and postporn to intensive bodies
and the production of affect in latecapitalism – tecnopower – new empires
– neoliberal panacoustics and panoptics – post-anatomical bodies – politics
of affect and radical ecology of the body – READINGS
[1 hours]
·
Presentations of projects by the participants [2 hours]
·
Practice
- How to build a Metabody (2):
proximity and relation – non-verbal communication – contact and improvisation
– microdances – experimenting with surveillance cameras on the body – forms
of intervention (in the street, in the internet, in private houses in closed
spaces) and final improvisation. [3
hours]
http://www.reverso.org/TTC.htm
