No:2/11

Dance and Media Technologies

(1) Introduction: real time synthesis
- contemporary arts practice & current research in arts and science -
(transgenic art, virtual reality systems, motion capture/animated human figure creation,
synthetic embodiment/avatars, distributed systems/networks)

- Relations between computer sciences and biotechnologies will be addressed from an artistic/cultural viewpoint -

(2) Practical workshop rehearsal with digital media.
The workshop offers an introduction to computer-based environments as trans-theatrical spaces for action, in which participants will experience and produce other kinds of perceptions of reality, beyond subjectivity or the conventional understanding of body in real time space.
The interaction with real-time digital processes invites a playful exploration of how the boundaries of real bodies or representations of bodies can be subject to modification. The workshop offers research perspectives on identity transformations in virtual reality.
Human interaction with digital technology suggests the composition of fictions: not "disembodiment" but a kind of hyper plasticity in which the human and the technological are partners.

JOHANNES BIRRINGER
German-born performance and media choreographer, currently resides in Houston (Texas), London (UK), and Schmelz (Germany) after 19 years of working in theatre, dance, performance art and multimedia collaborations on both sides of the Atlantic.
He began directing in the mid-1980s while finishing his PhD at Yale University, and then moved to Dallas and Houston to work in the independent visual art/performance scenes.
After teaching performance studies at Northwestern University, he finished books on "Media and Performance" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998) and on his cross-cultural work, entitled "Performance on the Edge " (London: Continuum, 2000). He previously published "Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism" (Indiana Univ. Press, 1991), and works as contributing editor for "Performing Arts Journal" (New York) and "Performance Research" (London). He joined Nottingham Trent University's well known School of Art and Design (Live Art) as a principal research fellow. In November 2003 he began the formation of LATela, the new Live Art Telematics Lab at Nottingham Trent. He launched the Lab as a node of international cross-cultural research in new performance technologies (ADaPT). After organising the international DIGITAL CULTURES LAB in late 2005, he was appointed chair/professsor of performance technologies at Brunel University in West London.