Kinetic Atmospheres:
Performance and Immersion
Preface
Figure 0.1 Inside the Horst forest area, Saarland, Germany, summer
2019. © Interaktionslabor
An ancient pond.
A frog plunges.
The sound of water.
(haiku, by Matuso Bashô, 1686)
I am, because we are
We are, therefore I am
(Ubuntu wisdom)
It is early morning, with a soft tint of light falling through the leaves, as
I walk in the forest and imagine discovering a hidden place, barely visible
bird nest or ant hill, then climb over a fallen, decomposing tree to reach for
a small rock, covered with Nacktmundmoos (naked mouth moss) and ivy, almost
invisible as rock but painted with the earthy colors of thick underbrush, tangled
mess of browns, greens, purples. There is moisture in the naked mouth moss,
I feel it between my fingers. I think of fossils and animic lines on the skin,
fingerprints of time, and of covert spaces that are produced beneath surfaces
of ordinary objects. I touch the un-manifested, the layered and thick strings,
the light flutter of wings, as I listen to wayward winds up above me, sensing
the air getting colder in the atmosphere.(1) The crickets are quiet but something
is fluttering, in the upper branches. The moisture reaches the skin on my face
and neck, as I lie down – or is it the humidity? – I am immersed
and crave for more, a wellspring of being acting like high voltage, do you have
any last words?
In my mind’s eye, I am a bird that has landed on this small mossy rock,
a precipice for rest, after a longer flight that brought me back, in the summer
season, to the terrains of childhood, my youth where roaming in deep and darker
areas of the woods meant performing discoveries about environment and body,
about the land, perhaps even an early unconscious form of body weather training
practiced without knowledge and foreboding, then. No one had prophesied to me
then that immersive experience in atmospheric dance and multimedia architectures
would become a possible subject for a book on performance art and design. But
“atmosphere,” I gather, has become a more popular subject recently:
symposia on staging atmospheres pop up, even books are now translated from architecture,
geography and philosophy into performance studies.
Having just read the autobiographical seasons of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s
latest outpourings – Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer – alongside
Didier Eribon’s memoir Retour à Reims, I sense it is not the right
time for an elegy about growing up in the hinterland. Childhoods are of interest.
Yet, scattered departures and returns into a range of mediums seem closer now
to the diverse preoccupations that inspire debate, and certainly inspired my
work on choreographic objects and kinetic atmospheres that I intend to share
here. Returning home may be as difficult as moving out, moving away. My retour
here is complicated by a sense of foreboding, the fifth act of Macbeth rings
in my ears, ever since as a young student I jumped up onto the platform of the
old Roman Theatre in Orange (France), wanting to test the acoustic resonance.
Out, out brief candle. Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.
I often feel drawn to geologists, cavers, deep sea divers, archaeologists, climate
scientists, and botanists. Have you ever heard of the marvellous book, with
pressed flowers and herbs, by Balthasar Johannes Buchwald: Specimen medico-practico-botanicum,
oder kurtze und deutliche erklärung derer in der medicin gebräuchlisten
und in Dännemarck wachsenden erdbewächse, pflanzen und kräuter…(Copenhagen,
1720)? It has wonderful illustrations that impressed me as completely intriguing
and enchanting, in a tactile sense, seeing the actual species of herbs, twigs,
petals, fronds, blades pressed onto the paper of the book’s pages, with
small vertical columns above, written in Latin, Dutch, Danish, German and French
– commentaries on the herbs, their flavor or medicinal healing capacities.
For example, the bittersweet nightshade: Amara dulcis, Dulcimara, Solanum candens,
solanum dulcimara; Bittersüss, Je länger je lieber, Hirschkraut….
There they are, a mise en scène of leaves and plant fibres, 230 specimens
pressed onto writing, a performance of organic and linguistic, historical poetics,
the book a consummate artefact – I think only a dozen copies have survived
and been preserved in libraries. Pressing flowers into pages of a diary, this
is something we do as school children, when flowers mingle with love poems,
reflections on the days in school or in the village when we were traumatized
or overjoyed by the attention of others, those who impressed themselves on our
young bodies and minds. Now, in my later years of life, the sense of foreboding
has shifted, not to the life ahead, growing up and into the bittersweet world,
but glancing over the shoulder, toward the stranger by the lake, and at the
art, theatre, dance, and music communities I have travelled with, collaborators
and instigators of wild discovery, along the substations, energy fields, stages,
abandoned seasons, and disappearing acts.
Light falls through leaves and branches, conjuring a stage or a precipice, a
relic of convictions and then one hears the percussion, distant beats. They
call, and fading up are colors of cymbals and gongs, and passageways, the dance
always moving as if movement were captured in the lesser moments of disrupted
dreams. The dreams can act as prophecies too. This book I wish to write here
is dedicated to movement, movement toward life (as Anna Halprin once called
it) and away from it too, into small distances, aimed at perceiving more and
more landscapes and terrains of nature (real and designed) as bearers of intelligence.
In reverse, looking into the dark goggles of VR and virtual spectrums, hopefully
not ghastly dystopias of bullet-riddled game worlds but sensual 3D environments
where you touch things and others.
Kinetic art and atmospheres, in the book of time, may not be remembered, as
so much or so little. And how do you record movement and atmosphere? Do you
write phenomenological diaries? Describe moods, emotions and feelings inside
atmospheric conditions, which are processes of affective relations that change,
and perhaps are quickly forgotten? Do you aim for high theories and definitions?
Why is there a body of techniques (somatechnics) and how do we shift body weather
and sensor knowledge, microcosmic pressures, off onto scales and planes of sound
that reverberate? I have not done the scientific measurements. I echo my thoughts
on performance technologies, whenever I rehearse and write, and yet I do not
plan to write or theorize much here. Rather, can I suggest you enter into a
quiet meditation on immersion, through the chapters, photographs, and paintings
here, through rehearsal workshops that are affective, I believe, because they
physically and cognitively explore interactivities and interfaces. May I invite
you to detect matter and mediations, eavesdrop and pick up some of these notes
towards an evolving or different understanding of the extended choreographic,
the atmospheric in motion, the kimospheric? These chapters that follow are not
organized strictly or coherently, they are spun, thrown, and let go, after many
rehearsals – resembling scores, suppositions, spectrograms.
Figure 0.2 eclipsemoon, acrylic on canvas. 2018. © Johannes
Birringer
They aim to reflect on theatre and performance, dance and sound, architecture and movement, as if they were ephemeral atmospheric models: I call them kinetic atmospheres. Thus they also stake out a few ideas on technologies, choreographic objects, biomedial environments and metabodies/metakinespheres in which the body is not necessarily the only basis of perception and of the less visible world of ubiquitous computational data processing, the living “postnatural” natureculture environment. Having looked over the shoulder to see the digital ground grow, behind me, as I am catching up, it makes me smile to read about the post digital, post nature, post humanity, as if we really knew how to grasp evolving media processes and transmissions, getting ready again for the next turn, formulating a new physics or metaphysics for the time being, or what Mark Hansen at one point, optimistically, called a “new philosophy for new media.”(2) Some new media quickly get old. Other philosophers, such as Donna Haraway, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Armen Avanessian, strive to delineate troubling entanglements, old habits remaining the same, and new temporalities in the “current ubiquity” beckoning to us from the future pre-emptively. Avanessian’s metaphysics speculate on the post-contemporary, or what we used to call future, the “post” marking how what is happening now is in relationship to what has happened but is no longer.(3) Are you following me?
For the time being, looking at the world of cultural production in the Anthropocene
from an ecologically-minded perspective – and thinking through performance
and mediation – a critical light on the aestheticization of experience
could draw attention to environments, complex systems and infrastructures, how
they are narrated, how they begin to take shape in manifold forms and airy subterfuges,
as engineered choreographies of organic machines, actors of information, matter,
energy and transmissions, audible scenographies, conductions and effervescences.
If I now choreograph live forms, or find ourselves collectively choreographed
and driven to certain alignments to dominant or exploitative determinations
and technical operations, then how does one conjure up practices (and this evokes
an ethics of such practices) connecting us, perhaps also in a ritual sense,
to a scrambled, less aligned poetics of the sacred and of creation, of prime
matter, and of potentiality? How does one conjure up intra-action with fossils
and industrial ruins, plants and animals, viruses, matsutake and the moon?
In what follows, the sensorial and atmospheric will stand out, with weathered
bodies and machines at play, and sensual choreographies as articulations of
the real and the virtual. Technical systems stretched a little, subtracting
here and there, accessories, costumes and masks adding up. With surveillance
equipment increasingly everywhere, why not also wear it on the body, conspicuously,
dialectically. And yet, whose bodies are trailed, what bodies that matter, in
the sensory labyrinth, in the mossy gardens of Kokedera (Saiho¯-ji, a Rinzai
Zen Buddhist temple located in Kyoto), or the old decaying forests of my childhood
Saarland?
The pre-emptive potentialities may include accidents, and blindness is welcome
here, in the vibrant performance interfaces, amongst friendly machines learning,
promiscuous malfunctions, dirty electronics, and cracked loops. If only I could
continue to return to hidden places, on this so-called computational planet,
retro-engineering enchanting forests of the imagination, as if reading a few
ideas about time and animacy, tended and untended nature, in the palms that
are falling off from high.
Notes
1 My psychophysical experience in the forest was matched, if
not outscored, by an experience I had inside a VR installation of “The
Plank” during the Digital Materialism workshop at Tanzhaus NRW (Düsseldorf)
in May 2019. I describe it in more detail in Chapter 5.
2 See Hansen 2004. At a lecture for the 2011 transmediale in Berlin, Hansen
offered new ideas on the panel for “Delimination of Life - Affective Bodies
and Biomedia” (https://vimeo.com/20753681), suggesting that his big claims
about embodied technesis and technological interfaces already were no longer
quite accurate and needed to be revised. See also: https://vimeo.com/20753675
3 Haraway 2016. Chun and Keenan 2016, Avanessian 2018. For Avenessian’s
ideas on the post-contemporary, see also his conversation with Suhail Malik
on “The Time-Complex. Postcontemporary.” Available at: http://dismagazine.com/discussion/81924/the-time-complex-postcontemporary/.
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(c) 2021