New Project: Explore my research through my hands (literally)
An artistic research project of my choreographies and my readings
I recently launched a new project on the platform for artistic research, Research Catalogue. As a sort of personal experiment alongside my PhD research, I will attempt to explore the theories that I am reading by recording, examining, analysing them through my own movements, postures and gestures.
As the topic of my larger PhD research is around dance and code, and I want to explore this relationship within the body in order to argue that with our bodies in art we can have a sort of resistance to technological power flows. (More or less, this is just the beginning so everything will slowly evolve.) The focus is in the body. And my research experiment with my hands is an attempt to also explore the theories I am exploring in the body as well, and not just as abstract connections, or required systems of processing theory within the academic context of a PhD.
Below is an the introductory text. You can follow along with the project here.
And hand, and index, and manual: ongoing explorations of my online choreographies in conjunction with my evolving research.
And so it begins in Spanish, underlined in red because it is spelt wrong according to Word. But a conjunction, anyway, is not about a direct idea to be decoded — (I should translate it to English, but I won’t. It exists in the prologue of a Spanish version printed by the Buenos Aires based publisher Caja Negra. It may or may not exist in English. It exists here as an and and y) — A conjunction instead is a starting point of discovery of other.
I have been wanting to start this project for a while, but I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t have the right connection. But then I started reading “Fenomenología del Fin: Sensibilidad y mutación conectiva” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi — (My first experience reading a theoretical book completely in Spanish, a point that is not to be put aside as something decoded — ah ha! — but to be anded into the conversation, the experience and the process. For me it is already a liminal starting point of not only a new life in Buenos Aires after arriving around 6 weeks ago, but also a new type of conjunción in my research) — and I realised that I did not need a connection. And what now?
The idea here will be to explore my own movements surrounding my research as I read it and process it and note it and write it and digitise it. This very current month, whatever month you find yourself reading this text, I am starting a PhD in Teoria Comparada de las Artes at Universidad de Tres Febrero in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My topic is around dance and code. I won’t go into details, and anyway, they will probably change depending on what month you are in. Instead I will say that I want to get to the body. To the dance AND to the code there is always a body to be explored.
I am not exactly sure what shape this will take. What I can say now is that I plan to record my movements while thinking through them with the very theories that I am reading. Every once and awhile I might make a connection, a code that can be used for you readers, to also understand, or better yet, use. But the point is more in the exploration, in the conjunctions.
From what I incorporated, conjuncted, from the Spanish and the Introduction of Berardi’s book, with the digital, we are moving away from a liminal world of conjunctions, or an empathic understanding, and instead find ourselves in connections, or clear codes of communication in structures of syntax. This changes the way we perceive the world, which includes our aesthetic sensibility and our emotional sensitivity. Have we lost our ability to experience that which cannot be said, that which is liminal, that which cannot be understood, that which cannot be codified, that which has no syntax, that which can only be felt? And in a very general sense, my research is asking a similar question. It is bringing back the idea of the body as a way of resisting flows of technological power through the conjunction of dance and code. And so why now?
I have often said, in understandable syntax to describe ideas that perhaps only make sense to me, that I often internalise a theory. I make it experience and then I use it to write. I also say I am interested in exploring the liminal. But I always go back to codifying it, to describing it, to writing it. I will of course have to do that to complete the PhD. There is a system in place after all and this system requires a specific syntax. However, here is my chance to remain in the liminal and in the conjunction and in the body as much as possible in order to process the things I am reading, writing and researching in new ways, with my aesthetic sensibility and my emotional sensitivity.
And let’s see where it goes.
