Hypomovement.



Stop moving. Stop moving so completely and utterly fast. Why is quicker better. Why is the next thing better than the last. The duality of past and present. The sense that we are stuck in limbo. Limbo. Like a movement with no direction, ongoing. Interactive, social. Old not new.

soundboard from kasumi on Vimeo.


SOUNDBOARD investigates the potential for meaning that adheres in increments of physical movement: the marks it leaves through the materials of motion and sound. Using only the sound created from the dancers’ bodies as they come in contact with the floor and each other, it is a study of the human body as it marks its position in space and time, and the very intimate, organizing rhythms that musical force brings to the equation of world and self. Muscles and tendons, joints and skin respond to the recursive structure of repetitive musical forms, conjured into movement, into dance and music. SOUNDBOARD seems to have evolved from a similar aesthetic of the intensely controlled spontaneity of my large scale ink drawings (shodo) dating from the late 1980’s while still in Japan.

Dead Man Walking...




The video plays between the duality of stillness and movement, one emphasises the other and vice versa. The overlapping layer which contains the most movement lacks the opacity seen in the main video screen and suggests this ephemeral, ghostly feel which captures the viewers attention as it illuminates the faces of the two still individuals at the front. Dead Man Walking exploits the Creed-ian idea that if movement is the height of vitality, then stillness must equate to death (bit extreme), but for dancers, stillness is the conviction, it's boredom, it's mental paralysis. The movement here works like a level of consciousness, a sense of desire to become free and undetained. 

Inspirations Kurt Hentschlager - interesting use of fluid abstract shadows, built up in layers --> Click
John Cage - can't stop thinking about 4'33, the sense of doing nothing, which equates to something, a finished product just like the dancers are doing nothing, they are not dancing but they are functioning as something else altogether --> Click
 
 I developed the videos so the dancers appear more clearly.




What we are presented is an eskewed portrayal of a conflict between what to look at, what to believe is a visual transcription of a mind talking, a dream, or what is infact the real-est out of the two. Is dancing an act and forced or is it the most natural form of movement, and stillness forced.


Capoeira

Capoeira is a fantastic dance which plays with the moves of martial arts, dance and sport, it is a highly physical and 100% active piece of dance which invariably captures and exemplifies not only the repetition of movement but the repetition of high intensity exercise. The dance incorporates balance, speed, agility whilst confronting a dancing partner whom they interact with. There are so many qualities of the dance which can be drawn out into a video piece, the basic move from step to step (as seen above) could be repeated.

Speaking to the dancers, there is a potential to develop a narrative, perhaps to involve a piece of drama. It would be interesting to place these dancers under a spotlight on a stage setting. To film them with a piece of video projected on top of them completely still. All of this set up will be recorded and then placed back into the gallery. This will involve, the layering of complete opposites - stillness and movement. Through video I will then take it back to the gallery where I will project it and thus continue and ongoing framing of a video framed and layered.

Next week involves this filming. Watch this space.

Inspirations I watched this video initially for the dancers, however, the Seaweed video presented at the beginning is a piece of work developed by two artists practicing in London, still trying to get hold of them, it's proving pretty impossible. The dancers are incredible and a massive influence (here).

Out of the ordinary...



11 min, 16 mm film, B/W, no sound
Camera: Bill Rowley
Edit: Elaine Summers
Dir: Elaine Summers
Prod: Hans Breder, Iowa University

This video celebrates the 'slowness' of movement, the dynamics of each move is emphasised because each gesture is slowed down to such a degree we are sensitive to every movement. Movement is a way of designing space, like Creed once referred to appropriation as the manipulate of the air we breathe and the space we move in.

What about the movements we do but placed in a different context. Carsten Holler's exhibition in the US focusses upon 'experience', obviously within the exhibition environment and the gallery context. The fairground ride is the epitome of repetition, it places a number of people within the same mechanical transporation...



Research in Ballroom Dancing.....in context.....




now to take out of it...

Life In One Day


A video which aims to hijack our concept or perception of where we are and what we're looking at, how quickly is time passing by, and the assurance and consistency in repeating ourselves. There's no anxiety when we know what to expect.

Nedko Solakov
At the mention of Jameson's metaphor of art being a 'speech in a dead language' relates to the idea of postmodernity being a break in 'historicity' (is this even a word?!). We are in a state of chaos, no longer running along a natural historical timeline that once existed which should therefore prompt much more exciting work which is created in entirely new conditions. This work below suggests Solakov's attempt to make a new language via music.


Solakov's exhibition at the Ikon demonstrated a snippet of some of his works (collectively picked by the Ikon gallery as part of four exhibitions...) the progression of his work revealed the acknowledgement of boundaries and borders and then the escape from these borders. Solakov integrates the context within the work and plays around with this.


Still reading about schizophrenia:
Time, Space, and Schizophrenia
Crucial to Jameson’s understanding of the postmodern and his project of a cultural politics is the transition from a temporal logic to a spatial logic in postmodernism. The global capitalist or late capitalist culture is, as we have seen, what Jameson calls postmodernism. The spatialization of time is a result of the destruction of the temporality of the subject, of societies move towards schizophrenia. Time is an organizing system, a continuity within which the subject may situate him/herself as a unitary individual. Within multinational capitalism we find ourselves able only to map the globe.
However it is critical for the subject to be able to mentally or cognitively map him/herself within not only a geographically global system but also within a social one. Humans used to map themselves temporally within the scheme of history. However, as the subject becomes more fragmentary, as the subject approaches a society within which one finds the end of historicity, the ‘real’ diminishes while schizophrenia flourishes. Postmodernism was originally characterized by its refutation of the objective and totalizing truths of modernity; truths are deflated as one is left with nothing ‘real,’ just the empty shell of the contemplated referent and the subject and his/her contemplation. This “breakdown of the relationship between signifiers”, between the subject and how he/she contemplates the object, results in a schizophrenic reality.