Reflecting on presenting my research interests…  May and October 2013

On both occasions I set up a live feed so that I could perform my interests…

Framing the body and composing with it,

Framing devices,

The human subject as dancer (everybody is a dancer),

and the humanity of the ‘dancer’.

The juxtaposition of the everyday with the choreographed,

Improvisation in performance.

Responses to my presentation/s:

– How adept I am with technology (even in performance mode).

– How much technology I use in the performance.

– The delay in the projected image causes the viewer to question whether it really is a representation of me.  This reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s assertion that through the camera lens, “The sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the hands of technology”, and of Rene Magritte’s La Condition Humaine (1933)

As Magritte wrote:

In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting.  Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room.  For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape.  This simultaneous existence in two different spaces is like living simultaneously in the past and in the present, as in cases of deja vu.  (My italics)

Quoted in Torczyner, Harry, Magritte: Ideas and Images. New York, 1977.

This simultaneity of past and present interests me…  and leads me to Bergson and Deleuze’s notions of simultaneous, but differing durations.