The photograph of the performance allows the performance to travel, and in some cases (for example, Ana Mendieta's "Silueta" series created in Mexico from 1973 to 1977), performances are staged exclusively for the camera. Choreographers discovered that dance-on-film or videodance is a composite medium in its own right: the choreography is created specifically for the camera. Making dances for the camera has become not only a cinematographic alternative to theatre-dance, but has motivated choreographers to re-conceive the aesthetics of dance for the theatre, the impact of which is evident in the cinematic quality of many contemporary dance works. Video has thus effected a transition in two directions, opening up a new screen space for movement images (concurrent with the evolution of music television), as well as bringing new modes of digital image processing and nonlinear editing to the practice of composition and scenography onstage. This essay addresses similar transitions and will examine new dance and its pioneering research on the interface between movement and computer. 

In light of current experiments in motion capture, computer animation, digital paint and sound programs, 3-D modeling, and interactive design, the history of motion studies and choreography in photography, film and video seems vital for a critical recognition of the shift that is taking place in performance technologies. Contemporary videodance and motion capture technology can be historically traced back to the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge at the end of the nineteenth century. Muybridge had invented a system of positioning numerous cameras in a line and snapping photographs in rapid succession to capture movement in ways never seen before. These momentary, frozen shots, when viewed in sequence, created a cinematic unfolding of movement in both human and animal subjects in a manner that revolutionized our ability to comprehend movement itself. Douglas Rosenberg, video artist and director of the American Dance Festival's Video Archival Program, has pointed out in numerous internet discussions that dance for the camera occupies a wholly different space than dance for the theatre. On the one hand, it is true that video dance, as the precursor of digital dancing and web-based dance, is a hybrid form, existing in a virtual space contextualized by the medium and method of recording. As Rosenberg emphasizes, 

it is not a substitute for, or in conflict with, the live theatrical performance of a dance, but rather a wholly separate yet equally powerful way of creating dance-works. From Eadweard Muybridge to Maya Deren and beyond, into the contemporary era, image makers have rigorously explored dance for the camera in all of its permutations. Since the earliest days of photography, artists working with optical mediums have been fascinated by the possibility of recording human movement, and in particular, dance. In doing so, they have [End Page 362] left us with not only an archive of the history of dance situated in the architectural space or site of film and video, but as well, are responsible for creating the genre we refer to as Dance for the Camera.¹

As it is utilized in Riverbed's Hand-drawn Spaces project (Cunningham) and the virtual dance installation Ghostcatching (Jones), optical motion capture can be defined as the computer hardware and software which enable digital three-dimensional representation of recording moving bodies. Recording sessions involve the placement of markers or sensors in strategic positions on the performer's body; cameras surrounding the performer track these sensors in time and space, feeding the information to a central workstation for consolidation into a single data file. Motion capture files can subsequently drive the movement of simulated figures on the computer, where they can be merged, connected, resequenced and mapped onto other anatomies in an animation program called Character Studio. With this animation tool, the animator-choreographer is able to draw out and reconfigure the abstracted motions and trajectories of the dance, or the ghost of the dance.³

These performance-design experiments, I suggest, are linked more intimately to the visual arts and filmic media than to theatre, and the absence of narrative content is symptomatic for the history of such experimentation in American postmodern dance. Robert Wilson, who recently created his first 3-D digital opera, Monsters of Grace, is a [End Page 364] fellow-traveler, and his preoccupation with design, light, and abstract movement composition follows the same formalist logic. All of the Wilson productions I have seen, including his collaborations with East German playwright Heiner Müller, were marked by a depersonalized formalist aesthetic of the painterly which, comparable to Cunningham's choreography, emphasized technical execution and precision, drawing lines in space and filtering out all psychological and emotional connotations. We might argue that the current experiments in dance/technology follow this aesthetic logic; there is only a small step from a preoccupation with pure movement research to motion capture and computer animation. But we will also discover contradictions, and Bill T. Jones's collaboration with Riverbed rather surprised me, given his deep involvement in complex narrative dance works that grappled with the political history of racism and homophobia and the body's mortality (such as The Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land; Still/Here). The disembodied, ghostly lines in Jones's virtual dance installation perhaps point to his willingness to explore the underlying, implicit fragility of the body's muscular movement, which is inevitably a movement--over time--towards disintegration or degeneration. In the language of video technology, the contours of Jones's figure, seen in the cubic box which resembles Laban's spatial concept of the "kinesphere" (the total volume of the body's potential movement), appear as a second or third generation of the source. The actual body is not, or no longer, here. The animated lines, in this digital theatre of disappearance, are slowly fading away, and the dance leaves behind the copies of traces. 

While choreographing Still/Here (1995), Jones in fact had begun to incorporate video projections as testimonies in his stage dance, following earlier precedents of performance art and dance that used video and 16mm film projections. Performers used cameras as soon as the technology became more widely accessible. For example, the Australia-based artist Stelarc already showed microfilms of the inside of his stomach and lungs at an exhibition in Tokyo in 1973. I always considered Stelarc a choreographer of movement and the body's extensions, and I knew the photographs of his suspension performances long before I saw him enact his current experiments with prosthetic devices and "fractal flesh," plugging himself into the World Wide Web via electrodes connected to his body. Stelarc quite literally "animates" his own body, testing the human-machine interfaces of our so-called cyberspatial future. On the other hand, the charcoal drawings of South African artist William Kentridge, which were among the most provocative works shown at the 1997 "documenta" (the international visual arts exhibition shown every five years in Kassel, Germany), present a different form of digital storytelling at the end of the century. He transformed the drawings into animated films (Felix in Exile, 1994 and History of the Main Complaint, 1996) that appeared like dark expressionist landscapes, CT⁴ scans of a history of violent repression and memory, guilt and forgetting. Closely linked to this technology of animation, Kentridge's theatrical work with puppets betrays a pervasive historical sensitivity towards the confluences of painting, sculpture, theatre, literature and philosophy. His Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997) is highly self-conscious of the political implications of the erasures and permutations in his "drawings for projection," and of the agents behind his manipulated wooden puppets. [End Page 365]

His choreography of the puppets and the puppeteers emphasizes the ironic distancing effect of the puppeteer (who is conventionally "invisible" and gives movement and voice to the puppet) whose ambiguous, neutral role is here accentuated. In one scene Pa Ubu, played by a live actor, lulls the dog puppet to sleep, then opens it up and steals some of the evidence it carries in its body, while the puppeteers stand upstage and watch carefully. The human puppets and the animal puppets give testimony to the Truth Commission; they are memory images. They become the medium of history. But the animators, who stand by silently or manipulate the puppets, are also always perceived as interpreters and translators, giving voice to the accounts of the victims. Kentridge's multimedia production, partly adapted from Jarry's Ubu Roi, animates characters and roles, narrative and epic conventions, and shifts brilliantly between documentary drama and burlesque, cartoonish gestures, extending the languages of performance while grappling with haunting moral issues.⁵ Finally, his work does not foreground a particular technological aesthetic but integrates the media into a metaphysical performance that seeks to navigate the complex nature of memory. 

It became a common strategy among historians to look at the relations between the live arts (performances, actions) and the visual arts through the lens of modern and postmodern avant-gardes that challenged the representational mechanisms and boundaries of the visual and plastic art disciplines. Performance art, as Live Art was called in the U.S. after the radical transformations effected by the 1960s counterculture, thus inherited the name and legacy of the modernist (visual) arts--for example the stylistic and conceptual dimensions of futurism, constructivism, cubism, surrealism, dada, and abstraction--while being understood as time-based and closer to the theatrical character of the concert. Since most "concerts," whether visual, musical or theatrical, were centered in the actions of the performer, there was always a strong emphasis on the role of body in performance, even if it involved the displacement of the physical body as such, as it was conceived in the elaborate designs and constructed architectures of the Bauhaus performances. When women performers began to focus on their physical, spiritual and sexual bodies and autobiographies, body art was still understood primarily as a modernist art form. As Carolee Schneemann pointed out in the early 1960s, she treated her body as an "extension" of the canvas and the visual medium in which she worked. Today, when we speak of extensions of the body, we generally refer to technologies and computer-assisted interactive designs in which the body moves or functions as a MIDI⁶ device. 

Since the 1960s movements in happening, body art, Fluxus, conceptual art and pop art, the entire paradigm of high art has shifted, and the blurring of boundaries and the confluences between art, technology, and popular media have widened the spectrum of "performance art" to a point where actions, events, concerts and installations could include any combination of media or (in)formal means of presentation. This blurring of the notion of performance makes it difficult to reinvent particular aesthetic criteria [End Page 366] that delimit our understanding of art process. Since the legendary collaborations between John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham (which preceded the influential work of Robert Wilson) or between the choreographers of the Judson Church, the method of composition (process) in dance and visual performance media has been of primary interest, especially since most performance events are ephemeral and cannot be collected into permanent museum exhibitions. Most of the actions and happenings of the 1960s in fact sought to blur the distinctions between art and life and thus programmatically undermined the institutional conditions of the art-object and its value in the market. According to Allan Kaprow, who coined the term "happening," such events were structured so that there was no difference between performers and audience.⁷ The work existed as long as the happening lasted. In today's internet terms, the work exists for as long as you are logged on. 

Ironically, we now have seen retrospective exhibitions of Fluxus art, body art, and site-specific art actions, and the myth of performance as subversion and transgression (and as anti-commodity) has to be relativized, especially in light of the expanded spectrum I noted above. Over the past fifteen years, it became apparent that many artistic strategies in performance art also became functionally useful for a whole range of cultural expressions ranging from public art, video art, graphic art and political or grass-roots activism to commercial media (music, television, advertising) and to processes in ethnography, social psychology and therapy. At the same time, the notion of "composition" has undergone significant changes since current generations of young artists grow up with video and electronic media that imply and facilitate the convenient sampling, mixing and remaking of the products of consumer culture. Most of the reference points of contemporary media art are indeed the experiences and lifestyles of media culture itself. As in ambient music, such media art may approximate abstraction and minimalism, but its materials are mainly constructed from consumer culture and the vast storage of recorded data in music, film and television. The model of the contemporary artist-mixer is the DJ. 

More important, however, is the new paradigm change we are experiencing near the end of the century, namely the shift from the analog spectrum to the digital era of recording, transmission and global communications (computer, ISDN⁸ and Internet networks). The history of performance in this century is marked by the advent of new technologies of representation (photography, film, video, synthesizer, MIDI, computer, etc), and it is particularly interesting to reconsider the radical challenges of the 1960s anti-aesthetic movement in light of the 1990s "happenings"--for example internet-based or online event-improvisations that also claim to subvert the differences [End Page 367] between performers/users and audiences. In the 1990s, working digitally and being digital evoke a new futurism of virtual performance possibilities; its new technological catchword is "interactivity," yet its compositional method is still based on design and on the instant feedback that we have known since the rise of closed-circuit video. 

In a recent teleperformance created during "International Dance and Technology 1999" (IDAT) in Arizona, the Australian Company in Space staged Escape Velocity as a duet between two dancers, two cameras, and two projectors linked by a direct online connection between the Web Cafe at Arizona State University and a performance space in Melbourne. The live mix effectively merged the two dancers, layering the choreography and the bodies in a spellbinding, transparent symmetry across a vast spatial and temporal gap. It was transparent insofar as we knew that the teleconference had been set up between Arizona and Australia, we could see the audience "Down Under," and when Hellen Sky started her dance in front of our eyes, we could see the projected image of her sister dancing the same choreography in Melbourne, and the two camera artists on either end of the performance began to interact with the performers and send their video signals through the line. At various points during the performance we could imagine the dancers being at-one, the sisters becoming a composite dancer floating in a third space created by the overlaid projections which included film footage of several outdoor locations (a forest, a desert). Even more hauntingly, the apparent symmetry of the dance of course was not precise; tiny delays in the transmission became part of the choreography and entered into the dialogue between present physical body and technologically mediated body. Ironically, of [End Page 368] course, both dancers were simultaneously mediated and transprojected. At the moment when these dispersions become possible, all safe parameters of the body's relationship to space, time and place have shifted. We witnessed a dialogue between ghosts mixed onto the pixilated, filtered and manipulated surface of the filmic space created by the projectors, the dance a traveling across time, the body morphing and aging right in front of us.⁹

In the following, I want to track some of the virtual implications of interactivity, and draw attention to cross-over experiments in dance and other performance processes. My main conceptual metaphor is not dependent on the technological aesthetic that marks our digital era. Rather, I trust my own artistic evolution from theatre and music into dance and technology, and I am particularly indebted to the experience of collaboration I have had, on both sides of the Atlantic and in Latin America, as I traveled with members of my company AlienNation Co. and participated in many workshops and site-specific performance actions with others. The main trajectory of my understanding the evolution of performance media, therefore, is movement, and my historical understanding of technology derives from improvisation and composition through physical, body-centered research. 

Again, these impacts may play out differently in different social, cultural and gendered contexts. If some of these environments now are virtual, I want to ask how we incorporate digital tools of composition in our creative process, and how immersive and projective computer-generated temporality and space (digitized form, content, movement, image, sound) affect the kinesthetic and psychological experience in our lived body. In a very pragmatic sense, then, I'd like to ask whether our working habits are fundamentally altered. And although I'm sure many of us will not necessarily ever have access to high-tech science or computer laboratories in the way William Forsythe did during his CD-ROM project for the Frankfurt Ballet (Improvisation Technologies), I am confident that we can test technological improvisations in any space that we ordinarily use to rehearse and work together. The main impetus for the exploration, in a basic political sense, is to work against the grain of the privatizing tendency of our era of PCs and to publicize collaborative creative work by extending our diverse knowledge of low-end or high-end equipment, raising the stakes for our own interaction with technical systems. 

I do not know where the work with digital media will take us, although I have been interested in mixed media art for quite some time, at least since the mid-1980s when I decided to abandon text-based theatre and begin a series of collaborative projects focused on the exploration of "social movement" (performance, travel, immigration, urban living) and the mediation of image/sound movements. The most constructive dimension of this shift in my work was learning to dance and to understand choreographies and scenographies of movement in an expanded sense of their relationships to the images, projections, and imaginations of the subjective physical body. At the same time I became increasingly interested in video/film, photography, music and the visual arts, and I can trace almost all of my work back to the conceptual influence of these media on my experience of physical movement and the rhythms and motions of the stories we tell with our bodies in specific environments or constructed spaces. Although the visual sensibility may appear to be dominant in such multimedia performance work, it is also important to remember that physical rehearsal involves all our kinesthetic and synesthetic senses, and the experience of space, time, energy, balance/imbalance, weight, scale, texture, color, sound and touch gain a crucial significance if we construct fully mediated environments. I have also come to value "touch" in a very concrete way, insofar as much of my work involves cross-cultural collaboration with people I get to know intimately during the process of creation. Touching in rehearsal is a fundamental basis of performing together and of getting to [End Page 370] know the distance or proximity of space between our bodies, the weight of our bodies, and the boundaries of our imagination. 

In recent years, artists in the dance communities have wanted to respond to the increasing presence of imaging/recording and electronic technologies in the culture and the exhibition contexts in which we work. A range of responses or negotiations can be observed at this point. When I was invited to the School of New Dance Development Amsterdam (SNDO) in 1996, we gathered for a workshop entitled "Connecting Bodies" which foregrounded the use of technology in dance. The technological workshop was ensconced inside a two-week international forum ("Bodies of Influence") for professional experimental dance artists working in a wide variety of movement, sound, improvisation, meditation, body-awareness and release techniques, to come together and exchange ideas about making and presenting work in today's climate. The actual technological workshop thus inserted itself into the nodes of a wider space of practices, including SNDO's hosting of specific dance-related "networking activities," such as a video collection project, an audio installation, an internet access room, a special project on cooperative networking, the development of an "improvisation performance" event, and the temporary opening of the Stamina Choreographic Computer Atelier, exhibited for hands-on training by its founders Bianca van Dillen and Mari-Jan Boer.¹⁰ Participating in "Connecting Bodies" thus meant shifting the focus to another side of bodily praxis, namely the sharing of bodies of information that originate in what the Canadian installation artist David Rokeby calls the "very nervous system" of technological interfaces. I want to summarize some of these interfaces in the following. 

We looked at Thecla Schiphorst's "LifeForms" program she wrote for Cunningham; this software is now widely used in the design of movement sequences for human and other articulated figures. We also saw her Bodymaps, an interactive installation activated by the viewer's touch, and other digital animation software installed in the terminals at the Choreographic Computer Atelier. We watched a performance with STEIM's "Big Eye" computer program, involving video cameras that convert a live dancer's movement to MIDI messages controlling lights, image projection, and sound onstage. STEIM is Amsterdam's well-known Foundation of Electro-Instrumental [End Page 371] Music, and electronic composer Joel Ryan came to our workshop to demonstrate his current live sound processing for choreographer William Forsythe. Amanda Steggell and Pier Platou gave a very funny video lecture on their recent M@aggie's Love Bytes concert, which combines media dance performances and music in real and virtual spaces, allowing dancers in actual space to interact with multi-layered sound, text and realtime videoimages beamed through online Internet facilities. Motion capture technology and character animation were introduced as an "extension" or simulation of human body motion when virtual-studio producer Peter Mulder patiently explained the most arcane new features of his NOB-Interactive Laboratory--for example, the operations of "Kinemation" (motion capture integrating forward and inverse kinematics), "Digital Doll" (animated skeletons that can be connected to each other in any configuration), and "Smart Skin" (character animation that can be taught to behave according to skeletal position or time). 

Heidi Gilpin demonstrated segments from Forsythe's CD-ROM-formatted Improvisation Technologies.¹¹ Andrea Zapp introduced new theories of the interactive viewer and the confusion of the senses in the Telematic Dreaming project by Paul Sermon; and Kitsou Dubois, a researcher at the National Center of French Spatial Studies, demonstrated new dance ideas derived from experiments in microgravity and weightlessness. The symposium began with a theoretical exposition on "Choreography, Women, and the Gift of Dance" by André Lepecki, and ended with Diana Theodores's comprehensive inventory of new perspectives on "technography." Indeed, women choreographers and their gifts of dancing have shaped much of twentieth-century dance history, but it is perhaps even more poignant to realize how many women have entered the technological realm of programming and redesigning interface systems that can incorporate movement ideas and choreographies. There are different angles from which to approach such incorporations and the nature of the interface, and we must keep in mind that the computer as a medium is strongly biased since it operates purely logically and in very tiny playing fields of integrated circuits. Even if it is patched up with other media (video cameras, projectors, image processors, synthesizers, MIDI managers, sound systems, and so on), it remains a machinic device operating on programmed code, treating everything quantitatively as information based on cybernetic models of positive/negative feedback loops and pattern recognition. The quantity of information it processes is mathematically defined, and the kind of information it processes depends on the way the program is coded to read pattern and randomness. All operations revolve around binary code. Since so much energy in cultural theory is spent on decentering the dualisms of Cartesian rationality, the [End Page 372] persistence of binary logic in computer technology effectively shifts attention to the quality and the activation of the interface configuration and the artistic and social practices that mobilize the interface, including the unresolved contradiction that the computer may not be concerned about Cartesian mind/body or gender distinctions when it reads bodies or physical actions, like everything else, as information. 

Schiphorst argues that it remains vital, of course, to write code, as in the "LifeForms" software, that applies an understanding of anatomy and body movement while allowing the user to modify predefined movement possibilities. On the other hand, most participants at the SNDO conference arriving at the issue from the side of dance and performance practice expressed their interest in the points of contact between what takes place in the human-scaled physical space and the information systems. As Gilpin suggested, we need not wait for digital technology, or think of it as a device for body representation, but empower ourselves as informers for technological interface design. We may not have an influential language yet to impress corporeal aesthetics upon network and computer surface design, and Gilpin is asking for "a discourse that can actually deal in articulate ways with movement and dynamism of any kind, not just moving bodies." But dance surely has articulated its operational, conceptual, and aesthetic systems, and since they already exist in the same media environment as digital technologies, their physicalities necessarily interact with virtuality. The question is, rather, how the interaction changes the images and sounds in cyberspace, the virtual geography of potentially infinite computational possibilities in a "place" that is not a place, or how the interaction can generate new kinds of "places," either between dance and multimedia activities or along and within real-time multi-sensory immersion environments. 

Furthermore, interaction with virtuality potentially or actually modifies human proprioception, as Dubois's research on weightlessness confirms. She points out that the dynamic conditions of movement are altered when "the sources of information provided by inertia-gravitational force disappear. The absence of gravity is lived as an aggression from sensorial origin." The new sensorial images are unusual and conflictual, and they effect space sickness, "a sort of disease of adaptation." In weightlessness or free floating, every movement can induce a totally unexpected displacement, and in approaching new possibilities of being in this space, one has to concentrate on the internal space of one's body (organs are reorganized, blurring the references to internal space) and the interaction with external space as well as on the imagination as it is stimulated by the new environment. Dubois is committed to exploring the exchange between space techniques and dance after she realized during parabolic flights that in a fluid universe of weightlessness the body needs to construct a subjective referential or inner vertical in order to apprehend external space and react to it: "The inner vertical can be felt as an infinite spiral; on the outside everything is relative and one experiences an extraordinary fluidity of movement." Her dance research is now influenced by her interest in the "space in-between" internal body space and external space, and she tells us that in her choreography she searches for a "quality of movement where the dancers are always in a situation of experimentation, a state of unstable balance . . . an interactivity between that movement quality and systems of scenographic apparitions which blur habitual references to the gravity axis of the spectators themselves, thus creating a phenomenon of resonance in their own bodies." [End Page 373]

This notion of "scenographic apparition" can be linked to the role played by "video ghosts" in interactive designs of movement (for example, Bill T. Jones's use of video as testimony in the choreography of Still/Here). In terms of the nodes, or zones of turbulence, we currently have at least four models of interaction in digital art. First, the basic point-and-click or touch-screen interactivity of computer-based multimedia projects, either encoded in CD-ROM formats or left on a hard drive, is confined to a site-specific installation, and thus comparable to video installations or intermedia exhibitions that may include user-access to the Net. The screen/monitor or its projection remains the primary surface of information, although hypertext or hypermedia formats imply a non-linear, non-sequential information structure that is unlike the performance experience in real time, especially since hypermedia is digitized information allowing the user to manipulate it in ways that are not possible for the viewer of a performance in real space. 

Second, the potential extension into the Net implies distance and spatial separation. The circuitry of telemedia can link locations and thus an interactivity that is not a one-way communication (as in broadcast media) but an engagement involving reciprocity and feedback. Reciprocity opens the possibility of altering and transforming the terms of reference of the exchange; multiple connections between sites create greater turbulence and dynamism among the connected surfaces. In the case of Paul Sermon's Telematic Dreaming, two separate interfaces are installed in separate locations connected via ISDN digital telephone network. The two separate installations in themselves are dynamic installations that function as customized videoconferencing systems inviting interaction with users. The success of the "performance" depends on the creative input of the audiences at both ends. Screen or video projection surface is replaced by rooms with a bed or sofa, a TV, a carpet. The rooms come alive when the user steps inside and acts. The bed in each location has a camera situated directly above it, sending a live video image of the bed, and a person ("A") on it, to a video projector located above the other bed in the other location. The live video image is projected down on the bed with another person ("B") on it. A second camera, next to the video projector, sends a live video image of the projection of "A" with "B" acting upon it back to a TV monitor that is next to the bed with "A." The telepresent image functions like a mirror that reflects one person interacting with another person's reflection. 

Zapp describes this scenario as a dynamic system with considerable psychological complexity, since the viewer actually becomes a physical user who is able to experience theatrical roles or spontaneous playful behavior, like acting, pantomime, and visceral movement or choreographic possibilities. The physical bed with its social meanings can provoke emotional responses heightened by the telematic experience, since geographical distance is dissolved in the interaction with another person. The ability to exist outside the user's own space and time is created by the real sense of touch (the bed), enhanced by an acute shift of senses in the telematic space, which Zapp (who has worked with Sermon in Japan) explains as a conversion of sight and touch. The two users in distant places exchange their tactile senses and touch each other by replacing their hands with their eyes. While it might be difficult emotionally to interact with a stranger on a bed in a public installation, the bed interface actually creates a new level of virtual consciousness and immersion affect. The participants act in real space but manipulate themselves in virtual space, the projection field of [End Page 374] interaction. Zapp goes so far as to claim that although the image representation is analog--reaching out with the hand or touching and reacting is shown in physical visible form--the telematic performance affects consciousness of body and self in such a way that the user's attention, initially focused on the real bed, after a while is no more concentrated on the immediate environment but on the distant telematic one and the virtual movement. The cause and effect interactions of the body extend through fiber optic network, and the shift in sensory perception may dislocate the awareness of where the body movement resides. Zapp argues persuasively that such a shift, which implies controlling and "feeling" virtual touch with the eyes, often leads users to explore different sensitivities, and a perhaps unfamiliar playfulness, in the contact and emotional exchange with the other. On the other hand, I feel that such visual "controlling" of tactile sensibility forecloses the most intimate sense we possess while shifting attention to the screen/projection-as-skin. 

The intermixing of analog and telematic media in this installation project suggests that interactive electronic art does not depend on a particular technological mode (analog, digital, radio, video, modem, satellite) but on the quality or conceptual structure of the meeting points and conduits of interactive levels. As a third example, then, M@aggie's Love Bytes opens up the possibility, which has also been explored in spatially separate music concerts linked up via satellite or Internet, to stage a dance concert in one location to a real-time audience while inviting the input participation of other artists, connected via modem and Internet, so that externally transmitted video images (from QuickTime cameras), sound-samples, voices and texts can be instantaneously integrated and layered onto the closed-circuit video projection and soundmix in the real space. The choreographer becomes a virtuality-DJ. The real space performance is also filmed with digital cameras and projected to the virtual site on the Net, and since the dancers are moving in front of the local video projection (hooked to the Mac) that is already a projection of the integrative virtual concert, Steggell could be seen as "choreographing" a live mix both for local audiences and for Web collaborators. Her work with present and absent collaborators utilizes the Web playfully for what she calls the "postmodemism" of "time warping and space bending," and this warping indeed functions as an aesthetic of chance events in which the dance between pattern and randomness replaces all known, stable contours of unitary time-space theatricality. When she first "staged" the event in a discotheque in Copenhagen, Web browsers from as far away as Tokyo and San Francisco tuned in to drop off sound and video samples, turning the dance-music concert into a kind of electronic quilt pieced together by the multiple-site collaborations. The quilt-concert migrating across the Net intimates an idea of collaborative performance that is largely unexplored in its effects on content, structure, and reception, since we would have to substitute more familiar principles of the rehearsed and structured collaboration process with the defining features of the digital and distributed medium where such "information pieces" may not belong to anyone any longer, and where the completely unpredictable "dance" may be as electrifying as senseless. Moreover, the live internet switching demands such an amount of high-tech equipment, lines, and cable connections to work properly that the smallest bug in the system can bring it all down, which has to be considered part of the unpredictability pattern. 

Finally, a fourth model of digital art would remove the intersection of actual and virtual performance and place interactivity inside immersive virtual environments. I [End Page 375] don't know of any examples where full immersion has been tested without the hitherto existing limitations of strapping the viewer/user to body suit, headphones and data glove, which implies wiring the body to the computer and shifting the kinesthetic experience to the simulated spatiality produced for eyes and ears inside the headphones. At the current stage of VR¹² research, the wiring is still necessary, which obviously reduces the number of users who can actively move into virtual performance spaces at one time. Canadian artist Char Davis's metaphorical reconstructions of nature in the fully interactive OSMOSE environment (which included an interface driven by the user's breath and balance) caused much attention when it was exhibited in 1996. Other large-scale immersive environments were built during a research project at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, and the photo and video documentations of Diane J. Gromola and Yacov Sharir's Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies (1994) display it as an ongoing project consisting of cyberspace "chambers" constructed as a fully connected lattice. Sound and VR artist Marcos Novak, who works with Gromola and Sharir, calls them "Worlds in Progress," and the chamber he programmed presents a space of abstracted forms, lines of light, and geometric constructs. Sharir, however, is seen dancing in the "Virtual Body" chamber that is rendered as a three-dimensional simulation of an enormous virtual body configuring the immersive environment out of visualizations of X-rays, sonograms, and other medical and MRI¹³ data of Gromola's real body. Her virtualized body becomes an architecture that can be "inhabited," and for Sharir it is the performance space for an interactive dance that engages both the three-dimensional simulation of Gromola's hollow body and the digitized images (video feedback) of himself dancing within these layers of virtual images. The tracking devices in his headphones and dataglove give him the illusion of multiple body experiences at high navigational speed, causing a sensation of disembodiment and disconnection since his point of view, which can change at a flick of the wrist, doesn't establish a full perceptional grasp of the interior body landscape as a coherent body. Rather, the interior body tends to dissolve into an inchoate environment of giant organs, endless strips of tissue, cavernous bones, curves, lines, and shapes. The virtual-body environment, in other words, doesn't pretend to be realistic; it is a reconceptualized space mapped by numbers of code. 

Gromola is aware of the disembodiment effect caused by disorientation, but she designed the space in this way to explore transcendent spiritual states of pain, since for her the "dervish" effect (in Sufi dancing) enables her to link a function of virtuality with her experience of medical treatment of chronic illness. While her conceptual relocation of her body as a virtual stage is truly astounding, what is more difficult to understand is Sharir's relationship to it and his assumptions about choreographing his movements and video images in response to his distressed, disoriented body-experience. Is his internal experience translated into conscious movement choices or do we see him react to a state of disconnection from himself? In the documentation of the experiment he expresses considerable uncertainty, wondering how agency and self are altered by immersion, and how a virtual environment and the possibilities of "distributed performance" can redefine performance venues. This raises another [End Page 376] question, namely how an audience without headphones would watch the dance of the VR performer. 

As Theodores pointed out in her exposé on "technography," interactive immersive computer technologies extend and transform the shape of movement and choreography, and if digital media can penetrate the materiality of the body, then our perceptual and ontological notions of embodiment are profoundly questioned: "We can challenge and/or confuse all existing senses we have of order and of norms, spatially, biomechanically, kinesthetically, and aesthetically. Classical frameworks of symmetry, specific body architecture, notions of sequence, and even the way we recognize our own sensory responses and faculties--all of these are challenged and reordered radically and perhaps liberatingly. As we shed the ingrained ideas of what the body ought to do, we enter into a new aesthetic and experiential order." While it is true that the collaboration between digital technology and choreography potentially expands the concept of non-phenomenological information and virtuality just as much as it expands the concept of what the body is, it is less clear how the audience is integrated and transformed into interactive users, since most of the practical experiments to date are made by the artists/programmers and designers themselves. 

The research experiments necessary for the evolution of a new dance/technology aesthetic became the focus of heated debate at IDAT99, after choreographer Susan Kozel presented her current work in motion capture and declined to entertain questions about the aesthetic direction of her process. I was among those who [End Page 377] wondered aloud whether the dancer, strapped up with wires and constrained in her movement to a tiny platform area prepared for the optical motion capture, is willingly compromising her potential range of movement, effort/shape, motivation and content-oriented expression to the point where watching the dance (I hesitate to call it choreography) is neither interesting nor stimulating for a conceptual evaluation of interface technology. The severely diminished movement, which on the videotape she showed looked like banal, repetitive improvisations with arm and upper body motion, struck me as a kind of impoverished minimalism that fails to be enhanced by the interplay with her computer-generated shadow images and animations projected on the wall behind her. The project she presented, Ghosts and Astronauts, is obviously in an early laboratory phase, and I am inclined to agree with Kozel that there is an inevitable gain and loss in experimentation, that we need time and exposure to motion capture technologies in order to develop a specific language of movement expression that enables a perceptual expansion or new mental awareness for the audience. Choreography with motion capture, in other words, may not necessarily be feasible with the existing or dominant (modern) dance vocabularies, and thus Kozel's videotape was misleading. Rather than focusing on her movement and what it interacts with, we may have to "inhabit" an altered space, listening to or sensing a different kind of dialogue that takes place between the "animator" and that which she generates. In Kozel's case, the dancer's motions are charted onto animated (geometric) figures, which she is exploring as "new life-forms" (following the tenets of Artificial Intelligence), and for her the bouncing cubes on the screen were far from being depersonalized and abstract. Stunningly, Kozel claims that it is possible, through the intimate connection she and her collaborators have developed with the technological instruments and the software, to identify the quality of the motion of the animated cubes according to the dancer who was wearing the sensors. Even if I didn't doubt this claim and the romantic subjectivism that underlies it, I wouldn't know how to integrate it into my earlier reaction to the lack of content of this work, especially if I cannot share the intimacy of exploration as an audience member. 

To build full-scale theatres for larger immersive audience interactivity or osmosis is as yet technically unimaginable, and the experience of some of the lab tests shown at IDAT99 made me impatient and yet curious. Unlike the role of the experimenter herself, my input role as user was quite minimal; in a sense, the body's intelligence doesn't get involved in informing the interface configuration, and as in Dancing with the Virtual Dervish, the question of the reconstitution of limits or borderlines between the interior and the exterior is not adequately addressed. On the "mirror stage" of such environments, the constitution of specific kinds of distances between self and the digital surface, the "other," seems crucial for the exploration of physical and psychic confusion or disorganization of the senses. One way to investigate these boundaries, I think, is to challenge the biological organism or organic movement in relation to surface intensities and in the tactile meeting of surfaces and animated figures. What can these sensors tell us about our mental landscapes; how do they move us into new sensory and conceptual territories? 

Telematic Dreaming and OSMOSE challenge our assumptions about the connection between vision, touch and hearing, and my idea of dancing with technologies, in fact, is related precisely to the phenomenal interface between movement (and movement copy) and digital video projection as a performative projection of another moving skin [End Page 378] or tactile surface linked to proprioception and neurochemical reactions--all the delicate and subliminal feedback mechanisms that move the brain to know the positions, tensions, and feelings of the body and its parts. My ideas for "Lively Bodies Lively Machines" (LBLM), the workshop I teach every summer, evolved from this thinking about deep contact between organic and non-organic surfaces or projections.¹⁴ A decisive issue in our thinking about technology and choreography is the [End Page 379] question of commensurability. In this regard, Theodores quoted Kozel's prediction that "if technology is regarded as abstract, logical and mechanical and bodies are seen as organic matter only, then the two will be mutually hostile. But if technology and bodies are seen additionally in terms of flows of energy or intensity or as fluid dynamics, then there is ground for collaboration." If indeed the technology in our performance experiments was driven by the experience of the body itself, then knowledge of the body and its silent languages can inform ways of connecting with non-phenomenological structures in digital art. Or it can influence visual or sonic digital environments in such a way that they transmit information sensually or heighten the physicality experienced in the electronic interface, as it is the case in Rokeby's "very nervous systems" (interactive sound installations) or in Pamela Z and Laetitia Sonami's work with DataGloves or DataSuits and multiple controllers, where the spatial sound events triggered by persons moving inside the interface can create a phantasmatic aura and affect their acoustic behavior, both inside the space and after leaving it. 

Theodores posits that the notion of "disembodiment" in technological immersion is resisted here for its perpetuation of the transcendent metaphysics of mindspace over body intelligence. Indeed, the thinking and sensing body empowered by technology offers up, in reverse, visceral languages of bones, organs, fluids, and even of seeing inside a movement. This would bring us, in choreographic terms, to the notion of "impossible anatomies," or the "impossible body," as Merce Cunningham suggested in his experiments with LifeForms. Zapp, Dubois, and Schiphorst would add that new systems of behavior can be informed by the absent presence of electronic bodies in telematic media, while unstable/weightless bodies or the animated models of LifeForms both hint at giving more materiality to "spaces in-between," to non-solid presences or vanished presences, to unlikely gestures (unlikely for trained movement behavior), and to possibilities of movements as yet unseen, which Schiphorst joyfully compares to the "shock of freedom." Furthermore, technology as a compositional tool, as opposed to its recording and archival functions, assumes as a starting point such cross-overs to an impossible body aesthetic. Theodores is correct in reminding us that the "thrill of the unnatural is reaffirmed by technology in much the same way that aesthetic pleasure was derived originally from classical ballet in terms of virtuoso technique and 'unnatural' acts. The technologically possible anti-gravitational body, the multi-layered, extended, enlarged, the vanishing, the inside-out bodies of the virtual and the immersed invite us to a new definition of artifice, of the extra-ordinary, and thus to new desires for the performing body." 

This idea of the unnatural desiring body offers a fascinating, erotic, and deeply politicized ground for performance/media practice, since it also reminds us of a wide range of contemporary performance art focused on the production of the "other," the foreign, the abnormal and dysfunctional, the diseased, and the abject body.¹⁵ As a [End Page 380] political site, the body thus performs already a potentially dysfunctional role vis-à-vis technological abstraction and recuperation/dispersion, and I agree with Theodores that the concept of "instantaneity" needs to be carefully examined as an effect of technology's affording us access to instant transactions, transformations and morphings. 

Technological composition or technography, in this sense, "can disappear before it has ever fully appeared," raising the issue of both a "radical forgetting and a radical remembering as perhaps two emerging ideologies of technography." Linking this to my examples of animated puppet theatre and online performance, the notion of instantaneity forces us to reflect on the contemporary experience of browsing, saturation and image/data transmission speed; if all art/information is speeding up, the very speed and intensity of technological advance are in themselves an informing agent of choreography, which also implies that the notion of an "aura" of the instantaneous loses its mystique. We would simply have to learn, once again, how to operate or function without the familiar integrity of an older physics of space, time, and mass. In the new parameters of digitally-enhanced performance, compositional dramaturgies or hierarchical structures or linear movement/narrative are substituted by templates of varying intensities, screen spaces, and lattice structures. In such noncentric spaces there is no stable point of view, and body forms and movement forms can be transformed and "disappeared" in many unforeseeable ways. In new performance research, such technological and bodily contingencies need to be tested in order to create physical platforms or stages on which such work can be exchanged with audiences.¹⁶

Johannes Birringer is an independent choreographer/filmmaker and artistic director of AlienNation Co., an international multimedia ensemble based in Houston. He is the author of several books, including Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (1991), Media and Performance: along the border (1998), and Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture (forthcoming). His most recent dance productions include Parachute (1998), North by South (1998), and migbot (1999); he is currently completing a new sci-fi opera titled MIRAK. The project website is at: www.alienationcompany.com.

2. See Lev Manovich's provocative archaeology of moving pictures leading to his thesis that in the age of digitization, cinema's identity as a media art is destroyed since "cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation" and subordinates the cinematic to the painterly and to special effects simulation. Manovich's "What is Digital Cinema?" appears in The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 172-92. 

3. See Paul Kaiser, "Steps," in Ghostcatching, exhibition catalogue published by The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City on the occasion of the installation of Riverbed's collaborative dance animation project with Bill T. Jones, January 6-February 13, 1999. The catalogue contains vivid descriptions of the technical and aesthetic process as well as numerous color illustrations of the digital installation. The color stills were also published on the Internet at http://www.cooper.edu/art/ghostcatching, and on Riverbed's website: http://www.riverbed.com. Another significant "mocap" project was initiated by producer/choreographer Scott deLahunta during a residency at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, in the spring of 1999. The research team, including deLahunta, Torunn Kjolner, Susan Rethorst, Kim Madsen, Erik Soldtfeldt, Susan Kozel, Claude Aebersold, and Luca Ruzza, engaged a series of digital performance workshops utilizing magnetic motion capture (Ascension Motion Star Wireless), animation (MAYA), and projection technologies. The project culminated in a production workshop, Digital Theatre Experimentarium (May-15 June 1999) and the première of White on White, with choreography by Susan Rethorst and animation by Soren Birk Jacobsen. A comprehensive Project Website was posted at http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sdela/dte/. 

4. Computerized tomography. 

5. For an incisive critical interpretation of Kentridge's use of the "mixed media" role of puppeteers and his collaboration with Johannesburg's Handspring Puppet Company, see Yvette Coetzee, "Visibly Invisible," South African Theatre Journal 12.1-2 (1998), 35-51. 

See also Leah Ollman, "William Kentridge: Ghosts and Erasures," Art in America 87.1 (1999), 70-75; 113. 

6. Musical Instrument Digital Interface. 

7. The term was first used in the title for Allan Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, performed at Reuben Gallery in New York in 1959. Subsequently, Kaprow explained his concepts in his book Assemblage, Environment & Happening (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1966). For an excellent, illustrated book on the history of performance art, see Elizabeth Jappe, Performance--Ritual--Prozess (Munich: Prestel, 1993). The new media museum at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe has now published an illustrated catalogue that traces the history of recent media arts and interactive installations; see Hans-Peter Schwarz, Medien-Kunst-Geschichte (Munich: Prestel, 1997). For other important handbooks on performance and media art, see RoseLee Goldberg, The Art of Performance (New York: Dutton, 1984) and Frank Popper, Art of the Electronic Age (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1993). 

8. Integrated Services Digital Network. 

9. Company in Space, directed by Hellen Sky and John McCormick, are recognized as one of Australia's most innovative performance companies, pushing computer and communications technologies to access new pathways between performer and audience. 

Escape Velocity was performed at Arizona State University on Saturday, February 27, 1999, with choreography by Hellen Sky (Arizona) and Louise Taube (Australia), computer design and operation by John McCormick (Australia), original score and interactive sound design by Garth Paine (Arizona), and camera performance by Luke Pither (Arizona) and Kelli Dipple (Australia). Using teleconferencing systems to bring dancers in the two locations together in the same virtual space, the composer in addition used VNS and MAX (MIDI sound software) to sense the video image of the choreography and create a layer of interactive sound fed into the mix with pre-structured material. Paine also used Supercollider to generate material that was controlled by an audience member at IDAT moving a mouse around on the screen of a browser at that end. He then converted those mouse positions into MIDI and a Supercollider patch at the other end which was also fed back into the mix. As my description indicates, with these performance experiments it is vital to recognize the team work that underlies the aesthetic production. Earlier that day at IDAT, another remarkable performance was presented by the collaborative team Half/Angel (dancer/writer Jools Gilson-Ellis, Ireland, and composer Richard Povall, Ohio). The Secret Project centered its thematic material in the use of interactive technologies in the context of live performance. Using motion sensing (BigEye) and other interactive softwares, the team explored the interaction of choreographies, original text/vocals and soundscapes. Rather than attempting to control a virtual stage space, Half/Angel sought to extend the actual and metaphorical motion of the performers into sonic and visual landscapes. With new softwares enabling a radical re-thinking of the body in physical and digital space, Gilson-Ellis challenged us to experience choreography as live musical composition and vocalization of the poetry she had written. In her movement, she literally danced with her arms and voice as extended musical instruments that can layer and caress the textscapes/soundscapes (programmed by Povall) she triggered in space through her interaction with the camera-sensor. The Secret Project was one of the most subtle and moving performances shown at IDAT, gaining attention for its astonishing integration of interactive live dance/sound and voice. 

10. The "Bodies of Influence/Connecting Bodies" conference/workshop was held at SNDO on June 9-21, 1996, organized by Ric Allsopp and Scott deLahunta. My references are to the weekend conference on the connections between dance and technology. Direct quotations are from my video transcription and from additional transcripts kindly provided by Scott deLahunta. I wish to thank the authors for their permission to quote them, and I especially thank Diana Theodores for her incisive and challenging synopsis of the various media demonstrations and theoretical premises she focused under "technography," the term she coined to address the mutually informing processes of technology and choreography. The references to Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Body are drawn from Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, ed. Mary Ann Moser (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), and additional references to OSMOSE and the work of David Rokeby are based on my on-site visits at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York City) and Gallery 2 (Chicago Art Institute). Paul Sermon and Rokeby were featured in the exhibit The Presence of Touch, organized by the School of the Chicago Art Institute's Department of Fiber, Sept. 20-Nov. 1, 1996. Other important recent video and digital art exhibitions include Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century (Tate Gallery, London 1995); Sonambiente (Berlin 1996); Being & Time: The Emergence of Video Projection (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo 1996); Mediascape (Guggenheim Museum, New York 1996); and Body Mécanique: Artistic Explorations of Digital Reality (Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, 1998-99). 

11. The CD-ROM was created at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, with interface design by Volker Kuchelmeister and Christian Ziegler. A revised version of Improvisation Technologies was published on CD-ROM as a special issue of the ZKM digital arts edition. Divided into 60 video chapters, the CD-ROM is made up of lecture demonstrations in which William Forsythe shows the essential principles of his improvisation techniques. Dance sequences, performed specially by Frankfurt Ballet members Christine Buerkle, Noah D. Gelber, Thomas McManus and Crystal Pite, can be called up as further illustrations. Also included is a document of improvisation practice: Forsythe's performance of Solo, filmed in 1995 by Thomas Lovell Balogh. The CD-ROM is in English only, and is accompanied by an illustrated English/German booklet featuring an interview with William Forsythe and an essay by dance critic Roslyn Sulcas. The CD-ROM also premiered at Dance Screen 99 (International Festival for Dance in the Media) in Cologne, 9-13 June 1999. 

12. Virtual Reality. 

13. Magnetic Resonance Imaging. 

14. The LBLM workshop in performance technologies was first created for the Split Screen Festival at University College Chichester (England) in 1996, and was held there again in 1998. It has been taught in other countries, most recently at the Nordic Solo dance festival-forum in Copenhagen (summer 1999), and it is generally offered at festivals, summer schools, and residency programs to students and practitioners from diverse artistic backgrounds. 

15. For a new critical study of the excluded, marginalized and repressed representations of bodies in modern dance, see Ramsey Burt, Alien Bodies (London: Routledge, 1998). For studies of contemporary performance art, see Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997); Linda S. Kauffman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Kathy O'Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Rodney Sappington and Tyler Stallings, eds., Uncontrollable Bodies (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994); Catherine Ugwu, ed., Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance (London: ICA, 1995); and Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). See also the essays in the special issue on "Sexuality and Cyberspace: Performing the Digital Body," published in Women and Performance 9.1 (1996). 

16. For a more extensive discussion of my ideas on "scanning dance" and "impossible anatomies," see my book Media and Performance: along the border (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 27-144. 

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theatre_journal/v051/51.4birringer.html