Of Skins and Screens:

Hyperdance, Haptic Cinema, and Contact Improvisation

 

Harmony Bench

 

Prelude: The First Time

At home. On a Gateway PC laptop, 15 inch display.

Resolution set at 800 by 600, thousands of colors.

Dial-up Internet connection.

 

I am trying to remember the first time I came across Somnambules. How did I get there? What path did I take through the World Wide Web to discover the work of Nicholas Clauss? Maybe I followed a link from somewhere else, maybe Clauss came up on a search. Most likely I was surfing the Net, procrastinating on some project that needed attention I was unwilling to give. Once at the site, did I wonder why nothing worked? Did I have to download plug-ins I had never heard of and which I did not trust? I have a short techno-memory; I forget that I only recently acquired the hardware, software, and know-how that I now take for granted. I know I was on a dial-up connection because I could not afford anything faster. I remember that Somnambules was Clauss’s most recent work, listed above links to his other pieces, and that it was months before I looked at any of his other Internet-based art works, dance or otherwise. Somnambules intrigued me in spite of its discouraging load-time. The preludes interspersed throughout the suite of dances were more significant to me then—small files that loaded quickly and gave me just enough incentive to wait for the scene to follow. And so I waited, mousing back and forth across small shadows, dolls, and dancers—hints, promises really, that my patience would eventually be rewarded.

The browser window opens onto a nightmarish vision of death, disembodiment, and decay engulfed in the darkness of a black screen. Dancing specters and haunted souls—casualties of digital media—appear throughout Somnambules, a hyperdance piece. A small but growing genre of dance and new media, hyperdance [1] shifts the material conditions of dance creation and spectatorship by considering the computer screen a site for dance performance. Combining visual art, music, and dance by collaborating artists Nicolas Clauss, Jean-Jacques Birgé, and Didier Silhol, respectively, Somnambules emphasizes the computer user’s body in navigation and exploration. The user’s motion, confined as it is to the small geographies of mouse or trackpad, and the user’s physical contact with the image, similarly confined, stand out in this piece as compared with other hyperdances. [2] Users affect onscreen motion through their own movements, which operate simultaneously with qualities of touch (click, drag, mouse, etc.): motion and touch work in tandem at the mutually-defining sites of the user’s body and the image. Drawing attention to the piece’s cinematic and choreographic components, I explore movement and touch as both objects of interaction and means of interaction in Somnambules. I further tease out specific modes of bodily interaction, working toward a more nuanced understanding of bodily engagement in the broader fields of interactive and responsive media.

This project, which interrogates the relationship of bodies to onscreen images and theorizes bodies in motion, is couched in the work of both cinema and dance theorists. Phenomenological and Deleuzian approaches to film and video prove especially helpful in theorizing bodily encounters with new media.[3] What Laura Marks and others call haptic cinema particularly brings attention to the sensorial aspects of seeing and offers a theoretical model for analyzing Somnambules. Likewise, the dance practice of contact improvisation situates bodies as loci of sensation in relation to all the other things that bodies are/do. Both contact improvisation and haptic cinema emphasize bodily engagement, namely through tactile sensation and “seeing” with the body. Both forms speak to responsive media, though neither model fully encompasses it—haptic cinema remains uninterrupted by spectators’ actions, and contact improvisation has not yet fully embraced the image as a potential partner.[4] In Somnambules, key strategies from both forms combine, namely the haptic vision of a cinema spectator and the responsive body of a contact dancer. In this paper, I explore the shared “sensibilities” of haptic cinema and contact improvisation and locate Somnambules at their intersection. Additionally, I posit contact improvisation as a productive model for thinking about bodies in interactive and responsive media. Contact improvisation gives us tools to consider images’ and viewers’ mutual constitution as they brush up against each other in ways that cinema intimates, but interactive and responsive media realize.[5]

 

Somnambules: Pluie

At a café. On a Mac G4 PowerBook, 12 inch

display.

Resolution set at 1024 by 768, millions of colors.

Wireless Internet connection.

 

I am hunched next to the only electrical outlet in the café—hunched partially because I am sitting at my computer, which only encourages my already-bad posture, but mostly because I am under a vent that blows crisp air on my face and hands. I am freezing, but also out of power. It is nearing lunchtime. The Cure is playing in the background: “I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you…” Opening my Internet browser (Safari), I navigate to www.somnambules.net and quickly click past the instructions. I arrive at a page which reads: “Somnambules: An interactive, choreographic, visual, and musical work in 12 scenes and their preludes.” Twelve thumbnail snapshots lay on a grid against a black background, each a link to a corresponding scene. I mouse over them, stirring up sounds of restless audience members waiting for a performance to begin. I keep the volume low so I do not bother the people around me—I never remember to bring headphones. I click on “Pluie” and wait for it to load, humming along to The Cure. “You were stone white, so delicate, lost in the cold. You were always so lost in the dark.”

A 4 by 6 inch image sits in the browser window—an intense squared-off red against a black background, hollowed out in the middle where a blurry, pixilated figure appears. It remains still. I begin to move my mouse, leaving the frame. “Lightning” flashes—the entire image shakes and fades behind bursts of white. It sounds like a veritable downpour. I backtrack and mouse toward the centered figure; the rain calms. I lean in closer. A man? Only a head and an arm, and something draped over his shoulders. I mouse and click. He begins to move, turning slowly, fading in and out of view. He faces outward on an angle, not returning my gaze. His eyes and mouth are black vacuums, rendering a skull more than a face. A layer of imagery appears on top of the turning man, covering him with transparent fabric, canvas maybe, with a seam running top to bottom. I try to trace its contours, to deduce the object from its transparent image. As I move my finger along my computer’s trackpad, the gauzy, striated fabric disappears, leaving the image a little flat and empty. The man-figure slowly wraps what might be a yellow raincoat around his neck like a scarf, taking it off again as he turns. His red-toned t-shirt has become a white dress shirt. Is it the same man? He tosses the coat in the air. I mouse. The red, bloody border evaporates leaving the man surrounded by black. Footsteps. Colors shift, dissolve, play across his partial figure, obscure his image even further. He remains still as his image melts under a slow-moving shadow—a darker duplicate of himself continuing the dance? He is a fluid moving across the surface of himself, translucent.

 

Haptic Cinema and Embodied Spectatorship

In Somnambules, the artists have foregone photorealistic accuracy in favor of rendering digital images as visual approximations. Clauss explores the textures of pixels rather than their precision, and thereby employs haptic imagery that disrupts the user/viewer’s gaze.[6] As a representational strategy, haptic imagery deflects the spectator’s visual mastery and changes the terms of visual encounters by demanding a tactile rather than optical way of seeing. Haptic cinema, then, is a name given by film theorists to experimentations in film and video that interfere with the viewer’s ability to grasp an image at an optical level.[7] Laura Marks explains, “Rather than making the object fully available to view, haptic cinema puts the object into question, calling on the viewer to engage in its imaginative construction. Haptic images pull the viewer close, too close to see properly…”[8] The haptic stands in contrast to the optical, yet works in co-operation with it. Each mode proposes a way of looking, a relationship between viewer and image, an ethics of vision. An optical image invites viewers to stand back and take in grandiose scenes, while haptic images require closer inspection. Haptic images are textured, at the surface, and dispersed over the screen or canvas. Optical images simulate three-dimensional space in their perspectival depictions—they have depth, they have a ground—whereas haptic images follow a two-dimensional, planar logic—layer upon layer. Optical vision is objective, distant—a form of seeing that extricates itself from the seen, a surveying sight. Optical images invite viewers’ mastery over the image. Haptic images undermine that mastery.

Whereas optical images invest in sensory dis-integration—to each sense its own function—haptic images address a re-integrated sight and touch—an intersense fusion.[9] Built on the physiological model of synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses—sounds appear as colors, tastes or smells assume shapes, etc.), haptic vision is a sensuous or sense-filled sight.[10] Deleuzian cultural theorist Brian Massumi explains: “[Vision] has arrogated to itself the function of touch. This purely visual touch is a synesthesia proper to vision: a touch as only the eyes can touch.”[11] Of course, synesthetic touch is not actual physical contact. The viewer does not press her body against the screen or image, but, through haptic vision, achieves proximity at a distance. Haptic cinema enables the viewer to share bodily contact with the screen through synesthesia’s combinatory logic, which here imbues the eye/the visual with sensory information usually associated with touch.

Pulled close to the image, a viewer cannot maintain a (critical) distance that would allow her/him to take in the scene. The viewer creates an image for her/himself, actively constructing and interpreting the image onscreen. As scenes, bodies, or objects lapse into unintelligibility, viewers must rally all sense-making faculties. Marks notes that “haptic images have the effect of overwhelming vision and spilling into other sense perceptions.”[12] The image dissolves, morphs, blurs—it simultaneously invites and undermines moments of recognition. Haptic images draw on embodied perception to create intimacy with the image, causing vision to “behave more like a contact sense.”[13] Haptic images do not stop at the eyes for interpretation, they alter the character and quality of sight by inviting a sensuous manner of “seeing” through the skin. As integrated wholes, bodies apprehend sensually what eyes cannot interpret optically. Notably, optical and haptic strategies are not antagonistic, though Marks suggests that the warm proximity of the haptic is an ethical response to the cool distance of opticality. The haptic must retain its relationship to the optical. As visual strategies, they necessarily slide into one another, contaminating each other.

The pixilated, layered, and indiscernable imagery in Somnambules contributes to the piece’s overall aesthetic,[14] as seen particularly well in “Pluie,” described above. The figure in “Pluie” turns around and around, throws his shirt or coat in the air, catches it, stands waiting. The details of these actions as well as his person are obscured—sometimes little more than a shadow indicates his presence onscreen. In stillness, there is little difference between the figure’s body and an undifferentiated conglomeration of hues. Ultimately, I deduce the body—its presence, location, facing, and organization—from the figure’s movement. My body tunes in to the familiarity of his simple actions, which are more recognizable as human than his image alone. Pixilation does not deteriorate the intention of the figure’s movement though it hinders my sight.

With my body actively seeing, I turn my attention away from the figure’s movement to the visual textures in “Pluie.” Set against a black background that bleeds into the black browser window, the scene has a curious, superficial depth. The dark swallows perspective-creating shadows and other markers that would establish spatial relationships among objects. Everything appears “at the surface,” even though there are distinct layers to the image. I can discern their hierarchical ordering—nothing appears below/behind the dancing bodies: all textures and embellishments are superimposed upon that initial image. But no horizon organizes these layers, no ground, no vanishing point—there are no clear references to a three-dimensional world, so each layer sits atop the others like a collage.[15] Semi-transparent, these layered textures and effects are familiar, yet unnamable: they are not-quite-recognizable objects. The bright red, bloody splotch is the clearest of these layers, but what about the light, gauzy textures, or the heavier fabric with the seam running through it, or even the dark puddle playing across the surface of the figure like spilt oil floating on a polluted lake—what are they? Their presence disturbs and interrupts my sight—I must see through the textures, which press into and change the figure that is the object of my gaze. They stand in between me and the figure as intermediaries, prisms deflecting my sight over the surface of the screen. They do not direct my gaze, but disperse it. I lean in closer.

Marks establishes a premise for bodily engagement with visual media that proves extremely helpful in fleshing out the site of the screen. Because she recognizes “the intelligence of the perceiving body,”[16] she pays close attention to what her body knows and feels in seeing. She maintains an intimate and embodied connection with cinematic images, finding a dialogical, even intercorporeal,[17] relationship between body and image. Film theorist Elena del Río elegantly depicts the intimacy of this relationship: “As the image becomes translated into a bodily response, body and image no longer function as discrete units, but as surfaces in contact, engaged in a constant activity of reciprocal re-alignment and inflection.”[18] How can interactive or responsive media possibly establish a more intimate connection between viewer and image than what del Río so eloquently describes for cinema? If new media art works simply rearticulate what cinema already does so well, then why cannot a cinematic understanding suffice? Although theories of embodied spectatorship and haptic visuality may demonstrate that image and viewer constantly re-align themselves, the viewer is responsible for the labor in this exchange. Even in haptic cinema, which blurs the boundaries between viewer and image, it is not the image that changes, but the viewer’s perception and interpretation of it. With interactive media, the image undergoes an ontological shift such that it does not remain impervious to the viewer’s presence but is distinctly and explicitly shaped by it. The image’s translation into a bodily response in cinema is met with the body’s translation into an imagistic response in interactive media, where Del Río’s passage rings even more true: body and image are surfaces in contact, and they do reciprocally inflect each other—not just in terms of a viewer’s experience of the image, but in terms of the actual appearance of the image.

 

Somnambules: Melting

In an office. 12 inch Mac laptop.

Resolution 1024 by 768, millions of colors.

Ethernet connection.

 

It is quiet in here. The only noise is my mouse clicking, a fan blowing in my computer as the processor works to render the changing images in Somnambules, and sounds from the piece itself, which now consist of rich and mournful strings. Even coming from my small speakers they assume a certain weightiness or importance. Gravitas, maybe.

I click into the piece. It is a duet: a man and a woman. They seem to have been dancing for some time already, never venturing far from the floor’s safety. The man lays on his back with the woman at his side. She leans into him as he suspends her feet in the crook of his elbow. Nowhere to go, momentarily fused. He lowers her feet, propelling her around. She slides between his hips and ribs, perpendicular to him. She finds her feet and plants them, ready to stand. Instead, she gives in once more to the downward pull, her elbow leading the rest of her body into the ground. I click and they quicken their pace. The man’s white shirt and the woman’s light skin occasionally glow with color saturation. Their dark hair and dark clothes attract an image-layer of weathered pages from a book. I can only make out a few words, but the brown and black of aging texts haunts the dancers. Or maybe it is the other way around—maybe the dancers haunt the illegible text as they glide underneath it. The pages can be seen only because of the dancers’ dark clothing, but their constant movement, as well as my own movement, undoes the text even as it makes the tattered and stained pages visible. In making the texts and images visible, however limited, the dancers de-materialize, decomposing under the pages projected onto them. The contours and coherence of their bodies blur into this other imagery. As I move the text gives way to splotchy, splattered red, and then to a black that threatens to engulf the entire image, like an emulsion slowly pulling away from the filmstrip that is its material reality. The image jumps slightly. Their movement is never quite smooth—it is somewhat jarring to watch, like 35mm home movies. Slow again. They sit up. Back to back. Her arms are overhead. He reaches back, takes her hand, and guides her into a brief sideways embrace. Their backs are to the camera. They unfold and reverse the sequence, only to repeat and reverse again, and again, infinitely.

 

Contact Improvisation and the Responsive Body

As many times as I have seen “Melting,” I still find it compelling—beautiful even, if one can still make claims for beauty. It moves me to contemplate and participate in the dancers’ intimate exchange. I am never quite sure what draws me into their dance: perhaps the satisfaction I derive from repetition and my concomitant desire (and ability) to interrupt its continuity, the way the coloring and the visual layers create a sense of nostalgia around the image, or again the insistence of violins and cellos supporting the duet. Perhaps this scene appeals to me because my presence and participation doubles the contact improvisation duet onscreen—the way I am invited to move across the screen as though it were also a body in motion. Brought into contact with the image, I improvise alongside it. My miniscule movements influence the speed of the dance and the visual attributes that frame and obscure the dancers. The image responds to my input as we partner each other in a contact improvisation. Anticipated by movement explorations throughout the 1960s,[19] contact improvisation emerged in the early 1970s with the work of Steve Paxton and his students. A form of improvised partnering, contact dancers relate to each other through touch, the medium and object of exploration. Their bodies joined by a point of contact, dancers track dynamic shifts and ride the momentum produced by their connection.

In her ethnographic history of the form, Cynthia Novack likens contact improvisation to a dialogue initiated and propelled by sensation.[20] Dancers follow and elaborate upon a point of contact by rolling, sliding, jumping, falling, rotating, catching, skipping from one point to another, introducing many points of contact all at once, exploring surfaces of bodies for different places to establish contact, and experimenting with qualities of touch. Two bodies in contact, both of them moving, even if only slightly. Two bodies attentive to physical sensation and all the information embedded in a simple touch—information about weight, velocity, anatomical structure and strength, energy, tension and balance, torque, etc.—even mood. The relationship between contact dancers is all together different from that established between cinematic image and viewing body, yet somehow Marks and Del Río find something in the cinematic relationship that uncannily resembles contact improvisation. Haptic cinema is a tactile cinema, grounded in viewers’ bodily and sensory apprehension of the image; contact improvisation is a tactile dance grounded in dancers’ bodily and sensory apprehension of each other. Both haptic viewers and contact improvisers relinquish their discreteness, merging around a point of contact.

In addition to discerning qualities of touch, contact improvisation asks dancing bodies to consider what a body can do at any given moment. How can two bodies maintain physical contact as they move through space? How can a body support another body physically and emotionally in the course of a dance? How does a body’s distribution of weight change the relationship between two bodies? How can one body insinuate itself into the space of another body from a place of respectful attentiveness rather than violent invasiveness? Bodies in contact both pose and answer such questions through their movement. Dancers do not interrupt their dance to evaluate shapes and discover solutions optically:[21] I can place my hand here, I can set up a lift in this way, I can hold my partner like this.[22] Rather, dancers assess the situation as they dance—their constant assessing and responding is the dance. As dance theorist Susan Foster notes, “By maintaining awareness of … contact, rather than of the body’s appearance or the dance’s organization and coherence, [dancers] are able to develop the mutual trust, support, and quick-wittedness necessary to dive into each instant’s action and move wherever it takes them.”[23] Contact dancers remain sensitive to touch while simultaneously filtering and interpreting sense data and rendering it as movement. In cultivating what Novack calls a “responsive body,”[24] contact improvisers make bodily intelligence visible through movement.

Tracking moment-to-moment changes, the responsive body receives, interprets, and responds to sensory information accordingly. Responsive bodies are thinking bodies.[25] In contact improvisation, dancers’ elbows and knees, shoulders and haunches strategically discern next moves. With an expanded awareness that encompasses both minuscule spaces of intersecting bodies as well as the larger space in which a dance occurs, vision explodes over the body. Vision travels over the surface of the body as a shoulder finds a waist and a subsequent lift, as hands find the floor and lower a body to the ground, or as an elbow finds a place to hook and catch a ride. In order to navigate such complex negotiations, Novack notes, dancers must “[see] through the body” and “[listen] through the skin.”[26] Responsive bodies apprehend each other in a haptic manner as they attend to changes in the environment, in their own bodies, and in their partners’ bodies. These skills based in kinesthetic and proprioceptive awareness become even more important as dancers become inverted, turned around, disoriented, or dizzy. Following a point of contact, bodies experience moments of disorganization as they merge with other bodies, with sensation, with momentum. They may become any number of impossible bodies before finding internal coherence and organization once again.

With contact improvisation’s emphasis on dancers’ shifting weight, it may appear ill-equipped to describe user-engagement with interactive images, which lack the mass of physical bodies. Contact improvisation generally assumes that two human bodies are in contact. Solos, where they occur, seem to function primarily as preparation for duets as a means of sensitizing a body to touch before approaching another body—a sensorial warm-up. Dancers may explore floors, chairs, walls, or other surfaces and objects as partners, but because such objects are more stable partners (read: inert) than human bodies in motion, these dances do not share the spectacular possibilities contained in merging two bodies’ weight and velocity. Additionally, like in haptic cinema, such a dance is significantly one-sided; for the most part, visible labor, movement, and change are properties of the dancer, not the object. Interactive and responsive media, however, are neither static nor stable. They respond to presence and input as computer users come into contact with the image. Such media also engage touch, sensation, and responsiveness—the conceptual and sensorial core of contact improvisation.

The dancers in “Melting” are already engaged in a contact improvisation when I click into the scene. The curtain rises, as it were, on dancers already in motion, establishing an indeterminate beginning to their dance—it seems to have been going on forever, and because the sequence is looped, it seems that it may very well continue forever. The dancers rotate under, slide across, and support one another. They do not see me. They do not return the camera’s gaze. As viewers, we are offered only a slice of their dance, a moment from a longer conversation. Recorded and looped, their dance loses its spontaneity and unpredictability in terms of its choreographic structure. Yet it remains a contact improvisation—not by virtue of the recorded duet taking place inside the frame, but by virtue of the user’s engagement. The contact improvisation occurs between user and image as they mutually inform/transform one another.

I slide my finger across the surface of the trackpad, the surface of the screen, and the dancing bodies thereon. The terrain is smooth, but that smoothness belies the multiplicity of textures in the image. Tracing small curves on the trackpad, I hover over the dancers’ duet. My point of contact is represented onscreen as a small hollow dot. I look past “myself” and disappear, neither in the image nor outside it. I feel only the point of contact, my fingertip on the trackpad—the resistance as I gently push upward, the ease as I slide back down, the light tug and give in my skin as I shift directions. I navigate my way over, across, around the colors and textures that appear. Finding the dot that represents me onscreen, I follow the duet, carried along by the dancers’ momentum. Figure-eights around their heads and shoulders. All points on the surface of the screen are connected, “potential next directions along which [our] point of contact might travel.”[27] Small gestures, tiny brush strokes interrupted now and then with mouse clicks, a Morse code of brushes and taps across the screen and the dancers’ bodies.

It is curious that their large and sweeping movement should provoke only small movements from me. The spatial difference is pronounced—their bodies have been reduced in size to fit a computer screen, but my body is even smaller, concentrated in the tip of my finger. Gliding along in this miniaturized fashion, my attention toggles back and forth between the duet’s changing look and my presence. I travel the screen not knowing where “I” am, but noting changes as the dancers’ magnetized bodies alternately attract and repel layers of text and spatter. Then I find “myself” and inch along their outlines, rising and falling with them. Even so, my (eye) focus and my touch are rarely trained on the same location: one follows the other across the screen, then leads. My presence is doubled in the stereoscopic vision of eye and hand. Not hand-eye coordination—double vision.

Although contact improvisation has its basis in the contact of presumably human partners, like haptic cinema, it allows for a reconsideration of a viewing subject in relation to an image. Haptic cinema and contact improvisation both define bodies and images by the contact between them,[28] by their “mutual inflection” as del Río notes above. Somnambules combines the visual and corporeal strategies of both haptic cinema and contact improvisation, requiring users to see with haptic vision and engage their responsive bodies. Haptic vision and responsiveness do not belong to the user alone, however. The image too draws on these techniques as body and image jointly articulate.

 

Somnambules: Docks

At home. On an iMac G5 desktop, 22 inch display.

Resolution 1680 by 1050, millions of colors

DSL Internet connection

 

My neighbor has the game on. Which game, I do not know, but his shouts at the television tell me he is trying to coax some unhearing player toward a goal. Looking out the window next to my desk, I can see him in his living room, standing in front of his TV, arms crossed, shifting anxiously from foot to foot as a crowd cheers in the background. I am bored today, looking for any distraction. I navigate to Somnambules. Restless, I stand up. After an embarrassing (but quasi-successful) attempt at using my body as a mouse pad, I sit back down, my initial enthusiasm for the idea sufficiently deflated.

I open “Docks” and size the window so it takes up most of the screen, taking advantage of the larger display. Aesthetically, “Docks” is somewhere between pointillistic, and impressionistic. Vivid, light-filled blues and greens surround an evacuated space I take to be a shadow. Vertical lines, glitches, move left and right through the frame, taking my eyes with them. Click. No movement but the image changes. Click. The shadow remains still as I cycle through bloody image after bloody image. Back at the blue, I begin mousing. Immediately I hear breath. Gasps and exhales—sampled and remixed takes on the stereotypical modern dance “breath-as-emphasis”—join dripping and drizzling sounds, cavernous echoes, footsteps, carnivalesque music, and additional indescribable sounds in forming the scene’s soundscape. Blue and green textures wrapped up and cut through with red splatter are replaced with the sepia tones of old films. In the center of the frame, pressed against his shadow, a seated man crosses and uncrosses his legs, first one side, then the other. He and his shadow are blurry, as though seen through treated glass. They multiply and enlarge. A few clicks later the man is standing. He swings his arm down—the pendular weight of his hand turns his body as he steps out. His arm catches at waist height and he retraces his path. A violinist sustains a single note. Mousing, he appears again seated and crossing his legs, joined this time by another man in a white suit. The latter circles in on himself, hopping with arms extended and left leg stretched behind him as the former rocks from side to side. I mouse. Shadows upon shadows are dancing, multiplying the figures over the screen.

 

Haptic Vision and Responsiveness

Somnambules establishes a bi-directional flow of information between user and image, a relationship that more closely resembles contact improvisation than haptic cinema. Whereas a cinema viewer may create an image for her/himself in an effort to make sense of an image or to endow it with meaning, changing it through reception and interpretation, the viewer/user of interactive media has a direct impact on the image’s appearance. Navigating Somnambules, I glide across the surface of the image as dancers move under me. Or is it next to me? I am simultaneously above and beside, in-between dimensions. Once the image opens itself up as a space in which viewers/users move, new viewing practices are required as image and body confront one another in an attempt to merge incompossible spaces.[29] Circumscribed by the software and hardware of personal computers—display size and resolution, processing speed, etc.—an image’s space includes its material conditions as well as the space and means of user interaction. An image is not confined to what appears onscreen, but encompasses (computational) processes as well as (visual, aural) products. Through controllers, keyboards, trackpads, sensors, cameras, etc., images extend outward from the screen into the viewer’s space, combining two-dimensional viewing surfaces with the three-dimensional space of the body. The spaces of image and body brush against, reach into, and enfold one another, making visible their co-articulation as they come into contact, mix, merge, and part ways.

Above or beside, I am moving in relation to the image—the combined entity of dancers with visual and sonic layers. I note changes onscreen and respond to them accordingly, sometimes by withholding response. My computer takes note of changes in my onscreen location and likewise responds, generally by altering visual or sonic attributes. If my haptic vision enables me to make sense of a distorted image by engaging my body synesthetically, my computer mirrors this haptic and synesthetic relationship with its electronic body. In Somnambules, not only do users see the image and negotiate it with their bodies, feeling their ways through changing imagery, the interactive image likewise apprehends users and negotiates their presence by synesthetically sounding or visualizing electronic sensation. We make sense of each other through synesthetic translations—from eye to bodily sensation, from touch to visualized change. Joined by a point of contact, user and machine, body and image shape each other in a feedback loop of sensorial exchange—responsive bodies in a physical or inter-corporeal dialogue.

New media theorists have cautioned against using the concept of interactivity (and by extension, responsiveness) too literally, fearing that anthropomorphizing machines belies the reality of machinic existence. The problem, the argument goes, is that computers do not interact, nor do they respond. As machines, they can only react to user input. Interaction and responsiveness proper are reserved as uniquely human modes of information exchange. Overlooking the extents to which human behaviors are conditioned, many theorists claim that because computers are programmed, it is impossible for them to react with the spontaneity or ingenuity one might expect of a human being. What this comparison reveals is simply that machinic responses are choreographed. In other words, they follow a score—a set of instructions or plan of action. A score, such as that which contact improvisers follow in tracking a changing point of contact, provides guidelines for the exchange, which may still give rise to an infinite number of possible variations. In contact, responsiveness is part of this score; it is through responsiveness that neither individual dominates or manipulates the dance. Likewise, in Somnambules I do not control the image though there is a relationship between my movement and changes onscreen.[30] Because Somnambules is open to my own improvisations, it is never entirely predictable, nor are my (emotional, kinetic, physiological, sensorial) responses to it. Neither I nor Somnambules is a closed system—each encounter presents a new context, a new performance.

“Docks” exemplifies the uniqueness of performance in hyperdance. The number of individual elements—movement, visual textures, and sounds—makes it difficult to know what will happen the next time I mouse or click. I hardly recall which combinations of visual, choreographic, and aural information I have already encountered. I cannot tell if the image in front of me is exactly the same as what I have seen before, or if it is slightly different. “Docks” has a repertory of ten or so individual sound tracks distributed over four sections of the frame and browser window. Sounds increase in complexity as I mouse inward, but they do not remain constant from one image to the next. There are only three distinct movement phrases, but dancers’ placement within the space of the screen, number of dancers and their doubles/shadows, and the dancers’ visibility are constantly shifting and altering the context of each movement’s appearance. Clicking repeatedly produces new visual layers, maybe six in all, randomly ordered. Each image comes when it wants to, I cannot discern the logic that governs each new image’s appearance. Each visual layer carries with it different rules, deterring me from discovering the interactive formula governing the scene. Even though I can distinguish individual elements, their groupings are numerous enough that “Docks” remains unpredictable. I cause changes in the image with every move I make, but unable to predict the effects, I am left to wander across the screen in curious exploration and surprise.

…

Somnambules is a very specific case of interactive media, but the modes of interfacing body and image it explores resonate with larger-scale responsive media installations. Interactive and responsive media imbue the user-computer or viewer-image relationship with mutual construction in a way that resembles contact improvisation. Bringing awareness to touch and to a user’s movement, Somnambules in fact reworks or remediates contact improvisation for the screen where the exchange between user and image is based in productive translations and con/fusions of sensory information. Similarities emerge between body and image that may not have been anticipated, especially when body and image are polarized as oppositional theoretical or corporeal investments. Somnambules, along with larger responsive media projects, suggest that the image, spread as it is over computational processes and screens, is also a site of sensation. As I mouse over the trackpad, I press my flesh into the image. I rub up against the image’s body and feel its resistance—it pushes back, it changes, it establishes momentum and flow. My computer’s solidity intermingles with the image’s fluidity. I crawl across the trackpad as a skin, navigating the image as another body while the image screens its sensations.

 

 

Many thanks to Prof. Susan Foster, Jeannine Murray-Román, and Sara Wolf for their helpful comments and feedback.