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Poetics of performative space

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Abstract

The TGarden is a genre of responsive environment in which actor–spectators shape dense media sensitive to their movements. These dense fields of light, sound, and material also evolve according to their own composed dynamics, so the agency is distributed throughout the multiple media. These TGardens explore open-ended questions like the following: what makes some time-based, responsive environments compelling, and others flat? How can people improvise gestures without words, that are individually or collectively meaningful? When and how is a movement intentional, or collectively intentional? This paper introduces what has been at stake behind the experimental work: subjectivation, moving from technologies of representation to technologies of performance, and the potential for ethico-aesthetic novelty.

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Notes

  1. I find it helpful to think in terms of inequality rather than equality or definition: concept ≠ representation ≠ abstraction ≠ concept. Also, theory ≠ philosophy ≠ model ≠ procedure (problem solving) ≠ poetry rhetoric theory. I would shy away from abstraction, model, sophist rhetoric, and art “theory’s” word salad, but affirm that we need philosophy, poetry, and concepts if we want a life worth living. See Deleuze and Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy?

  2. I thank Patrice Maniglier for teaching me this concept of the symbol.

  3. Anne Weinstone, essay, personal communication (Stanford 1995).

  4. Topological Media Lab, http://topologicalmedialab.net.

  5. Sponge, http://sponge.org.

  6. FoAM, http://f0.am.

  7. Regarding the specious present, see James’ (1890, p. 573) principles of psychology; see discussion in Meyer’s (2001) irresistible dictation.

  8. Tim Boykett, talk, Space and Perception, International Symposium on Mixed Reality, RIXC Media Space, May 20–21, 2005, Riga, Latvia, http://rixc.lv/sp/en.html.

  9. See Grotowski’s (1968) towards a poor theater.

  10. Stengers (2003a, b) has retold the stories of seven scientific disciplines in a way that presents the partial and provisional messiness of science as it is actually practiced. Telling science in this way has both cosmological and political implications, hence the title of her books: Cosmopolitiques.

  11. See Gendlin (1997) on felt meaning.

  12. There is a profound difference between discrete approximations to continuous things and things that are discrete from the get go. One example is the definition of flow by mean curvature, a project that Brakke (1978) tried to carry out but could not complete due to deep technical lacunae that could not be patched until Ilmanen’s (1994) work 20 years later. Elevating the discrete and the computable to universality, via for example Wolfram’s principle of computational equivalence or Newell and Simon’s (1976) symbol processing hypothesis excludes more life than it includes.

  13. This will be the subject of a book on the genealogy of topological media. For a spirited and beautifully motivated introduction to the mathematical study of proto-metric substance, see Jänich’s (1984) Topology.

  14. See Hardt and Negri (2000), empire and Multitude (2004).

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  1. Canada Research Chair, Media Arts and Sciences, Computer Science and Fine Arts, Concordia University, 1515 Ste-Catherine West, Montréal, QC, H3G 2W1, Canada

    Sha Xin Wei

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Sha, X.W. Poetics of performative space. AI & Soc 21, 607–624 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-007-0097-2

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