Event overview
The Centre for Cultural Studies presents a talk by philosopher, visual artist, and dancer, Dr Erin Manning.
Movement is not explained by sensation, but by the elasticity of sensation, its vis elastica.
Gilles Deleuze Logique de la sensation, 1981 : 45.
This paper explores how movement takes form. The suggestion is that movement does not have a form in itself but emerges ontogenetically as a taking form through an elastic point ? inflection. This taking-form defies the gravitational pull of simple displacement, bringing to the movement a capacity to be more-than. This more-than of movement actively creates a becoming-body. This becoming-body is form in its passing.
To think movement not as form-as-such suggests that movement and displacement are qualitatively different parts of a process. Displacement is only one aspect of movement: displacement takes hold through a pre-accelerated becoming of movement. Without the virtuality of pre-acceleration actively making the movement felt, there would only be falling or pushing. In a dance vocabulary, pre-acceleration is what makes the relation between becoming-bodies felt.
An exploration of the elasticity of the almost allows opens the way to thinking the concept of form not as a pre-composition of matter, but as a processual node of becoming. It affects a vocabulary of movement-choreography which might suggest that form can be imposed onto a moving body by emphasizing the fact that all bodies are always already moving. Taking form can be thought as a vectorization of a moving body such that what appears 'the form' qualitatively changes what a body can do.
Biography:
Dr. Erin Manning is Assistant Professor in Studio Art and Film Studies, Concordia University.
She directs The Sense Lab, an interdisciplinary research-creation laboratory that promotes the theoretical and artistic exploration of the sensing body in movement.
The sensing body in movement is understood as a relational body. The senses are not seen as pre-given biological apparatuses, but as veritable technologies of life that continuously reinvent what the body is and can do, through its interactions with its designed environment and the technical objects populating it. Her research is intimately connected to her work at The Sense Lab. Its results have appeared in two books, Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minnesota UP, 2003) and Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minnesota UP, 2006). Her first book explored how artists who are second-generation immigrants to Canada challenge the concept of home through thei r work. In Politics of Touch, Manning extends this problematic to explore the ways in which the sensing body in movement
inventively extricates itself from political philosophies that rely on concepts such as state sovereignty. Research-creation is at the heart of both of these inquiries: the question posed is how art practice provokes new ways of thinking, and ultimately, of living in the world. Her current work takes this problematic one step further by engaging specifically with the movement of the body, asking how new technologies reconfigure the sensing body in movement. In her artwork, Manning explores the potential of the body, asking the Spinozan question: “what can a body do?” She is interested in the ways in which bodies creatively and self-creatively express themselves, qualitatively changing the space-times they inhabit. Her preoccupations as a dancer are along similar lines. Currently she is exploring the concept of the movement-interval, an insubstantial “third” that holds the bodies of two dancers together in shared momentum, joining them dynamically across their separation. This enveloping interval composes what she is calling a virtual body (or a movement of thought). The virtual body is best conceived in terms of a directly relational movement of which the individual movements of the separate bodies involved
are synchronous expressions.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Nov 2006 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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