Tag Archives: Malmö University

MAY 2012 Jeannette Ginslov – Artist in Residence at Medea Spring 2012

Jeannette Ginslov: Artist in Residence at MEDEA Spring 2012 http://medea.mah.se/2012/03/jeannette-ginslov-artist-in-residence-at-medea-spring-2012/

Jeannette Ginslov – Artist in Residence at Medea Spring 2012

As artist in residence at Medea this Spring, Jeannette Ginslov will be researching and developing her ideas on “capturing affect with a handful of techne” within the framework of the AffeXity project. See the AffeXity blog for regular updates:affexity.org

Ginslov’s residency at Medea is funded by the Danish Arts Foundation

Together with a team of researchers and students, Ginslov will be exploring and striving for a number things:

developing the technical requirements and skills for capturing affective choreographies embedded in cityscapes, using video, the web browser Argon and mobile networked hand held devices.

amplifying and exploring affect through dance embedded within city locations, examining “patterns of relations between people, technologies, and architectures…ebbs and flows of affect…created and sensed by bodies in motion” (Susan Kozel).

exploring a phenomenological and collaborative approach to the choreography, the capture and reception of this interdisciplinary art form.

researching altermodernism, “the internet of things” and what art critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s calls a “relational aesthetics” or intersubjective encounters, where spectators are invited, even challenged to engage with a “participatory art work in which meaning is elaborated collectively rather than in the privatized space of individual consumption.” (Claire Bishop: Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, 2004).

subverting the commercial use of augmented reality usually associated with QR codes and downloads, by focusing on the notion of affect and dance embedded in cityscapes: a more artistic endeavor.

democratizing the use of, networking and sharing the research and technology with other screendance practitioners or interdisciplinary artists at conferences and seminars.

Partnering with Georgia Tech, BTH and masters students
This will be phase two of the collaborative project AffeXity, with Susan Kozel (Medea), Jay Bolter (Professor of Media and Technology, Mixed Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, US), Maria Engberg (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and Georgia Tech, US), Timo Engelhardt (Masters student Malmö University Computer Science Department: Media Software Design), Nachiketas Ramanujam and Sanika Mokashi (Students at Georgia Tech USA), Wubkje Kuindersma and Niya Lulcheva (Dance artists, DK).

Phase two of the AffeXity project
AffeXity is a two year long research project. The first phase of research was conducted during my residency at the Laboratorium, Dansehallerne Copenhagen in November 2011. As yet we have no idea how many phases there will be. However in its final phase we wish to see the project becoming a “social choreography”. Anyone will be invited to shoot and upload short screendance videos, using their “body in city” as a location of affect, archive their material onto a social media dance and technology platform and finally use Argon to facilitate a “performance” in their own city. These should reflect our premier of AffeXity in Malmö, November 2012.

Research making use of many technologies and devices
My focus of research for this residency, funded by the Danish Arts Council, is to explore the dialectical relationships between technologies, human and non-human or affect and techne. The project and research makes extensive use of many technologies, technological terms and devices. It involves screendance, HD video cameras (HandyCams, Go Pro, Panoramas), green-screen shoots, QR codes, iPads, iPhones, the web browsers Argon, chroma keying, GPS, KML, HTML, Java Scripting, FCP… plus a whole team of researchers and developers with the aim of capturing and amplifying the notion of affect within a city location.

The process however starts with a performative action, a dancer, exploring a visceral negotiation or affordance within a city location, the dancer teasing out through movement, the presence of affect: a liminality, an emotion, a kinesthetics, a shimmer, the carnal, the sensorial, the visceral or subtle subjective memory, presence or vibration of a location.

How do you hold a handful of techne?
My questions and research lie in the translation of this onto the timeline and mobile devices and finally into the moment of reception by the spectator. My questions will be: Is there a gap between the affect and the techne? How does one negotiate that space? What is that space between the body and the techne? Is there one? How does one hold a handful of techne (the actual plastic, glass, metal, object as well as all the technical know-how behind these technologies and coding) and then capture affect? How does one elicit affect from the dancer relating to the location, or the viewer participating in the event? What happens between the lenses, the lens of the camera and the lens of the viewer? Since I regard the camera lens as an extension of my eye and my movement centre, am I able to connect to my visceral technology with that of the dancer’s and the camera and finally into the viewer? How do I know when it is “there”? Is there a sense of intersubjectivity, during the capture of affect and then later during the performance of AffeXity? Is this carried through by an awareness of form and content, affect and techne working “hand in hand”?

Read more about Jeannette Ginslov’s previous work here.

Image: Affect Brainstorm by Susan Kozel and Jeannette Ginslov 19.02.2012. Photo & Fx by Jeannette Ginslov

Related articles:
- Mobile social choreographies: Choreographic insight as a basis for artistic research into mobile technologies – article published in Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media
- Medea’s residency program
- The AffeXity project

Ginslov’s residency at Medea is funded by the Danish Arts Foundation

 

Introducing Jeannette Ginslov: Independent Artist and Researcher @ MEDEA

Introducing Jeannette Ginslov: Independent Artist and Researcher

Jeannette Ginslov’s work centers around affect, haptic and digital materiality on several platforms: stage, screens, online and new media applications. Ginslov is currently working with Prof Susan Kozel at MEDEA on the project Affexity that draws together screendance, visual imagery and mobile networked devices. This is an introduction to Ginslov’s work.

By: Jeannette Ginslov

The simple clash between subject and style is a painterly one; the uncompromising line is made to yield to a curve. Only this defeat makes movement possible. (Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies, 1996)

This quote aptly describes my journey that curves its way through a practice and research area that spans many years, modes and platforms of production.

My roots are in Performance Art, protest theatre and contemporary dance theatre within the context of an Apartheid South Africa as a performer, choreographer and artistic director. The classical and contemporary dance training in South Africa, New York and France afforded me the tools to practice and research sites of resistance through the body and movement. Ironically after my first choreographic work, Sandstone, which was banned, I felt a sense of agency that led me to create over 40 live performance stage works exploring the Representation of Politics and the Politics of Representation. Here is probably the first South African screendance work ever produced: Sandstone

In 1998 I armed myself with a Master of Arts in Choreography based on the Body and the Dance Factory as sites of Resistance, exploring postmodernist feminist dance practices and choreographic strategies. My later works and collaborations in a post apartheid South Africa led to intermedia explorations with video, interactive media and movement. See the Intermedia/Interdisciplinary Collaborations YouTube playlist.

I supported my practice by teaching dance for dance companies, community centres, lecturing at universities and film schools. I also trained performers in Alba Emoting – a somatic practice for eliciting authentic emotions: CoNCrEte and see emotional body works I conducted in South Africa (CoNCrEte embedded below).

I left South Africa in 2008 with my son Jared, in order to study for an MSc in Media Arts and Imaging Screendance, at Dundee University Scotland, where I researched and wrote on the concrete and the digital: emotional and kinaesthetic amplification of the authentic and digitalised body in screendance. My research and outcomes explored Deleuse’s notion of affect, Laura U Marks ideas of tactility and the haptic, Massumi’s phenomenological ideas on sensation and movement, Dogme 95 filmic practices, the “carnivorous camera”, vertical montage and repetition in the edit as a choreographic tool.

In 2009 I started exploring other sites and modes of production with the use of online platforms and became associate producer dance-tech.net. I am a moderator for content on dance-tech.net that uses the most advanced social software platforms and internet rich multimedia applications. dance-tech.net provides movement and new media artists, theorist, thinkers and technologists the possibility of sharing work, ideas and research, generating opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborative projects.

I am also the creator of MoveStream that provides an interdisciplinary platform that investigating the crossover between the boundaries usually found in media/dance/cinema/video and the internet. It provides a fresh and adaptive evolving domain for the public to engage with culture, choreography and performance. As a networked phenomenon, it encourages a much needed flow and exchange in Screendance discourse. It offers a new Screening portal for Screendance makers with the possibility of developing new online performance vocabularies that reposition dance performance as a multi-sited, digitally mediated art form. Ease of accessibility encourages viewers to engage with the ontologies that are foregrounded in the interviews. It also serves as an open archive for Screendance, preserving the past with the capability of re-informing the present.

Presently I am researching and exploring Screendance, Affect and augmented reality with Prof Susan Kozel at MEDEA, Malmö University. The project, Affexity is an interdisciplinary collaborative project with drawing together screendance, visual imagery and mobile networked devices.

It will use a free open standards augmented reality web browser called Argon running on the iPhone and iPad for the location of choreographies embedded in city spaces. Focusing on affect and corporeality, these little narratives will be geospatially and accessed by viewers using mobile devices. The city used for the pilot performance will be Malmö, Sweden.

Photo credit: Bob Martin

See article online: http://medea.mah.se/2011/11/introducing-jeannette-ginslov-independent-artist-and-researcher/