european scene for choreographic creation & digital innovation
Presentation:
Body in play
The body is very often the subject and object of artistic works, and even its very absence is treated as a motif.
This concept of presence or absence is all the more evident in the digital arts. Research into avatars, in- teractive scenarios, nanotechnology and on-line creation refer to new perceptions of the body expressed in its scale variations.
All technologies developed in virtual worlds require the body to be labelled on movements in space, by perceptual and representative systems of identification. The body is a prerequisite for re-cognition.
Extension of the living
Areas opened up by new technologies generate transportable topologies in which dance can emerge and can be written. They free space for the imagination. These new tools, the dancers and the artists can and should seize these opportunities. Constantly evolving and always unfinished, technology continues with other technical equipment of the body, thereby touching on dance’s characteristic of having no beginning or end: there is no first act, let alone a last act.
Interdisciplinarity and experimentation
Encouraging hybridization and interdisciplinarityentails meeting new demands from and new practices by the public.
Prototyping is used to construct spectacular innovative objects and to experiment with processes to be used.
This approach creates links and knowledge transfers with and between researchers, universities and companies until the possibilities offered by the technologies used have been exhausted.
Mutation
Changes and issues have a direct impact on the design and distribution of cultural products in the in- dustrial and societal dimensions but also in the interdisciplinary fields of research and digital creation. Under their effect, the relationship with the concept of stage, image, body, text, identity and territory is questioned and redefined. They open up new opportunities for our sensory perceptions. The generation of “digital natives” (those born with digital technology) naturally incorporates this culture in any project. It drives an accelerated and almost irresistible restructuring of cultural values.
n + n Corsino
In October 2013, n + n Corsino opened SCENE44, a stage for choreographic creation and digital innovation, located in the Pôle Media centre in the Belle de Mai district of Marseille.
Aims to perform three roles as:
- a centre for creative work that provides reception facilities for artists and researchers in residence,
- a cultural cluster that highlights and develops relations between artistic creation, research and digital innovation,
- a testing ground for shared creative experimentation.
Its actions, oriented towards a relationship with the living world and close to the idea of applied research, measure the viability and potential of a technology through its artistic treatment.
The programme of artists and researchers in residence is the subject of a presentation to target audiences in the form of workshops.
The scenographic design of the digital stage and the production studios is based on mobility, the lightness of technological tools and their low energy cost. Portable technical image, sound and computer systems are used for adapting to the hosted projects.
From its beginning, SCENE44 was based on a partnership with the Laboratoire PRISM : Perception, representation, Image, Music and Sound (AMU-CNRS, Marseille) as part of the 10th international symposium on Computer Music and Multidisciplinary Research which brought together many international researchers and artists on the subject of Music and Motion. In this sense, collaborations will be developed with the Institut des Sciences du Mouvement, Etienne-Jules Maré, and the Institut des Neurosciences Co- gnitives as well as with players involved in the arts on national and international levels.
Sustainable
Dance is a placeless art. Not nomadic, but rather immigrant. Emigrated from where? Dance comes from movement. Non-localised movement. And migrating towards what? As opposed to the nomad who moves with(in) his/her own territory , dance weaves its way ecologically through very different performance spaces. It creates its territory where it exists. It takes in the void. Every movement is part of a topology of the instant.
It is also a visual art. The body is whole but deformable, to the extent where it is the subject-object of its own disappearance, according to whether the tracking shot advances or retreats as far as the confines of matter. A know-how that entails visual cognition and is based on an oral tradition. The exact word, chosen when a movement is handed on, clarifies it or obscures it .
Artistic creation makes a home for itself in new performance spaces by means of data digitization and the staged appropriation of objects such as smartphones, digital tablets and networks (incorrectly known as “social”) that are familiar to a global audience. The changes of territories determine other visions of the body and, conversely, as a result of comprehending the living world and conceiving it with other perceptions due to the scales that are more or less than normal life size, past categories become blurred.
The fictional world, whatever the number of its dimensions, is always projected onto a surface of comprehension that is seen as an ontological constant. From engraved stone to painted surfaces, from cartography and writing to animated images, the eyes are drawn to something: a place of projection of the imagination and of the mind, on which the continuous action of weight cancels itself. This necessary surface of access is a place of anti-gravity. A void suitable for navigating very close to the body and ideas.
Knowledge of the fine structure of the universe and of relational systems that organise the living world refers to a qualitative study of dynamic systems. It is in this sense that art already maintains many very close relations with the field of “exact” sciences, such as topology, neurobiology or quantum mechanics.
n + n Corsino