Temporal Textures and Phenomenology
Winter 2012, Fridays 16h00 – 18h00 (alternative: Wednesday 19h00-21h00), TML EV 7.725
This combines a theoretical seminar bridging textural, phenomenological and radical empiricist approaches to experience and morphogenesis, together with a series of experiments with temporal textures using lighting and acoustics. We hope that each informs the other.
Participants
Liza Solomonova, Navid Navab, Sha Xin Wei
Noah Brender, Tristana Martin Martin Rubio, Michelle Carr, Katla Ísaksdóttir, Dan Landreville, Laura Boyd-Clowes, Elodie Boublil, Tyr Umbach
JoDee Allen, Bergo Bettina, Harry Smoak, David Morris, Tore Nielsen
Seminar
The goal of this seminar is to develop some conceptual, movement, and computational approaches to time not as some abstraction but as how material change is experienced. To avoid naturalizing, transcendentalizing notions, it’s useful to adopt the term “temporality” in place of “time” for the experience of change. How can we defer anthropocentric interpretations of experience using our experimental techniques with responsive environments?
We read temporality from a phenomenological perspective. One experimental / experiential goal could be to workshop Einsteins Dream to create some situations of alternative temporality. We are movement artists as well as untrained bodies working together with media artists and programmers and theoreticians learning to think about movement in movement. A methodological experiment is to see whether and how we might transpose some practical, sited approaches to architecture based on sketching and “in-situ” making to making acoustic and visual textures that condition temporality.
Readings
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Body and Space, Temporality, in Phenomenology of Perception
Lightman, Alan. Einsteins Dreams. 1992.
Alexander, Christopher, A Small Example of a Living Process, in Process of Creating Life. 2003. p 571-632.
Supplementary Readings
Heidegger, Martin. §12 Transcendence and temporality, §13 Transcendence temporalizing itself in temporality and the essence of ground, in Metaphysical Foundations of Logic.
Hoy, David Couzens. The Time of Our Lives : A Critical History of Temporality. 2009.
Bancroft, Jessie Hubbell. Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium.1909.
Bancroft, Jessie Hubbell, and William Dean Pulvermacher. Handbook of Athletic Games for Players, Instructors, and Spectators, Comprising Fifteen Major Ball Games, Track and Field Athletics and Rowing Races. 1916.
Crampton, C. Ward, Emanuel Haug, Montague Gammon, Luther Halsey Gulick, and Jessie Hubbell Bancroft. School Tactics and Maze Running. 1915.
Experiments
We’re constructing a series of experiments in the TML space itself, using household halogens and LED strips animated by Max via DMX, theatrical lights, and projected, plus acoustic processing (in MSP) using a variety of tools for grain-based feature extraction, mapping logics, physical modeling, (re)synthesis and spatialization.
Rhythms, prosody in singing, music, movement
Dance and movement: children’s play, martial art, sport
Memory, place, identity
Illusions of time in cinema, music, theatre and architecture
Quantized capitalist time vs. amodern temporality
Einsteins Dream, time conditioning and movement in physical space
Maths
Pattern theory, topological dynamics