De- und Rekonstruktionen von Körper-Klang-Ausdrucksbeziehungen: Das “Embodied Generative Music”-Projekt

Preliminary abstract for a paper to be presented at the “Challenging Music, Dance and Performance: The Electronic Media” Conference, 31.8.-2.9.2009, Anton-Bruckner Privatuniversität, Linz, Austria

Making art, historically speaking, has meant to handle material for expressive purposes. This handling, in contrast, tends to disappear in arts employing electronic media, in placing the computer or circuitry at the core of sensual production: No longer does artistic practice (at least the kind of practice based on nuanced bodily movements, such as painting, drawing, sculpting, instrumental performance, dance, etc.) have bodily expression at its experiential core. While this could be perceived as an incisive loss, there is, however, one intriguing gain. Via real-time interactivity, electronic media can simulate the direct bodily relationship in the process of production, thus opening up its deconstruction and reconstruction, and with this, its research and extention. “Embodied Generative Music (EGM)” is a currently running basic research project devoted to such exploration of the relationships between touch and sound in instrumental playing. Combining a motion-tracking system with a sound processing system, the EGM project has been designing new relations between motion and sound production, i.e. between bodily expression and its expression in sound. This not only confronts us with a new, intermedial artform in which performers – in this case dancers – work with expression in two media simultaneously, it also allows for research into perception of musical Gestalt. I start with describing the project’s intermedial performance environment, discussing experiential phenomena it delivers for the performer, composer and audience; I then address how an aesthetic analysis of the dancer’s explorations helps advance our understanding of musical experience as embodied. Concluding, I consider how the concept of embodiment may elucidate the aesthetics of new artforms based on electronic media; artforms which, in integrating human motion into virtual “worlds”, alter or reinvent the idea of expression.

Challenging Music, Dance and Performance: The Electronic Media