Bodies of Colour/Media Skins

Abstract

A platform of digital and live art events, workshops and symposia such as Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance (2007) arouses curiosity, especially in the context of a technologized world of after effects. If one reads and experiences the world through code and dispersive networks, through les techniques numériques, as the French would call it, one wants to know what kind of closeness or intimacy is involved, and how it moves ‘across’. Implied in the movement there is also an assumption about the difference between the visceral and the digital, and this assumption concerns us here. In the following, I want to reflect briefly on the practical workshop I was invited to conduct during the Festival (with my design collaborator Michèle Danjoux), then add some critical comments on two dance productions developed by our ensemble: Suna no Onna, featured at the Intimacy platform in London, and UKIYO, developed in 2009–10 and staged at London’s Sadler’s Wells (2010). These comments do sway along the curved path, between the physical and the digital, that many of us are describing as we learn to perform in computational ecologies and train dancers, actors and musicians to act out certain behaviours in such environments of change (after-effects), drawing attention to interface operations and bio-information. I propose to define intimacy, in this context, as a heightened compounding sensorial opening into which we surge. Some call this experience immersive. We call it sensortized.