Mobile social choreographies: Choreographic insight as a basis for artistic research into mobile technologies

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Mobile social choreographies: Choreographicinsight as a basis for artistic research into mobiletechnologiesSusan Kozelaa Malmö University, SwedenPublished online: 03 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Susan Kozel (2010) Mobile social choreographies: Choreographic insight as a basis for artisticresearch into mobile technologies, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 6:2, 137-148

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SUSAN KOZELMalmö University, Sweden

Mobile socialchoreographies:Choreographic insight as abasis for artistic researchinto mobile technologies

KEYWORDS

choreographymobile phonesmediaartistic research

ABSTRACT

Creative use of networked wireless communications devices (such as mobile phones)contributes to a vibrant strand of media art called ‘locative media’, and has capturedthe imaginations of geographers, media artists, architects, engineers and philosophers.Now it is time for dancers and choreographers to contribute to the critical and creativeactivity around corporeality, expression and mobile technologies in social contexts.This article proposes an emergent area of research in combining dance and mobiletechnologies called ‘social choreographies’, and considers artistic research methodolo-gies relevant to this newly framed domain that are rooted in improvisatory studiopractices and drawing a choreographic sensibility into urban environments.

Research is about pursuing ideas. These ideas live as questions, as impulses,as tickling sensations that urge our thoughts and bodies into movement, thatshift our modes of attention, how we live, sense and know the world. I thoughtit ought to be sometimes are received as gifts from momentary perceptions or

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encounters with others, but they equally can be gut reactions to what we seeor read, that say ‘no, that cannot be’ or ‘I know it can be otherwise’. Then we,as dancers and choreographers, set our bodies in motion in order to under-stand, to celebrate, to critique or to affirm that things can indeed be otherwise.We build these ways of thinking and knowing through our bodies within achanging world.

This article addresses an area of contemporary research gaining in physi-cal, social and theoretical momentum: the use of mobile devices in our cities.The broader project, for which this article contributes a starting point, con-sists in applying choreographic and performative approaches to the studyof embodied expression through mobile devices with the goals of design-ing devices offering scope for enhanced corporeal expression and producingan embodied aesthetics. This article considers the first phase of this project,which was a week-long workshop for professional choreographers under therubric of the ‘Close Encounters’ gathering on artistic research in dance at theUniversity College of Dance in Sweden; the focus of the workshop was cor-poreal expression through mobile phones, but other mobile media devicescould have been considered (like handheld computers, GPS devices or evennon-networked iPods). Creative use of handheld, wireless, location-awaredevices is an established area of media art called locative media, and has cap-tured the imaginations of geographers, media artists, architects, engineers andphilosophers. Now it is time for dancers and choreographers to contribute tothe critical and creative activity around bodies and mobile devices in socialcontexts.

LOCATIVE ANDMOBILEMEDIA

Mobile media devices encourage or inhibit human exchanges. They areportable; they accompany us for hours, days and seasons; they span moodsand activities, cycles and rhythms of life; they are fluid. They contribute tothe social choreographies of our daily lives. We integrate these little chunksof miniaturized technology into our clothing, our pockets or our bags, andour daily gestures include the arm, head and spine movements associatedwith using them. We even walk and see differently when we use them. Oursenses are re-patterned, our intuition of space and time folds inwards or leapsoutwards. If our mobile devices are location-aware, we access another per-son; even if the devices are not actually networked we can hold images orsounds of them as archived data: we then carry the other with us, in our hearts,in our memories . . . in the devices themselves? It is not at all surprising thatthe researchers and designers active in this area struggle to find vocabularyto describe what is happening, not at all surprising that they stumble acrossterms that are more intimate to our practices than theirs: ‘performance’ and‘choreography’.

In the ‘softspace’ opened up by participatory technologies within buildingsor cities, architect Usman Haque claims that people are encouraged to become‘performers within their own environments’, and as this happens architecturaldesign becomes a ‘choreography of sensations’.1 Geographers like Ash Amin

1 Usman Haque’swebsite hasdocumentation ofprojects and some ofhis papers, http://www.haque.co.uk/papers.php

and Nigel Thrift have come to accept that people act in public spaces ‘for thesimple pleasure of acting’ (Amin and Thrift 2002), while some designers suchas Tony Dunne say that the most difficult challenges posed by the design of newintelligent objects draw us into the realms of metaphysics, aesthetics and poetry(Dunne 2006). Others see the confluence of voice, images, stories, buildings,

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Mobile social choreographies: Choreographic insight as a basis for artistic . . .

histories and body movement as urban choreographies performed through theuse of mobile devices.2 Beautiful and evocative ideas, all of them, but why was I

2 Ben Russell from theUK has writteninnovatively in this area;see http://rixc.lv/ram5.An entire issue of theLeonardo ElectronicAlmanac issue wasdevoted to locativemedia. Volume 14, Issue03, http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n03-04/

uneasy to hear them coming from the domains of architecture, geography anddesign rather than from choreography and performance? It was not that I feltwe owned these terms; rather I wondered whether choreographers and dancerswere missing the chance to contribute to a wider area of research, whetherothers were speaking for us. If so, they were without a doubt doing a good job,but I couldn’t help but feel there was still room for us to contribute. I decidedthat a contribution to this domain of research could begin through a CloseEncounters working group, and, through this process, insight could be gainedinto our own artistic practices as research. The parallel goals of the workshopare echoed by the parallel strands of this article: reflecting upon artistic researchmethodologies at the same time as contributing to choreographic perspectivesto a wider field of social and cultural research in mobile and locative media.

A better explanation of the technologies is perhaps useful. Locative mediagenerally refers to electronic devices that are aware of their location, like mobilephones or other devices that can talk to the wider world by means of Wi-Fi,Bluetooth or GPS. Once a location is determinable, sonic and visual mediacan be delivered directly to a person’s device; this media can be in real timelike a phone call or can be pre-recorded data. Media content is managed andorganized in an entirely different location, on a standard desktop or laptop con-nected to a server. As the location-aware device enters the area ‘tagged’ anddetermined by GPS coordinates, satellites trigger the assigned media causingthe device to download this formatted content. The result is an augmentationof physical reality with a layer of media. For example, it is common for locativemedia projects to arrange for a piece of text to be ‘left’ at a place in a city onlyto be displayed when another person with a specially enabled mobile devicehappens to walk by that particular place. It would be like receiving a text mes-sage as you pass a spot in a city, not from a friend but from the city itself. Itcould work in the other direction too; because the device knows its location,the person walking around can leave a song, a message or an image at a placefor someone else to find. Environmental awareness and social interactions formthe content of many locative media projects, and they frequently have political,cultural or more internal personal narrative components, dealing with memoryor storytelling.3

3 Some examples of thebreadth of locativemedia, as an actualartistic andtechnologicalphenomenon and asan imaginary trope,include Blast Theory’sperformances RiderSpoke and Uncle RoyAll Around You, http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_rider_spoke.html and Terri Rueb’sartwork (http://www.terirueb.net/).The UrbanAtmosphere’s groupuses mobile phones aslocation-aware andmeasuring devices toremix local stories(ParticipatoryUrbanism) but also tosense levels of airpollution (CommonSense); seehttp://www.urban-atmospheres.net. Infiction, WilliamGibson’s SpookCountry (2008)features a characternamed AlbertoCorrales, a locativemedia artist whosework often recreatesthe deaths ofcelebrities that canonly be seen byvisiting the actual spotof the death and usingeither a device or awearable visualdisplay.

Sending and receiving: one might say that the basics of media communi-cation are also the basics of gesture. Our working group deliberately did notoperate at the level of technological sophistication described in the precedingparagraph: it was not necessary. As a group of choreographers our goal was toexplore basic elements to emerge from our use of mobile media: philosophi-cal concepts, bodily knowledge, gestural vocabularies, social interactions andinteraction with urban spaces. All that was required in terms of technology wasa willingness for participants to use their own mobile phones, or a desire totake advantage of the phones generously provided by Lone Koefoed Hansenand Camille Baker.4 4 Lone Koefoed Hansen

from the University ofAarhus in Denmarkand Camille Bakerfrom the University ofEast London in theUK are bothresearching mobiletechnologies. Theyassisted me with this

Dancers understand fields, emanations, mutations, connections, suspen-sions and spaces in between. One of these words alone is sufficient to launchan improvisation. There are images I love from a knitting magazine showingtwo young women wearing brightly coloured belted raincoats, carrying brightlycoloured knitted bags, wearing preposterously large sunglasses, standing nextto each other on a New York City subway platform with the train whizzingpast. They look vibrant, happy, ironic, at home in their clothes and in the city.

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The spaces between them, and between their bodies and the urban structures,workshop,providing inputfrom the slightlyadjacent worlds ofdesign (Hansen)and mediaperformance(Baker). Theycontributed Nokiasmartphones to theworkshop for thosewho desired anincreased level ofvideo functionalityfrom their devices.For a relatedaccount ofperformancemethodsconverging withdesign processes,see Hansen andKozel (2007).

seem intimate and alive. Their bags are hand-knitted and designed specificallyto hold computers and mobile phones. I’m not just using my imagination: thepattern reflected by the image is for a computer bag, other patterns in the samebook are for mobile phone pouches and knitted motifs include emoticons ore-mail addresses. In our working group we became these women, and we alsoobserved people like them in Stockholm. We investigated the spatial, social,urban and embodied poetics that opens when we take seriously the sugges-tion that locative media fosters currents of social choreographies. A workingdefinition emerging from this stage of research is that ‘social choreographiesare temporal and spatial patterns of life enabled or haunted by mobile portablewireless technologies’, in the sense that we are constitutively haunted by theother (Derrida 2000: 203–05). This haunting need not be of the spooky andunnerving quality – it can be the palpable presence of others causing joy asmuch as longing or disquiet.

In the working group we played across three choreographic perspectives:(1) self-reflexively sensing our own movement as we engaged in the act ofusing our mobile phones; (2) observing others as they moved through spacecommunicating on their phones; (3) using the functions of the mobile devices(video, audio, etc.) to engage performatively with the world. We created ourown choreographies either in the studio, on the street or in our imaginations,carrying these back and forth in our thoughts, discussions and bodies. Aminand Thrift write that ‘there is a whole politics of embodiment, from the minu-tiae of gesture to the movement patterns of the crowd, which has still onlyrarely been systematically explored’ (Amin and Thrift 2002: 158). Recent expan-sions to the way geographers and philosophers of technology view cities haveincluded the recognition that animals and technologies are also actors in cities(actor network theory; Latour 1993), but many scholars and artists feel thatthe scope of urban politics is still too narrow. Gesture and behaviour need tobe examined both out of sheer fascination, but also because all of us who livein cities are increasingly controlled on these levels by the buildings, devicesand social codes produced by contemporary societies. Everything, from securebuildings and public transit to the smart products and genetically modifiedfoods we consume, affects how we move and corporeally inhabit our spaces.Amin and Thrift’s intuition is that this area can be usefully explored through‘artistic modes of understanding’. They are right.

SOCIAL CHOREOGRAPHIES

The idea of social choreographies came to me while working on a project inwearable computing (where we embedded small computers into clothing sothat pulse and breath could be shared among people).5 It seemed to be such

5 This was the whisper[s]project. For moreinformation seehttp://whisper.iat.sfu.ca/and a chapter in mybook devoted todiscussing wearablecomputing (Kozel2007).

an intuitive juxtaposition of words, banal even: ‘social’ and ‘choreography’.Should this term be plural or singular? Thinking of the movement of peoplein cities, the ebb, flow and flux of all activities across so many human and non-human forms, it seemed that the generous act was to make it plural, so as toavoid seeming to impose a unifying movement scheme on all that breathed andmorphed around us. As if we ever could.

As indicated above, all of our devices invite a set of physical gestures eitherdetermined by the data they convey (voice, text, visuals), by ergonomic or awk-ward design or by the set of codes communicated across distinct social groupsindicating how to use and wear devices in different social settings (the club,

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the subway, the library, the studio). The mobile phone is a vibrant example:do people hunch into it or speak loudly as an indication of social or financialstatus; hide it in layers of clothes or expose it; place it on their desks besidethem or dig in the bottom of their bags for it? Is it set to ring loudly or softly; isthe ring tone humorous or discreet? Is it almost never switched on? Qualitiesof performance – ephemerality, expressivity, humour, poetry, physicality – inte-grated into the design and use of mobile media can act to disrupt, to delightand to challenge conventional uses of devices, databases and networks. Chore-ographing the flow of data in a social setting involves being aware of what it is,who receives it, when, and in what form, according to which rhythm, narrativeor affective quality.

Choreographing my data, whether they are my movement patterns, myvoice, my scribbled thoughts, my heart rate, is like saying I want to play with mydata and yours, to flirt with them and with you, to shape them into expressiveportrayals of who I am, and of my relationship to you. Data choreography acrosssocial contexts contributes to an emerging and adaptive poetics, a chiasmicaesthetics of disappearance and exchange across the physical and the digital.Stillness and quiet in data exchange are as integral as acceleration; disconti-nuity and disruption are as important to human corporeal exchange throughdigital devices as are continuity and connection. It is choreographically signifi-cant for me to make a choice for my data to exist in a certain manner: do I send atext or make a call? Do I leave a voice-mail message or follow up with an e-mailmessage? Do I send an image? What I do with this data is significant too: doI save it or let it disappear? Do I remember it or archive it? And it is tremen-dously significant for me to choose to switch off my phone (to be disconnected)or to wear my music headset in public (to be disconnected in a different way).This approach to social choreographies and the choreography of data is in theearly stages of development: it is fundamentally corporeal, concerned with therhythms and flows of immanent states radiating outwards, combined with thepatterns of bodies, buildings and mobile devices in urban spaces.

An example of viewing the world through the lens of social choreographieshelps to prevent this discussion from becoming too abstract or speculative.While waiting for the underground at a central Stockholm station, I decidedto observe people with their mobiles (this station was not so deep that thesignal was lost). I saw a woman with her arm bent holding her phone at thelevel of her chest, head bent in concentration, a palpable mood emanatingfrom her as if the text she was reading – for I knew somehow that it wasa text message and not a game or simply a calendar – was personally com-pelling. Her focus was complete, as if she existed in a bubble embracing herupper body and her device. She was drinking in her phone, as if what shereceived was nourishing her. Then a person walked past her, a man holdinga sandwich in much the same position. All his attention was on this partiallyunwrapped, over-garnished, sandwich. His head and arm carved similar shapesin space to the woman with the phone. He had just begun to eat his sandwich,to ingest it, and it seemed to be nourishing him. She was doing the same tothe information on her phone. His mood was anticipation, hers seemed to betrepidation. They shared this public stage harmoniously, quite unaware of eachother. They passed very closely together but did not bump into each other,the space between them contracted and then expanded; the affective cloudsthey emanated were pure and clear, readable by anyone who took the timeto notice. Their choreographies were private and public, part visible and partinvisible, internal and external, spatial, gestural and emotional. The soundscape

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was the general hubbub of public transit. This choreography was performed bythem but it was brought into focus through my perception, imagination andcurrent fascination with social choreographies, otherwise this little momentwould have simply disappeared, swallowed up in the millions of gestures andthoughts occurring in social spaces every day.6

6 The methodology Iemploy for thislonger-termresearch projectinto socialchoreographies isalso underdevelopment. Mylong-timecorporealmethodology forartistic andphilosophicalexploration is aversion ofphenomenology,but this projectnecessitates asideways shift fromfirst-personphenomenology toa version ofheterophe-nomenology, orsecond-personphenomenologycombined withperformanceethnography. Fordetails ofheterophe-nomenology, seeKozel (2007); for adescription ofperformanceethnographyelaborated from aperspective ofactivist theatre, seeDenzin (2003).

Social choreographies, like data choreography, are about transubstantia-tion and convergence. Merleau-Ponty captures this when he says ‘I lend mybody to the world’ by being visible and mobile. My mobile body, ‘the ner-vous machine’, inheres in the world, gets caught up in things and others inthe world, and through this both the world and body are changed (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 162–63). Hubert Godard, whose research in neurophysiology andsomatics rests on a foundation of dance and philosophy, once asserted: ‘Thebody does not exist, we are nothing but connective tissue’.7 His words, which

7 Some of thefoundational ideas onsocial choreographiesfound in this sectionof this article areelaborated in thecontext of datachoreography andwearable computingin Kozel (2007).

I initially resisted, left such an impact on my way of living in my body, that asI sat quietly in a room the following day I felt my skin dissolve and tendrils ofmy body reach and wave in the space. I also felt a raw vulnerability, for the dis-solution of my armour of skin meant not just that I could extend into space butthat what was beyond me could reach into me: permeate and germinate. For amoment I became nothing but nervous system, a nervous machine. The mythof the self-contained body collapsed into dust around my feet, my body wastruly ‘caught in the fabric of the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 163), and thisfabric was the connective tissue, or flesh, of my body, things, others and thespace between things. When I phone or text you, do I not activate the connec-tive tissue between us? Through a choreographic lens, social choreographiesare based on the palpability of touch across distance.

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

The research methodology for our Close Encounters working group’s investi-gation of social choreographies was a version of phenomenology according towhich knowledge and creation come from the moment of doing, the momentof movement, that pre-reflective moment where knowledge and senses con-verge and where the basis for meaning resides. Phenomenology respects thatwhat we think, what we have read, what is generally held to be true, all bumpinto the moment of encounter with life, and with other beings breathing, mov-ing and speaking in the world. This collision is the basis of cognition andcreative insight. Sometimes we are better able to understand seemingly abstractconcepts by filtering them through the minute but concrete moment of encoun-tering the world through our bodies. Sometimes we are able to critique andreformulate ideas which seem to be sacred to philosophers or scientists. Whilewe undertake our physical experimentation, we can keep the philosophicalquestioning alive by writing about our experiences and extracting the signif-icant ideas. This is dance as research: that lush, conceptually rich crossing pointbetween thought and corporeality.

Research is not always the excavation of the artist’s own voice; it is thenestling of this voice into a community (sometimes a cacophony) of othervoices. Sometimes it is hard for a practitioner to accept this need to articulateher ideas in terms of harmonies or tensions with others. I was asked by one ofthe workshop participants: ‘why do we always have to situate our work throughthe words of others?’ A challenging question. Is academic writing merely aprocess of ceaseless justification by relying on others, or can it be seen as achoreography of creative tensions in the form of ideas? I see it as the latter, and

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I have to in order to muster the strength to grasp a dense argument presentedin a book let alone open a blank document on my computer, but simply statingit this way is not enough to convince a strong-willed artist. It is one thing to winan artist over to the merits of understanding a broader community of discourseand practice but something else entirely to foster in her the scholarly researchskills to do so.

I alluded above to three research strategies for mobile social computingwhich can be reduced to: (1) sensing from within, (2) observing from out-side and (3) engaging with the world through the mobile device. The first andsecond reflect distinct choreographic processes, and most of us have a pref-erence for one, even though we may do both. Some choreographers developmovement by moving their own bodies in space, capturing a kinaesthetic andaffective feeling from within, and then setting versions of this on other bod-ies. Other choreographers prefer to view forms, flows and patterns outside oftheir own bodies, obviously through a highly corporeal form of perception, butwith an external focus. The difference between these two perspectives can bemade clear by considering a collaboration in the United States between DavidRockwell (architect) and Jerry Mitchell (choreographer). When Rockwell wascommissioned to design a new terminal for the John F. Kennedy internationalairport in New York specifically for JetBlue, a new economy airline in the USA,he invited a choreographer to work with him. They began by observing the flowof people through two of New York City’s most loved public spaces: WashingtonSquare in Greenwich Village and Grand Central Station in mid-town Man-hattan. Their analysis was a compelling example of viewing from the outside.They noted how the architectural elements of Grand Central Station permittedpeople to flow through the space on their way to the trains while minimizingconfusion and collision. The enormous clock, the elevated balconies, the archedceiling, the stairways all contributed to the social choreographies of the space.‘The two men thought a lot about which public spaces in New York were well“choreographed” — that is, which shaped people’s movement successfully —and which were not.’8 They did a sort of ‘rhythmanalysis,’ a term coined by

8 The New York Timesarticle by Jesse Green(2006) has usefulannotatedphotographs of GrandCentral Station andWashington Square,http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/arts/dance/28gree.html?ex=1306468800&en=5ec14242e7e22c12&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Henri Lefebvre according to which the rhythms of a city are contemplated froma detached standpoint; this analysis occurs from a position of ‘spectral distance’,relating to speculation and spectacle by means of receptivity and exteriority.9

9 Amin and Thrift providea good explanation ofLefebvre’srhythmanalysis andjuxtapose it withWalter Benjamin’stransitivity (Amin andThrift 2002: 15–18).

Rockwell and Mitchell analysed crowd flow through urban spaces, but theydid not indicate how they felt as they moved through the spaces themselves.I did this when I visited Grand Central Station several months ago. I movedthrough the space with the crowd and paid attention to what I heard and saw,and to how I felt. I noticed elements indicated by Rockwell and Mitchell, suchas a strange sense of being unhurried and guided through the space by thearchitecture, but I also noticed elements they left out: like the sound. Despitethis being an enormous stone structure containing hundreds of rushing com-muters, it was strangely silent. This is not to say that one approach is better thananother, just to illustrate different ways of approaching choreography applied tosocial contexts. Are we part of the crowd reading through our bodies or are weoutside the crowd watching and witnessing? I suggest that both perspectivescan be phenomenological. To these two perspectives a third is added, takinginto account the presence of mobile devices. This option, developed specificallyfor the Close Encounters working group, was to use the functions of the phonein order to shape the flow and connection between bodies, some present in thestudio and some not. These functions can be quite basic: text, speaking, access-ing voice-mail or sending images, but their very limited nature also proved to be

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quite rich, echoing Felix Guattari’s suggestion that with art the ‘finitude of thesensible material becomes a support for the production of affects and percepts’(Guattari 1995: 100–01).

We did quite a beautiful improvisation, one which brought this thirdapproach to life. Four workshop participants occupied the centre of the studio,while the rest of us stood and observed from the periphery. The improvisa-tion instructions for those in the centre were to use their own mobile phonesto call or text someone, then simply to move through the space as they nor-mally would, while engaged in this activity. Watching this group I was struckby the social choreographies that emerged. After a period of concentrated still-ness while the task was initiated, the ‘mobile dancers’ began to move throughspace. Seemingly rambling patterns emerged, stopping and starting. Sounds ofvoices, both from the people in the room and from their friends, combined withsounds of ringtones and button beeps. It was clear who was texting, who wasspeaking to a person, who was leaving a voice message and who was access-ing voice-mail. All different modes of communication were reflected in theirbodies, their focus and their journeys through space. The use of gaze becamelargely internal, but this did not mean that the dynamic was solitary: this wasa crowded space. It was as if people they cared about enough to contact withtheir mobiles were suddenly in the space, albeit virtually. Even the one personwho called her voice-mail brought other beings into the space, but palpablypre-recorded, as if they lived as echoes of times past. I was most struck by theintimacy and vibrancy of their emotional states across these registers of pres-ence, and by the other bodies that seemed to materialize in the space. EchoingGuattari, the finite object that was the mobile phone brought forth a plethoraof kinaesthetic and emotional traces.

DARKMATTER

A participant in the Close Encounters working group came to the realizationthat his thought processes were choreographic. This observation prompts ashift from the elaboration of a social choreographic approach to mobile tech-nologies to the second goal of this article and of the workshop: reflecting uponartistic research methodologies. His insight was that his thoughts developedand accumulated according to a structure, a complex structure of many layers,where simultaneously several events like modules would occur. Choices weremade, and transformation over time took place, just like when he crafted hisdances. There was palpable delight in his discovery because he was at home inmovement, in choreography, and feared that his thought and use of languagemight not be as rich. He realized that his linguistic and academic methodscould involve concepts and structures analogous to his choreographic methods,and that these could easily embrace the mobile technologies we introducedinto the studio. This at once made both the academic research process andthe technologies less alien, and it allowed him to appreciate previously unrec-ognized qualities in his choreographic processes. I consider this an exercisein ‘mining for method’: doing a reflective archaeology of artistic processes toreveal the methodologies embedded within them, or at least to uncover themethodological starting points that can be elaborated further through appliedresearch.10

10 For additional writingon methodologicalapproaches toartistic researchcoming directlyfrom dance, seeKozel (2010a).

The intensity of debate, both within and outside academia, around themethodologies, scope and desirability of artistic research is increasing. HenkBorgdorff in his presentation at Close Encounters asked whether art has been

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‘infected by the research virus’, or whether a broad understanding of what con-stitutes knowledge is in process of shifting. I find this an exciting prospect. Ithas implications for so many levels of perception, thought and creation. In asimilar mode, Efva Lilja, Vice-Chancellor of the University College of Danceand convener of the Close Encounters event, introduced the role of observerinto each of three research working groups, but she deliberately did not definewhat this role entailed. As a result the questions were asked: ‘what does itmean to observe? to document? to live amongst others with the goal of con-structing knowledge?’ It became clear immediately that this was done froma fundamentally embodied position, and that this was yet another dimensionof artistic research. Bodies among bodies. Social, kinaesthetic bodies. Researchin the flesh. This extended philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s relation ofthe ‘seeing–seen’ (according which I see and I am seen, by myself, othersand things) and the ‘touching–touched’ (I touch and I am touched, by myself,others and things) into active practice-based research where the product ofresearch is not just an inert deliverable, a bounded object, but includes lay-ers of reception and response (Merleau-Ponty 1968). Receptivity is a process oftaking something into our bodies, of consuming in the material senses of inges-tion, digestion, integration into our personal and communal flesh. Researchis fundamentally material, which does not mean it is easily grasped. There isdarkness and light, poetry and clarity, ambiguity and logic.

I return frequently, through movement and thought, to the notion ofnegative space, and it occurs to me that dancers are instinctively adept atmetaphysics. We understand space, time and matter, as well as imaginativeextrapolations of space, time and matter. We have no problem inverting realityand improvising based on the most tenuous of suggestions. This was evident inan improvisation on negative space, or dark matter, done in our working group.Negative space is a term used in visual art: when students are learning to drawfor the first time it is not uncommon for the teacher to ask them to perceivethe negative space instead of the figure. It is a strange term, negative space, forconjuring value judgements between negative and positive, good and bad, butit simply means viewing the gaps between forms rather than the forms them-selves. By sketching the spaces between, for example, the trees of a landscape orthe arm and the torso, the whole picture emerges and sometimes with greatervibrancy than by simply paying attention to the foreground at the expense ofthe background. The physical improvisation is similar, asking people to movethrough space paying attention to the spaces between things, between theirlimbs, rather than to the things and limbs themselves. This is a poetic inversionwith implications for both mobile social choreographies and artistic research,for mobile devices manipulate the spaces between people and artistic researchopens entirely new perspectives on materials and relationships.

These perceptual and kinetic exercises echo Borgdorff’s claim that ‘art, byits nature, tends to be antithetical to existing social and cultural structures’, andLilja’s suggestion that ‘tears come first’. This is not a suggestion that artisticresearch is emotional and irrational or that women and dancers have a par-ticular affinity for crying, but that, as she said, ‘the restless and the uneasycontribute to arts research’. Uneasy with what? Drawing the speculation backto the focus on artistic research: uneasy with existing academic paradigms andmethods, at the same time as uneasy with unthinking, uncritical approaches tothe practice of choreography. Choreographers and dancers drawn to research inuniversity contexts often crave something; exhibiting high degrees of skills intheir disciplines, there is a desire to expand, critique, challenge, deepen and

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articulate. Structural openness on the part of an institution combined withrigour is essential for such students to flourish. Negative space is under-definedspace. The space of creative inversion. The place where people go when theywant to change the world. It is a space where dark matter, the unknown sub-stance of the universe, is explored, or as Åsa Unander Scharin wittily put it afterwe had improvised in the studio for half an hour: ‘the dark matter of fact’.

SEEINGMAUVE

With the exploration of social choreographies provided by the Close Encountersworking group, and the rare opportunity to witness the creative processes of agroup of experienced choreographers, it became clear that there is, of necessity,both rigour and poetry to the artistic research process that will certainly notbe exhaustively described in this article. I have attempted to translate some ofthe poetic corporeal processes with the linguistic device of metaphor, as in theuse of dark matter in the previous section. This section evokes colour and anunexpected choreographic side effect of a particular ubiquitous technology todraw this paper to a close and to set up the next current of reflections in thisdomain, by myself and by others.

Without intending to, and without offering ubiquitous computing in itsresearch profile, the building in which the University College of Dance washoused provided a practical and metaphorical example of an idiosyncraticresearch environment. The smart and energy-saving studios had sensorsembedded in the ceiling so that an absence of perceived motion caused thelights to dim. Appropriate for a dance class offering fairly consistent pat-terns of motion, this system had the bizarre impact of causing seated seminarparticipants to take turns to leap up from their chairs and fling their bodiesthrough space to keep the space illuminated. Quite the metaphor for embod-ied thought: the bodies in the space could not relinquish movement for longwithout running the risk of being plunged into darkness. The corporeal andrhythmic patterns produced by this technology were distinct from the chore-ographies fostered by mobile phone usage, indicating another avenue for socialchoreographic analysis.11

11 Ubiquitous computingis a variously definedterm but generallyrefers to computersystems being allaround us (in ourhomes, offices andpublic spaces),anticipating ourneeds andresponding to themoften before werealize we have theseneeds. Thesesystems arefrequently invisible,or embedded inobjects or structures.See Kozel (2011) fora performativeapproach toubiquitouscomputing.

Neither is my approach nostalgic of times before mobile devices and smartstudios, nor am I blindly pro-technological. By calling attention to bodies I amneither calling for a return to the halcyon days of organic existence (becauseI don’t think they existed), nor indicating that technologies are the greatestthings to have ever crossed our paths and got under our skin. Bodies and tech-nologies in cities and in dance studios just are, like the colour mauve. Aminand Thrift cite a wonderful snippet of technological history from the nineteenthcentury that profoundly affected human perception and ideas about the world.New dyes permitted fabrics to be made in the colour mauve: these ‘literallycoloured the urban world in new ways’ (Amin and Thrift 2002: 28). The pres-ence of mauve was not just the stuff of fashion, but ‘promised a new way oflooking at the world’ by adding a new visual register to the streets. Mauve wasfollowed by magenta. Can we imagine losing entire swathes of colour from oururban palette? Can we imagine a world without mobile phones? We might notwant to wear mauve, just as we might not want to carry a phone or use a certainringtone, but these have permanently affected our perceptual and gestural life.

Cities are, without a doubt, places of potential: ‘Each urban moment canspark performative improvisations which are unforeseen and unforeseeable.This is not a naïve vitalism, but it is a politics of hope’ (Amin and Thrift 2002: 4).

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Through the practice of social choreographies (seeing them, critiquing themand shaping them), choreographers can provide a more complete articulationof the corporeal and choreographic layer to this politics of hope.12 We can also

12 Amin and Thriftcoined the phrase‘politics of hope’several years priorto the 2008campaign of UnitedStates PresidentBarack Obama(recall that thisphrase became keyto his platform),prompting theobservation that asocialchoreographicanalysis of hiscampaign and hispresidency’sextensive strategicuse of mobile mediaand socialnetworking wouldbe compelling.

expand the awareness and the range of our own artistic research methods. Thesmall hiatus between performance (of a task, of a choreography) and attentionto performance is where research takes root. The rest is an articulation based onthis moment of perception. As choreographers, we do not have to step out ofour bodies, out of our practices, out of our ways of being in the world in orderto do research. We are already doing research. As dancers, we are not forcedto step outside of our bodies to use our mobile devices. They are embodiedtechnologies of touch and contact, and if they are not yet performing the waywe would like them to then we can try to make them more corporeal so, byhow we use them in our lives and our art.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper was completed during a residency at La Chartreuse: CentreNationale pour Ecriture et Performance in Avignon, France with the supportof an Odyssée grant from ACCR, the European network of Cultural Centres.An earlier, shorter version appeared as ‘Social Choreographies’ in the docu-mentation of the artistic gathering at the University College of Dance, CloseEncounters – Artists on Artistic Research, published by the University College ofDance, Stockholm 2008.

REFERENCES

Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift (2002), Cities: Reimagining the Urban, Cambridge:Polity Press.

Denzin, Norman K. (2003), Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and thePolitics of Culture, Thousand Oaks, CA, London, and New Delhi: SagePublications.

Derrida, Jacques (2000), Le toucher, Jean Luc Nancy, Paris: Editions Galilée.Dunne, Anthony (2006), Hertzian Tales, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Gibson, William (2008), Spook Country, San Francisco: Berkeley Trade.Green, Jesse (2006), ‘At the New JetBlue Terminal, Passengers May Pirouette

to Gate’, Accessed October 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/arts/dance/28gree.html?ex=1306468800&en=5ec14242e7e22c12&ei= 5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Guattari, Felix (1995), Chaosmosis, Sydney: Feral.Hansen, Lone Koefoed and Susan Kozel (2007), ‘Embodied Imagination:

A Hybrid Method of Designing for Intimacy’, Digital Creativity, 18:4,pp. 207–20.

Kozel, Susan (2007), Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, Cam-bridge, MA: The MIT Press.

——— (2008), ‘Social Choreographies’, in Close Encounters – Artists on ArtisticResearch, Stockholm: University College of Dance.

——— (2010a), ‘The Virtual and the Physical: A Phenomenological Approachto Performance Research’, in M. Biggs and H. Karlsson (eds), The RoutledgeCompanion to Research in the Arts, London and New York: Routledge.

——— (2011, forthcoming), ‘Sinews of Ubiquity: A Corporeal Ethics for Ubiq-uitous Computing’, in Ulrik Ekman (ed.), Throughout: Art and Culture

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Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, Cambridge MA, and New York: TheMIT Press.

Latour, Bruno (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, New York and London:Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964), ‘Eye and Mind’, in James M. Edie (ed.), ThePrimacy of Perception (trans. Carlton Dallery). Evanston: NorthwesternUniversity Press, pp. 159–90.

——— (1968), The Visible and the Invisible (trans. Alphonso Lingis) Evanston:Northwestern University Press.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Kozel, S. (2010), ‘Mobile social choreographies: Choreographic insight asa basis for artistic research into mobile technologies’, International Jour-nal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 6: 2, pp. 137–148, doi: 10.1386/padm.6.2.137_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Susan Kozel is a dancer and writer and is Professor of New Media with theMEDEA Collaborative Media Institute at the Malmö University, Sweden, andis Director of Mesh Performance Practices. Her performances and installationshave toured internationally and she has published widely. She is the author ofCloser: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, published by MIT Press.

Contact: Professor of New Media, MEDEA Collaborative Media Institute,Malmo University, Sweden.

E-mail: [email protected]

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Documents

Mobile social choreographies: Choreographic insight as a basis for artistic research into mobile technologies