Dancing Together Apart

Abstract

At a time when the Choreographic takes on a renewed sense of possibility as we adapt to the rhythms of an epidemiological model of society, dances of remediation, that collapse the distinction between interpersonal and infrastructural modes of sensing the world, offer, we argue, possibilities for perceiving and making sense of our changing lifeworld's (Bratton 2022). In this writing, we reflect upon an artistic research project that composed choreographic relations between corporeal, perceptual, conceptual, and informational modes, bringing attention to the expressive possibilities of attuning to, and regulating each other, even at a distance. Mental Dance involved multiple agents shaping states of distributed attention across physical and digital networks. In choreographing the work, we drew upon current neuroscientific research into the Bayesian Brain and Predictive Coding. Whilst applying such an approach to consciousness may appear systematic, even mechanistic in providing a model of how the brain processes information, our interest as researchers and performing artists lay in creating the conditions whereby we could test the limits of corporeal freedom within the parameters of an experiment across disciplinary spaces during viral times. Embracing brain-based computational psychiatry eschewed more familiar pyscho-somatic approaches embedded in psychoanalytic methods, opening a new paradigm for mediated performance. Mental Dance explored the intersection of dance, interactive sound design and psychiatry through a unique performance system that blended diverse 'mental spaces'. Hagendoorn (2019) describes 'mental spaces' as 'temporary thought assemblies that are constructed as one thinks and speaks' (756). In our project diverse languages of movement and music were remediated through AI and the flux of somatic attention expressed by two live performers. Realtime data generated by the dancers' movements and tracked by AI pose recognition software shaped a choreosonic environment for an online audience (Brown 2021). Our artistic research method drew upon dancers' intuitive kinesthetic and haptic sensory awareness and AI's capacity to learn, together with an appropriation of theories of the Bayesian Brain. Staging provocations from neuroscientific research and psychiatry, we mimicked the idea of the clinic as a site for soma-sci experimentation. In generating an empathic performance system that addressed relational intimacy and neural resonance at a distance, we navigated the uncertainty and unpredictability of repeated lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia, countering despair and ennui with the excitement and challenge of connecting through remote co-presence. In Dancing Together Apart, we probe the wiring of relations and the igniting of ideas that sparked this collaborative performance and propose choreosonic improvisation as a method to bring current neuroscientific research into the virtual studio where it can inform and influence the direction of new work and cultivate an altered state of kinetic intensities held between agencies, human and non-human.