Rehearsals for Mirrors

Monday, I'm leaving for Puebla, Mexico, to participate in the PERFORMÁTICA festival. Kristin and I are staging a dance/multimedia piece called "The Mirror Has Six Billion Faces," which will be danced by Cari Cunningham and Rick Southerland. There's a brief article about the piece in the UNR Nevada News.


The piece was inspired by an article in the New York Review of Books, which discusses, among other things, the recent discovery of "mirror neurons":

The importance of body image and motor activity for perception, physical movement, and thought is suggested by the recent discovery of "mirror neurons" by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues. They observed that the neurons that fired when a monkey grasped an object also fired when the monkey watched a scientist grasp the same object. The monkey apparently understood the action of the experimenter because the activity within its brain was similar when the monkey was observing the experimenter and when the monkey was grasping the object. What was surprising was that the same neurons that produced "motor actions," i.e., actions involving muscular movement, were active when the monkey was perceiving those actions performed by others.

The "rigid divide," Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia write in their new book, Mirrors in the Brain,

between perceptive, motor, and cognitive processes is to a great extent artificial; not only does perception appear to be embedded in the dynamics of action, becoming much more composite than used to be thought in the past, but the acting brain is also and above all a brain that understands.

We can recognize and understand the actions of others because of the mirror neurons; as Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia write, this understanding "depends first of all on our motor neurons."[5] Our abilities to understand and react to the emotions of others may depend on the brain's ability to imitate the neuronal activity of the individual being observed.

These are some photos from an early rehearsal. Some of the work was developed through exercises where the dancers mirrored each others' movements. It was a strangely intense experience for them. Particularly in the beginning, they were sensitive to moments where one person seemed to be "leading" the mirroring activity, and their subjectivity seemed to be spilling over the mirror line. Hopefully some of those destabilizing qualities will be activated by the finished piece.




The rehearsals, at UNR, took place in an appropriately mirrored studio. Three walls (and even the plate for the light switch) are mirrored, providing melting glimpses of infinitude.

Fractured Phobia

Melissa Swanson's BFA show, "Atychiphobia," opened today. The show featured prints, animation, and installation pieces composed of dried rose petals.


The prints hanging on the wall were "reduction prints" -- which also go by the name "suicide prints," if the printmaker is in a black humor mood. The printing block is gouged for the first color, then gouged away further for the second color, and so on, until eventually getting whittled down for the final pass. It's a bit of a tightrope process, since there's no going back. The block has to get killed for you to reach the end of the print.




For Melissa, the technique is tied to the show's title, which means "fear of failure." As Melissa put it, "Atychiphobia" isn't your everyday run-of-the-mill fear of failure -- the kind of fear everyone has, "the same way everyone has a fear of falling out of an airplane" -- but rather, it's a paralyzing fear. A fear so pronounced, it negates the ability to even try. Because if you try, there's that chance you'll fail, and then it will be confirmed: you really weren't good enough. It's better to not even put that on the table.




The floor of the gallery was strewn with rose petals that had images or words printed on them. They crunched nicely underfoot.



Three sheets of rose petals had been sewn together and printed on; at the opposite end of the gallery there was an animation, composed of several printed rose petals that had been scanned before they were discarded for the floor. The same image was printed on several petals, and the animation ran through the printed petals frame by frame: the repeated image remained fairly stable, while the rose petal forms themselves flickered out around them, their veined textures leaving faint impressions on the eyeball as they ran headlong through the projector. The printed imagery revolved around forms of birds and cages. Their silhouettes pulsed with a kind of brittle insistence.

David Hall Snaps

A few random sights around the art bldg a few days ago:

birds on wires

powerlinerflyers from wes johnson on Vimeo.

This is worth clicking thru for the HD version.

Mirror Scrap

It was interesting to see Mickey's disturbingly symmetrical portraits in the Junior Art Portfolio (see some of the pics in the blog post below) -- I've been playing around with some symmetrical concepts for a multimedia/dance performance piece I'll be staging in Puebla, Mexico in about a week, with Kristin as artistic collaborator and Cari Cunningham and Rick Southerland as the dancers. Above is a 5-sec clip of me playing with some live feed interlacing of video; the performance will include both live and pre-recorded clips that will fracture and combine the dancers' bodies.

Pictures at a Junior Portfolio Review: Spring 09

A partial list of topics broached:

The dilapidation of the Ponderosa Ranch
The limits of symmetry as an index of beauty
Urban vs. Rural
Freudian ambush of subject matter
Alzheimer's attack on memory
The egg pods left by Skates
Athleticism and Art
The potentially problematic adoption of cultural signifiers