made of space

Flowspace 2: the touch surface viewed from below, motion graphics from Impacts above.

Before I get to finish something for the website proper, I wanted to upload some stuff about this installation.

We contributed a piece to the Exhibition Milieux Sonores by Marcus Maeder, which was shown in Zurich at the Walcheturm Artspace in January 2009 and in San Francisco at the Grey Area Foundation for the Arts in September 2010.

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Here’s an abstract of a text I wrote a few years ago. It was published by the SonicActs festival here. This might be of interest if you’re into live-cinema, performative live-visuals (VJing) and abstract cinema in general.

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»To be a body, is to be tied to a certain world, [...]  our body is not primarily in space: it is of it.«
Merleau-Ponty – Phenomenology of Perception

this citation has been following me around for a while now. it even graces my website’s front page. of course the meaning of this fragment is hard to grasp without the connection to it’s original text.

»The main areas of my body are devoted to actions, and participate in their value, and asking why common sense makes the head the seat of thought raises the same problem as asking how the organist distributes, through ‘organ space’, musical significances. But our body is not merely an expressive space among the rest, for that is simply the constituted body. It is the origin of the rest, expressive movement itself, that which causes them to begin to exist as things, under our hands and eyes. Although our body does not impose definite instincts upon us from birth, as it does upon animals, it does at least give to our life the form of generality, and develops our personal acts into stable dispositional tendencies. In this sense our nature is not long-established custom, since custom presupposes the form of passivity derived from nature. The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life , and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to their figurative meaning, it manifests through them a core of new significance: this is true of such motor habits such as dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body’s natural means; it must then build itself an instrument and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world.«

MP Phenomenology of Perception (PP) Routledge Classics, 2002, London) p. 169

This quote from MP’s PP holds many clues to the embodied cognition perception issues visible in music and instrumental performance.