Tracing electronic gesture : a poetics of mediated movement
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Focusing on the choreographic coupling of human embodiment and digital media in new media art of the 21st century, this study traces a poetics of what I call electronic gesture. With such mediated movements, a musician executes exquisite choreographies on digital controllers using performance gestures from classical piano, and a digital technology distills the creative gestures of the eye from the hand, enabling a paralyzed street artist to draw by looking. Analyzing these hybrid human-machine gestures, I map the potential of kinetic engagements of human bodies and new media to generate new forms of sensory experience and creative agency. Reframing longstanding theorizations of the fracturing effects of new media, I argue that it is precisely these qualities that allow digital art to assert presence. Drawing on media theory, performance theory, and histories of technology, I construct a taxonomy of electronic gesture across "classical" arts in different media: writing, drawing, dance, and music. Examining a wide range of works by artists working in different media including dancer Bill T. Jones, cartoonist Lynda Barry, poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, musician Onyx Ashanti, and many others, I demonstrate how such art retroactively theorizes and selectively appropriates dynamic elements of gesture from prior, "analog" forms. Rather than impeding human expression, the digital structure of the bit licenses this borrowing. Underwritten by a conception of the gesturing body as atomized dynamic data, these new media art works and practices bring something of the original choreographic body with them, even as they leave it behind. These gestural samplings of older media forms allow emerging digital art to produce new forms of presence and in so doing, highlight new embodied agencies. Encompassing different mediations of gesture, from practices of inscription, gesture as signmaking and markmaking, to movement in recorded and live performance, my analysis moves across the whole art system. It traces how digital media quicken, remediate, morph or otherwise alter these existing mediations. Examining experimental new media such as electronic poetry, virtual dances created with digital motion capture and musical "controllerism, " I analyze the dynamics of distributed creative agency across electronic gesture. I demonstrate how, across media, both human and digital actors collaborate in these creative gestures. Ultimately, I show how our gestures invent our machines as well as ourselves. Through these artists, this study thus makes visible the complex interplays of human and digital agency, software and hardware, material history and discourse that animate electronic gesture. Performing the poetic affordances of electronic gesture, these artists offer creative dispositions for acting, moving, inventing, and becoming with new media and emergent digital technologies.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Chang, Vanessa Xiuchang |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Primary advisor | Bukatman, Scott, 1957- |
| Primary advisor | Ngai, Sianne |
| Thesis advisor | Bukatman, Scott, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Ngai, Sianne |
| Thesis advisor | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
| Advisor | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Vanessa Xiuchang Chang. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Vanessa Xiuchang Chang
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...