Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (review)

Here the reference to Freud is important in that when, in the Studies on Hysteria, he asked his patients to describe what they saw, the images disappeared in the course of their very description. So the description was an instrument for making the images return but at the same time for making them disappear, since what happened was that the description substituted itself for the image.

(Damisch in Bois, Hollier, and Kraus 1998, 12)

To judge by the many attestations found in Closer:Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, Susan Kozel believes passionately in the centrality of the human body in the world. Her attention "to a cyclical corporealizing of the thought of our predecessors" stems from an undoctrinaire approach to phenomenology and phenomenologists, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In Kozel's case, such an approach, or lack of one, allows her an interpretative freedom to explore "the performative experience of particular configurations of technologies." The performing body in and with technology lies at the center of her concerns as an author and a performer. Nor should this come as a surprise, considering that her primary identity, prior to writing this book, has been as a dancer, or as a performance artist who makes extensive use of dance and choreography in her performance work—work that combines or brings into interaction dance performances with aspects of new media technologies. This book extensively describes and illustrates her combinatory dance and technology practices.

In a section of chapter 3, "Strange Meanderings: An Embodied Poetics," Kozel describes trajets:

an installation with bodies moving in moving structures. A convergence of people, robotics, and computer sensing, it is an example of full-body human-computer interaction. Although not a game, people play in it; although not a performance, there is an element of performativity; although not VR, it is immersive. It is a fluid space, a space of interactivity inspired by the kinesthetic trajectories of dancing bodies, as such it has its own poetics, structures of meaning, and social interactions.

(178)

Such a prose style, one that cites proliferations of things referenced through lists of nouns and qualifying adjectives, occurs throughout the book. For example:

This initiative along with the increasing array of wearables projects that engineer innovative convergences among biometrics, fashion, performance, and design of smart wireless devices, finds itself within a contentious political domain: that of biometric tagging, public and private surveillance, and the acquisition storage and interpretation of personal data by governments and corporations, all in the interests of that ethical and political black hole called national security.

(272)

In chapter 4, Kozel discusses her work in motion capture performance—a tool used in CGI movie animation, most famously in the character of Gollum, performed by actor Andy Serkis in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In film, the digital description of the body in motion results in the disappearance of the literal or representational image of the body in favor of a form of animation. In Kozel's performance, the body also disappears, as projections of her dancing form overwhelm her actual physical being. Light traces against the screen dissolve the corporeality she insists upon in her theorizations. Similarly in chapter 5, Kozel describes the effects of wearables, i.e., technological apparatus that attach to the body and perform as extensions of its perceptual or reactive faculties. Kozel claims that these wearables insert affective states into the wearees, thus making them more tuned in to that which otherwise could not be sensed without technological enhancement.

These various practices of the physical and purported affective enhancement of the performing body do several things. First, they insert the body in the tradition of filmic projection, particularly its experimental use by French and American avant-garde visual artists in the late 1960s. Then, the effects of dematerialization gained through projection are used to criticize a society increasingly overwhelmed and controlled by mass media and the commodification of contemporary life. Put another way, the use of film in artistic practices self-consciously manipulates...