Embodiment and Social Distancing: Projects

“La Maldición de La Corona” is a collective and remote experiment based on William Shakespeare’s classic Macbeth carried out by Fundación Épica La Fura dels Baus during the lockdown. The experiment has involved around thirty creatives who have worked at a certain distance through videoconferencing platforms, and it has result in a pioneering work that transcends technological barriers and investigates the future of theater in times of digital revolutions. Therefore, the aim of this video article is to analyze how the use of virtual platforms have affect creativity in the development of a collective work.

Available for download here: https://doi.org/10.16995/jer.67.s1. [00:10] Why is the use of videoconferencing so exhausting? An analysis on the demands.   Each reconceived concert will exist like chapters of a story frame tale, broadly shaped by narratologies that will be articulated in 1) the production of audiovisual works, 2) the production of technical, artistical and philosophical outcomes that relate to the original work and 3) the development of sharing strategies to disseminate the work pedagogically and commercially.

VIDEO ARTICLE TRANSCRIPT
1) the production of audiovisual works 2) the production of technical, artistical and philosophical outcomes that relate to the original work 3) the development of sharing strategies to disseminate the work pedagogically and commercially.

Egyptian Love Poem in Nihilist Cipher, 2015
The Vortex Decameron tales will nourish from improvised, composed and every step in between contributions, and will start with three tales, the first being a staged version of James Rushford's monodrama for guitarist Egyptian Love Poem in Nihilist Cipher. The metaphoric solitude of this work takes a queer fifteenth-century Egyptian love poem and codifies it using a Russian cipher. Following this will be a hybrid performance

Internet Art At The Turn Of The Millennium
Tina La Porta This body of work spans from 1994-2005, during this time I made over twenty webbased works that explored the idea of "live-ness" on the internet.
If you live with a mental illness, then the concept of social distancing and self isolation is nothing new to you. For many, however, it is. The global arts community is responding to this time of distancing by shifting online via social media and the internet for digital connectivity and gathering.
In 1999 I launched a web-specific artwork titled Distance. In this work I explored the use of web cams to meet the desire for connectivity. These screenbased connections preceedded our current mobile means of communication.
The internet was still an emerging medium impacting our culture.

Internet based communication continued to be the focus of my works
Remote_corp@REALities, dystopia mix, distance in real-time: eye to the ear remix and no access!. "cu-see me" was the popular web cam application during Y2K, which included text-based real-time chat. These works incorporated images and text taken from cu-see me as well as sound made from faceto-face interviews with artists and students working with these emerging technologies. Forms inviting remote user interaction were also incorporated into the work asking questions such as "What does distance mean to you?" and "Does technology bring us closer or further apart?" In 2001, I wrote in an artist statement that these works have the "combined effect of functioning like an extended online conversation taking place in both real and delayed time, amongst geographically dispersed participants mediated by the surface of their computer screens." The idea of "liveness" on the internet was the primary focus of voyeur_web.
Placing webcams in the home, using technology to reach out to the world, became a phenomenon within the emerging web cam subculture. Staging exhibitionism and inviting voyeurism was the guiding tendency that called "attention to the interplay between the public and private spheres. period is a current concern. How to re-make the work for today's platforms and present the work in physical space are the challenges that I and many artists making work during this time face.
And now, during this time of self-isolation, I see so many arts organizations and individual artists turning to the internet, once again, to reach out to world, engage in dialogue, and distribute their work to a remote, geographically dispersed audience. Fundación Épica is a space for knowledge transfer and mutual learning that promotes a horizontal interaction between Arts, Humanities, Science and Technology. Épica is born out of the knowledge developed throughout more than 40 years of experience by the theatre company La Fura dels Baus. Thanks to its application, the Foundation aims to project a center that reunites the generation of new disruptive ideas through creative projects that allows knowledge transfer to society.
Due to the activities and workshops developed at the Foundation, Epica has implemented a methodology that is based on work in action: beyond the theories and reflections, the knowledge created is based on practice, team work, consolidation and mutual comprehension.
In our workshops, we rely heavily on interacting with specific objects that are free available to the students and participants and help them to constraint possibilities in order to create more interesting and relevant outcomes.
What Hutchins calls "material anchors" for thinking. During our last workshop called "La Maldición de la Corona," we wanted to explore how to address creativity in lockdown. In order to accomplish so, we Escogimos Macbeth por varias razones. Una de las cuales igual es que está libre de derechos, esta es la primera. Segunda, que tiene una estructura dramática muy concreta. Por lo tanto, partimos de una estructura que ayuda a la creación, porque si hubiéramos partido de cero seguramente en dos semanas no nos hubiéramos puesto de acuerdo en qué historia íbamos a contar. En cambio, una historia que ya está explicada lo que sí le podemos dar es una forma especial de cómo explicarla, de cómo contarla.
We chose Macbeth for various reasons. One of which is that it is royalty free, this is the first one. The second one, it has a very specific dramatic structure. Therefore, we started from a structure that helps during creation, because if we had started from scratch surely in two weeks. Instead, with a story that is already explained, we can give it is a special way of explaining it, of how to tell it.
Then, we also chose Macbeth because it had a certain parallel with the fact that we are locked up at home and that it has changed our lives. Something similar happens to Macbeth. He finds himself in a magical fact, and we do not know very well if he imagines so or if there are witches who explain a specific future to him.
Somehow there was a parallel in what we were experiencing. A coronavirus arrived and it absolutely changed our relationships and our way of existing and our way of creating. [Voiceover:] The difficulty of understanding a voice or where voices were coming from was solved in a spontaneous way using visual cues instead, like putting an ear close to the camera to indicate that one cannot hear what the other person is saying, or making a specific greeting in order to be identified. This is something our group has studied in detail while analyzing creative processes in choreographies and it was interesting to see similar patterns here.
[… Can you hear me? Lluis? … ohhh … Yes. Pedro, we can hear you … I think

Lluis has jumped off]
Another relevant solution was turning abstract concepts into spatial metaphors, as we see analyzed in George Lakoff studies of embodied linguistics. In this video fragment we see first how the concept of disconnection is turned into "jumping" a character, and how YouTube channels become "rooms" for performance rehearsal. In a similar vein, windows that normally represent participants, are labelled as G1, G2, etc.
indicating "rooms" in which the different groups present their parts of the performances in specific group videoconferences.
We have shown how digital media can be reconceptualized by means of cognitive metaphors to turn the eerie conditions of digital media while working in groups to turn what can be named such as a panoptic object like a teleconference meeting into a "pathologic" one (in Dunne and Raby's sense) that is adapted to the need to reconvert abstract digital elements into virtual equivalents of material anchors. Second wave feminism thought us that the personal political. Third wave feminism in which my research is inscribed made us feel that the personal is constructed by multiple intersections for which in my research, race, gender, ethnicity, and class are being juxtaposed and superposed to give volume to an in-betweenness that is both informed by postcolonial thinkers such as Homi Bhabha and the concept of lieu, space to finally bloom, by Patrick Chamoiseau; but also in-betweenness as being the renegotiation of being in academic spaces, in artistic spaces, and in mothering as a practice.

A. Dunne & F. Raby
Taking another detour to Fleur Summers and Angela Clark back in 2015, articulating challenges of being mother, academic, and artist/Inspired by the labour of performance artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles, early afternoon with Eole or late at night with my partner Jb, we collected the remains (flour, hair, food items, play dough among others) of our everyday performances at home. Gathered them into a ritualistic balayage/sweeping followed by a literal jarring process. We used a broom and a stainless dustpan and emptied the remains into emptied jars that were part of our home Our everyday performances at home suggested how hegemonic dominant scripts may be disrupted, challenged, and transformed through intimate interventions within traditional spaces, collectively reorienting and reconfiguring conversations on how to know/make/nurture differently.
That -needed to carefully pay attention, re-evaluates what making means for me in the context of Covid-19 -inspired by Jenny Odell 2019.
In April 2020, Rinaldo Walcott warns us that during the Covid-19 crisis academics have found themselves in a crisis of their work, acutely noticing that they were far from the reality on the ground. Humbly and collectively attempting to challenge and articulate counter-hegemonic ways of holding conversations, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's term, bringing us back to 2012. We find, we collect, we observe, we jar, I get prepared for when it is safe to meet again and to share embodied knowledge.
My partner Jb, Eole a toddler, as well as the spaces we traverse -all of them participate in the co-making of everyday performances and thus co-produce my PhD research.
We are in an assemblage of kin after Donna Haraway, collectively stocking and freezing archives of a time of social distancing/saving them for later.
My body has never been more covered by touch. In doing so, this research study is revaluing the labour it takes to breath, be, perform together, as I reconsider my environment -co-maker of my research.