Constant Surveillance?

After our discussion last class I was left wondering if we are ever not being watched.
Are we under constant surveillance? I don’t mean to sound paranoid but I think there is always some sort of surveillance going on, whether it be from an outside source or internal. With this constant surveillance then comes constant judgment; from others but mostly from ourselves. The harshest judgments often come from within. So then in regards to the structure of the “panopticon” if we are watching ourselves would the tower be located within the cell itself? Or is the cell in the tower? We are simultaneously in the tower and in the cell? I think that it is difficult to make a distinction between the watcher and the one being watched. It is difficult to assign one role because we are constantly functioning under both. We cannot escape being watched because we are in the end watching ourselves, probably more than any one else is watching us to begin with.

Kunst und Wunderkammer

1655 Museum Wormianum

cabinet of curiosities
aka
art (kunst) and (und) wonder (wonder) cabinet (kammer)

Anatomy Theatre

Leiden Anatomy Theatre circa 1610

The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella

It is divided into seven rings... the higher and lower walls of the city to be adorned with the finest pictures, and to have all the sciences painted upon them in an admirable manner.
1602 The City of the Sun

Memory Theatre of Guillo Camillo

They say that this man has constructed a certain amphitheatre, a work of wonderful skill, into which whoever is admitted as a spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero...The work is of wood,marked with many images, and full of little boxes; there are various orders and grades in it. He gives a place to each individual figure and ornament.
1532 letter from Vigilus to Erasmus

Insect-icon

Hi there, everyone. So I saw this exhibit by Huang Yong Ping when I was living in Vancouver, BC last year. His work deals a lot with power & dynamics, within people, society, cultures etc... It just struck me that this particular work is quite the representation of the panopticon, primarily in structure, but also because it contains live insects that are aware they are being observed, but not of the meaning/consequences/idea of the observation... because, you know, they're insects! There was a huge controversy over this showing - the Humane Society was concerned re. its ethical validity, if correct care being taken of the insects, etc. These images should give an idea of what it looked like:



Image:
Huang Yong Ping, Theater of the World, from Theater of the World--Bridge Is Theater of the World an insect zoo? A test site where various species of the natural world devour one another? A space for observing the activity of “insects”? An architectural form as a closed system? A cross between a panopticon and the shamanistic practice of keeping insects? A metaphor for the conflicts among different peoples and cultures? Or, rather, a modern representation of the ancient Chinese character gu¹? —HYP

1. Composed of three insects superimposed upon a plate, the character gu means vicious things or evil spells.

Also: Huang’s Theater of the World (1993) takes one of its clear references from Bentham’s panopticon, its radial arrangement of cells strikingly resembling Bentham’s description. (See also BESTIARY, GU, and XUANWU.) There is, however, no central observation tower. The main space [where the observer stands], in fact, more closely resembles that of a coliseum or an amphitheater. The activation of the work—living animals and insects left to a gladiatorial relationship of slay or die—indeed resembles the theater of spectacle of a Roman or Neoclassical kind rather than the disciplinary institutions of modern society. One possible closer representation may be Coup d’oeil du Théâtre de Besançon by French Neoclassical architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1804). Thus, Huang’s own panopticon may very well be an inverse of Foucault’s contention of the modernity of our social experience: “We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism...Huang sees the expansive, simultaneously modern and antimodern potential of this metaphor when he reads his own work as “a cross between a panopticon and the shamanistic practice of keeping insects.” ” (See http://visualarts.walkerart.org/oracles/details.wac?id=2229&title=Lexicon for further references to Panopticon, Foucault, etc).

The power (and pitfalls) of watching/mirrors...

Hey guys,
Rose Anne passed this on to me, but i thought you might find it interesting.

http://www.charactermotion.com/gallery/index.html

It's a motion-capture based form of choreography technology (similar to the "Life Forms" program that Merce uses) but really designed from a ballet standpoint.

If you go to the website, you can download a 20-day free trial of it, which is pretty cool. As i was playing around with it, it struck me as a really interesting extension of part of the reading for this week.

Randy Martin spoke to the dancers relationship with the mirror a great deal, noting that "the culture of the mirror" (162) dictates a progressive evolution through the class, where the dancers at first is very dependent on the mirror and wedded to the process of self-correcting via mimesis. However, as Martin notes, through the class the dancer must separate themselves more and more from the mirror if they truly want to move, or as he says, "when [movement is] generalized from the mirror to appear anywhere, what allows dancers to 'attack' the movement, in the sense of moving as if they already had the authority or approval of correctness that they sought." (162)

This idea of having to progress from the visual to the visceral to find the authority over the movement struck me again when playing with my demo of the dance forms program. To me (and this is of course me as a dancer who is more used to classes without mirrors than with, and doesn't use the mirror at all to choreograph) it felt that the attempt to set movement visually on a form (form especially - because the program doesn't ascribe to the reality of what bodies can and can't do, it lacks humanness) was somehow missing the point. For a ballet, fine. To play around with, fine. But for making modern choreography? My modern choreography?
The word that I kept coming up with was lie. While i can see the value of a program like this, especially for aging choreographers such as Merce, it just felt so wrong for my body and my mind.

Again, that returned me to Randy Martin's analysis of the mirror-based class structure, and left me wanting his analysis on non-mirror classes. Personally, I feel that class devoid of mirrors allows the mind to accept that all of the class is "the dancing part" and continually reminds me to disassemble the hierarchies of what is "dance" and what is "technique", but I would love to get an outside view on it.

We talked a lot in class today about panoptic structures, but we only touched on how these affect performer and viewer.

As a performer, I know I am being watched (or at least there is that potential.) Usually, I can only see a few audience members, if any, but I know they are there watching. In that sense, it must be like being in a cell in the panopticon, albeit with a difference of intention. I am performing because I choose to, the prisoner or patient or pupil does not have a choice.

I think for the most part, the audience is happy when they are invisible; it is comfortable to observe without being noticed. I equate this to the popular past time of people-watching. I feel perfectly at ease staring at interesting people until they stare back. As an audience member, my invisibility has been a comfort; I could yawn, roll my eyes, fall asleep, smile, laugh, cry and keep these actions more or less to myself. Even when I have been asked to participate in the performance by reading, waving, or closing my eyes, I do not feel highly visible because of the structure of the stage.

Panopticism

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon is pictured here. The plan consists of a ring of cells built around a central tower from which all the cells can be seen. Foucault writes, "They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible." Visibility, as Meghan noted in class, makes one take responsibility for their own subjection.

He who is subjected to the field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play simultaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. Discipline and Punish 202

This assembly is a dance technology. On April 28th and 29th 2007 Martha Williams directed and performed in a dance installation entitled Stacked, converting an out of business clothing store into a surveillance menagerie. Each dancer took residence in one of a dozen changing rooms which they themed and designed the interiors of. In the main room camera feeds from each room were composed and projected so that all of the dances could be seen at once.

The geometry of the panoptic (one seeing many) inverts that of spectacle (many seeing one). For example, compare the structure of the Panopticon to that of the Globe Theater.
Lets investigate how architectures of performance and surveillance resonate against each other.

In each system:

1. what travels/flows from the center to the periphery?
2. what travels/flows from the periphery to the center?
3. how does visibilty/invisibility effect each of these flows?

In general:

1. identify a contemporary structure or phenomenon with panoptic features
   
2. find another way to structurally or functionally invert the panopticon
3. find another way to structurally or functionally invert the theater/arena

Remember to be thoughtful in your response. You never know who is watching our blog.

Motion Active Recording

Here is a clean version of the patch we worked on together. This machine records when their is motion and stops when there is no movement. It captures only the changes. This is an effective surveillance technology. In the comments section you will find the code.

Copy the code into the computer's "Clipboard" like you were going to copy and paste the text.

Open up MMJ and goto File:New_from_Clipboard

There's your patch. Press "esc" for full screen. Play with it.

Record a dance.

Use jit.submatrix or jit.scissors or jit.split just upstream of "motion_detector" in order to make only part of the screen motion sensitive.

Record a dance with your mutated system.

The Slip

Locating dance within Foucault's framework of docility is both difficult and provocative. In attempting to pin dance to this trellis it becomes apparent that dance is slippery and cannot be easily categorized. It is clear however that discipline and dance are deeply entangled. Natasha spots this in the body of the soldier.

These men of the 17th-late 18th centuries were molded into figures with upright postures, programmed steps and structured attitudes; compare to ballet, especially, where all of these are instructed from an early age. Even the goals are similar - achieving honour and respect (of movement), grace, alertness, agility and strength. The quote on pg. 136: "A body that is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved", is applicable to any dance class or performance, even improvisational. We are constantly subjecting our bodies to our aspirations and limitations, using the body and our knowledge to further its abilities for the task at hand, transforming it (whether in attitude or structure) to execute movements and improving it for the short-term goals and the long-term benefits.

Foucault opens his section on docile bodies with a reading of Montgommery's 1636 military manual La Milice francaise. It's description of the dancerly pikeman, who 'will have have to march in step in order to have as much grace and gravity as possible' resonates with Thoinot Arbeau's dance manual Orchesographie. Written less than 50 years earlier, it had illustrated the strong linkages between choreography in the court and on the battlefield.

Thinking that making a dancer is just another instance of creating a docile subject (be it a soldier, factory worker, school child, or mental patient) can be uncomfortable to say the least. Janet points out how subtle power mechanisms can operate to form the subject.

For example the idea of coercion - that the power structure is being so fully and well imposed because of the fact that it's being slipped in the back door, so to speak. "Small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious," (p. 139). It's not being beaten into people, it's "proper" execution is being rewarded. It is being made convenient. I think that these ideas have a very great relationship to the more "open" versions of modern and contemporary dance technique. Even when we are not working from highly stylized and codified techniques, we are still being instructed by a teacher, being ordered into levels, being auditioned for placement and so on. Therefore if we are properly disciplined in WHATEVER is the "proper" kind of "technique" (even if that is merely a general body awareness?), we are being subject to a certain power structure based on WHO decided what is "proper".

We are inside a discipline machine with all of the spatial and temporal markers Foucault describes. This class demonstrates that. A component of the dance {1,2}/3 or graduate study in the department of dance at Sarah Lawrence College. The class is physically located in a distinct place within a time table. The time and space within the class is also divided and in doing so controls the physical activities of the participant bodies. Some stand, some sit, some on the floor, some on chairs, some speak, some erase, some write and some read. We move inside the computer for a spell. Then there is time and space designated for dancing. Our bodies and activities are seem well placed within space, time and the structure of the academy.



But, Sarah Rosner pushes back with a contrarian maneuver.

I think the thing that hit me most about the idea of discipline via the control of movements is how much i DIDN'T feel like it applied to my experience of dance.

And Sarah Richison voices related discontent, but finds in it a contradiction.

say you revolt. are no longer docile. escape from prison. you find some way to do some other dance. so you move off and do your own thing and someone follows you. someone wants to do your dance. are you then the new discipline? yes. you have manipulated their body, right.

For those of you who were looking for straight answers I fear that we have none. Instead we are left with a set of contradictions and a general understanding that dance is slippery, at times obedient and located, at other times disobedient and dislocated.

Here are one, two, three, four dances, two made inside the institution and two made outside. Dissect them with regards to this contradiction between dance's discipline and disruption.