Numero-graphies: Concepts and Functions for Digital Dance

Summary of the proposed manuscript and of its main contribution

A body is a machine. In fact, ‘a body’ is never (only) a human body, ‘a machine’ is
never (only) a technological application, and the static, perennial character of ‘being’
is always doubled by the temporality of ‘becoming’. To say that a body is a machine,
therefore, does not actually require any essential identification, but only the
recognition of a creative individuation. In other words, when we talk of the
‘machinic’ nature of bodies, what we foreground is their incipient creativity: a
creative potential that is not simply a prerogative of the human subject, and that is not
reducible to a chaotic spontaneity or an indefinite, vague sensation. In the language of
cybernetics, the appearance of novelty (creativity) is linked to a process that oscillates
between complexity and rational calculation: the new emerges when a multiplicity of
connections is compressed into a new ‘unit’ or ‘occasion’ of experience. Adopting the
cybernetic terminology, we can define the creative act as “a computational modeling
of "interactive" shapings and reshapings of ... energetic boundaries between
communicative agents - not all of whom need be human.” (Pfohl, 1997) Under this
light, germs of creativity start to appear everywhere, all the time, even where we
would not expect them to be (for example, ‘in the body of a computer’), in a
complexly suggestive cybernetic imaginary.

We are now at a juncture where most creative forms are being developed through a
mobilization of digital technologies. Digital technology is often wrongly associated
with notions of disembodiment and virtuality. This book sets out a conceptual
analysis of the virtual as an abstract field of potential that is the experiential condition
for all actual bodies, movements, things. Avoiding the virtual/digital and the
digital/disembodied equations, the aim of the book is to unravel the non-coincidence
but also the productive relation between digitalization and virtuality. A new
conceptual vocabulary is needed in order to work beyond the phenomenological
schema of a natural bodily realm coming before cultural and technical apparatuses,
but also to open up pre-determined notions of digital interaction, communication and
computation, connecting them with a new cybernetics of the virtual. The proposed
book project offers a possible delineation of such a vocabulary, presenting it as a
theoretical basis for digital culture and art, and for a re-consideration of digital
technology in its open, potential aspects. Intervening in the specific field of digitalized
dance, the aim of this book is to overcome the opposition between the continuous,
fluid quality of organic movements and the discreet, syncopated nature of
technological processes. I consider this an exercise in the rethinking of rhythm. This
re-thinking is crucial not only to critically analyze digital dance, but also, more
generally, to explore the working of technology and to address the digitalization of
aesthetics and philosophy as an important paradigm shift of our age. In the early
twentieth century, the philosopher William James already addressed the issue of
experience and its rhythm in a very interesting way. In his philosophy of radical
empiricism, everything that is experienced, either continuous or discrete, either
individual term or in-between relation, must find a place, suggesting that experience
can alternatively be connoted by its fluid or syncopated character, according to what
is at stake. This approach seems even more timely in our digital days, when the main
ontological suggestion seems to be the possible digitalization, and therefore the
possible cutting of the whole material world, into discrete bits of information.

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In the history of philosophy, thinkers such as Plato, Leibniz, Bergson, James,
Whitehead have led the way toward a thinking of the continuity/discontinuity (or, in
the same sense, of the bodily sensation / rational thought) relation, developing a line
of thought that has been taken up but also re-invented, in different ways, by
contemporary thinkers such as Shaviro, Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi. Drawing on
these thinkers, this project overcomes the old philosophical controversy between
continuity/discontinuity as two opposed aspects alternately prevailing in the most
ancient world views but also in most contemporary philosophical and aesthetic
conceptions, transforming this binarism into a necessity for different terminological
emphases. Discreteness, in other words, appears as the key word of this project, not as
an ontological ‘truth’ about the world in its entirety, but as a fundamental concept or
idea in relation to the philosophical thinking of technical digitalization.

The philosophical thread of this project unravels itself along the analysis of digitalized
dance in its main forms. The book is divided into three chapters dedicated to the most
important experimentations in the field: dance on screen (alternatively called ‘dance
for the camera’), Motion Capture of dance performances, and the use of the Dance
Forms software for choreographic composition. The first chapter looks at Loie
Fuller’s Serpentine Dance as the first example of dance on screen, going through
Maya Deren’s short dance films and through modern electronic dance videos by Nam
June Paik, to end with a particular genre of contemporary digital videochoreography
(or ‘mathematical montage’) exemplified by young video makers Davide Pepe and
Antonin De Bemels. These examples will be discussed through Whitehead’s and
Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptions of image, perception and thought, and through
Bergson’s ideas on the image, movement and time. The second chapter explores
examples of Motion Capture and its cutting of dance gestures into digital bits, in
contemporary performances by artists such as the Openended Group, or in William
Forsythe’s website “Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced”; here,
Whitehead’s concept of ‘atomization’ and Deleuze’s concept of the ‘cut’ will be
related via Leibniz’s thoughts on movement, binary arithmetic and infinitesimal
calculus. The third chapter focuses on the passage from old numerical notation
systems to the use of the choreographic software Dance Forms by choreographer
Merce Cunningham; in this case, Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari’s views on
numbers and quantification will be interwoven through the work of mathematician
Gregory Chaitin, and his ideas on the infinity of mathematics and digitalization.

The main contribution of Numero-graphies. Concepts and Functions for Digital

Dance is philosophical. More precisely, the aim is to draw a connection between
philosophy, choreography and science, in the light of a more speculative interest for
the creativity of thought. In this context, digital technology is considered as the
concrete application of a scientific thought: the ‘computer as an idea’, or a digital
tendency of thought; in the same way, choreography is considered not only as a
‘scientific’ form of art based on the deployment of geometric and physical,
physiological and mathematical functions, but also as a particular way to
conceptualize, or ‘algorithmically think’, movement and dance. I am not a
choreographer or a scientist myself, and this book will not be exploring the direct
applications of how a choreographer or a scientist thinks; instead, I will take these
examples as occasions for a thinking which is more philosophical, or conceptual.
What interests me in the choreography/science (or dance/technology) relation is the
possibility of ‘thinking’ thought as the manifestation of a tendency towards

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‘abstraction’; in this sense, abstraction should be understood not as a transcendental
stream of the mind, but as the material ‘extraction’ of creative units (‘noumena’) from
the (phenomena) of the real, and as the re-alignment, assemblage or ‘montage’, the re-
combination of these units as concrete objects of thought (i.e. as philosophical
concepts, digital algorithms or dance steps). In this sense, the book takes as its point
of departure the concept that is at the basis of the Technologies of Lived Abstraction
series: “What moves as a body returns as a movement of thought.” By addressing the
undoing and the creative ‘re-doing’ of dichotomies such as thought/body or
abstract/concrete, this project conceptually matches one of the main purposes of the
series, while contributing to it with the creation of new, original concepts to be
connected with the dance/technology practice. The creation of new concepts of
‘rhythm’, ‘sensation’ and ‘thought’ will in its turn foreshadow the possibility of new
emerging techniques and practices in other fields (such as cinema or, more in general,
the digitalization of visual and sound art), addressing itself to an interdisciplinary
audience. At the same time, the book also aspires to provide a contribution to the
study of both new media and dance, by more directly talking to those people in these
fields who are interested in developing a way to ‘think through’ their practices.

Context of the research

The frequency and proliferation of dance and technology experiments is a relatively
recent phenomenon. Throughout many years of experimentation, the development of
a series of increasingly tight interchanges between dancing bodies and multiple
machines of digital manipulation has been generating a particular confusion about the
respective essences and positions of the ‘live’ and the ‘mediated’, a confusion directly
springing from a binary body-mind separation, and involving choreographers, dancers
and spectators alike. What the technical and analytical critiques of this genre often fail
to provide is a set of alternative conceptual tools to analyze this machinic conjunction
in its creativity, because they are all mainly based on pre-established
phenomenological possibilities defined by the biological determination of human
movement and creativity, in relation to the limited coldness of the technology. In this
context, a work that I think will be very influential in fostering important debates in
dance and visual studies and in pointing towards new directions in these fields, is Erin
Manning’s book Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. The book responds to
the need for a critical reflection on the virtuality of movement as an attention for what
is to come, rather than for what has already been determined, accomplished,
performed. The proposed book project shares with Manning’s research some of its
fundamental conceptual underpinnings (such as the interest for a philosophical
conceptualization of dance, the notion of the body as a ‘machine’, but more
importantly the idea of rhythm as an experienced event connected to the dimension of
‘what is yet to come’). At the same time, a different point of departure distinguishes
the approaches of the two books: while, for Manning, everything starts from the
experience of movement, and the potential influence of technology can only be
evaluated in its capacity to alter our perception of spacetime, in my work the central
question is that of numbers and their capacity to generate new kinds of experience,
focusing on the numerical functioning of technology and its delineation of new
experiential parameters.

Luciana Parisi is another thinker whose research on digital technology and its relation
to the body and perception is central in the context of my book. Parisi’s work focuses
on the ‘weirdness’ of mathematics and the potential of numbers to generate novelty,

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and therefore on the creative aspects of the digital code in relation to practices such as
bio-technology or architectural design. The influence of these two thinkers on my
own work, and at the same time the differences existing between their respective key
concepts (movement and lived experience, as opposed to a numerical concept of the
virtual), suggest to me that the project I am proposing will feed forward from their
excellent work. In particular, my own work will show how notions of virtuality and
creativity subtract both human bodies and technical applications from any mechanist
or vitalist interpretation.

Among the numerous articles I have written on this subject, the most recent is “The
Minor Arithmetic of Rhythm: Imagining Digital Technologies for Dance”, an essay I
was invited to contribute for the collection Deleuze and Performance, edited by Laura
Cull for Edinburgh University Press. In particular, this article questions the necessity
of an exclusive human-centred perception, conception and imagination of the
possibilities of dance, by postulating a series of expressive qualities and quantities
potentially lurking in-between the interstitial spaces and relations of numerical,
choreographic and technological codifications. The current book project, Numero-
graphies. Concepts and Functions for Digital Dance, emerges from an enquiry
directly related to this article. Rather than being conceived as a technical analysis or
commentary on the practicalities of dance and technology, it makes a speculative
proposition in the field. The originality of this project is its close reading of
philosophical theories of movement, perception and thought, and its use of this
reading to understand what happens to the choreographed form after it is translated
into the digital realm, at the same time delineating the possibility of an (im)material
idea in technology and dance.

Much work has been done on the particular expressive form of ‘dance on screen’ in
the fields of dance, cinema and audiovisual studies. This project does not provide a
technical analysis of dance as such, or of cinematic and video images per se; its more
speculative aim consists in abstracting a series of concepts from the practical work,
and in developing them as points of departure to understand the digitalization of
choreographed dance in its ontological consequences. In particular, the book takes a
particular genre, defined here as ‘digital videochoreography’, as an example of how
the attention for choreographic detail is often blurred by the abstract potentialities of
the digital in itself, and by what it does, subtracts or adds to movement. In the parallel
field of Motion Captured dance, we can see a proliferation of experiments that aim at
capturing the flow of movement and its qualitative nuances, transferring them to an
autonomous moving figure, usually a 3-D graphic image or a soundtrack. In fact,
without proposing any ontology of fluid processes and continuities over the metric
discontinuity of the numerical, the Motion Capture of dance hints at the potentiality to
continuously split movement, in what I define as ‘the virtuality of the cut’.
(Portanova, 2009) In the same way, the digital choreographies composed with the aid
of the Dance Forms software leave an awkward impression of split, fractured bodies
with heads, arms, legs becoming un-synchronized, each limb moving at its own
autonomous velocity in a sort of anatomical collage of dancing parts. In other words,
the dancing body as a mobile anatomical system with its own modalities and
techniques, is re-assembled and re-organized by its encounter with the numerical
machine.

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The originality of this project lies in its capacity to weave a philosophical weft
between the performative and the technological, and also to develop a philosophy of
digitalization which can assist in the understanding of the connection between
contemporary art and science. For this aim, the research adopts Deleuze and
Guattari’s philosophy of ‘machinic’, or ‘abstract’ materialism, moving the focus from
the subjective aspects to the ‘abstract materiality’ of sensation and thought. At the
same time, the conceptual goal of the book is achieved through a further
substantiation of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, which is expanded into a method
of ‘radical empiricism’ as developed, among others, by James and Whitehead. Other
relevant thinkers that will assist me in the research are Brian Massumi, Henri
Bergson, Gottfried Leibniz, Gregory Chaitin, Steven Shaviro, Manuel De Landa,
Charles S. Peirce, Gaston Bachelard, Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe and
Bernard Cache.

Explanation of the theoretical framework

One of the most important paradigms that are still fundamental in contemporary
digital culture is the essentialist dualism between the 'naturalness' of the living body
and the 'artificiality’ of its cultural or technological mediations, a misleading
ontological opposition inherited from the canonical tradition that begins with
Aristotle, moves through Descartes and Kant and leads toward more recent
conceptualizations. As an echo of this dualism in the specific field of contemporary
dance, the impact of technologies for video editing, or of movement and animation
software, on choreographic and performative processes has generated many
ontological doubts about the physicality of the human body. This project situates itself
in a different tradition that, emerging from philosophers such as Eraclitus, Lucretius
and Plato, goes through Leibniz and Spinoza, to arrive at modern and contemporary
thinkers such as Bergson, James, Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi, a
tradition that totally challenges the centrality of the human, considering it as only one
of the components in every experiential and creative process.

This research combines philosophical concepts from a ‘radical empiricist’ tradition

with theoretical platforms teased out of the performing arts, and with scientific
explanations of chaos, complexity theory, differential calculus. This methodology
devotes particular attention to technology in its capacity to generate new feelings and
thoughts, and also to take the body increasingly far away from habitual physical
attitudes (for example when choreographic software goes as far as suggesting to the
dancers new degrees of possible bodily deformation). This influence of the digital can
be directly related to its abstract potential as an idea: the idea to cut things and to re-
combine them ad infinitum, constitutes the infinity of digitalization as a way of
thinking. Or, to put it in different terms, all that there is in the in-betweens of the
computing, of the algorithmic processes, all the operations that actually make a
computer come out with a precise possibilistic combination, are the product of a
capacity to think: not a capacity of the programmer, or of the technology, but of that
incredible machine that are numbers. Mathematical operations think, and make us re-
think of dance.

Given its interdisciplinary nature (from dance to technology, from choreography to

science, although all addressed through a philosophical question), the method of
research for this project has to necessarily consist of an in-depth development of
conceptual work to be combined with participant observation techniques, so as to set

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the conceptual work in tension with the scientific functions of technology, and with
the capacities of the dancer to dance the choreographic algorithms. For the chapter
dedicated to digital videochoreography, I have associated archival research on old
dance films and videos to a direct dialogue (through email discussions and Skype
interviews) with contemporary video makers Antonin De Bemels and Davide Pepe.
The second chapter, dedicated to Motion Capture, draws on my previous and ongoing
research, and on the documentation of all the practice-based workshops and labs (such
as the Digital Cultures Lab organized at the Nottingham Trent University) that I have
personally attended in 2005, and where I had the opportunity to observe practitioners
at work. For this chapter, I have also contacted Paul Kaiser from the Openended
Group, one of the leading multimedia art producers and programmers of Motion
Capture systems, who has already sent me documentary material and excerpts of his
theoretical work, and with whom I have had several Skype-conversations. Research
on William Forsythe’s website “Synchronous Objects,” containing choreographic
material from one of the most recent performances of his company, will be mainly
based on my direct interaction with the site. For the last chapter, dedicated to the use
of Dance Forms and other choreographic software, I am reading all the available
written material on Merce Cunningham’s work, and have also assisted to some
performances by his company ‘live’ in Europe.

My research approach has been greatly influenced by the conceptualizations and

methods emerged from some particular events I have had the occasion to participate
in. In may 2006, I was invited by Prof. Massumi and Dr. Manning as a guest of
“Dancing the Virtual,” a research-creation event on philosophy, movement and dance
held at the SAT (Society for Arts and Technologies) in Montreal. After this event, the
Sense Lab (directed by Dr. Manning) has offered me research access to its location at
the Hexagram (University of Concordia), where I have just completed a one-year
post-doctoral research project that has led to the writing of this book proposal. During
my post-doc, one of the main projects I have worked at has been the launch of
Inflexions, the online journal of the Sense Lab, a collaborative tool for the establishing
of a common ground of research in different fields, from philosophy to technology,
science and multimedia art. Being a member of the editorial board of Inflexions has
allowed me to be involved in its practical but also in its conceptual preparation, and to
think about many issues regarding the dance and technology relation, issues that have
now become crucial for my book. The main subject of the journal’s second issue,
edited by me, is “Rhythmic Nexus: The Felt Togetherness of Movement and
Thought”, and it contains excerpts from the early phase of conceptualization of this
book project.

Outline of target audiences

My published articles have usually had an international philosophical and
interdisciplinary audience comprising scholars, students and thinkers in various fields
of research (such as but not limited to Media and Communication Studies), an
audience also close to authors such as Brian Massumi, Erin Manning and Luciana
Parisi. These readers are usually specifically concerned with the relationship between
technology, performance and philosophy, and focus on issues regarding the body,
movement and the digitalization of the compositional/performative processes. Part of
the audience has also been composed by readers more generally interested in digital
media and the digitalization of creative practices, not only from the point of view of
its technical aspects, but also from the point of view of its ontological effects, and on

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the more profound changes in our cultural, philosophical and aesthetic paradigms.
Together with these, I have also received positive feedback by readers in the fields of
Performance and Dance Studies, especially those more interested in engaging with a
speculative conversation on the present (and the future) of their practice. I consider
Numero-graphies as a continuation of the ongoing dialogue I have had with all these
audiences, but particularly as a deepening of my previous philosophical
conversations. The main aim of this book is in fact to philosophically explore the
relation between choreography and science. I am assuming that readers of this work
will particularly look for a rigor of philosophical conceptualization, although always
with an interest for the technological and the performative aspects. People more
generally interested in art and contemporary aesthetics will also find in this work an
exploration of concepts such as rhythm and meter, sensation and thought, together
with other subjects such as continuity/discontinuity and form/quality, and their
recombination by the aesthetics of digitalization.

Breakdown of chapters
The book consists of an Introduction, three main chapters (each of them sub-divided
in three sections) and a conclusion. Introduction and chapter 1 are already written.
Chapter 2 and 3 are written as drafts. Maximum word count will be 63000.

Introduction
Length 7210 words. The Introduction is included in the proposal.

[Link] Strain: Abstract Volumetrics of Videochoreography

This chapter explores the relation between the numerical functioning of video editing
software and the qualitative affectivity of dance, by developing a series of reflections
on different forms of dance on screen (from the first dance films of Loie Fuller to
Maya Deren’s shorts, from Nam June Paik’s electronic videos to Antonin De Bemels’
digital videochoreographies). Taking into consideration the differences between these
works, the chapter suggests that, in the digital videochoreographic conceptualization
exemplified by De Bemels’ videos, the numerical montage of the dance into a sort of
digital re-choreography replaces the more detailed attention for forms and qualities,
and creates a particular affect, or an abstract thought-feeling, directly generated by the
mathematical and geometrical structuring allowed by the technical machine. This
chapter is included in the proposal.
Length 22160 words.

[Link] of the Gesture: Rhythm and the Bio-Metrics of Motion Capture

This chapter analyzes the Motion Capture of dance, in the collaborations between the
digital artists of the OpenEnded Group and various choreographers, and also in
William Forsythe’s notational website “Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing,
reproduced), The chapter particularly focuses on the relation between Motion Capture
and the body’s anatomical and physiological codes. In this case, the way in which
technology microscopically cuts movement apparently gives us a definite limitation of
its qualitative continuity. But the cuts of the technical apparatus seem to point towards
a ‘divisibility’ with no end (who knows what microscopic level can be further reached
in the digitalization?). This technologically cut field does not make of movement a
continuity of infinitesimals, and yet it does not have any limit. Differently from digital
videochoreography, the feeling of the cut as a ‘conceptual sensation’ through Motion

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Capture reveals ‘divisibility’ as a particular ‘quantitative quality’ directly related to
the experience of movement and of the moving gesture.
Length 14221 words.

3. Choreo-Combinatorics: the Algorithmic Thought of Dance Forms

This chapter will be focused on the relation between the choreographic software
Dance Forms used by Merce Cunningham, and mathematics. It will show how the
most interesting aspect in the choreographer’s use of the digital tool is its closeness to
mathematical notions of ‘irrational’ numbers and chance. In the choreographic
process, all the possible (and impossible) variables of movement obtained through the
software’s algorithmic operations are composed into choreographic scores and passed
to human dancers in flesh and bones who perform them ‘live’. The potential of
Motion Capture is therefore taken one step further, delineating a different possibility
to mathematically engage not only with the intense qualities of movement, but also
with the precision of the choreographic forms, and with the way in which a dance step
individuates itself as a dance step. Length 15002 words.

Conclusion
Length 3000 words.