Negotiating the Parameters of Missed Conversations in Urban Spaces

This proposal represents a research strand of my Masters in Art and Design (majoring in dance and video) project, ‘In the Company of Strangers’. The proposal critically explores the forces of indeterminacy which I maintain are responsible for the dynamics which create the personna of the ‘stranger’ in encounters between people in urban spaces. I am particularly interested in pursuing and viewing concepts related to ‘missed-conversations’ through my dance research-practice which, as a scrutinizing lens, attest to the theories which reside in the states of ‘becoming’ evidenced in selected writings of Henri Bergson and Brian Massumi.

I maintain that our engagements, meetings and encounters in urban spaces frequently manifest as ‘missed conversations’.

This is due to the inevitability in our existence of indeterminacy – a state facilitating the breakdown of structured actions and intent and therefore, a signifcant mediator of our behaviour leading to our inability to be fully present for prolonged periods of interaction with another, at any given moment in time. Indeterminacy implies motion and emerges, as Massumi so ably asserts, through ‘… an unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary …’*. We are constantly being drawn away – always either approaching or embracing involuntarily, a state of ‘Leaving’ which co-mingles with and unerringly erodes our efforts to converse with another in the here and now. This proposal seeks to offer up a documentation of missed conversations approached performatively in a mixed-reality (Real and Second Life) expressed through a language of indeterminant ‘Leaving’.

* ‘Leaving’ is defined in upper case because for me, it references the event as an Urban Myth that I am creating: The act of leaving mediates our relations and shared time and space with others in urban environments. Ultimately perhaps, ‘Leaving’ will make strangers of us all.

*Massumi, B. Parables for the Virtual – Movement, Affect, Sensation 2002, Duke University Press, Durham and London.

Mike’s current focus is on improvisational movement exploration within real and virtual site-specific frames of reference. (Second Life.com). Principal areas of research practice over past ten years have been in the integration of traditional art-making materials and progressive movement modes with digital multi-media, in relation to two and three-dimensional, real and virtual installation and dance/video performance. He is in the final, thesis year of his AUT Masters in Art and Design majoring in dance and video. Mike and his wife Fiona co-direct the Contact Improvisation Dance company, Coriolis Dance Co, based in Nelson, NZ.

http://hoststranger.blogspot.com