Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies, Sources

___by Diane Gromala


1. Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies was co-created with choreographer Yacov Sharir, and was initially supported by and created at the Banff Centre for the Arts and the University of Texas. Subsequent funding allowed for more robust MRI inclusions and interactive techniques. Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies was performed and presented in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and New Zealand.

2. Diane Gromala. "Pain and Subjectivity in VR," in Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture. Lynn Hershman, ed., Seattle: Bay Press, 1996. pp. 222-237.

3. For a discussion of the intensely ambiguous aspects of subjectivity elicited by VR technology, see N. Katherine Hayles, "The Seductions of Cyberspace" in Rethinking Technologies, Verena Andermatt Conley, ed. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. P. 173-189.

4. Although immersive VR is notoriously difficult to access for artistic purposes and has outlived its mass interest, I continue to explore it, primarily because of its affective characteristics. Experience of six degrees of freedom and "infinite space," for example, is a potentially provocative instance of Kristeva1s chora -- the unnameable, chaotic, womb-like space that exists prior to the the nameable form, the presignifying trace of shared body space of mother and child that resists representation, but remains experienced as desire. Traces of the chora, according to Kristeva, are found in the "musicality" and kinetic rhythms of language, or in this case, perhaps, in VR.

5. The incunabula refers to the first fifty years of printing that followed Gutenberg1s invention of the printing press.

6. The gestural or pantomimic body refers to a specific consideration and experience of the body thought to be indicative of the context of the Middle Ages.

See Robert D. Romanyshyn. Technology As Symptom and Dream. London: Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1989.

7. Liane Lefaivre. Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1997.

8. N. Katherine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

9. The abject is an "uncanny irruption" of Kristeva1s semiotic, in conflict with the symbolic law. It is manifest in the language of cultural taboos and emerges at the symbolic boundary between inside and outside of the body.

10. Elizabeth Grosz. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.






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