Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A radically empirical exploration of movement and technology and the transformations of choreography in a digital realm.

Digital technologies offer the possibility of capturing, storing, and manipulating movement, abstracting it from the body and transforming it into numerical information. In Moving without a Body , Stamatia Portanova considers what really happens when the physicality of movement is translated into a numerical code by a technological system. Drawing on the radical empiricism of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, she argues that this does not amount to a technical assessment of software's capacity to record motion but requires a philosophical rethinking of what movement itself is, or can become.

Discussing the development of different audiovisual tools and the shift from analog to digital, she focuses on some choreographic realizations of this evolution, including works by Loie Fuller and Merce Cunningham. Throughout, Portanova considers these technologies and dances as ways to think--rather than just perform or perceive--movement. She distinguishes the choreographic thought from the performance: a body performs a movement, and a mind thinks or choreographs a dance. Similarly, she sees the move from analog to digital as a shift in conception rather than simply in technical realization. Analyzing choreographic technologies for their capacity to redesign the way movement is thought, Moving without a Body offers an ambitiously conceived reflection on the ontological implications of the encounter between movement and technological systems.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Series Foreword (p. xi)
• Acknowledgments (p. xiii)
• Introduction: Thinking Choreography Digitally (p. 1)
• Technologies as Ideas
• Philosophies as Methods
• Choreographies as Examples
• I Imag(in)ing the Dance: Choreo-nexus (p. 17)
• Digital Affectivity ...
• ... or Digital Definition?
• 0 To Perceive Is to Abstract (p. 21)
• Diagram
• Knowledge
• Causal Nexus
• Presentational Nexus
• Digital Nexus
• 1 Digital Abstractions: The Intuitive Logic of the Cut (p. 41)
• Digital Cut
• Digi-strain
• Di-fractals
• The Image, between Sensation and Imagination
• II Remembering the Dance: Mov-objects (p. 57)
• What a Dancing Body Can Do (Desubjectifying the Motion)
• What a Technology Can Really Do (Reobjectifying the Potential)
• 10 Can Objects Be Preserved? (p. 65)
• Singularities
• 11 Can Objects Change? (p. 73)
• Calculus
• Topology
• Mereotopology
• 100 Can Objects Be Processes? (p. 85)
• Generative
• Parametric
• The New
• Rationally Remembering
• III Thinking the Dance: Compu-sitions (p. 97)
• Numbering Numbers
• 101 Numbered Dancers and Software Ballet (p. 105)
• The Abstractness of Relation
• The Rhythm of Counting
• The Detachment of Technology
• 110 When Memory Becomes Creation (p. 119)
• Algorithmic Connections
• Algorithmic Complexity
• Binary Alternative
• A Germ of Conclusion: In Abstraction (p. 133)
• Notes (p. 141)
• Index (p. 175)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Portanova's first book is a dense, ambitious investigation of encounters among various dance choreographies, technologies, computer programs, and philosophical concepts. Portanova (independent scholar) attempts to create "a speculative proposition for a philosophy of movement in the digital age" by developing three trajectories. First, she traces advances in audiovisual tools (especially the shift from analog to digital) and ways this progress influenced ideas regarding movement in space and time. Second, she offers choreographic examples to illustrate these developments. Finally, she presents some philosophical concepts to analyze and align with the choreographic examples. The heart of the book is the philosophical discussions based on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead. Portanova links their theories to examinations of dances and processes developed by three American choreographers. Her illustrations begin with collaborations between Loie Fuller and the Lumiere brothers (1892), include several iterations of an alliance between William Forsythe and the Advanced Computing Center for Arts and Design at Ohio State (2009), and cover a project linking Merce Cunningham with the OpenEndedGroup (Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, Paul Kaiser) between 2001 and 2011. This book will be most useful for readers with knowledge of philosophy, mathematics, and computer science. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. S. E. Friedler Swarthmore College