Moving Without a Body

<b>A radically empirical exploration of movement and technology and the transformations of choreography in a digital realm.</b> <p/>Digital technologies offer the possibility of capturing storing and manipulating movement abstracting it from the body and transforming it into numerical information. In <i>Moving without a Body</i> 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. <p/>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 <i>Moving without a Body</i> offers an ambitiously conceived reflection on the ontological implications of the encounter between movement and technological systems.