As a starting point, our question for you is: what aspects of your practice/research are invisible to your collaborators?
Here is our own provocation, to incite provocations…
Cross-disciplinary research and collaboration is integral to projects involving movement and computing, in which researchers across the arts, sciences, and humanities gather to examine issues related to movement analysis, representation, and generation, and likewise the role of movement in computational systems.
With this call for provocations, we invite you to interrogate not only the differences in perspectives and approaches that circulate within between the disciplinary cultures, but more importantly, the effects produced by these differences over time. These differences may relate to implicit or explicit understandings of things like bodies, gestures, choreography, composition, algorithms, data, performance, and more broadly to time, space, interaction, movement, and computing. Over time these differences may come to matter differently for different participants in a collaboration, inciting tension that can at once hinder and inspire innovation.
In asking this question, we do not seek to reconcile perceived differences in perspectives or work towards a shared vision between collaborators and communities, nor do we seek to highlight difference for difference’s sake. Rather, we ask this question to draw out the effects that these differences may come to make over time in relationships between individual collaborators, and between disciplinary communities. As provocateurs, our curiosity is not about difference itself, but rather the processes of differentiation, differencing, and differences-in-the-making experienced between various people, personalities, practices, and practice-based perspectives.
Fleshing out our question, here are some additional prompts:
- What is included and excluded, intentionally or not, from the representations of time, movement, bodies, interaction, gestures, etc. which are integral to your practice/research? In what ways do these exclusions matter to you?
- How does that which is invisible or excluded also iteratively shape your practice with regard to movement and computing?
- Who gets to claim expertise and ownership of knowledge and know-how related to movement versus computing—or alternately, in both areas—and what are the implications of acting as a representative of your disciplinary community in a cross-disciplinary context?
- What is the role of collaboration, both implicit and explicit, in projects related to movement and computing? In past MOCO proceedings, who becomes implicated (beyond stated authors and participants) in papers related to transmitting choreographic knowledge, producing software platforms to support learning in dance and music, and movement analysis more broadly?
-Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, and Jessica Rajko