Roundtable: Dance and Second Life

The following roundtable will be held at Society of Dance History Scholars: http://www.sdhs.org/
I will attend as a panel.

I have been working as a member of INETDANCE Japan: http://www.inetdance.com/ and demonstrated dance contents insides second life.

Envisioning virtual cartographies for corporeal interaction: dance and performance convergent applications of Second Life

Isabel de Cavadas Valverde

RoundTable Abstract

We want to contribute to map and analyze the implications of recent formats of dance and performance research making use of Second Life® environment and avatars. We propose a roundtable to discuss the work of three researchers in Dance Performance Technology, Mike Baker, Yuikihiko Yoshida, and my self, Isabel Valverde. To us the Second Life 3D environment is a novel terrain for creative convergence, rather than separation, of physical-virtual embodied realities. The constant traversing between physical and virtual modes of embodiment and sites informs their theoretical and practice research. The process of involving these novel and accessible networks is regarded not as substitution but as amplification of corporeality in its infinite possibilities of subjective and inter-subjective modes of interactive engagement.
　How is dance being challenged by artistic embodied practice in SL and hybrid mixed-reality environments? How is this practice influencing and affecting the way we theorize and historicize dance, setting new directions in dance-technology development, and proposing new forms of bodily knowledge?

Presenter #1 (Mike Baker)

Title: In the Company of Strangers

I propose the documentation of missed conversations approached performatively in mixed-reality (Real and Second Life) expressed through a language of indeterminant ‘Leaving’. Due to the inevitability in our existence of indeterminacy, that is a state representative of chaos - a breakdown of order – we have an inability to be fully present at any given moment in time. Indeterminacy implies motion and emerges as Massumi 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’ that co-mingles with our efforts to converse with another in the here and now.

Presenter#2 (Yukihiko YOSHIDA)

Title: Real Dance and Dancing in metaverse : from the activity by INETDANCE Japan

Abstract:

In Japan, choreography using Avatars and making digital dance content is getting popular. INETDANCE Japan works with media artists to release Creative Commons licensed digital content. Content is stored at the level of the movement of body parts so that choreographers can share remix and reproduce it in their works. Japanese pop culture content is included, for example "Hatsune Miku" and the Japanese idol unit "Perfume". A strategy that combines Open Source and Otaku Culture is being undertaken to affect products in exisiting markets. The content is to be transferred into Metaverse contexts, increasing Far East dance content.

Presenter #3 (Isabel de Cavadas Valverde)

Title of Presentation:

Performing In Between Embodied Modes of Experience: Real Virtual Games project with hybrid site-specific physical and avatar bodies and environments
Real Virtual Games (RVG) is a collaborative transdisciplinary project, proposing alternative hybrid embodied interface environment for live and avatar inhabitants. RVG questions videogames and MUVE (Second Life®) social places’ immersive interfaces in their deployment of handicap embodiments, rather than a promised expansion. I will discuss RJV’s deviated application of the Second Life® environment through constructive deconstruction. Engaging performative interactive situations, the project experiments creative modes to alter and estrange what became too limited desktop bodily experiences. We want to contribute to an emerging posthuman corporeality concerned with subjective, collective, hybrid and mutable realities within Western Cartesian bio-information globalized virtuality of contemporary condition.