Corporal Literacy Symposium, September, Ghent

[Rob van Kranenburg]

Hi,

In September, in Ghent, Maaike Bleeker and Rob van Kranenburg 
organize the Symposium 'Corporal Literacy' in the AILA 2003 
Conference.

We want to try to generate broad, eclectic and productive concepts 
through discussion and debate with (scroll down to the programme) a 
very diverse and powerfull group of professionals.

We hope to see you in Ghent, in september. That's where the contours 
of this new field are being shaped,

Greetings from sunny Ghent, Rob.

Corporal Literacy Symposium

A workshop/panel in the Conference: MULTILITERACIES: THE CONTACT ZONE
2003 International AILA Conference on Literacy
http://memling.rug.ac.be/aila

What is it about?

Maaike Bleeker:

New developments in a variety of disciplines -  ranging from 
philosophy to medicine to cognitive science - argue for a revaluation 
of the body as actively involved in processes of world making rather 
than a passive decoding machine. This revaluation of the body points 
to the necessity to change our understanding of the role of the body 
in processes of perception and meaning making. Corporal literacy 
understood as the bodily capacity to read and make sense also changes 
the notion of thought and meaning itself, the idea of what it means 
to do thinking, to make meaning, to rationalize. "What is important" 
write Lakoff and Johnson in their Philosophy in the Flesh, "is not 
just that we have bodies and that thought is somehow embodied. What 
is important is that the very peculiar nature of our bodies shapes 
our very possibilities for conceptualisation and categorization."  
Corporal literacy describes these abilities of the body to perceive, 
read and make sense. It is a strategic term, with which we want to 
make a space for interaction and collaboration between researchers 
approaching questions of bodily meaning making from various 
backgrounds.

   George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh. The 
Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books 1999: 
19

Rob van Kranenburg:

In A future world of supersenses, Martin Rantzer of Ericsson 
Foresight claims:  "New communication senses will be needed in the 
future to enable people to absorb the enormous mass of information 
with which they are confronted," According to him the user interfaces 
we use today to transmit information to our brains threaten create a 
real bottleneck for new broadband services. "The boundaries of what 
constitutes consumer electronics and computers are getting blurred," 
said Gerard J. Kleisterlee, the chief executive of Royal Philips 
Electronics. "As we get wireless networking in the home, everything 
starts to talk to everything."  Implementing digital connecitivity in 
an analogue environment without a design for all the senses , without 
a concept of corporal literacy, leads to information overload. In a 
ubiquitous computing environment the new intelligence is 
extelligence, "knowledge and tools that are outside people's heads" 
(Stewart and Cohen, 1997) In a ubiquitous computing environment the 
user has to be not only textually and visually literate, both also 
have corporal literacy, that is an awareness of extelligence and a 
working knowledge of all the senses.  It is our claim in staking out 
a field of corporal literacy that  in contemporary performance and 
theatrical practice we find an actualization  of (and ways of dealing 
with) the bottleneck scenarios that are envisaged by information 
experts.


Where is it?

Location: Ghent, Belgium
Date: 22-27 September 2003

Contact:

Contact Persons: Rob van Kranenburg - Maaike Bleeker
Contact Email:  kranenbu at xs4all.nl - maaike.bleeker at hum.uva.nl

Corporal Literacy - Ghent, September 23 - 26, 2003
Preliminary Program

Day 1: Tuesday September 23, 11.00 - 18.00 hrs.

Maaike Bleeker (University of Amsterdam) The Anatomical Theatre 
Revisited. Introduction

Philipa Rothfield  (La Trobe University) Corporal Literacy

This paper will look at the notion of corporal literacy via 
phenomenology of the body.  Kinaesthetic practices such as dance will 
be discussed, along with anthropological work on phenomenology and 
cultural difference.

Rebecca Skelton (Chicester UK) Ways of becoming more literate: 
through dancing, through being.

Through the phenomenological approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty this 
paper will outline how the practice of Skinner Releasing Technique 
(SRT) can tune the dancing and non dancing body to its perceptions 
through a creative process of image specific, movement explorations. 
It will outline how something of the psychophysical totality 
experienced by the dancer when being 'moved by an image',  can make 
sense of how the individual deals  with the noise of the everyday; 
the constant process of receiving feedback from and tuning into 
information (as in tuning a radio) that occurs, just by 'being in' 
the world.

Alan Dunning (Alberta College Art and Design), Paul Woodrow, (Dept. 
of Art, University of Calgary), Dr. Morley Hollenberg (Dept. of 
Medicine, Health Sciences), University of Calgary: 
Besides Ourselves - The Body Double and the Shape of Its Thought The 
Einstein's Brain Project

The Einstein's Brain Project is a collaborative group of artists and 
scientists who have been working together for the past six years to 
visualize the biological state of the conscious body. In this 
presentation the Project will explore its various reasons and methods 
for constructing visual forms directly out of the human acts of 
living, acting and thinking in the body's moment to moment
reconstruction of itself and its world.

Patricia Portela
Aliemotion: A Web Conference

Day 2:  Wednesday September 24, 11.00 - 18.00 hrs

Rob van Kranenburg: Introduction

Olha Homilko (Ukraine)
Desomatization and Disembodiment as the alternates of Corporal Literacy

The paper deals with the metaphysical desomatization of a human being 
in the modern philosophy and its overcoming in contemporary 
theoretical discourse. That is to say,  the subject of the 
presentation is the  metaphysical shift from Ego to Soma as a 
principal ontological authenticity.

Seth Riskin and Noah Riskin (MIT) Identical Twinhood and Corporal Literacy

Identical twinhood presents a rare opportunity for the development of 
corporal literacy: the chance to observe and communicate with one's 
genetic double. As identical twins, the authors draw from their 
expanded experience of body-knowing it from inside and outside-to 
shed light on the connection between "self" and "other" and between 
the body and the world it perceives.


Sarah Rubidge (Chicester UK) Spaces of Sensation: The Immersive 
Installation and corporal literacy

The multi-sensory immersive interactive installation is a perfect 
environment to explore and experience the complex interweaving 
systems that make up the embodied mind. My paper will examine the 
implications of these environments for corporal literacy, drawing on 
the work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio (2000) and Gerald 
Edelman (2001), psychologists such as Howard Gardner (1993), and 
philosophers such as Bergson (1910); Merleau Ponty (1989) and Deleuze 
and Guattari (1987).

Stijn Ossevoort (IVREA) on Wearable Computing.

I will present two wearable electronic objects based on the augmented
relation between two individuals and their favourite piece of 
clothing. Both objects have been designed to be a non-distracting, 
integral part of their daily activities.



Day 3, Thursday September 25, 11.00-18.00 hrs. Alternative location: 
The Small House of Radical Art (Ghent)

Alissa Cardone and Petra Vermeersch
What the Body Knows, Lecture + Performance

Using the example of Artaud to think through the idea of corporal 
literacy. Literacy is associated with cultured modes of reading and 
writing. Is this an appropriate logic for thinking about the ways in 
which the body knows, learns and transmits information? The key to 
new ways of communicating is in movement.

Rita Marcalo (Chichester UK)

What if? This presentation asks what understanding would one have of 
the role of the body in the processes of perception, if one 
constructed such an understanding around Bergson's theorisations.
In stating that "_ we perceive only the past" (p. 150) , Bergson 
seems to equate perception (of the present) with a particular kind of 
very immediate memory (of the past). He further establishes the body 
as the mediator between the external object and this immediate memory 
(or perception).
Taking Bergson as a starting point, this presentation enquires on the 
role of bodily memory - or as Bergson says memory that is "fixed in 
the organism" (p. 151) - in the perception and survival of 
choreographic performance.
The presentation would first take the form of a 15-minute 
presentation, and then of a 15 minute performance.


Bruno Colet: performance (all day).
AllenWood  (Australia) - ''Le Minddlur''


Day 4, Friday September 26, 11.00 - 18.00 hrs.


Ramsay Burt (De Montfort Universiy) 
A preliminary exploration of cognitive approaches towards reading 
abstract dance.

Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson's work on the embodied basis of 
metaphor in language, this paper looks at a recent work by the 
English choreographer Jonathan Burrows in order to explore bodily 
meaning making in abstract dance choreography. Reading Lakoff and 
Johnson backwards, it suggests that dance performance consitutes a 
dialogic process that articulates, through bodily meaning making, the 
cognitive structures that they have postulated underpin language.


JDean (Computer Information Systems and Language Arts at the 
Milwaukee Area Technical College)
A New Alphabet: an inquiry into digital literacy and embodiment.

A New Alphabet (http://pw.english.uwm.edu/~jdean) an inquiry into 
digital literacy and embodiment is a multi-faceted and divergent 
critique of new media, technology, and literature in a digital 
collage of essay, poetics and iconographic images from fine art.  
Each page is an alphabet letter exploring the apparatus of perception 
and cognition in relation to thought. A New Alphabet while using new 
media offers a Blakeian resistance to formation of a culture of 
uniformity and/or enchantment with new media, promoting instead, 
critical recognition of a continuous momentum of flux of ideas and 
methods of transmission.

Steven de Belder: Re-reading the Layman.

Christel Stalpaert (University of Ghent) From Time to Time: The 
Bodily Capacity to Read and Make Sense of Temporal and Spatial 
(co)ordinates.

Valerie Briginshaw  (Chicester UK) From performance through embodied 
ambiguities to interconnected subjectivities.

-- 


web: http://simsim.rug.ac.be/staff/rob
mail: kranenbu at xs4all.nl
mobile:
++32 (0) 472 40 63 72
Call home first 0032 9 2333 853
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