The call for provocations launched in 2018 remains OPEN! You can browse the growing collection of provocations, and SUBMIT your own at: https://provocations.online/whatescapescomputation.

Below is the collection of provocations authored by those who took part in the Panel Discussion at MOCO 2018.

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Adam Russell

Consider the use of gesture recognition in interactive performance as a form of temporal linkage between the shifting intentions and actions of performers across time. Following Bergson, let us think of what is being linked here (past and present) as not static or point-like, but as a multiplicity of unfolding movementa.Formalising such links...
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Amy LaViers

Can machine bodies express the same ideas as human bodies? This question has been explored in my lab through embodied practice, study of theoretical underpinnings of computer science, and experimental quantification of robotic system capacity. The figure below, from an in progress work (https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.05365), shows the dearth in external complexity of...
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Baptiste Caramiaux

As a provocation more than a personal statement, I would argue that if by interactive performance we mean technology-mediated performance involving interaction between human and digital technology of some kind, nothing escapes computation. In other words, interactive performance is, by definition, the act of performing computations. -Baptiste Caramiaux
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Jean-Marc Matos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZDf3npLeZc 3 distinct interactive and participatory dance projects: Narcissus Reflected, RCO and BodyFail, in which various complex elements escape computation. On the level of the variability of audience involvement and participation, statistical evaluation of audience choices and decisions via their mobile phones, and their physical experiential actions and reactions. Finally,...
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Jessica Rajko

As I began to write, Ananya Chatterjea’s [1] work immediately came to mind. Chatterjea questions the dominance of somatically informed, postmodern methods of ‘listening to the body’ as having ownership over embodied discourse within dance. In this she does not discredit or devalue such work, but instead articulates that to...
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Sarah Fdili Alaoui

What escapes computation in artistic performance is almost everything… From rich experiences, intentions, movement in continuous space and time, computation makes numerical representations, and these are incomplete snapshots of a larger story. Rather than the attempt to capture faithfully the phenomena in stake, computation should be a constrained frame that...
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Sha Xin Wei

The unsolved hard problem of consciousness: the gulf between “internal consciousness” and physical observables, implies that no computational techniques based on physical sensing can yield certificate of intention.   Any choice of measure, or instrument of measurement, makes some aspect of experience legible, and others illegible. Any sensor makes some feature...
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Victor Gonzalez-Sanchez

Can we better understand the complex process of human music perception through a standardisation of the quantification of involuntary correspondences between motion and music? Exploring the frequency-domain and time-domain links between sound and motion signals in a systematic manner might encourage international and interdisciplinary collaboration, boosting developments in the field...
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