Re: Invitation to private presentation

Armando Menicacci (menica-a@mail.micronet.fr)
Thu, 12 Nov 1998 03:22:47 +0100

Dear collective wisdom,

not speaking english (and being a newbie here) I'd never dare to
summarize nor sinthetize, but I think (sometimes it happens to me) that
some issues expressed in the _Invitation to private presentation_ thread
cuold be referred to philosophical ideas that are currntly having succes
even out of phylosophy and could be of some help to take discussion to a
more large problem.

The ideas about pure dance, and tho ones like _Dancing is about
>using the body to express meaning_, and others expressed more or less in
>the same idea come in fact from tha nature versus culture eternal battle.
>I don't even want to enter the field, I'd only say that for me a computer
>is a natural product, just like honey. Man and bees are the same "nature"
>product, they both use natural products (petroleum, sand and copper for
>men, pollen lifeblood and sap for bees) that they transform into other
>things.

As someone said we use technology even in shoes, music making, wonderbra,
floors, and so on, but we take it for granted. Another thing we should
appreciate in technology, in my opinion, is that -arguing about technique-
we are reconsidering things we took for granted.
This issue takes me to second part of the discussion :

We saw (a little bit too fast) that opposing dance to technology is absurd.
After all men are made of carbon, and computers of silicon, for the moment,
we are units of carbon interacting with units of silicon, as Suzanne Kozel
wrote in "Writing on dance". That's all. But some could say that flash and
blood are real while computer is a calculating and body unaware device.
Accordig to Michel Bernard (founder of Paris 8 university dance department)
and physiologist Alain berthoz (researcher on body movement) men have to
precalculate space, momentum and thousend othes things before actually
moving. In other words there is so much fiction in perception that we can
say that there is no passive moment of it. That's the end of the metaphore
: sanses receive information, brain elaborates it and movement is
performed. It doesn't work like that.

In conclusion we are carbon simulation processors. Why can't ask some
stimulation from silicon simulation processors?
Armando