researching performance- performing research

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Researching performance,performing research:

dance, multimedia and learning

Synne Skjulstad, Andrew Morrison & Albertine Aaberge,Synne Skjulstad, Andrew Morrison & Albertine Aaberge,Synne Skjulstad, Andrew Morrison & Albertine Aaberge,Synne Skjulstad, Andrew Morrison & Albertine Aaberge,InterMInterMInterMInterMeeeedia, University of Oslodia, University of Oslodia, University of Oslodia, University of Oslo

Figure 1: Willson Phiri & Stephanie Sund in a digitally enhancedduet; video still from performance at Statens balletthgskole,Oslo, December 2001.

212 Researching ICTs in Context

A sense of contextA sense of contextA sense of contextA sense of contextOne day at a time

It's the middle of the week, early in the afternoon and we are about midwaythrough a collaborative educational and research project called Ballectro.1

As the name suggests, the project is a hybrid of dance and digital media.The slate grey autumn sky bounces up from the Oslo fjord into the largecurved windows of one of the studios at Statens balletthgskole.2 Six finalyear modern dance students are in a class with their choreography teacherand are joined by three project participants from InterMedia at the Univer-sity of Oslo. We are workshopping material which may become a part of adance and multimedia performance scheduled for the end of the semesterat both our institutions. We are also collaborative learners in a project in-vestigating dance and multimedia. Yet, as multimedia researchers we arealso learning how to carry out research into digital media as performance.

Improvisation is central to today's session as is often the case in ourongoing collaboration both as performance and as research. The chore-ographer has asked the students to select one figure each from a largecluster of postcards and to use it as a springboard to developing a solopiece. The pieces will then be combined in a larger sequence which,later, might be included in the overall performance. The students im-provise their solos and then, after a break, they repeat and refine them,this time accompanied by music. This music had been developed espe-cially for the project by a different student who has volunteered his tal-ents to the project. The students develop their movements, some ofthem very actively, others through more intimate expressions. In thecorner, the digital music maker lies fast asleep, stretched out betweenhis studies, a part-time job and composing the music for the project.

The choreographer darts between the students, quietly moving them intoslightly different positions, whispering suggestions to two of them. Sheplaces each card on the floor at the front of the studio, mimicking the spatialzones in which each of the students is moving. The electronic music, still inan early version, creates the sense of future performance, one to be remixed,and reperformed as our collage-like approach becomes more coherent.

'Come over here and take part,' the choreographer says to the twomultimedia developers sitting in the corner. 'Just dance,' she encourageswith a smile. And slowly we begin to fumble around between the styledimprovisation of the students. They seem quite unperturbed by our

Researching performance, performing research 213

wobbly steps. Later, as the media players in this unfolding scene, wecomment to one another that this is what ethnographers do, they becomepart of the fabric of the context they a researching, if not its soloists!

Background to BallectroBackground to BallectroBackground to BallectroBackground to BallectroCollaborative project design

In this chapter we present material from this collaborative educationalproject involving improvisation, dance and multimedia. This varied for thedifferent partners in the collaboration. In this sense the chapter is about'learning performance'. We therefore also explicitly used the project as aresearch agenda generating process. Recent research into the potential in-tersections of dance and digital media has often carried out through col-laborative processes and workshops. For example, Birringer (1996) detailsthe heuristics of one such workshop as being ' offered to provide a labo-ratory for the organic intergration of performance and digital arts, and forthe development of new interdisciplinary methods of composition.' As me-dia researchers and teachers in the field of digital media, we discuss waysof conducting and understanding research as and through performance.We suggest, by close reference to the development and performance of amultimedia-enhanced dance piece, that researching ICTs might be ex-panded to include notions of performance.

We suggest that this is potentially fruitful at several levels. First, that re-search into ICTs sees context as a significant element in how research isperformed. Here, we refer specifically to how to learn to build a new me-dia-enriched performance environment in which the medium of expressionis primarily moving bodies and moving media. Second, we suggest that re-search into ICTs might benefit from considering aspects of performancestudies in studying and interpreting digital media and their various repre-sentations and uses. Third, through the inclusion of visual material, fromboth the process of making the dance piece and from its performance, weoffer a glimpse of how research into ICTs may to take up some of thechallenges of applying of digital media in presenting research.

A learning design

Ballectro was based on the collaborative development of a student per-formance for a non-fee-paying audience. This context gave us freedom


to workshop our way into making an actual performance as well as tobe open to ways of researching an interdisciplinary interplay betweenmedia and dance, between learning and performance, and between re-search processes and products. This project design allowed the students toparticipate at different levels of the project as learners of dance, learners ofchoreography and, to a limited extent, as learners of new media.3

We were also learners of project-based research involving new part-ners. As researchers and designers of digital media, our main objectivein the following collaboration process was to develop closer under-standing of digital media and how dance could inform both productionand the research into ICTs.

Ballectro was an experimental new media arts project, and by definitionit involved a range of boundary crossings. In a discussion of such emergentand experimental work, Stocker and Schpf (1999: 14) comment that:

Even though the only aspect that the heterogenous, hybrid configurationsof current works often have in common is their use of the computer thatis, their technological or material medium an essential, defining featureof this new art is impossible to overlook: despite the experience that hasbeen gained and the virtousity that has developed, media art is, above all,an experiment one that often brings the creators and the proponents ofthis new art into association with engineers and researchers.

Many interdisciplinary researchers find themselves crossing fields,methods and theories. They need to also find ways to work within theseintersections and find ways to communicate them as research.

A publication designDance may be an important player in the building of the interdisicpli-nary links between practice and theory which are needed in the study ofICTs in culture and context. For example, in referring to a dance anddigital media workshop, Birringer (1996) comments that:

Performance dancing with and across patterns is an avenue to con-test rigid or vapid formulations handed down to us since the emergence ofthe strength of bodily intelligence unravels the grids and pixellatedmonotonies of the computer's inscriptive power.

We take up this challenge by investigating this claim also with refer-ence to the building of a Ballectro project research website in which a


range of media, including video, are used. In contrast, this print andwritten text is one formalised means of reporting on a multimedia per-formance project and its processes of production and public mediation.However, as we argue, the web site provides a more fully mediatedpossibility for understanding the project. This context refers to the me-diation of the content of Ballectro, that is as dance, as multimedia andas research. Yet, it also refers to a way of communicating research cen-tred on a process-based exploratory design.

As developers, teachers and researchers of new media ourselves, wehave found it difficult to locate an elaborated learning and researchcontext within which to place a project such as the one we present here.Huge financial and technical resources have been invested in ICTs, butperhaps a time is now arriving when we ought to be more seriouslyconsidering how the environments, content and contexts in which ourdigitally mediated communication occurs do indeed intersect.

A multi-method approach

The Ballectro project employed a multi-method design in both developmentand research. In the project we deliberately played with digital tools andtechnologies in effect danced with them ourselves. The final perform-ance piece was a collage of elements from a variety of learning tasks, im-provisation sessions and more formal plans. Heuristically, the project gen-erated problems which, in turn, needed immediate and longer term researchframes, solutions and explanations. Here the spiral model of software de-velopment (e.g. Denning & Dargan 1996) and a reiterative and reflexiveapproach as deployed in the many sub-fields of design studies was impor-tant. In addition, production based research was realised through a processof making. These various aspects were extended from researching the proc-ess and performance to communicating the project in digital arenas.

As with many classroom based research projects, Ballectro was car-ried out within a broad, but non-deterministic, action research frame-work. As a choreographer and media researchers, we were instrumentalin introducing new elements within the dance curriculum and at a newmedia and learning research centre. We were actively involved in theproduction and the research process and had an integrative role here.Further, the research was cyclical: it involved an ongoing interplay oftheory and practice (Avison 1997: 198).


The experimental and process character of the Ballectro project as alearning and performance activity, also extends to finding ways to per-form research on and in digital communication.

We therefore discuss questions about the changing rhetorical andmediational contexts of presenting, reporting and analysing research.This points to the importance of understanding multimedia project de-sign, the application of multi-method inquiry in research processes anddesigns, as well as in the analysis and presentation of research. In termsof performing research, together these elements may be said to consi-tute a mutable research design. This is design is flexible, relational, se-lective, contingent, reflexive and hybrid.

Later in the chapter we will discuss such associations and their valuein a collaborative design and performance. In the next section we out-line some of the difficulties in researching a multimedia-dance processand its performance as text.

Researching performanceResearching performanceResearching performanceResearching performanceOn performance

While the performing arts have existed for centuries in theatre, dance, andsong, it was in the 1970s that performance as a feature of the avant gardebecome accepted as a medium of artistic expression in its own right (Gold-berg 2001: 7). However, the term performance has itself been hotly con-tested in the complex of post-structualist approaches to media and the arts.Performance is a cultural practice, a pratice of representation, and so in-evitably enters the arena of ideology as it often did in the 1970s in the formof happenings and agitprop pieces (Counsell and Wolf 2001: 31). A per-formance act may question existing systems of thought, actions, and be-liefs. It may be characterised as a one-time happening realised through oneor several performers. Or, increasingly, it has come to be seen as a moremutable event-oriented expressive discourse. A performance is the textconstructed by actors, dancers or narrators, yet its uptake lies with theaudience or the computer user. Howell (1999: 146) argues that:

As performers you are looking for an 'action language': one you canspontaneously 'speak'So you need to think by performing, instead oftrying to complete your thinking prior to the performance. Performing


is not a translation from another language. As in writing, where the handthinks the sentences, your actions must think the performance.

In recent years many researchers and educators have made claims aboutthe need to develop multimodal, multiliteracies (e.g. Kress 1998, Kress1999, Tyner 1998). Yet, in their often wide-ranging discussions of digitalliteracies, few such writers refer directly to dance and the role of perform-ing arts more generally, preferring to remain with broad issues of access,competence and intertextuality. Further, in the now large literature on 'new'media, 'digital dance' has not featured prominently, in comparison, for ex-ample, with hypernarrative or computer games. Researchers of games and'interactivity' (e.g. Aarseth 2002) and writers on the usability of websites(Nielsen & Tahir 2001) are also investigating questions of performance inwhat Brenda Laurel (1993) has called 'Computers as Theatre'. While con-cerns such as the user's discourse (Liestl 2002 forthcoming) in games andthe functionality of websites do indeed merit research, the performing artsin digital environments are often overshadowed by more commercially in-tended products. Further, electronic arts in general have not featuredstrongly in the research discourses on learning, ICTs and context.

In contrast, electronic performing arts are often conceptual and of anembodied nature; they occur both a physical performance texts bydancers, yet they are also constructed by audiences. These performancepieces may occur only online, but they frequently exist in real time, andin material spaces, such as installation pieces in art galleries or asmixed media performance works in front of an assembled audience.4

Dance may also be implicit in these works (e.g. Schiphorst 1996/1997,1997). Such mixed media performance art is often difficult to catego-rise. Typically such experimental works play on notions of hybridity,identity, human-machine relations and the subjectivity of the viewer orinteractant (Jones & Stephenson 1999). These works tend to be reflex-ive in character. They draw our attention to the ways in which digitalmedia may be used to mediate performance, whether art, dance ordrama. In contrast to computer games, which by definition must beplayed on screen, or online, many performance pieces which use digitalmedia do so by shifting between different types of screens, projectionsand media types; together these are part of an emerging live event in whichplot, movement, music, and scenography may all be in flux. The intentionof the artist is thus often that of mediating this flux to an audience.


The use of digital media in performance now also implies that itselements and structures may also be not only machine mediated butalso machine generated. Thus, since the mid-1990s, the contexts of per-formance have increasingly included elements of digital media in whichanimation, projection and random selection have entered into the per-formative text. They have challenged our notions of performance atboth the textual and the interpretive level, and further in the intersec-tion, cross-over and hybridisation of these levels. In the print collectionPerforming the Body/Performing the Text, edited by Jones and Stephenson(1999), a performance script by Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante is inter-leafed with more traditional expository academic discourse on perform-ance and interpretation. When multimedia material is included in both per-formance pieces and in research about them relationships between text andinterpretation, 'actors' and audiences may become more complex.

Changing research literacies

Research into the performing arts has a long history, one in which criti-cal interpretation has been paramount. The processes of dramatic pro-duction or musical composition, for example, have gradually becomemore central to our teaching and researching the performing arts. Thiscan be seen in a leading British project into the role of practice in re-search. Hosted at the University of Bristol (Department of Drama:Theatre, Film, Television) 'Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP)'is a five year project which is investigating the intersections between crea-tivity, performance and the broading of research paradigms to include newmodes of performance. Such information is to be found online. It points tothe emergence of attempts to meet the challenges suggested by both ex-periments with digital media and performance, and in attempts to conveythis interplay between theory and practice via digital media.5

For developers, teachers and researchers of digital media who work withperformance arts, an initiative such as this one suggests that there is grow-ing professional concern to establish ways of better understanding rela-tionshsips between ICTs as compositional and mediational tools and thecontexts in which they are made, used and interpreted. However, in parts ofthe academy there is both a lack of interest in these relationships as well as aresistance to understand and to investigate them as arenas for serious re-search. While there may be research on practitoner-researchers (e.g. Jarvis


1999) referring to relationships between work-based learning, adult educa-tion and practice-based research in knowledge-making, many universitiesare in the process of learning how to apply digital media in online teachingprogrammes. Less prominent is a concern with mediating research based onknowledge, experience and insights from new media production and theevolving compositional processes of multimedia research discourse.

This points back to the ealier reference to digital or electronic literacies.In the context of such relationships between production and analysis ofdigital media texts and contexts, these electronic literacies are defined notso much by their realisation via a generation of students who have grownup with digital media, but as part of a potentially modulated research andpedagogical expertise to which the academy ought to already be investing.

Many university websites still make limited use of a variety digitalmedia and related research and pedagogical designs which truly stretchnew media communicatively, that is in relation to both content andtools. Further, few of the university websites which are concerned withdance could be said to be media-rich. In this respect, a recent sympo-sium hosted by PARIP (which we did not attend) was held to realise itsgeneral aim of investigating 'creative-academic issues raised by practiceas research, where performance is understood as theatre, dance, film,video and television.' To this we would add digital and online media. Thesymposium covered four main themes which we paraphrase here as theyare similar to issues we address in relation to Ballectro. The PARIP sym-posium discussed: what practice is as research; how practice may be ques-tioned as research in 'live' and 'recording' media; ways of documenting andre-presenting practice as research; and, the ways in which academic con-texts of practice as research affect how it is pursued and evaluated.6

On the research front, many of the online publications about digitalmedia and dance tend to have been written from a dance, rather than amedia, perspective (e.g. Wechsler, no date). While this chapter ap-proaches the collaborative Ballectro project from the point of vew ofdigital media, we believe that it is important that performance anddance be more fullly included in the fast growing field of digital mediastudies. We argue this because performance arts and performance sudiescan contribute to the methodologies for making and analysing digital me-dia. Thet may also play a part in hwo we increasingly come to be users ofand actant upon digital media texts, environments and communication.


Performance-based research

Drawing on our theoretical and practical knowledge of digital media, de-sign, learning and research, we suggest that we conceptualise performingarts and research about them in digitally mediated domains as perform-ance-based research. In such a research approach, digital media may bepart of the design and shaping of the of dramaturgy and scenography. Inthis chapter, we attempt to support this claim by referring to Ballectro as apilot in which we were able to experiment with the intersection betweenpractice, production and performance, and ways of documenting, mediat-ing, presenting and analysing them in and through digital media. Manyprojects on ICTs appear to steer away from discussing the changing rolesof production and practice in both learning and in research. Both dance anddigital media offer possible ways to understanding how to research and tocommunicate about performance in ICTs, culture and communication.

In this book, we do this via print technology and a set of establisheddiscursive conventions. However, as the appearance of images andweblinks suggests, this chapter refers to another, digitally mediated, com-munication platform, namely the Web. In our presentation of this chapterat the accompanying SKIKT conference,7 we further draw on oral per-formance as well as the Web to suggest ways in which communicating re-search might be conducted in addition to written expository discourse. Forus this is not merely a rhetorical game: it is part of performing and prac-ticing a wider communicative context for ICT-related research. In generalterms, this is a constitutive research discourse in which digital media isboth object and subject, synthetic and analytic, medium and message.

Finding our feetFinding our feetFinding our feetFinding our feetA collaborative, interdisciplinary improvisation

In summer 2001, a cooperation between the SKIKT funded KTK proj-ect called Assemblages, based at InterMedia at the University of Osloand the Departement of Ballet and Dance (Statens balletthgskole) atthe Oslo National College of the Arts was initiated.8 From the start, aprocess-oriented and improvisational approach characterised the col-laboration. What emerged was an experimental multi-purpose projectwhich aimed to link dance, digital media, education and research.9


One of the objectives was to integrate digital media and dance, cre-ating a hybrid performance. This piece would be shown in front ofaudiences at our two institutions before the Christmas holiday. We alsowanted to use ICTs in experimental teaching and learning as an inquiryinto how ICTs could be used to generate institutional change, and to re-search how ICTs could be informed by dance and choreography. Thischapter is therefore one of a series of publications generated from this proj-ect (see e.g. Morrison et al. 2001, the Ballectro project website 2002).

Choreography meets digital media design

Cartography. Mapping. Dancers working with computers know that mappingis not the old explorers' dream of discovering a terra incognito. We do not con-front a new territory, but dance through a transformation of exisitng materialrealities and relations. Once intitial squeamishness is overcome, dancers makethe best cyborgs. Haven't we been shaping and distorting our bodies and abili-ties with a variety of techniques for centuries. Dancers know that the bordersof the body are mutable, porous. When dancers engage with systems like mo-tion capture they crave close contact with the abstracted digital data, not to an-nul it, but to share in contrasting spaces and physicalities. (Susan Kozel 1997).

This quotation points to the importance of the choroegrapher, Jane Hveding,with whom we worked on Ballectro. She works as a dancer, a freelancechoreographer and dance teacher. She provided us with an experimental,'free-form' approach to building a collage-like choreographic process. Inaddition, she invited us into this process and provided us with the security inwhich to improvise as multimedia makers, teachers and researchers.

This offered us a context within which to investigate the reciprocalrelationships between performance, movement, space and expression indigital media and dance. Importantly, this learning context was one inwhich we were not overshadowed by a dance professional who insistedthat her views dominate. Nor did she see the project in terms of moreestablished approaches to film/video and dance. This provided us withan important 'space' in which to start 'finding our feet' together.

Dancing on the academic table

Jane Hveding had been selected by Statens balletthgskole to assist sixfinal year dance students in a course on choreography in the fall of2001 leading up to the annual student performance. We used parts of


the summer 2001 to meet with Jane and to discuss how such a collabo-rative project might be shaped and carried out. As none of us had yetmet the students, we used this time with her to experiment with thefacilities in InterMedia's new building.

Figure 2: Jane Hveding in the video conference room atInterMedia, summer2001 on the first day of our collaboration;(left) infinite regression in projected image; (right) the sameevent filmed from a different camera and projected onto one ofthe other screens.

We began this by workshopping in the video conference room, perhapsnot the first space to think of in terms of a dance and digital media proj-ect. By introducing a choreographer to this facility, we suddenly foundourselves in the middle of a 'stunt' performance, where the video-conferencing system was transformed into a surveillance camera arenafor projecting the moving images of the choreographer who had begunto dance on the room's tables. Right at the start, we could see, and wecould sense, that physical movement and improvisation would be cen-tral to the project. Not only would it be a way of trying out differentchoreographic configurations, it would also be a way of thinking abouthow the 'apparatus' of digital media might itself be moved, shifted offthe desktop and used reflexively to suggest ways of looking at move-ment and the visual, as dance, as digital media and as digital-dance.

The workshopping moved on to InterMedia's tv-studio buried in thebasement of our new building. This was a studio still very much need-ing to be used and promoted and, therefore, later we were able to coman-deer it for weeks at a time. Initially, on our part as multimedia designers


and researchers, we saw this not as a tv-studio, but as an experimentalmultimedia space. However, this was not how the studio had been de-signed, nor was it how the technician responsible for it viewed how thespace ought be used or managed. Over time, her interests in the projectgrew and she made an invaluable contribution to its technical success.However, at first she was alarmed that we wanted to unscrew video pro-jectors, remove lights and replace enormous, professional tv cameras withan improvisation process including hand-held digital video cameras.

In this project we would repeatedly need to explain that we were not in-terested, as it were, in pre-defined settings, either spatially, technically, cho-reographically or educationally. We would need to explain that we werelearning how to collaborate in an interdisciplinary performance-based proj-ect. We would again and again also need to explain that the nature of thisdevelopmental production and performance research inquiry would need tobe understood in terms somewhat different to many of the reports on ICTand learning projects in which research designs are already largely given.

Through a glass darkly

In one of the first shared sessions in the studio, which included the cho-reographer, technician, and multimedia makers, we experimented withequipment which was already available. Here we were interested inseeing the space as other than a zone for broadcasting.

A computer projector, a mobile fabric screen and different lightswere combined in ways that pre-figured the collage-like structure ofmuch of the project. What was also important at this early stage, asStone (1995) suggests with digital media, was that we improvised andplayed. In this studio we rarely sat down, other than on the floor. In thissession we found an ordinary drinking glass which somebody had leftin the room, and as a result, the blue light from the projector (not yetconnected to a laptop) was beamed through the end of this glass. In thisplay, we took turns in moving between the projector and screen, andbehind the screen, some of the effects of which can be seen in Figure 3below. We saw for oursleves that we would need to think through thework with the students, and for the final performance, in new ways fordance and for digital media. We would need to rethink more establishedconventions of video and film on and for dance, just as for digital me-dia we would need to move beyond the confines of the desktop.


Figure 3: 'Through a glass darkly '. Andrew Morrison and JaneHveding during the first session in the tv-studio at InterMedia,summer 2001. The inverted camera was used together with videofeedback in the later performances.

These examples are mentioned because they illustrate a bottom-up wayof working which was essential for the project. The playful mood inwhich this collaboration started was continued during the further workwith the students and with making the performance piece itself.

Reconfiguring learning contextsReconfiguring learning contextsReconfiguring learning contextsReconfiguring learning contextsCollaborative learning

To work on such a project of simultaneous teaching and learning, weneeded to learn about dance and choreography. We also needed to learnhow to incorporate the media in a performance context. In broad terms,we had to learn by doing and this doing was to be done via workshopdance and digital media sessions in which improvisation, play, experi-mentation and rehearsal were central.

In this respect, the project drew on the notions and actions approachof the reflective practitioner (Schn 1983, 1987) and tried not only toapply them to dance education (McFee 1994), but to the composition ofa multimedia-dance project: as learning, as design and as research.Where such an approach may be opposed to a technical rationalism, itsees knowledge as inherent practice and practice as a means of findingsolutions to problems, as well as theorising them. Thus reflective prac-tice is a route to generating knowledge, but one in which this is seen associally constructed. In the case of the Ballectro project, this was an in-


determinate, processural reflection-in-action, and one that needed tolook outwards from known disciplinary borders in the collaborativeshaping of a new hybrid performance and space. As Wei and Kuzmanovic(2001) comment on the context of their collaborative dance and mediawork, 'It is the rich confusion of our physical world, together with the in-stability of the virtual one, that allows hybrid public spaces to emerge.'

Meeting the dance students

At the start of the fall term in 2001, we met with the six students at theStatens balletthgskole. The dance peice would need to be ready by lateNovember. The students were already accomplished dancers after twoyears of full-time study at their institution. They were six very differentpeople, if of roughly the same age. The group included three womenand three men. Two of the men, Koshiwayi Sabuneti and Wilson Phiri,come from Zimbabwe. Two of the women are also from outside Nor-way, Beta Kretovivov is from Iceland, Malin Rengstedt is from Swe-den, while the third male dancer, Erlend Samnen is from Norway as isthe third women, Stephanie Sund. English and Norwegian were there-fore the working languages of this diverse group.

These students had expressly asked for inputs on video and dance andwere interested to learn more about how digital media might be used indance, though they had themselves not moved much beyond web browsingand SMS messaging. We introduced the students to the project membersand to a new institutional and practice/performance setting at the Univer-sity of Oslo. In addition, we developed a tight schedule for collaborationwith them and their choreography teacher. We soon learned that, giventheir other dance commitments, there would be little time for training indigital media. All-the-same, the students were to play an active part inmaking the performances, and many of the ideas and movements in theworkshops and the final performance also came from the students.

The negotiation between the various actors in the project six dancestudents, a choreographer, two technical personnel, a musician, and threemedia designers/researchers was complex. We were involved in a 'de-veloping project' in which delicate negotiations were repeatedly neededbetween persons, cultures and disciplines. The altering of traditional rolessuch as choreographer, editor, producer and designers and dancers led tointeresting discussions among ourselves when we had to decide the credits


in the programme for the Christmas performances. The dancers had madetheir own solos, the project leader was doing media design and the engineerworked on the lighting, and the choreographer was just as much a projectleader. The researchers were doing choreography. As is the case in suchcollaborative projects, we often took on slightly different roles and had tolearn to function within and beyond our own fields of expertise. In hind-sight, though, one could argue that a stricter, more linear way of workingmight have been more effective in developing a finished 'multimedia' pro-duction. Had the logistics of the project been more thoroughly anticipatedand planned, our medley might also have been easier to perform.

ICTs in the learning context of Ballectro meant that both teach-ing, learning, making a performance and researching were differentaspects of the same project. Interdisciplinary collaborative projectswhich involve experimental new media have a tendency to turn es-tablished roles of teachers and learners upside down. In such an ex-perimental project, nobody is an expert, and everybody has to learnfrom one another to be able to the work collaboratively. In the Bal-lectro project, stepping out of one's own professional roles was re-quired for creating a climate for collaboration and workshopping.From the media side of the project, it was necessary to learn aboutdance, choreography, and performance to be able to think about themedia as an integrated part of the performance. The choreographerand dancers had to learn about digital media to be able to see possi-ble relationships between the dance and the media.

Practice and performance spaces

The actual bodily movement of real people, and not only the screen-baseddesign of digital media, was an important dimension in the collaboration.On many occasions the choreographer answered our questions by dancing,by moving, by using gesture and by drawing. We gradually learned byher example, and by watching the students also moving and learning how central thinking with the body is to choreography, dance design andperformance. This was most important in rethinking our own understand-ing and design of digital media in the learning processes of the project andin the performance context. As will be discussed later in the chapter, thisalso further influenced our approaches to communicating research online.


The movement in an actual physical space (the large dance stage atStatens balletthgskole, or the Intermedia tv studio with its smaller 'stage'area) provided the research project with a means of bringing design and re-search of ICTs into several interesting spatial relationships and contexts. Thetwo performance spaces differed in size and quality. As far as dance wasconcerned, the larger professional stage at Statens balletthgskole was supe-rior, but it needed to be booked and was in great demand. In contrast, thecold concrete floor of the tv-studio, now called the studio, was more of a pri-vate rehearsal space where it was possible to leave equipment which had al-ready been set-up. At various points in the project, the multimedia-relatedequipment had to be hauled between this studio and the stage at Statens bal-letthgskole, and re-purposed for that different context. So much for 'mobilemedia' in all this shifting of equipment in a project about movement!

We have described and discussed some of the media related compo-nents of Ballectro in an online paper (Morrison et al. 2001). Here we re-fer to three examples only. At Statens balletthgskole, we tried out in-teractive Flash animations with different movements and shapes.10 Theanimations were projected at the back wall on the stage, and the stu-dents were asked to select items from the computer and to interprettheir movements and to improvise on the basis of them. Further, theseselections were randomly generated by the software. Some of the stu-dents felt that the movements in the animations restricted them insteadof giving them material for new movement. Given time constraints,these activities were not followed up in the way originally planned: wetended to move along with the dance at this point. However, some ofthese animations were used in the final performances but as scenogra-phy to a choreography inspired by the postcards exercise described atthe start of the chapter.

We also introduced a projected live camera to the teaching. The camerawas placed upside down at a certain angle to the back wall. This created avisual feedback effect. The students needed to find out how their movementscould work together with the video. They quickly found ways of moving ones that were clearly also producing and developing a strong aesthetic that they probably would not have found out without the feedback. Exampleof this can be seen in Figures 4 and 5 below in the form of Willson Phiri'sboxing-match with his upside-down self, and Erlend Samnen's generationof his own dance moves from seeing them multiplied in front of him.


As with the animated shapes in Flash, this video feedback was de-veloped into a part of the final performances. So too was the use of'spatial video' in the live filming and projection of close-ups from groupand duet sequences. Auslander (1999) has discussed 'liveness' in perform-ance and media. In the actual final performances we wanted to maintain afeel of the importance of improvisation and liveness, of its performativity.In The Analysis of Performance Art, Howell (1999: 229) argues that:

A key question for performance artists must be, how do we keep the im-provisation diverse, how do we ensure that even our most spontanesousactions read ambiguously, so that our audience finds it difficult to decidewhether it is watching something improvised or something rehearsed.

Repeatedly, we found that the relationships between movement and themedia were strongly interdependent, and there was a knack to their co-composition.

Figure 4 & 5: (left)Willson Phiri boxing with himself at the firstupside-down camera session at the Ballethgskole, fall 2001.(right) Erlend Samnen at the first upside down camera ses-sion at the Ballethgskole, fall 2001. Notice the feedback effecton the graphics from the camera display.

We also invited students to film with DV cameras while they danced. Wewanted to try out how they would move with the cameras, as dancers and notfrom the standpoint of more traditional video. We were able to see how thisdance looked form the point of movement of the dancers; this would be in-action, inside footage. We used this event to suggest to the students that theyshould be thinking of how to 'see through' other aspects of the use of digitalmedia in the project. We also suggested that this would be a likely need inunderstanding and practising the future interplay of dance and technology.


Figure 6: (left) Malin Rengsedt and Beta Kretovivov film aduet between Stephanie Sund and Koshiwayi Sabuneti; BetaKretovivov films a solo imporvisation by Erlend Samnen.

This inverting of camera and dancing with images of live images pointto how important it is not to take technology and tools as a given, but tosee them as felxibel and mallable, despite their boundedness. Similarly,if interdiscilinary teaching and research into ICTs is to succeed, it isimportant to let go of a certain degree of certainty and to step forth withsome security given by a collaborative partner.

Performance and contextPerformance and contextPerformance and contextPerformance and contextOne 'performance', two contexts

As the project developed, we decided to use the studio at InterMediaand the stage and rehearsal studios at Statens balletthgskole as a per-formance spaces. This decision was made for practical reasons: thedancers needed room in which to keep developing their project and weneeded a stable testing ground in which equipment did not have to beremoved from the practice space immediately after the session.

This was possible at InterMedia, yet the studio venue there was not de-signed as a dance space: it was smaller than the stage at the dance school,and its hard floor was not kind on dancers' feet. However, the studio pro-vided the project with its own space for rehearsing, and for accentuating theplace of digital media and research in the project. Further, this broughtdancers into a research setting, and also allowed colleagues from the de-partment to see our work in progress, as dance, as digital media and as anexploratory research project. The decision to move between two unalikespaces was also made because we intended that the work also be performedin two different contexts, one connected with research and the other dance.


Production with research

However, this shifting context in which the project was being developed alsoadded extra levels to an already complex project process. In the researchcontext around InterMedia, the project was not easy to categorise and, with avery small budget, technical needs had to be redefined. The project couldonly proceed on the basis of many technical compromises. While this was attimes frustrating for all the participants, the project was designed as an ex-ploratory learning and design collaboration between new partners over ashort period. In addition, we were working to develop a student performancepiece in which digital media was not meant to over-shadow their dancing. Inthe context of Statens balletthgskole, we felt that our piece was seen moreas a danced choreography than as aa dance-media hybrid.

The project did not fit easily into the existing structures of the two in-stitutional contexts. Yet, as a whole, the project was useful in piloting theneeds of such action-based research in a new research centre, where manyfacilities had yet to be used experimentally, and where working with digitalmedia production and research into electronic arts had not been part of themain concerns of either research or production. The project also broughtresearch on choreography and digital media into the dance school.

Performance for researchPerformance for researchPerformance for researchPerformance for researchImprovisation for researchersOne of the difficulties of this project was explaining the importance ofimprovisation and experimentation in the medley of dance, learning anddigital media: as learning, as design and as research.

We decided one way to do this was to bring the project out of the studioin the basement of InterMedia and into the central public space of thebuilding. The six students improvised dance in this space for approximatelyfifteen minutes. The space includes the entrance and the canteen as well as aflight of three levels of stairs open to the other areas, and linked with glasselevators. This offered people many points from which to view the improvi-sation. It also allowed the dancers to move across and up and down publicspaces and to draw our attention to our own typical movements acrossthem. The improvisation took place without music and against the backdropof the daily activities of this pubilic arena. The students ran up and down thestairs, following some pre-arranged moves. At times they followed a


movement one of them had begun. They fell to the floor. They wrappedthemselves around the bannisters and descended the staircase in a largemoving mass. One of the students raced up to the top of the stairs wayabove the onlookers and shouted out into the roof of the glass atrium. Oth-ers danced in and around the elevators, pressing the buttons, holding openthe doors and breaking the rules of polite public use. People going abouttheir business walked right into this improvisation and responded to it dif-ferently. The leader of an ICT and learning project was physically drawninto the dance. As the improvisation piece came to a close, the large groupof onlookers began to return to offices, labs and meeting rooms.

The student dancers also introduced improvisation at an interval in aseminar on Mobility held at InterMedia in November 2001.11 The stu-dents had been invited to perform an improvised piece to highlight as-pects of human movement and artistic expression through dance. Onthis occasion, however, they performed in the open air, in a large court-yard hemmed in by glass walls and set into a well in the main entrancelevel of the research park. Participants in the research seminar on mo-bility were asked to leave the warmth of the seminar room and to moveoutside to see a dance piece on mobility and improvisation. As part oftheir improvisation, the students used the air streams from a large ven-tilation system cone, and blew leaves, paper and other objects into the air.The audience, looking down on the performers, was encouraged to throwchocolates, paper balls and empty cardboard boxes down into the space.The students then reacted to some of these immobile objects. They alsotook photographs during their performance. These were later used in an in-stallation the students made in the canteen at Statens balletthgskole as partof their contextualising of the project for their end of year performance.

Performance for researchersHaving introduced Ballectro as dance to a research context throughimprovisation, the project was now introduced as dance and mediato teachers, graduate students and researchers through a researchseminar entitled 'Designing Design' which we also arranged. Thisseminar discussed how different fields of design may inform re-search and development in digital media, and how we may employapproaches from design to investigate, analyse and understand digi-tal technologies and their uses. It also asked in what ways an inte-


grated approach to design can help us to conceptualise and practicethe use of ICTs in communication, learning and culture. Papers forthis seminar were published in electronic form only. The media re-searchers in the Ballectro project used this occasion to present theproject from an online research paper. The paper concentrated oncollaboration and the role of digital media in the project (see Morri-son 2001). For us, the overall seminar was a means of building anelectronic resource of academic publications around design anddigital media. We were able to present material on the media com-ponents of the project as well as its collaborative and participatorydesign. This 'design of design' was then extended at the close of theseminar with the first full public performance of the dance piece.The researchers, then, shifted their roles from the seminar and be-came performers of a different kind (mixing sound, video, projec-tion, and computer files).

Figure 7: Video still from a trio, performance at the DesigningDesign seminar, InterMedia,28 February 2001; dancers: MalinRengstedt (back) and Koshiwayi Sabuneti (front).


Lasting roughly 20 minutes, the performance was specifically for theseminar participants and other interested researchers. This gave theseresearchers the possibility of 'performing the text as an audience', andnot reading about it in a report or article form. Video material of thisperformance is to be found on the Ballectro website under develop-ment. We invite readers of this chapter to interrupt their current role asreaders of print academic discourse, and to see a mediated form of theperformance by visiting the 'Performances' section of the Ballectro web.

This interruption is a deliberate part of our wider argument aboutthe possibilities to move between layers of discourse and discoursetypes in research which is about and in digital media and perform-ance. Our presentation of this chapter at the SKIKT conference, forwhich this book has been prepared is a further attempt to crossboundaries between print and electronic discourse, between presen-tation and performance, and between production and interpretation.

Figure 8: The studio space at InterMedia after the Ballectroperformance at the Designing Design seminar, 28 November 2001.


Performance for dancePerformance for dancePerformance for dancePerformance for danceFrom research to dance context

Following these improvisations and the performance for researchers atthe University of Oslo, we now moved to the performance setting ofStatens balletthgskole. This was a shift in context, in terms of space,technology, performance and audience. This shift also impacted on ourunderstanding the mechanics of the project as well as the interpretationof the performance piece.

While Ballectro was given prominence by being the opening piecein the annual student concert, it was very clear to us as media develop-ers and researchers that we had entered an entirely different learningand performance settting. This proved to be important in two main re-spects. The first concerned technical adjustment. The second refers tothe multi-level choreography and multimedia character of the piecebeing placed in an established dance performance schedule.

Moving to the larger and wider stage, and the fact that our perform-ance would be replaced by another scenography, meant that we had toreconfigure the entire technical arrangement of the work. Although weknew the dimensions of the stage from having rehearsed there, we hadto alter the screens we had made to fit this space. However, we did notchange their size as we would have liked to have done. We also quicklyrealised that due to the scale of the performance space having ex-panded, the dance itself would open out. Similarly, our use of digitalmedia would need to accommodate a broadening of movement. Mostimportantly, this meant that a second, more powerful computer projec-tor had to be added to the technical repertoire. This was so that thecomputer projected material would be bright enough to be seen by anightly audience (of about 150 persons). This audience was also likelyto be more critical of the dance and choreography, and the ways inwhich multimedia enhanced or detracted from them.

As the piece was to be followed by an entirely different dance, the setfor Ballectro, including expensive computer equipment also had to betaken down in minutes by the non-dancers in the project. This was quite adifferent kind of performance for us as researchers to conduct over sixnights. While in its processes of composition the piece had been frequentlyrestructured, now we repeatedly re-performed the same structured piece.


Figure 9: Stills from a Ballectro performance at Statens balletthg-skole. The dancers (above) are multipled on the back screen viavideo projection of live camera feed. The dancer (below), BetaKretovivov, observes the projection of a previously recordeddigital video of herself dancing. In Icelandic and Slovenian, shequestions her own moving self. Simultaneously, music (compressedand accelerated sound built from her own voice) plays.

While so far we had called the piece and the project Ballectro, sug-gesting a merger of dance and electronic media, the students and thechoreographer now decided the piece needed a different, and less bal-


let-like name. After much debate we settled on the title 'flsj frash'.This pointed to two aspects of the performance. The first was that wehad used the software Flash to develop part of the dance, but of coursethe possible 'Flashdance' was the title of an entirely different Holly-wood film from the 1980s. Second, the title 'flsj frash' referred first to theNorwegian spelling of Flash and, in a playful other senses, to one pronoun-ciation of the word by a Zimbabwean speaker of Shona suggesting 'cool-ness'. This allowed us to refer to the Norwegian and Zimbabwean partici-pants in the project, though the nuances in this title may be partly missed.

Another change we met was that our formerly contained perform-ance piece now joined a medley of others in an established dance per-formance schedule geared towards a dance community. In this context,we were also finally able to see our work in relation to other cho-reographies, some developed by the staff and two based on the work ofthe well-known Norwegian chorographer, Jo Strmgren.

An additional, and difficult, change for us as researchers who haddriven the digital media part of the performance was that in this per-formance context some of the technical control now needed to pass intothe hands of a lighting and sound specialists contracted by Statens bal-letthgskole. This meant, especially as regards sound, that we were nolonger able to integrate all the elements of what was a multi-level cho-reography and multimedia performance ourselves. Used to mixing theselements in tune with the dancers and other media, we now saw howseparate many dance performances are from their creators. Perhaps thisis no surprise to choreographers and lighting and sound specialists.

Performing researchPerforming researchPerforming researchPerforming researchReporting research in online environments

There is a small, if growing body of research about conducting online re-search (e.g. Jones 1999, Mann & Stewart 2000, Hakken 1999; see also thisvolume). This print based material is chiefly concerned with how to carryout a range of research methods in primarily Internet based domains. Ap-plied research is presented but little mention is made of visual media (seee.g. Pink 2001) or of building a multi-mediational research rhetoric. Suchan argument is to be found in several online journals concerned with schol-arly publication and digital discourse (e.g. Gailin & Latchaw 1998, Ingra-


ham 2002). However, as Morrison (2001) has argued, few electronic jour-nals in the humanities and social sciences make apt use of images in theirweb-based mediation of research. In addition, fewer still employ videomaterial as part of an electronic research rhetoric (e.g. Owens 2000).

Digital video and audio were used to document aspects of Ballectro. Stilland moving images were an important part of reflecting on the learning andwork process as well as the performances.12 We used the projection of re-corded and projected video to help us decide how to shape the larger chore-ography; reviewing footage also helped in selecting and refining materialfor the piece. Drawings, sketches, and notes were used to keep track of acomplex process. For some of the period a sociologist observed our ses-sions, and although given the density of the project his role as a videodocumenter was not fulfilled, he nevertheless introduced important ques-tions about participant observation in a performance-driven project. Danceitself was also a mode of memory-making: the repeat movements, the re-hearsals and the need to 'learn' the piece as non-dancers forced the multime-dia developers to put down their notebooks and cameras. In addition to thevideo material filmed by the researchers, at times the students also filmedtheir own dance movements as well as the contexts in which their learningwas taking place at Statens balletthgskole. Video was also used in severalworkshop activities to highlight issues of presentation, and improvisation,though video-playback of dance was rarely used. Elements of the dancewere repeated with changes and different expressions. This reflexive devel-opment design also filtered into the ways in which we also worked as par-ticipants and as participant observers ourselves.

However, face-to-face discussions and actual 'rehearsals' in theworkshop sessions were the most frequent means of making sense ofthe ongoing process. The aim of using digital video was not to producea fully documented multimedia ethnography online, though such toolsnow enable us to follow research and learning trajectories via the web.However, building a multimedia-rich website (now underway) was oneway of documenting aspects of the project: as a means of record for thedance school and as an aid to future learning and research projects(Ballectro 2002). We were also trying to perform research rhetorically,by way of experimenting with how to present it in an online setting.

Thus we aimed to generate an example of how one approach to project-based research may be communicated in a digital domain. In particular, asthe Ballectro website demonstrates, we needed to find a fit between the


content, the process and the medium so as to reduce some of the distancebetween a partly digitally mediated performance and its interpretation.

Extending performance based research

This chapter, therefore also, lies within the evolving Ballecto projectwebsite. It too is part of a wider project at InterMedia to build capaci-ties for designing research materials for online communication. Notonly would we need to establish how and where and why to use still im-ages, but these questions would also apply to video, and the quality, sizeand streaming of files. Thus, we needed to select material from the processand the performances. We linked them with research papers, such as thisone, as well as to other research on dance and digital media available on-line. In short, we were trying to develop a prototype to demonstrate howthe web is a medium within which a convergence between the researchprocesses and products may be constructed, and thus also interpreted.

Jones and Stephenson (1999: 8) argue that:

Interpretation is, we would argue, a kind of performance of the object,while the performance of the body as an artistic practice is a mode oftextual inscription. The body (as the corporeal enactment of the subject) isknown and experienced only through its representational performances whether presented 'live,' in photographs, videos, films, on the computerscreen, or through the interpretive text itself. Interpretation, like the pro-duction of works of art, is a mode of communication. Meaning is a proc-ess of engagement and never dwells in any one place.

With respect to Ballectro, such 'interpretation' may be seen at two lev-els. First, the project may be read as an instance of what we call 'per-formance based research'.13 Second, we suggest that it may be useful tobroaden the electronic reporting of media-rich ICT-related research toinclude performance.

Future stepsFuture stepsFuture stepsFuture stepsElectronic rhetoric and hermeneutics

In researching about dance and digital media, we were somewhat sur-prised at what we did not find online. While many dance sites exist, in-cluding those which discuss dance and technology (e.g. the Dance &


Technology Zone), few of them have high quality images. Rarely doesone come across a dance site filled with images and text which contex-tualises these images.14 We imagined that we might also find videomaterial on dance online, but this was even harder to find.15

There would still appear to be relatively few examples of dance on-line in which digital media is prominent but also where a multimediateddance may be said to be represented (see e.g. deLahunta 1998a, Bir-ringer 2002) and analysed (Sha & Kuzmanovic 2000). Online examplesof the documentation of dance in context, such as that from the De-partment of Dance at Ohio State University (2002) also exist, particu-larly with reference to dance and digital media workshops (Birringer2002). Robbie Shaw (2002) has a five and a half minute web dancevideo called 'Time train'. Re-mediating the genre of a silent film, thepiece has chorographic input from its performers. Further, this web-screened video was edited digitally. In another work, called 'Panic skid',Jennifer Marshall and Robbie Shaw (1999) present two dance videoswhich run simultaneously and which are surrounded by text.

The documentation of electronic arts projects is an important part ofbuilding its history and its rhetoric (e.g. Dpocas, 2001). However, un-like many of the performance pieces of the 1960s and even 1970s,digital video, stills and audio now offer handier and cheaper means fordocumenting performance-based projects, and especially the corporeal-ity of dance, and their mediation online. There are now several projectson the documentation of choreography and related dance performances.The Norwegain dance and multimedia performer Amanda Steggell andher collaborators provide a close-to-home example of how a perform-ance work may be viewed online; in 'Maggie's Love Bites'16 the onlinemediation is part of the message (see also deLahunta 1996). This is wellillustrated in a cd-rom based documentation of choreography for workentitled 'A Desparate Heart'. Similar is an instructional cd-rom 'Prey: aninnovation in dance documentation' on the choreography of BebeMiller (Mockebee 2002). This cd-rom contains notes, each of which

displays Bebe teaching or coaching the dancers alongside the Labano-tation phrase, a complete edited video of the group work, historical, cul-tural contexts, interview with Miller, review by Candace Feck, Miller'sWorld, and brief instances of the process and moments of the originallong phrase that Miller and the students created.


Such an approach is also taken over to dvd in a title called 'Going to thewall a document of the process', again referring to a work by Bebe Miller.

Such experimental research and performance settings provide uswith a 'laboratory' space within which to conceptualise the changingcharacter of dance and digital media. In particular, they also provide uswith research driven contexts based on practice linked with theory.These contexts provide actual, populated interdisciplinary spaces forthe embodiment of the synthetic-analytic model Gunnar Liestl (2001,2002 forthcoming) proposes is so important in digital media productionand analysis. 'Peformance' may thus be seen to be extended beyond therole of the dancer and the static, seated audience.

Responsive digital media and performance

'Performance' may thus be seen to be extended beyond the established andassigned roles of the dancer and the static, seated audience to a more plasticrelationship between tools and tellers, performers and the audience as per-formative players who may enter a performance space and piece and trav-erse the divide between the stage and the spectator. This can be seen in thecollaborative works of Sponge and FoAM (sic). These are interdisciplinaryand collaborative research and design teams working with digital media.

'Tgarden' is one of their interesting performance based project wes-bites (Sha & Kuzmanovic 2000, Sha et al. 2000).17 This site, and theirothers, presented us with prototypical examples of performance, in-cluding dance, digital media and web mediation are co-present. Impor-tantly, the 'Tgarden' project site stresses the importance of responsitivity indigitally mediated performance. A collaborative and interdisciplinary re-search, technical and artistic venture, 'Tgarden' investigates:

how people individually and collectively make sense of responsive, hy-brid media environments by articulating their knowledge in non-verbal ways.More specifically, the project investigates how a person can create meaning-ful gestures in a dynamic environment and develop expertise in them.18

This can be seen in the videos which accompany this explanatory ver-bal text. In a section of their website entitled 'Transforming the tool',Sponge state that 'We're interested in making it possible for someonewho is trying to "write", in the broadest sense, to refashion the tools ofwriting him or herself. A reflexivity of action.'


Sponge and FoAM presented us with digitally mediated research dis-course in which digital media was employed to communicate the researchcontent and context. In short, it demonstrates a web-related contextualisa-tion of interests and publication types similar to ours. In their own words,the web site is a hybrid and augmented space, but not just about perform-ance but also as the performance of their research. This is apparent in theirpublication of a conference paper bearing video material from the perform-ance (by the audience) as well as slides from the presentation of the paper.

Two of the project members, Sha and Kuzmanovic (2000), argue that'By shifting attention from representation to performance, we shift the fo-cus of design from technologies of static representation (e.g. snap-shot da-tabase schemas with data from forms), to technologies of creation and per-formance.' As deLahunta argues, (and as we have experienced as learners,designers and researchers), arts education, including dance and media,needs to be broadened to include the problems and approaches we havetried to contextualise here as part of an ongoing shift in our literacies. Hedemonstrates this himself in an online piece as a 'temporary typology prac-tice' referring to dance and digital media. He links a presentation text withits presentation notes, video footage and web links (see deLahunta 1998a).

Dymanic perfomative discourse

As Susan Kozel (1997) says, 'How do we map the body of dance as itexpands its representational systems?' How too are we to do this fordigital media? That is for dance and media as artistic and as academictexts? Now that dance cds and dvds and research projects and publica-tions have begun to demonstrate links between choreography and itsperformance, we hope that it will be possible to stretch this further andtake some new steps into a dynamic, electronic and responsive per-formance. This may be the case in a proposed collaboration with threechoreography students in the fall of 2002 in which they will each de-velop a choreography for other students to dance. At present we are stillto learn about their interests, but their chreography teacher has asked usto collaborate with them in working on renaissance material. At presentwe are calling this the Piazza project. Piazza might be one site in whichwe can further investigate relationships between dance and digital me-dia design, and also perhaps learn how to work and to develop more re-sponsive multimedia dance spaces and performances.


From the point of view of research and pedagogy on digital me-dia, through the Ballectro project we learned to perform, to researchperformance and to perform research. A future interdisciplinary andcollaborative multimedia-dance project such as Piazza might result in 'asite' in which research processes, accounts, performances and interpre-tation are connected with an electronically mediated rhetoric. In suchfuture steps, we would also hope to embody the performing of researchso that 'moving media', responsive performers and audiences might alsobe 'players' in its making and interpretation, stepping between digital-dance and digitally mediated dymanic research texts. That, however, isa matter of a different time, space and context.

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Notes1 Ballectro is a project funded by the KTK initiative, housed at InterMedia atthe University of Oslo. KTK stands for 'Communication: Technology & Cul-ture', a programme funded by SKIKT. According to original documentation,KTK 'focuses on the interfaces between the traditional subject areas. The cen-tral effort is therefore directed towards the development, application and


analysis of communication technology in the light of historical/philosophical,linguistic/symbolic, societal, political, legal, ethical, pedagogical and techno-logical factors. This applies to both the conditions for and the consequences ofsuch technology. The aim of this priority area is to develop new competencethrough interdisciplinary research with a view to meeting the needs of societyfor new teaching provision, mediation, publicising and further research.'Statens balletthgskole also contributed to the funding of the project. Informationon Statens balletthgskole may be found at: http://www.khio.no/ballett/index.html.The Ballectro project website is at: www.intermedia.projects/ballectro.htm. Ourthanks to Brd Ketil Engen for comments on the chapter.2 Statens balletthgskole (known in English as the National College of Balletand Dance) is part of the Kunsthyskole in Oslo. In this chapter will use theNorwegian name.3 Workshops are being used as part of the building of the Ballectro website;students from the project will be partly involved in this process.4 Marita Liulia, Kimmo Pohjonen and Aki Suzuki's Performance Manipulator(at Kiasma, ARS01, Helsiniki, Finland) is a combination of concert, exhibi-tion, media, and dance performance. It involves a similar mixing of art formsand ways of performing we found interesting in Ballectro. The Manipulatorartists also combine traditional artforms (dance, visuals, music) with new tech-nology. Available at: http://www.kiasma.fi/ars/manipulator/index.php5 The 'Context' section of the PARIP website summarises this:

The pursuit of practice as research / practice-based research (PAR /PBR) has become increasingly important during the past ten years tothe research cultures of the performing arts (drama, theatre, dance, mu-sic) and related disciplines involving performance media (film, video,television, radio) as the contribution of the arts and cultural industries tonational health and prosperity has climbed up the political agenda. Agrowing number of performing arts / media departments in higher edu-cation are now offering higher degrees which place practice at the heartof their research programmes. This represents a major theoretical andmethodological shift in the performance disciplines traditional ap-proaches to the study of these arts are complemented and extended byresearch pursued through the practice of them.

See: http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/#context6 See: http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/#context7 The SKIKT conference website is at:http://www.intermedia.uio.no/konferanser/skikt-02/skikt-research-conferance.html8 For example, Tronstad (2002, forthcoming) suggests that the concept per-formance is only partially useful in conceptualising online MUD adventures.


9 Details of choreography and dance aspects will be addressed elsewhere, aswill a focus on learning.10 For more detail on the media aspects of the project, see Morrison et al. (2001).11 This seminar and the one mentioned hereafter on design were both part ofthe KTK Assemblages project, funded through the SKIKT programme.12 We documented parts of the process while the project unfolded. DV cameraswere used to record aspects of the different sessions. Mostly the documentation wascarried out as general observation without direct interviews of the students. Thedocumentation is valuable for several reasons. It demonstrates a creative process butalso miscommunication. We documented less and less towards the end of the proj-ect as we started to run low on people to fill the different roles, and do specific tasks.Another reason for the decline in documentation was the gradual change from acreative process to rehearsals. Towards the live performances more effort was putinto making the performances actually work the way we wanted than on the re-cording of the process. Given our time boundaries, recording and interviewing theparticipants tended to break concentracion and to use up rehearsal time.13 Here we do not mean the kind which is inherent in research assessment ex-ercises such as conducted in British universities.14 In contrast, for example, performance artists and groups, such as the Norwe-gian based Motherboard, have used the web to link real-time performances towebsites with scripts and a range of different performance types to build dy-namic environments. (see http://www.notam02.no/motherboard/). Troikaranch, for example, has a salon on projects (see:http://www.troikaranch.org/websalon2.html) and also provides a different im-age each day (see: http://www.troikaranch.org/yearbody.html).15 Perhaps, the tradition of dance for film and the video of dance for televisionoffer dancers higher quality images and more satisfying representations of cho-reographies and their performances.16 From online notes to this piece:

M@ggie's Love Bytes has developed through the group's engagementin net life, and tries to cater for a great amount, and diversity of traf-fic/inter-activity during the performance. The ongoing process of run-ning the show is embedded in the expression of the piece (words suchas open, close, fetch, connect, disconnect, and icons such as the runningdog in FTP, and the open and closed eye in CU-SeeMe, appear on thewall, adding an extra dimension to whatever may be happening justthen). All these features form an integral part of net life as we know it.And this is the point: M@ggie's Love Bytes is in fact a regular dancetheatre performance of the 90's which dares to reflect upon, and per-form through our digitally-connected lives as they happen - now! How-


ever, what makes this project unique is the (re-claimed) power of themoving, gesturing human body in cyberspace, embodied in the dancers.

At: http://www.notam02.no/~amandajs/where.html17 Synne Skjulstad and Albertine Aaberge were able to become players in thisresponsive media and dance work at Ars Electronica in Linz, September 2001.18 At: http://www.sponge.org/events_m3_tgarden.htm. See also:http://titanium.lcc.gatech.edu/topologicalmedia/tgarden/index.html

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