Transmedial composition in kinetic performance: Mimesis without resemblance, ambiguity, and the enactive mind
🗓️ Thursday, 25 June — 10:10am
- 10:50am
(40 mins)
Presenters
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Abstract
This presentation explores transmedial composition in kinetic performance as a practice foregrounding embodied, kinaesthetic knowledge; understanding that precedes language and whose centrality in aesthetic experience and is marginalized by the computational standardisation of aesthetic experience.
Drawing on Movement, Mimesis, and Mimicry (Uniarts Helsinki) and previous research, I use the performance Inscription as case study. Performer Alwynne Pritchard shares the stage with non-representational kinetic sculptures "disembodied prosthetics" that bear no resemblance to a human body whose movements derive from her motion-captured data. The mediation here, the motion capture, robotics and software translate one performer's movement into mechanical forms that necessarily transform it, producing difference, not replication.
The presentation traces three ontological thresholds. Intent to inscription: human movement inscribed into mechanical forms, understood through Derrida's trace and Malafouris' material engagement theory as transformation, not degradation. Mechanism to agency: non-representational forms enlisting kinaesthetic knowledge through enactive perception (Noë, Sheets-Johnstone), creating an "intentionality vacuum" compelling embodied meaning-making. Sensation to kinship: pre-reflective bodily resonance (Gallese) fostering felt relation with non-human performers grounded in kinaesthetic recognition rather than visual resemblance.
I argue that transmedial composition here is not the organisation of parallel media but the design of conditions for co-emergent meaning, irreducibly embodied, plural, and private. The practice orients toward a horizon - felt kinship - that can only exist in the interior of each encountering body. This is intended as a subversive compositional stance: work whose essential content is constitutively inaccessible to standardising forces, belonging to knowledge that cannot be extracted or algorithmically reproduced.
Drawing on Movement, Mimesis, and Mimicry (Uniarts Helsinki) and previous research, I use the performance Inscription as case study. Performer Alwynne Pritchard shares the stage with non-representational kinetic sculptures "disembodied prosthetics" that bear no resemblance to a human body whose movements derive from her motion-captured data. The mediation here, the motion capture, robotics and software translate one performer's movement into mechanical forms that necessarily transform it, producing difference, not replication.
The presentation traces three ontological thresholds. Intent to inscription: human movement inscribed into mechanical forms, understood through Derrida's trace and Malafouris' material engagement theory as transformation, not degradation. Mechanism to agency: non-representational forms enlisting kinaesthetic knowledge through enactive perception (Noë, Sheets-Johnstone), creating an "intentionality vacuum" compelling embodied meaning-making. Sensation to kinship: pre-reflective bodily resonance (Gallese) fostering felt relation with non-human performers grounded in kinaesthetic recognition rather than visual resemblance.
I argue that transmedial composition here is not the organisation of parallel media but the design of conditions for co-emergent meaning, irreducibly embodied, plural, and private. The practice orients toward a horizon - felt kinship - that can only exist in the interior of each encountering body. This is intended as a subversive compositional stance: work whose essential content is constitutively inaccessible to standardising forces, belonging to knowledge that cannot be extracted or algorithmically reproduced.
Biography
Thorolf Thuestad is a sound artist, composer, kinetic sculptor and artistic researcher. He studied music technology and composition at NTNU, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Utrecht School of Arts, and holds a PhD from the University of Bergen, Grieg Academy. His work spans stage and installation arts and contemporary music, currently centred on performances for kinetic sculptures and human performers. Notable collaborators include Verdensteateret, Transiteateret and Bit20 Ensemble, and he has contributed to productions receiving multiple Hedda Awards and a Norwegian Theatre Critics Award. He co-founded Neither Nor with Alwynne Pritchard and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki.
