TENSOR
Tensor is a performance created by Beliz Demircioglu & Jamie Allen. It has been performed in Codice-Idee per la Cultura in Italy.
The body, as points in space, with its nearly infinite variations of position and placement, reflect aspects of voice. Our first voice is the body, and within our motion lies language and fluidity, often sought to be mimicked by technology. Fluidly interpreting and improvising, we seek to merge our tools and our bodies into one. The position of a body is the relation of all points, the vectors and coordinates abstracted from the physical environment. A form emerges, generated by the sum of all tensions between the points: body language. Throughout this relationship, the body doesn't hold itself as an identifiable solid form, but rather as a fluidly changing web of tensors. The body as voice, technology as mimicry.
We employ 'tensors' here as mathematical entities, implying all things that are not 'quantities', i.e.: geometric relationships that do not form a thing', but that form relationships between them. They comprise scalars, vectors, and linear operators, and exist without a frame of reference to support them. Reading a linear distance parameter between a dancers feet and arms, we infer rates of change, position, relative orientation to create a visual and audio field without concrete reference point or repeatable datum.
This information is used to control and locate, in a multichannel field, audio approaching the human voice. Speech synthesis tools are in tandem with recorded audio to project the story of a technology becoming human. An aural history of speech synthesis is moved through on stage, bridging woman to machine, and machine back to woman. Beginning with the earliest mechanical techniques (through archival audio recordings), up to recent formant models of voice, the dancer-as-voice drives the progression through lines of movement. A visual substantiation of the tensor data will be supplied via on-dancer projection.
The output of ankle and wrist mounted electronics gives a representation of how the body relates to its own tensions in its form and in its internal relationships. The piece will show the mapping of character development as 'coordinates' via mathematical analogy by developing different patterns in movement and repeating them to create motifs.
