Gesture Bending, Gesture Bending, refers to poetic transformation, prolongation and enrichment of gestures through staged and unstaged technical mediation of movement and here specifically through the incorporation of responsive sound instruments/environments.
A Gesture Bending event dynamically transforms the potential affective, emotional, and symbolic charge of a gesture in real-time. It can for example lead to the signification of an empty gesture or abstraction of an inherent signifier. A Gesture Bender can synthesize conditions in which participants synergetically improvise with a unique and hybrid expressive force to create events and multidimensional compositions.
A Gesture Bending event dynamically transforms the potential affective, emotional, and symbolic charge of a gesture in real-time. It can for example lead to the signification of an empty gesture or abstraction of an inherent signifier. A Gesture Bender can synthesize conditions in which participants synergetically improvise with a unique and hybrid expressive force to create events and multidimensional compositions.
Gesture Benders invite audiences to sculpt musical events via gesture and movement with sonified objects in spaces conditioned by fields of sound that vary according to their movement. In these environments, inhabitants hear sounds that are resynthesized from coordinate contact or movement. While drawing sound out from given objects through physically interacting with them, one discovers how nuances in physical movement can create intricate sonic textures.
Gestures transmute objects into sound, augmenting their materiality. Through interactively varied augmentation of the object’s natural acoustical response, the ”synthetic” and the “natural” collapse in performative sonics. The inhabitants’ gestures not only lead to unexpected musicality but to narratives about shaping relationships with the world.
Gestures transmute objects into sound, augmenting their materiality. Through interactively varied augmentation of the object’s natural acoustical response, the ”synthetic” and the “natural” collapse in performative sonics. The inhabitants’ gestures not only lead to unexpected musicality but to narratives about shaping relationships with the world.
The goal is to invest, augment, and sonify various indeterminant rhythms of the body, nature and the environment to create events that are at once objective and playfully personal. Gesture Bending does not use symbolic language to convey and specific ethical standpoint or a narrative about life and matter but instead structures a performative and affective field to potentially reactivate repressed singularities, destabilize the capitalist normalization of behaviour, and bring into the foreground our emotionally complex relation to the body, matter, movement, time, and the eco-life.
We often render everyday actions with similarity and indifference. Gesture Bending can distance a gesture from its usual appearance. Thus every movement and every gesture is reinvented with maximum difference. This difference is not brought about as an appearance but as a dynamic event. Audio-visual augmentation of staged objects (events) liquefies the fixedness of forms and the virtual reality (casual efficiency) of consumerist perception and thus every gesture becomes a dynamic event, full of relational indeterminacy.
When everyday gesture are perceived artfully in their most open form, their loose their "real" (virtual) appearance to an eventful becoming and then repressed structures of subjectivity are allowed to emerge from the horizon.
We often render everyday actions with similarity and indifference. Gesture Bending can distance a gesture from its usual appearance. Thus every movement and every gesture is reinvented with maximum difference. This difference is not brought about as an appearance but as a dynamic event. Audio-visual augmentation of staged objects (events) liquefies the fixedness of forms and the virtual reality (casual efficiency) of consumerist perception and thus every gesture becomes a dynamic event, full of relational indeterminacy.
When everyday gesture are perceived artfully in their most open form, their loose their "real" (virtual) appearance to an eventful becoming and then repressed structures of subjectivity are allowed to emerge from the horizon.
Gesture Bending, aesthetically decomposes the discursive chains within the gestural universe and detaches signification from perceptions and common sentiments. New sensations and new relations need to be originated to liberate the nearby percepts and affects from the discursiveness that often dominates standardized mentalities and common perceptions. It is from liberated perceptions that radical subjectivities are formed.
Aesthetic decentralization of stereotyped everyday events or components of expression will deconstruct the discursive code in use and will disconnect the material functions of power from the materiality of basic sensations. Sometimes after gesture are bent, specially after intensely sensational and "cruel" moments (cruel in an Artaudian sense.) , after the decentralization of power has taken place, re-composition of forces and motifs can take place and new existential territories can be invented.
The audience is given a chance, a relational field, to extract new and unbounded forms, meaning, affects and percepts from the otherwise familiar situations. The emergent mental modalities are more likely to be in closer contact with ecological and mental complexities of socio-gestural behaviour than if they were left centralized and directed by the subjugated tonality of standardized mentality. Through the "autopoiesis of aesthetic affects" new ways of living emerge from the gesture bending event and spread through the world.
The audience is given a chance, a relational field, to extract new and unbounded forms, meaning, affects and percepts from the otherwise familiar situations. The emergent mental modalities are more likely to be in closer contact with ecological and mental complexities of socio-gestural behaviour than if they were left centralized and directed by the subjugated tonality of standardized mentality. Through the "autopoiesis of aesthetic affects" new ways of living emerge from the gesture bending event and spread through the world.