Devices of Existence: Contact Improvisation, Mobile Performances, and Dancing through Twitter
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Published:March 2017
Susan Kozel, 2017. "Devices of Existence: Contact Improvisation, Mobile Performances, and Dancing through Twitter", Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, Will Straw
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Based on the author’s artistic project IntuiTweet, which integrates movement improvisation, phenomenological writing, mobile phones, and the popular social-networking platform Twitter, this chapter explores choreographic and performative approaches to the study of embodied expression as transmuted by mobile communication devices in urban spaces, demonstrating that the results are uncannily akin to a form of contact improvisation stretched across time and space. Social choreographies are argued to be temporal and spatial patterns of life that are enabled or haunted by mobile portable wireless technologies in the sense that we are constitutively haunted by the other, as articulated by Jacques Derrida in his reflections on Jean-Luc Nancy. Intercorporeality is theorized to help make sense of the improvisatory exchanges of the IntuiTweet project, which exist at a particular point of convergence between the social and the aesthetic.