Dr. Sher Doruff
School
UAL/Central Saint Martins
Year
2006
Keywords
diagrammatic praxis, online presence, real time technology, KeyWorx
Thesis Title
The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram
Abstract
Ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicits change and change transforms. Tracing concepts from chaos and complexity the-ory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation in Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists, this thesis un-packs creative protocols in translocal performance practice. It examines the inter-section of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingen-cies implicit in the technicity of real time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/expression and in-stinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, intuition, respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translo-cal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. Key-Worx is a software application developed for real time, distributed, multimodal media processing. It’s a technology that supports this type of creative experience - a real time, translocal jamming that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal.
Bio
Sher Doruff has been working in the visual and performance-based collaborative arts in a variety of capacities since the 1970’s. She studied Fine Arts, migrating to music performance/composition while living in Chicago and New York. In the late 80’s-00’s this practice incorporated digital technologies in Live Art performance contexts.
Based in Amsterdam since the mid-90's, she completed her PhD – The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram - in 2006 with SmartLab at University of the Arts London/Central Saint Martins. Entangling aesthetic/philosophical gestures and a longtime interest in radical educational pedagogies, her work has been situated in the expanded field of artistic research practice for the past ten years as a researcher, tutor, mentor and supervisor in, with and through many European universities. Her research practice currently explores fabulation and fictive approaches to writing in and through artistic research. She has published the novella trilogy Last Year at Betty and Bob’s with 3Ecologies Press/Punctum Books and recently co-edited Fieldings, a book on 3rd cycle research in the performing arts at DAS Graduate School.
She currently supervises 3rd cycle/PhD artist researchers at the DAS Graduate School/ Amsterdam University of the Arts in the THIRD programme. She has been a member of several editorial boards including the Journal of Artistic Research and maintains a sonic art practice.
