poetic gesture
Ricardo Dominguez. Personal email correspondence with the author. December 3rd, 2006.
"The notion of 'gesture' that I have been playing with as a way to frame different trajectories of performance from my CAE [Critical Art Ensemble] work to EDT [Electronic Disturbance Theater] and beyond are based on my early encounter as an actor [with][Bertolt] Brecht's idea of 'gestus.' The 'gestus' allows the actors' somatic architecture to comment on the economies of stage, the character event, and the audience as part of the performance itself while at the same time allowing a fictional narrative to become part of the dialectical de-framing of the social fictions of command and control beyond the theater doors.
The 'micro_gesture' in the 1980s was attempt to trace the emergence of a new public spaces/neoliberal enclosures that were being established via the interlocking of the mall economies (controlled consumers) and the microcircuits [of] the emerging digital economies (controlled databodies) and dissident vectors of disturbance that were established in response to the Aids crisis (uncontrolled groups/cells) that we at CAE were encountering at that time. The 'micro_gesture' I did were examples of work that measured the event of power by de-masking its global condition on specific street corners and/or the question of economies of the cure under signs of the therapeutic state. This allowed us to break down power to smaller and smaller elements using 'gesture' that could then easily foreground the grid of command and control of body and its will to sidestep them.
Another condition of the 'gesture' also invoked the 'body/soma' as a core anchor for establishing new types of disturbances, that intermixed the history of the 'body/soma' nexus of performance art and history of the crowd as 'gestus' which now might name as the 'multitude' - that new forms of the body/bodies were also being established to counter the global mall/micro condition. So that the 'gesture' may be read as
an invocation of a concept that marks a passage in the 1980s from group subjects of resistance based earlier models of armed revolution to an assemblage of a new type (sic) of militant with transversal/network tools.
With ECD [Electronic Civil Disobedience] the 'gesture' also attempted to redirect systems of communication against the hegemony of communication as 'to effect' to one of 'somatic' networks 'to affect' as Deleuze was somewhat calling forth in his statement: 'The key thing may be to create vacules of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.' The 'gesture' was then seeking a kind of will to creativity that was linked to informatics but broke it at some point by establishing cavities through which top-down messages could not pass and another type of messages passed at a deeper level of networks slowing down or crashing down and another ecology of intensification to emerge."
"The notion of 'gesture' that I have been playing with as a way to frame different trajectories of performance from my CAE [Critical Art Ensemble] work to EDT [Electronic Disturbance Theater] and beyond are based on my early encounter as an actor [with][Bertolt] Brecht's idea of 'gestus.' The 'gestus' allows the actors' somatic architecture to comment on the economies of stage, the character event, and the audience as part of the performance itself while at the same time allowing a fictional narrative to become part of the dialectical de-framing of the social fictions of command and control beyond the theater doors.
The 'micro_gesture' in the 1980s was attempt to trace the emergence of a new public spaces/neoliberal enclosures that were being established via the interlocking of the mall economies (controlled consumers) and the microcircuits [of] the emerging digital economies (controlled databodies) and dissident vectors of disturbance that were established in response to the Aids crisis (uncontrolled groups/cells) that we at CAE were encountering at that time. The 'micro_gesture' I did were examples of work that measured the event of power by de-masking its global condition on specific street corners and/or the question of economies of the cure under signs of the therapeutic state. This allowed us to break down power to smaller and smaller elements using 'gesture' that could then easily foreground the grid of command and control of body and its will to sidestep them.
Another condition of the 'gesture' also invoked the 'body/soma' as a core anchor for establishing new types of disturbances, that intermixed the history of the 'body/soma' nexus of performance art and history of the crowd as 'gestus' which now might name as the 'multitude' - that new forms of the body/bodies were also being established to counter the global mall/micro condition. So that the 'gesture' may be read as
an invocation of a concept that marks a passage in the 1980s from group subjects of resistance based earlier models of armed revolution to an assemblage of a new type (sic) of militant with transversal/network tools.
With ECD [Electronic Civil Disobedience] the 'gesture' also attempted to redirect systems of communication against the hegemony of communication as 'to effect' to one of 'somatic' networks 'to affect' as Deleuze was somewhat calling forth in his statement: 'The key thing may be to create vacules of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.' The 'gesture' was then seeking a kind of will to creativity that was linked to informatics but broke it at some point by establishing cavities through which top-down messages could not pass and another type of messages passed at a deeper level of networks slowing down or crashing down and another ecology of intensification to emerge."
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