Corpus Corvus: Exploring Contemporary Mythos Through Immersive Media Poetics
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Digital Performance
Presentation Title:
- Corpus Corvus: Exploring Contemporary Mythos Through Immersive Media Poetics
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Corpus Corvus is a mixed reality performance artwork that explores contemporary mythos through immersive media technologies. The research is a multi-faceted engagement with posthuman embodiment, augmented/mixed reality, digital performance, and immersive media composition. Corpus Corvus utilizes stereoscopic 3D projection, motion capture animation, an integrated physical/media choreographic vocabulary, and electroacoustic composition to explore the Pacific Northwest Native American myth of the raven as god and thief who steals the sun and creates the universe.
The title Corpus Corvus refers to the body of the raven. The piece traverses the landscape of the Corpus Corvus through dilations into ten corporeal dimensions: formation, throat, wing, eye, talon, belly, heart, spine, brain, dissolution. Each of the ten segments articulates a densely integrated 3-dimensional kinesthetic-audio-visual composition, which I refer to as somatic media architectures.
Formally, the piece explores the relationship between movement of a physical body and animation in a digital stereoscopic 3-dimensional image field. Through use of theatrical lighting and projection techniques in conjunction with stereoscopy, the body and animation are perceived to occupy the same 3-dimensional space. This physical-virtual dance is accompanied by a sound score based upon ravens’ vocalizations abstracted through human imitation and technological processing. The cumulative instantiation of performative embodiment spans a dynamic spectrum from the animalic to the immaterial.
This paper presents documentation of the performance work, discusses the research objectives underscoring its construction, and introduces the neopoetic immersive media language system that informs its composition. The foundational ground for the neopoetic system is the Poetics of Aristotle and its relation to the ancient Greek theater as a practical systemic ideology for the Greek drama. As Aristotle’s Poetics posits six basic components for the construction of drama (plot, character, thought, diction, song, and spectacle), the neopoetic system has six constituent aspects: expanded embodiment, experiential metaphor, technoetic mythos, matrix architecture, perceptual resonance, and the rheomode*). In summary, the neopoetic system unfolds from the posthuman physical-virtual body and extends the human sensory system into immersive media perceptual hyperspaces.
*) a term coined by quantum physicist David Bohm that means “flowing language” and describes “the language of the quantum wave.”
