Mid September 2013, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts I traveled to the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin to explore works by László Moholy-Nagy. I engaged directly with his seminal piece the Light-Space Modulator [1930], also called Light Prop for an Electric Stage. Installed in a darkened gallery with spotlighting to create a dramatic play of shadows, transparencies, and reflections generated by the machine’s multiple surfaces, this Prop produces what Moholy-Nagy termed an “architecture of light”. It is believed he may have also envisioned it as part of an avant-garde theatrical performance. Moholy-Nagy argued that through enhancing our senses we may engage with technology rather than allow it to control us. My creative research for [LIMINAL] will explore the articulation of human relationships with technologies through multiple senses and in various media. The title [LIMINAL] references the tipping point or threshold beyond which a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced. [LIMINAL] implies being in an intermediate state or phase; in other words in between or in transition.  

    My initial research for [LIMINAL] concerns the development of a scaffold for an intermedia study of ontology, incorporating dance, performance, video, and the Web. The body has become a primary subject of discourse within cultural studies and remains central to the ephemeral practice of live art, be it dance, theatre, or performance. Frequently the body is present in the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ simultaneously. This occurs both in performance as well as in daily life as individuals utilize cell-phones and web-cams. I will explore how this hybridized placement can affect our reading of the body as text. Homi Bhabha theorizes and empowers hybridized reality as “… a form of liminal or in-between space, where the cutting edge of translation and negotiation occurs.”2 Bhabha terms this liminal reality the “third space”,3 which he regards as a dynamic and articulate “space that engenders new possibility”.4 I intend to explore how technology animates / reinstates / destabilizes the meaning(s) of the corporeal body. I will consider how new technologies in performance might change the understanding of what a body is, or what a machine is. Research for my project will also entail close reading of dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster’s work on Corporeality. 

    Although I contributed an initial aspect of [LIMINAL] to Plug In ICA’s “Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media & The Arts” group exhibition in March - June 2014 (Winnipeg) I will continue to develop this series.  From August 1 - 30 2014 I was in residence at SÍM - Icelandic Visual Artists Association in Reykjavík to refine my contribution to the Plug In ICA’s exhibition before was installed at the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin in October 2014.