Registers as inventions: body, dance, memory and digital medias Doctoral Consortium Thembi Rosa Escola de Belas Artes Federal University of Minas Gerais Brazil thembirosa@gmail.com Carlos Falci Escola de Belas Artes Federal University of Minas Gerais Brazil chfalci@gmail.com ABSTRACT This PHD research aims to map and study a selection of artistic propositions that use digital interfaces to deal with creations re- lated to body, dance, memory and archives. The focus is on how new technologies are afecting the process of creation, opening up to new modes of interactions with the public, as well as in- stigating new approaches to cognition, memory and the means of registration. The research is inspired by and will make use of some methodologies and softwares (Piecemaker and MoSys) devel- oped and used by the Motion Bank project. As such, some ’chore- ographic objects’ will be proposed based on three selected per- formances made in Brazil; furthermore, diferent approaches to handling digital archiving in dance will be explored. The main question of this research refers to the modes of dance using new technologies. We also want to test how much embodied experi- ences related to choreographic’s principles can be amplifed and perceived throughout the creative process of proposing choreo- graphic objects as well as sustaining the notions of bodies as dy- namical archives. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Performing art ; KEYWORDS Dance and technology, Choreography, Movement visualization, Dig- ital Archives, Notation System ACM Reference Format: Thembi Rosa and Carlos Falci. 2018. Registers as inventions: body, dance, memory and digital medias: Doctoral Consortium. In MOCO ’18: 5th Inter- national Conference on Movement and Computing, June 28–30, 2018, Genoa, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3212721.3212876 1 INTRODUCTION Dance and digital media have an interconnected history since the beginnings of the cinema; Loie Fuller and Maya Deren are some remarkable examples. Nowadays, we can visualize dance as maps, drawings, interactive installations or choreographic objects, as named Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full cita- tion on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or re- publish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. MOCO ’18, June 28–30, 2018, Genoa, Italy © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6504-8/18/06. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3212721.3212876 in the project Synchronous Object, proposed by the choreographer William Forsythe. The project works with data collected from his choreography One fat Thing, Reproduced with the intention to demonstrate some principles of the choreography in digital me- dias. Through those choreographic objects we are able to see the choreographic thinking without the body, as its representation no longer depends exclusively on the bodies in motion; it can also be visualized by other means, like animations, charts, topography, dig- ital tools and many other ways, like those presented in the chore- ographic objects. Therefore, diferent felds of knowledge, such as graphic design, statistics, computer science, cognitive science, an- thropology and others are taking part in this trans-disciplinary conversation. The current inter-relationships between body and digital media seem to disrupt the traditional notion of archive as something that is clearly organized in a system that is fxed and immutable, try- ing to keep the past in a specifc hierarchy, order and place. The projects and studies in this area are bringing new light to "dance archives that have a history of dissatisfaction and discomfort with traditional archive", as presented by Maaike Bleeker [1]. Through- out many examples, Bleeker demonstrates that, especially in Dig- italization, we are seeing a shift from "archive order" to "archive dynamics" (Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory). With digitalization, new objects of knowledge can emerge and instigate relevant ques- tions regarding digital archiving. In her essay Bleeker brings for- ward and discusses the most recent projects concerning dance and digital media that are extensively explored by many artists and re- searchers involved in the book Transmission in Motion, the tech- nologizing of dance [1], which she edited. We are focusing on memory as a mediation process established between gestures, bodies, choreography, and digital apparatuses of registering like the aforementioned softwares, metadata, motion capture. In this sense, memory must be considered as an event con- necting bodies, choreography and technologies, breaking with the idea of something recorded inside an archive. The archive dynam- ics would be the movement provoked by memories in motion. In this sense, memory has agency inside the process rather than be considered passively as a fxed resultant of the contact between diferent elements. Although we do not have many Brazilian dance projects explor- ing those articulations with digital medias and digital archiving, we aim to connect three Brazilian performances to some new soft- wares platforms such as Piecemaker and MoSys used on Motion Bank, as well as to other tools that have being developed in partner- ship with digital artists and students from the Digital Arts course