Reflective Lecture by Bracha Ettinger

In her lyrical lecture Bracha focused on her ideas of transject, trans-subjectivity, transjectivity, in-spiriting and transpiriting. She discussed the difference between empathy-within-compassion and com-passion on the one hand and empathy and compassion on the other hand.

The lecture was the outcome of the Frame workshop 'Sharing days with Bracha Ettinger' and the first public showing of her latest artwork - Bracha Ettinger / "No Title (Yet)", n. 1. 2003-2009.

(video reportage coming up soon)

The Virtual I/Other

Choreographic Drifting

Thank you Or and Keren for all the much appreciated input you have brought into our studio work!

Droste effect

Virtual Interactions

Co-emerging I and non-I

I was doing this simple video edit after we have been discussing the concept of 'Otherness' with Kenzo. On that day, in the studio, we were not working with any particular texts. Instead, we were trying to create our own (here, Kenzo's) bodily 'reading' of what it might mean or feel at all, to be 'of plural'.
We were working with the camera on and thinking of it as of an open book, recording not for the sake of registration but for the sake of creation in the very moment.

What happened was as a short story of felt disintegration within oneself (or so I am able to describe what I saw in Kenzo's performance). The visible mechanization and intractibility of movement took charge...

When editing, I was quite literally thinking of the state of the matrixial, expressed best in Bracha Ettinger's own words:

"Matrix is an unconscious space of simultaneous emergence and fading of the I and the unknown non-I which is neither fused nor rejected. Matrix is based on feminine/prenatal inter-relations and exhibits a shared borderspace in which what I call differentiation-in-co-emergence and distance-in proximity are continuously rehoned and reorganised by metramorphosis (and accompanied by matrixial affects) created by - and further creating - relations-without-relating on the borderspaces of presence and absence, subject and object, me and the stranger. In the unconscious mind, the matrixial borderline dimension, involved in the process of creating feminine desire and meaning, both coexists and alternates with the phallic dimension."

citation from: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, "Metramorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial Borderspace", presented as "Matrixial Borderspace" in Identity and Display, Association of Art Historians 19th Annual Conf., Tate Gallery, London, 2-4 April, 1993; in Rethinking Borders, ed. J. Welchman, Macmillan; cited from manuscript, n. p.

Body as Interface

As we play with different contexts for multiple interactions both within and beyond the moving and 'networking' body we cross its different modes of communication. We go through the automatic, the habitual, and the range of seemingly unconscious processes that trigger movement.

While practising with different para-structures (those accommodating the psychosomatic dynamics in relation to external conditions) that formulate their own interactive knowledge we talk about cybernetic etymology - about messages in circuit, which basically sees information as difference that makes a difference as a basis for interactive patterns.

This process of differentiation as a point of interaction occupies us for a longer while. It seems a dynamically powerful condition of suspended connectivity grounded in separation and disengagement that generates.

Teleological guidance

Working within somewhat blurry structures of practice-based researching resonates with instinctive guidance as well as some trust in developing sense of purpose.

Our studio-based work ethic alludes to this shared sense of purpose, and might be expressed by saying that:

“By being connected along with and within the path of teleology one derives a certain meaning and sense which is real and substantial even if it is not definitive and ultimate in terms articulating itself in the format of a logical and rational explanation and definition.” (Renos K. Papadopoulos, p. 31)

Otherness

I am wondering about ways and forms of ‘otherness’ being active in one’s personality and how it/they interrelate(s) with the main body of the (dancing) personality and to other collective structures in the spatially interactive network.

A couple of sessions of using a camera less for recording purposes and more for creating a (dependent?) virtual character on the screen produce some slight bodily reformulations of understanding of ‘the other’.

Technological inefficiencies vs. Countertransference

Applying the quote:

“Irritation means: You haven’t yet seen what’s behind it! Consequently, we should follow up our irritation and examine whatever it is we discover in our ill temper!” (Jung 1932a: par 168),

our motivation for tracking our own sources of bodily knowledge in technically imperfect conditions (take latency for example) might seem as well valid.

In this retrospective inquiry of movement interaction we try to mind that the ‘causal instinct’ relates not only to the cause (of subsequent movements) but also to the meaning of it.

The idea of countertransference is a self-reflective learning exercise, which basically means: to know how to know what makes one know :)