DIAGRAMMING MOVEMENTS BETWEEN THE CARTOGRAPHIC AND CHOREOGRAPHIC

Location
Our molecule will be co-located at:
University of Chichester, Department of Dance and Performing Arts
University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment
One London venue (possibly the Siobhan Davies Studios [in negotiation])

Members
Chichester:
Professor Sarah Rubidge
Grad students: Chris Jannides, Andrew Wilford, Zeynep Gündüz

Oxford:
Dr. Derek McCormack
Grad students: Sebastian Abrahamsson, Zoe Enstone, Joe Gerlach, Jeff Hung, Thomas Jellis

Movement Profile
We want to facilitate a distributed field of movement and experiment between two techniques of thinking-space, two technologies of lived abstraction – geography and dance. We invite emissaries to help us to generate this field within the context of a movement profile deliberately distributed between two key hosts/locations: Sarah Rubidge at the University of Chichester and Derek McCormack at the University of Oxford. Sarah is based at the University of Chichester, but lives and has a professional life in London. She travels regularly the 60 miles of straight and winding roads between the urban conurbation of London and the walled cathedral city of Chichester, by car and train, passing through suburbs and woodlands, hills and plains.  The Chichester molecule within the Derek/Sarah molecule lives and works/studies in and around the city, using bicycle and foot to navigate the environment.  Derek lives and works in Oxford. His workdays are spent moving between two institutions – the School of Geography and the Environment, where he is part of the Technological Natures research cluster, and Hertford College, where he teaches geography and tries to avoid the ghost of Thomas Hobbes. He spends time reading and writing in the coffee shop at Blackwells’ bookshop, and cycles to work on a fold-up bike.

We hope that emissaries will visit and travel with us between both sites, facilitating in the process the diagramming of lines of movement that move between the cartographic and choreographic.

Our molecule is distributed transversally across a number of evolving event-particles moving between London, Chichester, and Oxford. We hope that part of the concoction of a tasty relational soup will involve the emissary moving between these sites (if possible). But as a point of departure for beginning in the middle of things it is best if emissaries treat Derek in Oxford as the initial host for this molecule. An outline sketch of his movement profile and contact details can be found here:

http://www.quikmaps.com/show/96639

Alternatively, email: derek.mccormack@ouce.ox.ac.uk

OLYMPIC PHI-FI

Location: London 2012 Olympic Site
Name of Participants: The-Fold (M. Beatrice Fazi, Jonathan Fletcher, Caroline Heron)
Contact e-mail: contact@the-fold.net
Name of Emissary: Jonathan Fletcher

The process has begun. A whole city breathes and sweats for what is next-to-be. A cityscape is being
rearranged for the facilitation of a 17-day spectacle. The London Olympics is capital’s grand carnival, the
greatest show on earth, a post-modern Barnum. In the UK we all have a vital stake in this, we are all literally
“investing”. This is our duty-bound display of wuthering empire, an opportunity to flush out the bluster in a
day-glo explosion.

During the Society of Molecules The-Fold intends to complicate the envisioned Olympic narrative through a
practice-based fiction of speculative thought.

In an article in Radical Philosophy Andrew Bowie took various philosophers to task for experimenting in
“continental science fiction”, the practice of which he asserts as being both ‘immature’ and ‘unhinged’. Can we
think of finer compliments when it comes to the creation of concepts and the practice of being? Maturity
seeks to abandon the child, to be realistic and to accept the possible and reject the impossible. To be
unhinged is to invite madness and abandon the rational, to refuse to accept Knowledge and to be accepting
of anything that could be lurking round the corner. What could be more sci-fi than Deleuze & Guattari’s
processual and differential creation of concepts?

Speculation asks you to be a potential, of thought, action, experience: life! To speculate is to challenge stasis
form an attentive posture - infinite planes yet to be imagined and yet to take place. Ballard, Burroughs and
Dick: the foremost thinkers of a future that clarifies the now whilst simultaneously erasing it and opening it
up to possibility.

For the Society of Molecules we intend to create a hyperstitional portal at the construction area of the
London 2012 Olympic site. We will generate a time machine at the nexus of collapsed temporal zones,
offering a travelogue around the site from the perspective of its future dismemberment. Where the
foundations of an imminent celebration are being laid, we come to see the residues of what was a dream of
glory. Where there are plans for imminent construction, we walk the archaeologies of machines and
humanities. Amongst intuitions of presence and absence, we will encounter an emergent environment from
the stand point of its material relations - erased, denied, consumed, reassembled by a posteriority we can now
only imagine. Regeneration then becomes the speed of life - its micro and macro velocities. Too fast to
compete with for any discourse and narrative lamenting “what it used to be”.
The only way to escape the spectacle is to go beyond its reach, to go past it and to deny its becoming. The
spectacle thrives on its own anticipation, its very existence is its own becoming. We propose to catalyze
participants in speculating upon positions and conditions of the site, to walk upon its very concrete and
induce the “after” of the new city that we are all constructing.

The-Fold
www.the-fold.net
The-Fold is a London based group of three friends who met in 2007 during their MA in Interactive Media at
Goldsmiths. Upon its completion the set of individuals decided to join forces and establish a creative project group for
the purposes of research and production within the field of interactive aesthetics. Through The-Fold they expand upon
their theory and practice by engaging with thought-processes through abstract and material capacities of intervention in
media ecologies.

M. Beatrice Fazi
beatrice@the-fold.net
Born and raised in Italy, I studied humanities and philosophy. Through a strange mixture of cyberpunk
and ontology, I discovered the Virtual and since then never fully recovered. In London, I study humans
and machines and find them both quite beautiful. I am also a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural
Studies, Goldsmiths. My research is an investigation on the poetics and praxis of interactive aesthetics
through the concept of "expression", as applied to computation and interaction. I have so far worked in
education, IT, cultural diplomacy, journalism and advertising.

Caroline Heron
caroline@the-fold.net
Of Northern Irish extraction Caroline is now resident in one of the five host boroughs of the Olympic
site in London. She approached the area of Interactive Media from a sideways path, having begun her
career in the practice of contemporary crafts only to abandon it in pursuit of the elusive 'grasp' of
interactivity, and now remains forevermore in a happy state of total confusion. Intervening within media
ecologies has been of particular interest to her as can be seen in her most recent work, produced as part
of her MA, entitled "Forgotten Gesture" (http://carolineheron.wordpress.com).

Jonathan Fletcher
jonny@the-fold.net
Jonny lurks on the margins, obsessed with the future-now, disinterested in the past. Currently engaged in
journalism, radio production, disintegrating audio ambience and experimental film.