This

is a pre-print version, published with the author's consent in the interest of open dissemination, but somewhat different from the final, archival version of the article. Do not cite this version without permis- sion from the author; the archival version is published as: Kozel, S. (2010). Mobile social choreographies: Choreographic insight as a basis for artistic research into mobile technologies. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 6:2, pp. 137148. DOI:10.1386/padm.6.2.137_1

SUSAN KOZEL Malm University, Sweden

Mobile Social Choreographies: choreographic insight as a basis for artistic research into mobile technologies

ABSTRACT Creative use of networked wireless communications devices (such as mo- bile phones) contributes to a vibrant strand of media art called locative media, and has captured the imaginations of geographers, media artists, architects, engineers, and philosophers. Now it is time for dancers and choreographers to contribute to the critical and creative activity around corporeality, expression, and mobile technologies in social contexts. This paper proposes an emergent area of research in combining dance and mobile technologies called social choreographies, and considers artistic research methodologies relevant to this newly framed domain that are rooted in improvisatory studio practices and drawing a choreographic sensibility into urban environments. Research is about pursuing ideas. These ideas live as questions, as im- pulses, as tickling sensations that urge our thoughts and bodies into movement, that shift our modes of attention, how we live, sense, and know the world. Sometime these impulses are received as gifts from momentary perceptions or encounters with others, but they equally can be gut reactions to what we see or read that say no, that cannot be or I know it can be otherwise. Then we, as dancers and choreogra- phers, set our bodies in motion in order to understand, to celebrate, to critique, or to affirm that things can indeed be otherwise. We build these ways of thinking and knowing through our bodies within a chang- ing world.
This is a pre-print version, published with the author's consent in the interest of open dissemination, but somewhat different from the final, archival version of the article. Do not cite this version without permission from the author.

This paper addresses an area of contemporary research gaining in physical, social, and theoretical momentum: the use of mobile devices in our cities. The broader project, for which this paper contributes a start- ing point, consists in applying choreographic and performative ap- proaches to the study of embodied expression through mobile devices with the goals of designing devices offering scope for enhanced corpo- real expression and producing an embodied aesthetics. This paper con- siders the first phase of this project, which was a week long workshop for professional choreographers under the rubric of the Close Encoun- ters gathering on artistic research in dance at the University College of Dance in Sweden; the focus of the workshop was corporeal expression through mobile phones, but other mobile media devices could have been considered (like handheld computers, GPS devices, or even non- networked iPods). Creative use of handheld, wireless, location-aware devices is an established area of media art called locative media, and has captured the imaginations of geographers, media artists, architects, engineers, and philosophers. Now it is time for dancers and choreogra- phers to contribute to the critical and creative activity around bodies and mobile devices in social contexts. LOCATIVE AND MOBILE MEDIA Mobile media devices encourage or inhibit human exchanges. They are portable; they accompany us for hours, days and seasons; they span moods and activities, cycles and rhythms of life; they are fluid. They contribute to the social choreographies of our daily lives. We integrate these little chunks of miniaturized technology into our clothing, our pockets, or our bags, and our daily gestures include the arm, head, and spine movements associated with using them. We even walk and see differently when we use them. Our senses are re-patterned, our intui- tion of space and time folds inward or leaps outward. If our mobile de- vices are location aware, we access an other person, even if the devices are not actually networked we can hold images or sounds of them as archived data: we then carry the other with us, in our hearts, in our memories in the devices themselves? It is not at all surprising that the researchers and designers active in this area struggle to find vo- cabulary to describe what is happening, not at all surprising that they stumble across terms that are more intimate to our practices than theirs: performance and choreography. In the softspace opened up by participatory technologies within buildings or cities, architect Usman Haque claims that people are en- couraged to become performers within their own environments, and as this happens architectural design becomes a choreography of sensa- tions. 1 Geographers like Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift have come to ac- cept that people act in public spaces for the simple pleasure of acting (Amin & Thrift 2002), while some designers such as Tony Dunne say that the most difficult challenges posed by design of new intelligent ob- jects draw us into the realms of metaphysics, aesthetics, and poetry (Dunne 2006). Others see the confluence of voice, images, stories, build- ings, histories, and body movement as urban choreographies per- formed through the use of mobile devices.2 Beautiful and evocative
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ideas, all of them, but why was I uneasy to hear them coming from the domains of an architecture, geography, and design rather than from choreography and performance? It was not that I felt we owned these terms, rather I wondered whether choreographers and dancers were missing the chance to contribute to a wider area of research, whether others were speaking for us. If so, they were without a doubt doing a good job, but I couldnt help but feel there was still room for us to con- tribute. I decided that a contribution to this domain of research could begin through a Close Encounters working group and, through this process, insight could be gained into our own artistic practices as re- search. The parallel goals of the workshop are echoed by the parallel strands of this paper: reflecting upon artistic research methodologies at the same time as contributing to choreographic perspectives to a wider field of social and cultural research in mobile and locative media. A better explanation of the technologies is perhaps useful. Loca- tive media generally refers to electronic devices that are aware of their location, like mobile phones or other devices that can talk to the wider world by means of wifi, Bluetooth, or GPS. Once a location is determin- able, sonic and visual media can be delivered directly to a persons de- vice; this media can be in real time like a phone call or can be prere- corded data. Media content is managed and organised in an entirely dif- ferent location, on a standard desktop or laptop connected to a server. As the location-aware device enters the area tagged and determined by GPS coordinates, satellites trigger the assigned media causing the device to download this formatted content. The result is an augmenta- tion of physical reality with a layer of media. For example, it is common for locative media projects to arrange for a piece of text to be left at a place in a city only to be displayed when another person with a spe- cially enabled mobile device happens to walk by that particular place. It would be like receiving a text message as you pass a spot in a city, not from a friend but from the city itself. It could work in the other direc- tion too; because the device knows its location, the person walking around can leave a song, a message, or an image at a place for someone else to find. Environmental awareness and social interactions form the content of many locative media projects, and they frequently have po- litical, cultural, or more internal personal narrative components, deal- ing with memory or storytelling.3 Sending and receiving: one might say that the basics of media communication are also the basics of gesture. Our working group delib- erately did not operate at the level of technological sophistication de- scribed in the preceding paragraph: it was not necessary. As a group of choreographers our goal was to explore basic elements to emerge from our use of mobile media: philosophical concepts, bodily knowledge, gestural vocabularies, social interactions, and interaction with urban spaces. All that was required in terms of technology was a willingness for participants to use their own mobile phones, or a desire to take ad- vantage of the phones generously provided by Lone Koefoed Hansen and Camille Baker.4 Dancers understand fields, emanations, mutations, connections, suspensions, and spaces in between. One of these words alone is suffi- cient to launch an improvisation. There are images I love from a knit-
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ting magazine showing two young women wearing brightly coloured belted-raincoats, carrying brightly coloured knitted bags, wearing pre- posterously large sunglasses, standing next to each other on a New York City subway platform with the train whizzing past. They look vi- brant, happy, ironic, at home in their clothes and in the city. The spaces between them, and between their bodies and the urban structures, seem intimate and alive. Their bags are hand knitted and designed spe- cifically to hold computers and mobile phones. Im not just using my imagination: the pattern reflected by the image is for a computer bag, other patterns in the same book are for mobile phone pouches, and knitted motifs include emoticons or email addresses. In our working group we became these women, and we also observed people like them in Stockholm. We investigated the spatial, social, urban, and embodied poetics that opens when we take seriously the suggestion that locative media fosters currents of social choreographies. A working definition emerging from this stage of research is that social choreographies are temporal and spatial patterns of life enabled or haunted by mobile port- able wireless technologies, in the sense that we are constitutively haunted by the other (Derrida 2000, 203-205). This haunting need not be of the spooky and unnerving quality, it can be the palpable presence of others causing joy as much as longing or disquiet. In the working group we played across three choreographic per- spectives: 1. self-reflexively sensing our own movement as we engaged in the act of using our mobile phones; 2. observing others as they moved through space communicating on their phones; 3. using the functions of the mobile devices (video, audio, etc) to engage performa- tively with the world. We created our own choreographies either in the studio, on the street, or in our imaginations, carrying these back and forth in our thoughts, discussions, and bodies. Amin and Thrift write that there is a whole politics of embodiment, from the minutiae of ges- ture to the movement patterns of the crowd, which has still only rarely been systematically explored (Amin and Thrift 2002, 158). Recent ex- pansions to the way geographers and philosophers of technology view cities have included the recognition that animals and technologies are also actors in cities (actor network theory, Latour 1993) but many scholars and artists feel that the scope of urban politics is still too nar- row. Gesture and behaviour need to be examined both out of sheer fas- cination, but also because all of us who live in cities are increasingly controlled on these levels by the buildings, devices, and social codes produced by contemporary societies. Everything, from secure buildings and public transit to the smart products and genetically modified foods we consume, affects how we move and corporeally inhabit our spaces. Amin and Thrifts intuition is that this area can be usefully explored through artistic modes of understanding. They are right. SOCIAL CHOREOGRAPHIES The idea of social choreographies came to me while working on a pro- ject in wearable computing (where we embedded small computers into clothing so that pulse and breath could be shared among people).5 It seemed to be such an intuitive juxtaposition of words, banal even: social
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and choreography. Should this term be plural or singular? Thinking of the movement of people in cities, the ebb, flow, and flux of all activities across so many human and non-human forms, it seemed that the gen- erous act was to make it plural, so as to avoid seeming to impose a uni- fying movement scheme on all that breathed and morphed around us. As if we ever could. As indicated above, all of our devices invite a set of physical ges- tures either determined by the data they convey (voice, text, visuals), by ergonomic or awkward design or by the set of codes communicated across distinct social groups indicating how to use and wear devices in different social settings (the club, the subway, the library, the studio). The mobile phone is a vibrant example: do people hunch into it or speak loudly as an indication of social or financial status; hide it in lay- ers of clothes or expose it; place it on their desks beside them or dig in the bottom of their bags for it? Is it set to ring loudly or softly; is the ring tone humourous or discreet? Is it almost never switched on? Quali- ties of performance -- ephemerality, expressivity, humour, poetry, physicality -- integrated into the design and use of mobile media can act to disrupt, to delight, and to challenge conventional uses of devices, da- tabases, and networks. Choreographing the flow of data in a social set- ting involves being aware of what it is, who receives it, when, and in what form, according to which rhythm, narrative or affective quality. Choreographing my data, whether they are my movement pat- terns, my voice, my scribbled thoughts, my heart rate, is like saying I want to play with my data and yours, to flirt with them and with you, to shape them into expressive portrayals of who I am, and of my relation- ship to you. Data choreography across social contexts contributes to an emerging and adaptive poetics, a chiasmic aesthetics of disappearance and exchange across the physical and the digital. Stillness and quiet in data exchange are as integral as acceleration; discontinuity and disrup- tion are as important to human corporeal exchange through digital de- vices as are continuity and connection. It is choreographically signifi- cant for me to make a choice for my data to exist in a certain manner: do I send a text or make a call? Do I leave a voicemail message or follow up with an email message? Do I send an image? What I do with this data is significant too: do I save it or let it disappear? Do I remember it or ar- chive it? And it is tremendously significant for me to choose to switch off my phone (to be disconnected) or to wear my music headset in pub- lic (to be disconnected in a different way). This approach to social cho- reographies and the choreography of data is in the early stages of de- velopment: it is fundamentally corporeal, concerned with the rhythms and flows of immanent states radiating outwards, combined with the patterns of bodies, buildings, and mobile devices in urban spaces. An example of viewing the world through the lens of social cho- reographies helps to prevent this discussion from becoming too ab- stract or speculative. While waiting for the underground at a central Stockholm station I decided to observe people with their mobiles (this station was not so deep that the signal was lost). I saw a woman with her arm bent holding her phone at the level of her chest, head bent in concentration, a palpable mood emanating from her as if the text she was reading for I knew somehow that it was a text message and not a
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game or simply a calendar was personally compelling. Her focus was complete, as if she existed in a bubble embracing her upper body and her device. She was drinking in her phone, as if what she received was nourishing her. Then a person walked past her, a man holding a sand- wich in much the same position. All his attention was on this partially unwrapped, over-garnished, sandwich. His head and arm carved similar shapes in space to the woman with the phone. He had just begun to eat his sandwich, to ingest it, and it seemed to be nourishing him. She was doing the same to the information on her phone. His mood was antici- pation, hers seemed to be trepidation. They shared this public stage harmoniously, quite unaware of each other. They passed very closely together but did not bump into each other, the space between them contracted and then expanded; the affective clouds they emanated were pure and clear, readable by anyone who took the time to notice. Their choreographies were private and public, part visible and part invisible, internal and external, spatial, gestural, and emotional. The soundscape was the general hubbub of public transit. This choreography was per- formed by them but it was brought into focus through my perception, imagination, and current fascination with social choreographies, oth- erwise this little moment would have simply disappeared, swallowed up in the millions of gestures and thoughts occurring in social spaces every day. 6 Social choreographies, like data choreography, are about transub- stantiation and convergence. Merleau-Ponty captures this when he says I lend my body to the world by being visible and mobile. My mobile body, the nervous machine, inheres in the world, gets caught up in things and others in the world, and through this both world and body are changed (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 162-163). Hubert Godard, whose research in neurophysiology and somatics rests on a foundation of dance and philosophy, once asserted: The body does not exist, we are nothing but connective tissue. 7 His words, which I initially resisted, left such an impact on my way of living in my body that as I sat quietly in a room the following day I felt my skin dissolve and tendrils of my body reach and wave in the space. I also felt a raw vulnerability, for the disso- lution of my armor of skin meant not just that I could extend into space but that what was beyond me could reach into me: permeate and ger- minate. For a moment I became nothing but nervous system, a nervous machine. The myth of the self-contained body collapsed into dust around my feet, my body was truly caught in the fabric of the world (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 163), and this fabric was the connective tissue, or flesh, of my body, things, others, and the space between things. When I phone or text you, do I not activate the connective tissue between us? Through a choreographic lens, social choreographies are based on the palpability of touch across distance. ARTISTIC RESEARCH The research methodology for our Close Encounters working groups investigation of social choreographies was a version of phenomenology according to which knowledge and creation come from the moment of doing, the moment of movement, that pre-reflective moment where
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knowledge and senses converge and where the basis for meaning re- sides. Phenomenology respects that what we think, what we have read, what is generally held to be true, all bump into the moment of encoun- ter with life, and with other beings breathing, moving, and speaking in the world. This collision is the basis of cognition and creative insight. Sometimes we are better able to understand seemingly abstract con- cepts by filtering them through the minute but concrete moment of en- countering the world through our bodies. Sometimes we are able to cri- tique and re-formulate ideas which seem to be sacred to philosophers or scientists. While we undertake our physical experimentation we can keep the philosophical questioning alive by writing about our experi- ences and extracting the significant ideas. This is dance as research: that lush, conceptually rich crossing point between thought and corpo- reality. Research is not always the excavation of the artists own voice, it is the nestling of this voice into a community (sometimes a cacophony) of other voices. Sometimes it is hard for a practitioner to accept this need to articulate her ideas in terms of harmonies or tensions with oth- ers. I was asked by one of the workshop participants: why do we al- ways have to situate our work through the words of others? A chal- lenging question. Is academic writing merely a process of ceaseless jus- tification by relying on others, or can it be seen as a choreography of creative tensions in the form of ideas? I see it as the latter, and I have to in order to muster the strength to grasp a dense argument presented in a book let alone open a blank document on my computer, but simply stating it this way is not enough to convince a strong-willed artist. It is one thing to win an artist over to the merits of understanding a broader community of discourse and practice but something else entirely to fos- ter in her the scholarly research skills to do so. I alluded above to three research strategies for mobile social com- puting which can be reduced to: 1) sensing from within, 2) observing from outside, and 3) engaging with the world through the mobile de- vice. The first and second reflect distinct choreographic processes, and most of us have a preference for one, even though we may do both. Some choreographers develop movement by moving their own bodies in space, capturing a kinaesthetic and affective feeling from within, and then setting versions of this on other bodies. Other choreographers pre- fer to view forms, flows, and patterns outside of their own bodies, obvi- ously through a highly corporeal form of perception, but with an exter- nal focus. The difference between these two perspectives can be made clear by considering a collaboration in the United States between David Rockwell (architect) and Jerry Mitchell (choreographer). When Rock- well was commissioned to design a new terminal for the John F Ken- nedy international airport in New York specifically for JetBlue, a new economy airline in the USA, he invited a choreographer to work with him. They began by observing the flow of people through two of New York Citys most loved public spaces: Washington Square in Greenwich Village and Grand Central Station in mid-town Manhattan. Their analy- sis was a compelling example of viewing from the outside. They noted how the architectural elements of Grand Central Station permitted peo- ple to flow through the space on their way to the trains while minimiz-
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ing confusion and collision. The enormous clock, the elevated balconies, the arched ceiling, the stairways all contributed to the social choreo- graphies of the space. The two men thought a lot about which public spaces in New York were well choreographed that is, which shaped people's movement successfully and which were not.8 They did a sort of rhythmanalysis, a term coined by Henri Lefebvre according to which the rhythms of a city are contemplated from a detached stand- point; this analysis occurs from a position of spectral distance, relat- ing to speculation and spectacle by means of receptivity and exterior- ity.9 Rockwell and Mitchell analyzed crowd flow through urban spaces, but they did not indicate how they felt as they moved through the spaces themselves. I did this when I visited Grand Central Station sev- eral months ago. I moved through the space with the crowd and paid attention to what I heard and saw, and to how I felt. I noticed elements indicated by Rockwell and Mitchell, such as a strange sense of being unhurried and guided through the space by the architecture, but I also noticed elements they left out: like the sound. Despite this being an enormous stone structure containing hundreds of rushing commuters, it was strangely silent. This is not to say that one approach is better than another, just to illustrate different ways of approaching choreog- raphy applied to social contexts. Are we part of the crowd reading through our bodies or are we outside the crowd watching and witness- ing? I suggest that both perspectives can be phenomenological. To these two perspectives a third is added, taking into account the presence of mobile devices. This option, developed specifically for the Close Encoun- ters working group, was to use the functions of the phone in order to shape the flow and connection between bodies, some present in the studio and some not. These functions can be quite basic: text, speaking, accessing voicemail, or sending images, but their very limited nature also proved to be quite rich, echoing Felix Guattaris suggestion that with art the finitude of the sensible material becomes a support for the production of affects and percepts (Guattari 1995, 100-101). We did quite a beautiful improvisation, one which brought this third approach to life. Four workshop participants occupied the centre of the studio, the rest of us stood and observed from the periphery. The improvisation instructions for those in the centre were to use their own mobile phones to call or text someone, then simply to move through the space as they normally would, while engaged in this activity. Watching this group I was struck by the social choreographies that emerged. After a period of concentrated stillness while the task was initiated, the mo- bile dancers began to move through space. Seemingly rambling pat- terns emerged, stopping and starting. Sounds of voices, both from the people in the room and from their friends combined with sounds of ring tones and button beeps. It was clear who was texting, who was speak- ing to a person, who was leaving a voice message, and who was access- ing voice mail. All different modes of communication were reflected in their bodies, their focus, and their journeys through space. The use of gaze became largely internal, but this did not mean that the dynamic was solitary: this was a crowded space. It was as if people they cared about enough to contact with their mobiles were suddenly in the space,
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albeit virtually. Even the one person who called her voicemail brought other beings into the space, but palpably prerecorded, as if they lived as echoes of times past. I was most struck by the intimacy and vibrancy of their emotional states across these registers of presence, and by the other bodies that seemed to materialize in the space. Echoing Guattari, the finite object that was the mobile phone brought forth a plethora of kinaesthetic and emotional traces. DARK MATTER A participant in the Close Encounters working group came to the reali- zation that his thought processes were choreographic. This observation prompts a shift from the elaboration of a social choreographic approach to mobile technologies to the second goal of this paper and of the work- shop: reflecting upon artistic research methodologies. His insight was that his thoughts developed and accumulated according to a structure, a complex structure of many layers, where simultaneously several events like modules would occur. Choices were made, and transformation over time took place, just like when he crafted his dances. There was palpa- ble delight in his discovery because he was at home in movement, in choreography, and feared that his thought and use of language might not be as rich. He realised that his linguistic and academic methods could involve concepts and structures analogous to his choreographic methods; and that these could easily embrace the mobile technologies we introduced into the studio. This at once made both the academic re- search process and the technologies less alien, and it allowed him to appreciate previously unrecognised qualities in his choreographic processes. I consider this an exercise in mining for method: doing a reflective archaeology of artistic processes to reveal the methodologies embedded within them, or at least to uncover the methodological start- ing points that can be elaborated further through applied research.10 The intensity of debate, both within and outside the Academy, around the methodologies, scope, and desirability of artistic research is increasing. Henk Borgdorff in his presentation at Close Encounters asked whether art has been infected by the research virus, or whether a broad understanding of what constitutes knowledge is in process of shifting. I find this an exciting prospect. It has implications for so many levels of perception, thought, and creation. In a similar mode, Efva Lilja, Vice-Chancellor of the University College of Dance and convener of the Close Encounters event, introduced the role of observer into each of three research working groups, but she deliberately did not define what this role entailed. As a result the questions was asked: what does it mean to observe? to document? to live amongst others with the goal of constructing knowledge? It became clear immediately that this was done from a fundamentally embodied position, and that this was yet another dimension of artistic research. Bodies among bodies. Social, kinaesthetic bodies. Research in the flesh. This extended philosopher Maurice Merleau-Pontys relation of the seeingseen (according which I see and I am seen, by myself, others, and things) and the touch- ingtouched (I touch and I am touched, by myself, others, and things) into active practice-based research where the product of research is not
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just an inert deliverable, a bounded object, but includes layers of recep- tion and response (Merleau-Ponty 1968). Receptivity is a process of taking something into our bodies, of consuming in the material senses of ingestion, digestion, integration into our personal and communal flesh. Research is fundamentally material, which does not mean it is easily grasped. There is darkness and light, poetry and clarity, ambigu- ity and logic. I return frequently, through movement and thought, to the notion of negative space, and it occurs to me that dancers are instinctively adept at metaphysics. We understand space, time, and matter, as well as imaginative extrapolations of space, time, and matter. We have no prob- lem inverting reality and improvising based on the most tenuous of suggestions. This was evident in an improvisation on negative space, or dark matter, done in our working group. Negative space is a term used in visual art: when students are learning to draw for the first time it is not uncommon for the teacher to ask them to perceive the negative space instead of the figure. It is a strange term, negative space, for con- juring value judgements between negative and positive, good and bad, but it simply means viewing the gaps between forms rather than the forms themselves. By sketching the spaces between, for example, the trees of a landscape or the arm and the torso, the whole picture emerges and sometimes with greater vibrancy than by simply paying attention to the foreground at the expense of the background. The physical improvisation is similar, asking people to move through space paying attention to the spaces between things, between their limbs, rather than to the things and limbs themselves. This is a poetic inver- sion with implications for both mobile social choreographies and artis- tic research, for mobile devices manipulate the spaces between people and artistic research opens entirely new perspectives on materials and relationships. These perceptual and kinetic exercises echo Borgdorffs claim that art, by its nature, tends to be antithetical to existing social and cultural structures, and Liljas suggestion that tears come first. This is not a suggestion that artistic research is emotional and irrational or that women and dancers have a particular affinity for crying, but that, as she said, the restless and the uneasy contribute to arts research. Uneasy with what? Drawing the speculation back to the focus on artistic re- search: uneasy with existing academic paradigms and methods, at the same time as uneasy with unthinking, uncritical approaches to the prac- tice of choreography. Choreographers and dancers drawn to research in university contexts often crave something; exhibiting high degrees of skills in their disciplines there is a desire to expand, critique, challenge, deepen, and articulate. Structural openness on the part of an institution combined with rigour is essential for such students to flourish. Negative space is under-defined space. The space of creative inversion. The place where people go when they want to change the world. It is a space where dark matter, the unknown substance of the universe is explored, or as sa Unander Scharin wittily put it after we had improvised in the studio for half an hour: the dark matter of fact.
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SEEING MAUVE With the exploration of social choreographies provided by the Close Encounters working group, and the rare opportunity to witness the creative processes of a group of experienced choreographers, it became clear that there is, of necessity, both rigour and poetry to the artistic research process that will certainly not be exhaustively described in this paper. I have attempted to translate some of the poetic corporeal processes with the linguistic device of metaphor, as in the use of dark matter in the section above. This section evokes colour and an unex- pected choreographic side-effect of a particular ubiquitous technology to draw this paper to a close and to set up the next current of reflec- tions in this domain, by myself and by others. Without intending to, and without offering ubiquitous computing in its research profile, the building in which the University College of Dance was housed provided a practical and metaphorical example of an idiosyncratic research environment. The smart and energy saving stu- dios had sensors embedded in the ceiling so that an absence of per- ceived motion caused the lights to dim. Appropriate for a dance class offering fairly consistent patterns of motion, this system had the bizarre impact of causing seated seminar participants to take turns to leap up from their chairs and fling their bodies through space to keep the space illuminated. Quite the metaphor for embodied thought: the bodies in the space could not relinquish movement for long without running the risk of being plunged into darkness. The corporeal and rhythmic pat- terns produced by this technology were distinct from the choreo- graphies fostered by mobile phone usage, indicating another avenue for social choreographic analysis.11 My approach is neither nostalgic of times before mobile devices and smart studios, nor am I blindly pro-technological. By calling atten- tion to bodies I am neither calling for a return to the halcyon days of or- ganic existence (because I dont think they existed), nor am I indicating that technologies are the greatest things to have ever crossed our paths and got under our skin. Bodies and technologies in cities and in dance studios just are, like the colour mauve. Amin and Thrift cite a wonderful snippet of technological history from the 19th century that profoundly affected human perception and ideas about the world. New dyes per- mitted fabrics to be made in the colour mauve, these literally coloured the urban world in new ways (Amin and Thrift 2002, 28). The pres- ence of mauve was not just the stuff of fashion, but promised a new way of looking at the world by adding a new visual register to the streets. Mauve was followed by magenta. Can we imagine losing entire swathes of colour from our urban palette? Can we imagine a world without mobile phones? We might not want to wear mauve, just as we might not want to carry a phone or use a certain ring tone, but these have permanently affected our perceptual and gestural life. Cities are, without a doubt, places of potential: Each urban mo- ment can spark performative improvisations which are unforeseen and unforeseeable. This is not a nave vitalism, but it is a politics of hope (Amin and Thrift 2002, 4). Through the practice of social choreo- graphies (seeing them, critiquing them, and shaping them) choreogra- phers can provide a more complete articulation of the corporeal and
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choreographic layer to this politics of hope.12 We can also expand the awareness and the range of our own artistic research methods. The small hiatus between performance (of a task, of a choreography) and attention to performance is where research takes root. The rest is an articulation based on this moment of perception. As choreographers, we do not have to step out of our bodies, out of our practices, out of our ways of being in the world in order to do research. We are already do- ing research. As dancers, we are not forced to step outside of our bodies to use our mobile devices. They are embodied technologies of touch and contact, and if they are not yet performing the way we would like them to then we can try to make them more corporeal so by how we use them in our lives and our art. NOTES This paper was completed with the support of a residency at La Char- treuse: Centre Nationale pour Ecriture et Performance in Avignon, France. An earlier, shorter version appeared as Social Choreographies in the documentation of the artistic gathering at the University College of Dance, Close Encounters Artists on artistic research published by the University College of Dance, Stockholm 2008. 1. Usman Haques website has documentation of projects and some of his papers http://www.haque.co.uk/papers.php. 2. Ben Russell from the UK has written innovatively in this area, see http://rixc.lv/ram5. An entire issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac Issue was devoted to Locative Media. Volume 14, Issue 03. http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n03-04/ 3. Some examples of the breadth of locative media, as an actual artistic and technological phenomenon and as an imaginary trope, include Blast Theorys performances Rider Spoke and Uncle Roy All Around You http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_rider_spoke.html and Terri Ruebs art work (http://www.terirueb.net/). The Urban Atmospheres group uses mobile phones as location aware and measuring devices to remix local stories (Participatory Urbanism) but also to sense levels of air pollution (Common Sense) http://www.urban-atmospheres.net. In fiction, William Gibsons Spook Country features a character named Al- berto Corrales, a locative media artist whose work often recreates the deaths of celebrities that can only be seen by visiting the actual spot of the death and using either a device or a wearable visual display. 4. Lone Koefoed Hansen from the University of Aarhus in Denmark and Camille Baker from the University of East London in the UK are both researching mobile technologies. They assisted me with this workshop, providing input from the slightly adjacent worlds of design (Hansen) and media performance (Baker). They contributed Nokia smart phones to the workshop for those who desired and increased level of video functionality from their devices. For a related account of performance
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methods converging with design processes, see Hansen and Kozel (2007). 5. This was the whisper[s] project. For more information see www.whispers.ca and a chapter in my book devoted to discussing wearable computing (Kozel 2007). 6. The methodology I employ for this longer term research project into social choreographies is also under development. My long-time corpo- real methodology for artistic and philosophical exploration is a version of phenomenology, but this project necessitates a sideways shift from first-person phenomenology to a version of heterophenomenology, or second person phenomenology combined with performance ethnogra- phy. For details of heterophenomenology see Kozel (2007), for a de- scription of performance ethnography elaborated from a perspective of activist theatre see Denzin (2003). 7. Some of the foundational ideas on social choreographies found in this section of this paper are elaborated in the context of data choreography and wearable computing in my book Kozel (2007). 8. The New York Times article by Jesse Green has useful annotated pho- tographs of Grand Central Station and Washington Square, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/arts/dance/28gree.html?ex=1 306468800&en=5ec14242e7e22c12&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=r ss 9. Amin and Thrift provide a good explanation of Lefebvres rhythmana- lysis and juxtapose it with Walter Benjamins transitivity (Amin and Thrift 2002, 15-18). 10. For additional writing on methodological approaches to artistic re- search coming directly from dance see Kozel 2010a. 11. Ubiquitous computing is a variously defined term but generally re- fers to computer systems being all around us (in our homes, offices, and public spaces) anticipating our needs and responding to them often be- fore we realize we have these needs. These systems are frequently in- visible, or embedded in objects or structures. See Kozel 2010b for a per- formative approach to ubiquitous computing. 12. Amin and Thrift coined the phrase politics of hope several years prior to the 2008 campaign of United States President Obama (recall that this phrase became key to his platform) prompting the observation that a social choreographic analysis of his campaign and his Presi- dencys extensive strategic use of mobile media and social networking would be compelling.

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REFERENCES

Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cam- bridge, UK: Polity Press. Denzin, Norman K. 2003. Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Le toucher, Jean Luc Nancy. Paris: Editions Galile. Dunne, Anthony. 2006. Hertzian Tales. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Gibson, William. 2008. Spook Country. San Francisco: Berkeley Trade. Green, Jesse. 2006. At the New JetBlue Terminal, Passengers May Pir- ouette to Gate. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/arts/dance/28gree.html?ex=1 306468800&en=5ec14242e7e22c12&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=r ss Guattari, Felix 1995. Chaosmosis. Sydney: Feral. Hansen, Lone Koefoed and Susan Kozel. 2007. Embodied imagination: a hybrid method of designing for intimacy, Digital Creativity. Vol 18, No 4, pp 207-220. Kozel, Susan. 2007. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kozel, Susan. 2008. Social Choreographies, in Close Encounters Art- ists on artistic research. Stockholm: University College of Dance. Kozel, Susan. 2010a. The Virtual and the Physical: A Phenomenological Approach to Performance Research, in The Routledge Companion to Re- search in the Arts, in Biggs, M and Karlsson, H (eds.) London and New York: Routledge. Kozel, Susan. 2010b, forthcoming. Sinews of Ubiquity: A Corporeal Eth- ics for Ubiquitous Computing, in Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Ulrik Ekman. Cambridge MA and New York: The MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. New York, London: Harvester, Wheatsheaf. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Eye and Mind in The Primacy of Per- ception, ed. James M. Edie, translated by Carlton Dallery. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp159-190.
This is a pre-print version, published with the author's consent in the interest of open dissemination, but somewhat different from the final, archival version of the article. Do not cite this version without permission from the author.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. BIO Susan Kozel is a dancer, choreographer and writer specializing in the area of movement and digital technologies. Working in England, Europe, Scandinavia, and Canada, she collaborates with digital artists, software engineers, architects, and composers to create performances and installations. She is the director of Mesh Performance Practices http://www.meshperformance.org. Her most recent book is Closer: per- formance, technologies, philosophy (2007) published by The MIT Press.

This is a pre-print version, published with the author's consent in the interest of open dissemination, but somewhat different from the final, archival version of the article. Do not cite this version without permission from the author.