Artist Statement

The body is as immediately abstract as it is concrete; its activity and expressivity extend, as on their underside, into an incorporeal, yet perfectly real, dimension of pressing potential. _Brian Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect (1995)

Creative live art work with live processing interface that explores identity and representation, African American and mixed-race positionalities and queer sexualities. Work uses a Kinect and MAX interface to offer playful exploration of how labels adhere to people in motion. Soundscore created through processed deconstruction of music by Thelonious Monk and Irving Berlin. Created by LIPPAGE:Performance|Culture| Technology: Sound discoveries by Jamie Keesecker; MAX development by Kenneth D. Stewart, concept and performance by Thomas F. DeFrantz.
“The Weight of Ideas” is an excerpt of a larger work, “where did i think i was going? [moving into signal]” (2014). This work engages five separate interface designs gathered to underscore the vagaries of contemporary life reflected through prisms of digital scale. Digital cameras, Kinect cameras, and wireless microphones will record gestures by the performers and process the images and sounds through MAX, Isadora, and Ableton Live software. The work wonders at the physical and emotional cost of incessant movement resulting from job changes, natural disasters, and shifts in available technology.

• Thomas F. DeFrantz is director of SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology. Born a Hoosier [from Indiana, USA], DeFrantz is Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies, Dance, and Theater Studies at Duke University, and Past President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. His books include the edited volume Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002, CHOICE Award, Errol Hill Award), Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture Oxford University Press (2004, de la Torre Bueno Prize), and Black Performance Theory, co edited with Anita Gonzalez (Duke University Press, 2014). He has taught at NYU, Stanford, Hampshire College, MIT, the University of Nice, and Yale; has presented his research by invitation in Australia, Canada, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, and Sweden. Current research imperatives include explorations of black social dance, and the development of live processing interfaces for performance. slippage.org