Living Data: Align

2015 Conversations

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"It is because science grows out of the preoccupations and pressures of everyday life
that its discoveries have, in the end, to be accessible to all of us."
Lisa Jardine, 1999. Ingenious Pursuits:
Building the Scientific Revolution p.8

Can heat energy be choreographed to reflect anthropogenic global warming
and will this reality be conveyed at the 2015 BEAMS Festival?

Artist-film maker Adam Sebire and Dancer-choreographer Robyn Seiboth collaborate with me and other artists, to combine body knowledges with insights shared through play with infra red imaging technology.

Adam explores cinematographic ideas with a heat-sensing camera, on loan from UTS scientist Andrea Leigh who uses it to test responses of leaves to increasingly variable temperatures. Robyn explores how the technology can visually expand her choreographic practice of contact dance improvisation. I am one of several dancers invited to improvise within a choreographic score, to bring to human scale the microscopic and astronomic dimensions of Life as an evolving whole. All artists involved are independently driven to engage new audiences with the actuality of global warming.

As I move with Robyn and the other dancers, I increasingly identify with projections of our glowing bodies as fellow living entities in conversation. I feel more and more like one of many moving parts that make a whole evolving entity. I wonder how people at the BEAMS Festivalwill relate to our performance.

Lisa Roberts in conversation

Adam Sebire

We've talked before about collaborating with scientists and how that works. So how is it collaborating with a dancer?

Ah, no no, it's great, because she approaches it with a whole different mind set, and suddenly we find that, Oh, OK, the technology can do this. Because I've been using it in one particular way, which is from my film making background. No, it's always great to have different disciplines come in and go, Yes, we can do this as well. So, particularly with Robyn I'm finding that heat traces are coming out. 'Cause when I'm in the bush it's quite hard to notice. The ... ground is warmer. Here it's cooler. So when she moves, or when she rests on the floor, we're getting heat images.

Robyn Seiboth

Echoing the developmental process... and evolutionary process. Then there's the structure of each individual exploring their own body surfaces, and really coming to terms with themselves as one single-celled creature almost... using that contact, using the different layers of the body, and levels of the body, and textures, to really leverage movement, and to form a contact gravity dance.