Exhibits and Posters, Return to the Material Conference 2013

Abstract

I propose to exhibit a physical sculpture: a visualization of the entire 85-year run of the Florida Historical Quarterly. I identified the top one hundred key terms and arrayed each according to the number of times that term appears per year. The resulting pattern is a macro-scale reading of the historiographic “shape” of the journal. I’ve turned the visualization into physical sculpture through 3-D printing, a sculpture I propose to display throughout the entire run of the conference, to be viewed and commented upon at any time by conference participants. I would then hold a session discussing both the process by which I created the object and the rhetorical argument I am making about scholarly performance. “FHQ III” represents digital humanities praxis as art, and the digital humanist as “radical visualizer.”

Adaptive Use Musical Instruments (AUMI) software interface enables people who have very limited controlled (voluntary) movement to independently engage in music making. Michelle Heffner Hayes, Kip Haaheim, Nicole Hodges-Persley, Sherry Tucker, University of Kansas.

Embodied experiences of music and dance are difficult to describe, let alone preserve for the future. Every listener—those who play or dance and those who don’t—experiences it differently. And when that embodied experience takes place across the digital divide, as diverse bodies differently respond shifting material conditions, perceptual response, and improvisatory navigation—what is the material and how do we share it? In this panel discussion, four KU faculty from the departments of American Studies, Dance, Music, and Theatre, will discuss the material and ephemeral findings of their work on improvisation utilizing a musical instrument download that responds to movement large and small, adapts to all bodies, and calls attention to the user’s experience of their body as they face the screen of a laptop, PC, or IPad. Music and dance are not disconnected in this practice built on body-triggered sound; instead this connection is heightened. In addition, dance need not configure a bodily ideal, but shapes bodies, incorporates all bodies, and constructs connections between people. Panelists will speak at the brink of a forthcoming multi-media performance (KU Commons, October date TBA 2013) that explores lines of performance/research, dis/ability, mobility/stasis, agency/eminence, and sounding/perceiving.