Grisha Coleman

2014-15 Mohr Visiting Artist

The Stanford University Department of Theater and Performance Studies will host New York based artist Grisha Coleman during the fall 2014 term as the fourth Mohr Visiting Artist.

The Mohr Visiting Artist Program is supported by Nancy and Larry Mohr and administered by the Stanford Arts Institute.

Related Course

DANCE 156T/TAPS 156T: Hybrid Action: Physical Intelligence in Digital Culture

The term ‘hybrid action’ introduces the notion of movement, expressed in both the physical and virtual worlds. What is physical intelligence? How could we cultivate it? What technologies can extend sensory awareness, and which can suppress it? How can better understanding of human movement impact a creative/design process?

This class takes human movement as a practice based [experiential], creative, theoretical, historical, and philosophical realm of study. Working within a somatic framework, this course introduces basic principles and practices of body awareness approaches that emphasize sensory experience along with basic anatomical knowledge as a way to extend one’s ‘physical intelligence’. Importantly, the class asks how movement study can inform creative practices from computer programming to engineering to choreography, as well as applications in health and rehabilitation, cognitive and neuroscience, philosophy and literature.

Literature around theories of embodiment come from a variety of disciplinary fields, giving the course a broad approach to understanding how we use movement and the body to engage in our world and with digital systems, putting experiential design at the forefront.

In parallel, students are introduced to 1] interactive technologies developed to extend possibilities for sensing, analyzing and responding to movement [e.g. Max/Msp, Processing, Kinect, camera tracking,] and 2] literature in the field that looks at current work and contextual writings in critical cultural and media studies, philosophy, sciences and historical texts.

The class emphasizes hands-on, individual and collaborative projects through research and prototyping. Through practice-based research, the projects encourage students to develop strategies for designing, developing and building hybrid [physical/digital] projects – or ‘experiential media systems’. This work leverages the movement investigation as a way to innovate in the function and design of digital technology, while the technologies and their constraints also have implications for the way that we move in the world. The work is given context and direction by how these hybrid systems may be applied in a social context [e.g. health, arts, design, education]. Final projects are expected to be collaborative and more complex in scale, development and design.

Short readings, written responses, and in-class discussion are part of the critical response to concepts of embodiment from literature, the arts, human-computer design, philosophy, linguistics and neurosciences.

About Grisha Coleman

Grisha Coleman, Assistant Professor of Movement, Computation and Digital Media in the School of Arts, Media + Engineering and affiliate faculty in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre (both in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts) at Arizona State University, is a dancer, choreographer, and composer in performance and experiential media systems. Her work has been recognized nationally and internationally: she is the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts [NEA], and an Arts in Media grant. Other notable awards and honors include grants from the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund, The Creative Capital Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, and The New York Foundation Artists’ Fellowship (NYFA). A graduate of the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, with an MFA in Composition and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, she was a member of acclaimed dance company Urban Bush Women [1990-1994], and subsequently founded the music performance group HOTMOUTH, which toured extensively nationally and internationally, and was nominated for a 1998 NYC Drama Desk Award for “Most Unique Theatrical Experience.” She is a current member of the board of directors for Society of Dance History Scholars.