Publication details
The Tiller Girls - Robotic Performance. Dancing Ornament of Post-Industrial Society
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In 2009, Louis-Philippe Demers along with his collaborators created robotic stage production “The Tiller Girls. All meet the stage”. The title refers to the name of the most famous dance group of the beginning of the 20th century. However, if the John Tiller’s girls fascinated an audience with their perfectly synchronized movements in the chorus line dancing, the robotic performers’ movements remind us of a group of dancers who come together to improvise without any ambition to perfectly re-produce choreography. While Siegfried Kracauer identified in the dance of the Tiller Girls the mirroring of the Industrial age (The Mass Ornament). In the movement of the Demers’ robotic performers, there can be recognised the pattern of post-industrial production, with reference to Vilem Flusser’s description of intelligent instruments production (Our Shrinking). Thus, the paper will focus on Demers’ robotic performance as an ornament of postindustrial artistic production. The possibility of using Flusser’s general theory of gesture as an aesthetics and poetics of postindustrial creative production will be proposed. |
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