ada lovelace & susan kozel

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, "an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology." While there are many women who inspire me in this realm (...taking a brief pause to appreciate the twenty-first century...), I'm going to focus today on video artist/choreographer/theorist Susan Kozel. Kozel writes about "the physical experience of digital technologies to create new philosophical paradigms...Through her work, [she] researches the physical and philosophical vocabularies emerging from the convergence of dance and media technologies."

I have to give Kozel some credit for jumpstarting my personal explorations of technology about four years ago at the UC Riverside (Dis)junctions Conference. The highlight of the conference for me was the talk given by Kozel. She discussed her projects Trajets (involving video projected on screens that are choreographed to respond to participants walking on a sensored floor), Whisper, and Between Bodies ("wearables" that monitor participants' heartbeats, breath rates, and muscle contraction and transmit them through video or garments to other participants), among others.

Her latest book is Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, out last year from MIT Press.