Soi Moi: The Techno-Soma-Aesthetics of a Dance for the iPhone

On the course of intensive research a corpus of artworks that instantiate dance performance in cyberspace have been inspected in order to understand how expert-practitioners used new technologies for production as well as the new means of public dissemination that they enabled. This paper is dedicated to Soi Moi, which was made for the IPhone in 2009 by n+n corsino using motion capture, synthesized environments and multi-sensorial human-computer interaction. I bare the commitment of an expert-spectator that demonstrates the value of this research-practice to understand and inform creative process, technological development, aesthetic experience and scholar debate. This enquiry pursued a constructivist analysis of components and attributes that revealed the ‘remediation’ of disciplinary traditions. But intersecting close examination with a contextualizing project and interpretative layers generated a productive dialogue with theoretical perspectives about the arts, media and cyberculture of the 21st century. It shall be evident why securing a place for this artwork in the history of new media art and performance is a relevant contribution to knowledge. Despite solid proof that performance experts have provided computer technology and information society with pioneering discourse, their practices have a marginal position in the new media art sector and market. Retrieving research results is paramount. Like ephemeral live dance and performance artworks have succumbed to time, the spectre of redundancy hovers Soi Moi because the state-of-the-art technology in use is already outdated.