I was expecting something quite different when I first encountered Improvisation Technologies by William Forsythe and the ZKM / Institute for Visual Media. I thought it would be the product of a sequential collaboration - a record of dance archived on a CD-ROM. Instead, I discovered a truly co-developed installation. The "technology" is both the CD-ROM interface and the performance technique developed by Forsythe. It is a digital dance school that makes performance tools out of a computer and a body in Cyberspace. It is an accommodating specimen for the contemplation of postmodern performance art and an opportunity to witness a merger of the live and the mediated.

Jeff Shaw, the director of ZKM, shares his thoughts about the project in the booklet that accompanies the CD-ROM. He writes, "The artist’s performative body and the spectator’s participatory body increasingly become immersed in the dialectics of mediated experience." Indeed, the spectator/spectacle dichotomy avails itself to the discussion of mediation, otherness, reproduction and simulation. "Today, the protagonist body, plugged into virtual reality, is a perspicuous extension of that conjunction [linking the live to the mediated]." Improvisation Technologies so delightfully supports this claim. But, participating in the dance lesson, I wondered if a conjunctive nature could even be articulated. Maybe, the dialectic has collapsed into something more unified. Does there remain an epistemological difference between the body and the technology?

In the field of cognitive neuroscience, the anatomical cause/effect of object recognition is discussed in terms of brain representation. Recently, using brain imaging methodology, it has been discovered that humans represent living things – the body – and non-living things – the object-tool – in different parts of the brain. The philosophical implications of this finding are startling. A living entity must provide for the observer some stimulant that a non-living thing lacks (or visa versa). What does a living entity contain that differentially stimulates the brain? If psychophysics finds some application in metaphysical inquiry, what can these new findings tell us about Shaw’s conjunction between the body and its tools?

Neuroscientists have attempted to explain this unexpected neural organization of object representation with two possible models. The first, a property-based model, attempts to compare the form of a living body to that of a manufactured or non-living object. In general, evolution conserves form even when a vestigial feature might create functional constraints. It is argued that living things share a non-specific form that arises from the evolutionary process, whereas object-tools are differentiated in the brain according to their utterly functional, efficient form. A second, widely accepted model is category-based. Proponents of this explanation emphasize the fact that living things are only seen while non-living things are both seen and used. When one sees a live body or a tool, visual regions of the brain are activated. But unique to the tool is a memory of motor engagement. This sense memory activates additional brain representations that lead to discrimination between living and non-living things.

In Improvisation Technologies, is William Forsythe a living man or an object-tool? Applying the models of representation discussed above, my brain might have a difficult time articulating that distinction. He is both living body and technology. He is both evolved and efficient. I know him as an artist and a tool. The scientific debate over neural representation may add little more than a rhetorical flavor the discussion of mediation in postmodern performance. At the very least, it is in keeping with Shaw's intention behind the Improvisation Technologies and a further exploration of his stated interests.

The Forsythe-ZKM collaboration offers a "tool for the analytical dance eye" which encourages the performer to transform herself through and into "technology." The CD-ROM is a conjuction of the living and non-living, the body and its tools.