Horizons of Movement: encounters in kinesthetic thinking

Programme
Thursday September 22nd of September, 2016
Place: Mawby Room
Kellogg College, Oxford,
60-62 Banbury Road
Oxford, OX2 6PN
9.30 - 10.00
10:00 - 11.00

11:00 - 11.30
11.30 - 12:30
12:30 13:30
13:30 14:00
14:00 15:00

15:00 15:30
15:30 16:30
16:30 -

Greetings and coffee

The diagrammatic imagination of Alexander Grothendieck, Fernando
Zalamea (UNAL)
Q&A and feedback- Chair: John G. Stell
Break and refreshments
From actions to semantics, Peter Gardenfors (Lund)
Q&A and feedback- Chair: Nicolas Salazar Sutil
Lunch
Static Movement, John G. Stell (Leeds)
Material Speculations of Risk: Graphing the Movements of Disasters,
Michael Guggenheim with Bernd Kraeftner and Judith Kroell
(Goldsmiths)
Break and refreshments
Roundabout Methods: kinetic clues and cinematographic
experimentation in the social sciences, Javier Lezaun (Oxford)
Drinks and reception
Friday September 23rd of September, 2016
Place: as above

9.30 - 10.00
10:00 - 11.00
11:00 - 11.30
11.30 - 12:30

12:30 13:30
13:30 14:00
14:00 15:00
15:00 15:30
15:30 16:15

16:15 -

Greetings and coffee

Absolute Rhythm: kineasthetic radio, Paul Carter(RMIT)
Q&A and feedback- Chair: Javier Lezaun
Break and refreshments
Piloting choreographies for elemental movement, Derek McCormack
(Oxford)
Q&A and feedback- Chair: Nicolas Salazar Sutil
Lunch
Dynamospherics: the atmosphere of movement (underground),
Nicolas Salazar Sutil (Leeds)
Smoke-filled rooms: atmospheric matter and the legibility of
encounters, Nerea Calvillo (Warwick) and Javier Lezaun (Oxford)
Break and refreshments
Horizons of Movement roundtable session with Gardenfors, Zalamea,
Carter, & McCormick. Chairs: Nicolas Salazar Sutil and Javier
Lezaun
Reception

Abstracts

he diagrammatic imagination of Alexander Grothendieck: dynamic movement and

the mathematical creativity
Fernando Zalamea (Universidad Nacional de Colombia)
Alexander Grothendieck (Berlin 1928 Saint-Girons 2014) may be considered the
greatest mathematical genius of the last sixty years, and, along with David Hilbert, one of
the two fundamental mathematicians of the last century. Grothendieck has opened many
new perspectives for the XXIst century, after having published ten thousand pages,
introduced more than a thousand original definitions, and imagined deep new
understandings of the concepts of number ("schemes"), space ("topos"), and form
("motives"). The size and the depth of his work are truly outstanding, but his output is
almost unknown outside a circle of specialists. On the other hand, after his recent death,
his life is now awakening some interest (five partial biographies, two documentary films,
and even a novel, appeared in the last three years).
Grothendieck's universe may be divided (wrongly, as in any compartmentalization) in four
periods. From 1949 to 1957, along some geographic margins (Nancy, Sao Paulo,
Kansas), he produces central contributions in very concrete mathematical regions:
topological vector spaces, (co)homology, category theory, complex variables. Between
1958 and 1970, now in the center of mathematics (IHES Paris), Grothendieck sets up
the abstract conceptual foundations of algebraic geometry (lments de gomtrie
algbrique, EGA, with Dieudonn; Sminaire de gomtrie algbrique, SGA, with
students and other collaborators). After leaving the IHES (political radicalization,
deception with his entourage), he engages in strong ecological activities (1970-1973), and
progressively returns to the borders of French province (Universit de Montpellier 19731988). A new passion for mathematics arises (1981-1991), along fresh new readings of
concrete mathematical structures (moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces, groupoids,
topological surfaces, dessins d'enfants, tame topology). It is also the time of profound
reflections on the emergence of mathematical creativity (Rcoltes et semailles).
Grothendieck retreats completely in 1991 to an unknown village in the Pyrenees (now
identified as Lasserre), and, between 1991 and 2004, writes fifty thousand pages (!) of
mathematical, psychological, philosophical, and mystical papers (with thirty thousand
pages devoted to a Trait du mal...) Some decades will be needed to get a fair
perspective on this gigantic material.
In our contribution to the workshop Horizons of Movement, we will focus on some of the
methodological forces at work in the first and third (lesser known) periods of
Grothendieck's activity. A holistic perspective, with many stratified levels and mixed
transits between them, can be well drawn from Grothendieck's strategy to understand
mathematical thought. Polarities, contradictions, dialectics, provide a new emergence of
mathematical ideas. Diverse expressions of relative mathematics (through category
theoretic shiftings and sheafification) explain a kinetic emergence of form, whilst the
appearance of a sophisticated "archetype types calculus", produces new invariant
structures beyond movement. Since Grothendieck may also be considered the greatest
geometer after Riemann, and his mathematical imagination is well rooted in the
diagrammatic methods of category theory, the many levels of representation in his
conceptual transregional mathematics provide forceful methods, able to be extrapolated to
concrete transdisciplinary questions in the visualization of culture.

From actions to semantics

Peter Grdenfors (Lund University)
This article focuses on relations between actions and the semantics of natural language.
Within theories of cognitive linguistics it has been argued that not only must linguistic
information be compatible with the perceptual system, but actions should also be
considered. One characteristic feature of actions is that they involve forces, typically
exerted by an agent. Forces and actions should consequently be among the building
blocks of cognitive semantics.
Mark Johnson was among the first to bring out the role of forces in semantics. He argues
that forces form perceptual Gestalts that serve as conceptual schemas. This forms the
beginning of what nowadays is called embodied cognition. The forces that are cognitively
represented need not only be physical forces, but can also be social or emotional forces.
My core thesis is that an action can be described as a pattern of forces. These patterns
are represented in principally the same way as patterns of shapes. The best empirical
support for the thesis comes from psychophysics. The psychologist Gunnar Johansson
developed already in the 1950s a patch-light technique for analysing biological motion.
He attached light bulbs to the joints of actors who were dressed in black and moved in a
black room. The actors were filmed performing actions such as walking, running, and
dancing. Watching the films in which only the light dots could be seen subjects
identified the actions within tenths of a second. Further experiments showed that subjects
extract subtle details of the actions performed, such as the gender of people walking or
the weight of objects lifted.
One lesson to learn from these experiments is that the kinematics of a movement contains
sufficient information to identify the underlying dynamic force patterns. On this
perspective, the information that the senses primarily vision receive about the
movements of an object or individual is sufficient for the brain to extract, with great
precision, the underlying forces.
A consequence of analysing actions as force patterns is that similarities of actions can be
determined. For example, walking is more similar to running than to waving. Indeed, there
are strong reasons to believe that actions exhibit many of the prototype effects that
Eleanor Rosch presented for object categories.
Together with Massimo Warglien, I have developed a model of events that includes
seeing actions as force patterns. In this model, an event is represented in terms of two
components the force of an action that drives the event, and the result of the application
of force. An event is built up from an agent, an action, a patient, a result and possibly
other thematic roles such as instrument, recipient, and beneficiary. The result of an event
is modelled as a change vector representing the change of properties of the patient before
and after the event. For example, when somebody (the agent) pushes (the force vector) a
table (the patient), the forces exerted make the table move (the result vector).
The cognitive models of actions and events can be used to develop a semantic
representation for verb meanings. According to the model, verbs have two main roles: (1)
To describe what has happened (or will happen); and (2) to describe how it happened (or
will happen). The first type is manner verbs that describe how an action is performed. In
English, some examples are run, swipe, wave, push, and punch. The second type is result
verbs that describe the result of actions. In English, some examples are move, heat,
clean, enter, and reach.
Manner verbs can be analysed in terms of force patterns. For example, push refers to the
force vector of an event. On the other hand, result verbs are modelled as change in

properties. For example, move refers to changes in the spatial domain of the result vector
and heat refers to changes in the temperature domain. This proposal can explain
similarities between word meanings. For example, the meaning of walk is more similar to
that of jog than that of jump because the force patterns representing walking are more
similar to those for jogging than those for jumping.
In neurolinguistics, results from Friedemann Pulvermller provide important indications of
the connections between verb meanings and actions. He focuses on the motor aspects of
meaning schemas. When the brain understands a verb, it prepares an action. For
example, he has shown that when you read a manner verb such as kick, the same part of
motor cortex is activated as when you actually kick. An interpretation is that the brain
simulates the action it reads about.

Static Movement
John G. Stell (University of Leeds)
Conventional computational representations of spatial data use numerical co-ordinates.
However, for everyday commonsense purposes, precise geometrical information is
unhelpful and provides more detail than necessary. The location of an object in a room is
conveniently conveyed between humans in language using qualitative spatial relations
such as on, left of, near to, inside, etc. Qualitative spatial relations can be represented
computationally. This representation involves encoding spatial relationships within formal
logic and using the fact that expressions in formal logic can be processed to derive
deductions in an analogous way to the more familiar computation with arithmetic
expressions to yield numerical results. Calculi formalising qualitative relations typically
provide sets of jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint relations meaning that any spatial
configuration between two entities can be classified as one and only one of a given set of
relations. One fundamental set of such relations consists just of the five possibilities: that
two entities coincide in space, are separate, overlap, that the first occupies part of the
space of the second, or vice versa. Almost all of the emphasis in accounts such as is
concerned with the representation of static relationships.
In this paper I consider the representation of movement based on qualitative accounts of
space. Two approaches can be explored. The more immediately obvious is the
construction of calculi of kinds of movement, such as approaching, avoiding, engulfing,
circling, and so on. Such calculi do not appear to exist. There are qualitative accounts of
movement along routes, including directional instructions involving qualitative phrases
such as turn right or bear left, but a turn can be a static juncture in a path rather than a
kind of movement. An analysis of the reasons for the lack of formal movement calculi in
the qualitative style suggests that the difficulty of categorizing movement into any system
of disjoint types is a fundamental obstacle. Thus, while there have been studies of the
dynamic world in qualitative terms, ontological frameworks to represent it, and of time
itself qualitatively, calculi of relations analogous to the static case have not emerged.
The second approach to movement in the qualitative context, is to remove it altogether.
Movement can be represented by a change in static relationships leading to a qualitative
account in which the representation consists of pairs of static relationships the initial and
final states. The resulting conceptual neighbourhoods provide a net- work of static
relations such that transitions between adjacent nodes in the network are possible without
passing through any different intermediate relation. For example, in two dimensions, two

circular regions where one is initially a part of the other cannot move continuously in the
plane to a state of disconnection without at some intermediate stage passing through a
state where their boundaries share some points but their interiors are disconnected.
This representation places movement in the gaps between distinct static relationships,
and I will explore the connections with the way that action in graphic novels appears in the
gaps between the panels. The gaps are only apparently empty, because the same
characters and objects are identified from one panel to the next. The collection of traces of
continuing existence resulting from these identifications parallels the binary relation
between static states used to describe qualitative change in adjacency trees.
Movement, then, can be represented as sequences of static states with continuity of
identity relating between states. Different systems of static qualitative relations provide
different languages of movement, but there are issues about whether the movements that
are qualitatively indistinguishable in these formal languages would be recognised are
similar movements in many contexts. Two objects can move from one spatial relationship
to another but how similar as movements are all the various ways of doing this? In
examining this question I will use level of detail as well as change over time. This provides
another kind of movement; the observer zooms out but there is apparent movement in the
world: distinct objects merge, tenuous linkages vanish and connected objects separate.
The combination of the apparent movement with the actual movement is able to enhance
the qualitative description. Paradoxically, by zooming out and losing detail we gain
information because we can relate the detailed to the coarsened representation.
Imagining temporal states arranged horizontally and granularity, or level of detail, varying
vertically, movement becomes represented through the gaps between the states in each
direction in combination with the relationships between the entities which also run both
horizontally and vertically. The conclusion is that the granular dimension enhances the
qualitative representation of movement, but this prompts the question of whether the
addition of other dimensions, specifically granularity of time as well as of perception, is
capable of providing further enhancement.
Material Speculations of Risk: Graphing the Movements of Disasters
Michael Guggenheim with Bernd Kraeftner and Judith Kroell (Goldsmiths College,
University of London)

Our contribution starts with a simple question: How is it possible to democratize the
creation of risk scenario building? Typically, expert based risk scenarios methodologically
are founded in the Delphi method. The Delphi method is, in its various guises, based on
telling or writing risk scenarios. As such, it depends on the ability to cognitively preconceive of risks and give them a narrative shape. It requires a lot of pre-knowledge.
Delphi is thus neither well equipped to produce surprising scenarios (which, post 9/11 is
one of the main requisites of scenario building), nor can it easily be done by non-experts,
because these often lack the pre-knowledge and narrative skills.
The answer to this problem for our research was to develop a new method to materialize
storytelling: to build a sandbox in which people could develop scenarios step by step by
using various props. The players were given three simple instructions: 1. Built a world with
the objects at hand. Build it step by step, object by object, explaining for each step what
the object represents, explain its agency and its meaning. 2. Turn the world upside down.
Using the same methods as in step 1, create a disaster that could happen in this world. 3.

Create and emergency provision for this world. By materializing risk scenarios, the
sandbox disaggregated risk scenarios into temporal and spatially traceable steps. A story
became a movement in time and space.
For us, this disagreggation was primarily a (successful) methodological tool to produce
what we aimed at: namely to allow anyone to produce surprising disaster scenarios. But at
the same time it also produced new problems for how to understand the data produced.
For, other than simply producing new disaster scenarios, it also produced a wealth of
forms and shapes in the sandbox, which have their own logic. In our contribution, we
would like to address four issues related to these logics:
First, we can wonder about the agency of objects in the sandbox. Objects in the sandbox
are placed and moved, and such placements and movements have observable features,
we differ depending on the qualities of the objects, their agencies, their role in the plot etc.
Second, the relationship between a scenario and its shape. Our method draws heavily on
the uses of sandtables in psychotherapy and diagnostics. In the psychodiagnostic work of
Charlotte Buehler, the shapes of objects in sandtables is used to infer the psychic state of
the player. In our case this would obviously the wrong reference point. How then can we
interpret the various shapes of stories, the links between a sequential storytelling and its
spatial step-by step distribution in a rectangular space?
Third, we can think about the indeterminacy of the unfolding of the story and how this
indeterminacy is enabled and constrained and in through the sequencing of objects. In
short, we can think through how storytelling is a back and forth of telling and seeing, and
of thinking and placing.
Fourth, we can wonder about the shape of disasters: How is a disaster understood as a
movement, and what shape does that movement have? Disasters, as devised by us, are
events that turn a world built in the sandbox on its head. As these events can be imagined
as emotional, conceptual, ontological etc. , but need to be created with objects, the
question is whether there is a particular shape and movement of disasters. We can also
wonder how that shape and movement is different from the world itself, and what its
qualifiers are.
Roundabout methods: kinetic clues and cinematographic experimentation in the
social sciences
Javier Lezaun (University of Oxford)

This paper analyzes the historical development of a cinematographic approach to socialscientific experimentation. That is, the shift from a mode of inquiry in which film provides a
tool to record kinetic events generated under experimental conditions to one in which
experimental situations are purposefully arranged to maximize their cinematographic
effect. This evolution becomes starkly visible when one compares the pioneering use of
film by Wolfgang Khler in his studies of chimpanzee intelligence on the eve of World War
I with the techniques that his protge and colleague Kurt Lewin would develop in the
1920s and refine in the 1930s. By the time Lewin produces his famous motion picture of
democratic and authoritarian social climates, and in active dialogue with developments in
avant-garde cinema, an unabashedly cinematographic mode of social-scientific
experimentation had become possible, a mode that aligned the presentation of the events
that had unfolded in the laboratory with the visual registers of a mass audience. This

development was truncated, however, and would remain marginal within academic
practice, as the social sciences turned after World War II to forms of experimentation and
filmmaking rooted in a faux-naf ideology of static observationalism. The paper draws on
this material to develop an analysis of movement as an experimental heuristic in the
history of the social sciences, and of the revelatory power of modes of experimentation
that establish a genuine, dynamic relationship with the medium in which sociality is made
manifest.
Absolute Rhythm: kinaesthetic radio
Paul Carter (RMIT)
The rubric for our workshop argues for the significance of a creative and elusive
subconceptual realm of gesturo-kinetic formations and still-babbling languages. This
paper considers the expression of such formations and languages in the medium of
radiophonic composition and notation. Then, arguing that the radiophonic era is over, the
paper speculates about the applicability of such notation practices to the dramaturgy of
public space. Between 1986 and 2000 I wrote and co-directed over a dozen works for
voice broadcast nationally and internationally. These works habitually use echoic mimicry
to evoke gesturo-kinetic formations where voices, working with fragments of contact
Pidgins or (even more minimally) with phonemic mere coincidences engage, in speaking
pantomimes.
Although it is an elusive term, Ezra Pounds concept of absolute rhythm has repeatedly
seemed to express the way in which these gesturings and babblings may possess a kind
of unity, an overall atmosphere or regionality. This paper discusses some of the poeticokinesthetic influences on Pounds theory, and uses these origins in the mechanics of flight
to suggest some strategies for the translation of a radio notation into a post radiophonic
performance of complex, non-linear communicational structures. One particular challenge
of this is to situate the poetic voice in the public domain. Pound compared the composition
of the Cantos to turning the dial of the radio to different historical frequencies. Post-radio,
it has been claimed that the poet is a radio. But how, in reality, is the radio space
reterritorialised in everyday socio-spatial practice? What art of vocalisation might do it?
Piloting choreographies for elemental movement
Derek McCormack (University of Oxford)
This paper will explore what it means to sense the movement of elemental processes, and
how, in doing so, important questions are raised about the choreographic arrangement of
the relations between bodies and their environmental surrounds. In order to do this the
paper takes as its starting point a deceptively simple device: the balloon. As a technology
of travelling and journeying, the balloon provides a device that, in its early days, generated
new senses of being-in-movement, or what Albert Santos Dumont called stillness in
motion. As a meteorological device, the balloon has been central to the making explicit of
the atmosphere as a layered zone of elemental movement of variable intensity. And, to a
lesser extent, the balloon has and continues to be used as a kind of choreographic object
with which to facilitate different apprehensions of elemental forces and ecologies of
experience. The paper draws together insights from each of these deployments of the
balloon, before focusing in particular on recent artistic and technical experiments that
foreground the capacity of this device to disclose the relation between the elemental and
different forms of life. In the process, the paper speculates upon the question of how both
senses of movement and the scope of the choreographic might need to be extended in

order to grasp the intensity, extensity, and force of the elemental. To this end it considers
briefly the value of piloting as an ethico-aesthetic orientation for thinking about what it
means to move and be moved.
Dynamospherics: the atmosphere of movement (underground)
Nicolas Salazar Sutil (Leeds)
In a chapter of his unfinished and unpublished book Effort and Recovery, the pioneer
dance researcher Rudolf Laban wrote of the experience of visiting a cave in the
Carpathian Mountains in his native Hungary. The case study is intended as an
exemplification of the theory of efforts, particularly the concept of shadow movements. For
Laban, effort is the dynamic content of a motor action, as opposed to the kinetic
determination. This distinction also cuts through the qualitative or quantitative
determinations of motion, or indeed the nonmetric and metric aspects of motor activity.
Effort is a horizon of movement Laban described within his explorations of the
dynamosphere (1966), which includes the thinking and emotional processes that underpin
and drive physical movement.
In this essay, I would like to connect Labans work with the theory of affect, by arguing
that, as an open-ended social phenomenon (Massumi 1998), affect involves nonindividuated movement. Affect is a shared environment of sensations, emotions and
intuitions processed within open-ended thought, tied to what I call atmospheres of
movement. A moment of crowd panic, a group of ravers bouncing to a beat, or indeed, a
group of tourists visiting a wondrous cave, can all illustrate the many ways in which
affectively socialized movement adopts, though dynamic effort, an open-ended and
kinesthetic sociality.
My question is: why is it so difficult to describe this atmosphere, to pin it down in a
representational way, to give it a language? Whilst Laban developed a system of
categorization of effort actions and factors, and whilst he developed a system of
representation of the dynamosphere (effort graphs), I would contend that dynamospherics
eludes formalization. Dynamospherics is a nonrepresentational horizon of movement,
what we might call, in Lacanian terms, real movement.
Based on autoethnographic research carried out in prehistoric decorated caves over the
last three years (including the UNESCO heritage site of Altamira in Spain), I argue that
movement has the capacity to transform social experience, and even the media
communicational expression of movement as found, for instance, within the media
geography of this astonishing decorated cave (Altamira). The parable of the cave, drawing
both on Labans autoethnography and my own, tells us that intensive spaces such as
karsts can establish unique atmospheres of movement, for unique socialization based on
a sharing of dynamic and affective spaces. Within the altered sensorium that is the cave,
vision, sound and proprioception are altered by an affective geology, creating conditions
for a unique kinesthetic atmosphere that eludes representation.
Smoke-filled rooms: atmospheric matter and the legibility of encounters
Nerea Calvillo (University of Warwick) and Javier Lezaun (University of Oxford)
In this paper we explore the implications of designing and thinking with a kinetic and
atmospheric material like smoke. We do this by analysing the exhibition design project
Sticky Airs, an installation developed to host video-art and performances in the context

of a music festival in Murcia (Spain) in 2015. The installation was built with water vapour,
glycerines, solid carbon dioxide, hot water, high and low temperatures and ventilators to
organise the flows of visitors, as well as to condition the ways in which video-art pieces,
performances and debates could be experienced. The goal was to achieve the biggest
amount of effects possible: to define temporary areas, diffuse walls, floating floors,
freshness curtains, visibility barriers to host and intensify the artistic performances.
The paper focuses on two main implications of the use of smoke to create spaces of
encounter. First, it looks at how the spatio-temporal mobility of smoke as a construction
material challenges traditional design methods and conceptual approaches to architecture
and exhibition spaces. Smoke dilutes boundaries, fills in the empty, and forces design to
be experimental. Second, smoke transforms the legibility of space, including the
movement and identities of its visitors. The deliberate (and experimental) use of smoke to
create a particular atmospherics of encounter probes existing understandings of sociability
and communication grounded in literal or phenomenal notions of transparency.
Event Contributors
Nerea Calvillo is an architect, researcher and curator, and Assistant Professor at the
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick). The work produced at
her office, C+ arquitectos, and her environmental visualization projects like In the Air have
been presented, exhibited and published at international venues. Her current research is
on toxic politics, pollen, atmospheres and queer urban political ecologies.
Paul Carter is a writer and artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Relevant publications
include Dark Writing (2008), Meeting Place (2013) and Places Made After Their Stories
(2015). His design studio, Material Thinking, is currently designing a distributed public
artwork (Passenger) for Yagan Square (Perth, Western Australia). He is professor of
design (urbanism), School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne.
Bjrn Peter Grdenfors is a world-renowned Swedish philosopher, current a Professor
of cognitive science at the University of Lund. He is a member of the Royal Swedish
Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and recipient of the Gad Rausing Prize. In
2009, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2014
Bjrn Peter Grdenfors was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Zukunftskolleg at the
University of Konstanz. Relevant book publications include: Geometry of Meaning (MIT
2014), Conceptual Spaces (MIT 2000) Dynamics of Thought (Dordrecht, 2005).
Michael Guggenheim is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of
London. Michael was the lead PI on the ERC-funded project "Organising Disaster: Civil
Protection and the Population", which looked at how disaster experts conceive of the
population. Michael has also worked on change of use of buildings and how materiality
and use interrelate. Previously, Michael was a co-curator of "die wahr/falsch inc.", an
exhibition on science and the public in Vienna. He is the co-editor of the book Re-shaping
Cities: How Global Mobility Transforms Architecture and Urban Form (Routledge, 2010)
Javier Lezaun is James Martin Lecturer in the Institute for Science, Innovation and
Society, and Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum
Ethnography at the University of Oxford. Javier is currently researching the role of kinetic
and atmospheric designs in social experimentation.
Derek P. McCormack is Associate Professor in the School of Geography and
Environment at the University of Oxford. He has written on nonrepresentational theory,

affect, and performance. His current work, funded by a British Academy Mid-Career
Fellowship, focuses on atmospheres. He is the author of Refrains For Moving Bodies:
Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces (Duke, 2013) and the forthcoming The
Allure of the Atmospheric, also with Duke.
Nicolas Salazar Sutil (Buenos Aires, 1976) is Academic Fellow in Digital Performance at
the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds. He is the artistic
director of Con8, an experimental digital performance group that explores the broad
theme of human movement and technology. He is the author of the books Motion and
Representation (MIT, 2015) and Digital Movement: Essays in Motion Technology and
Performance (with Sita Popat, Palgrave 2015).
John G Stell is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds.
His main area of expertise is knowledge representation and reasoning for spatial
information. Current work has two aspects: interdisciplinary connections between
qualitative spatial representations and research in the computational arts. Stells research
has received funding from EPSRC, AHRC and from Ordnance Survey. He is also on the
editorial board of the Journal of Spatial Information Science. With Claude Heath and
Patricia Cain, he has worked in the area of 3D drawing.
Fernando Zalamea (Bogot, 1959). Ph. D. in category theory and mathematical logic
(University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1990, under Ernie Manes). Monographic studies
on Peirce (Peirce's Logic of Continuity, Boston 2012) and Lautman (editor and translator
of his entire opus to Spanish, Bogot 2011). Author of Synthetic Philosophy of
Contemporary Mathematics (New York 2012), among other twenty books on
mathematics, philosophy and cultural studies. He has obtained some of the main Spanish
speaking awards in literary essayism (Siglo XXI, Jovellanos, Gil Albert, Kostakowsky,
Andrs Bello).