Panelist Bios

Jan Schacher

I am an artist-researcher, performing on stage and other environments, working with/through sound and presence. Trained as an instrumentalist, composer and digital artist, the focus of my practice has shifted from using sounds to be organised as music to seeing the body as the central site of action, perception, and culture, becoming the carrier of sounding performances. I am investigating how the musician’s body, acting as resonator for sound’s presences, establishes and grounds the intertwined relationship between inner and outer perception, between tangible musical actions and the intangible presence of sound, between the different subject’s agencies towards/with/through sound. Reflection about the spaces, structures, and processes of sound experience and of shaping time/space in relation to the body, begin in listening to inner states. Relationality of/in performance is established by listening to the other’s states. The intersubjective space opened by performing with sound, with the body, with the other is as much cultural, individual as it is experiential.

My artistic works are situated in such diverse contexts as media festivals, improv music gigs, intercultural projects, and sound art investigations in urban space, and aim at linking the diverging, yet complementary strands into a comprehensive/comprehensible assemblage that functions both in the artistic and scholarly domains. In parallel to my practice as an artist, I hold the position of Associate Researcher at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology at the Zurich University of the Arts, where I lead research projects that deal with a.o. Musical Gesture, Immersive Media, and Surround Sound from a position of artistic as well as systematic, empirical research.

www.jasch.ch
www.icst.net

Dr. Susan Wiesner

Dr. Susan Wiesner is the founder of Range of Motion Dance in Charlottesville Virginia, a company of adult dancers with special needs. She earned her Certification in Movement Analysis from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies and is the LIMS Archivist/Historian. At the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) Wiesner is Principal Faculty Specialist for the Performing Arts where she manages Performing Arts/DH projects and teaches a graduate course in the Digital Humanities and Embodied Knowledge. Her current research (ARTeFACT) focuses on movement and notation systems as a means of machine learning and transfer of data between artistic forms.

Rommie L. Stalnaker

Following a professional performance career. Ms. Stalnaker began working with the ARTeFACT project as choreographer/mo-cap ‘physical manifestation’/researcher, developing ontologies, creating the ARTeFACT Movement Thesaurus, and contributing to the analysis of metaphor and movement. She has presented as panelist at multiple conferences and workshops and co-authored a chapter in a text on performance theory and design. Ms. Stalnaker was a bursary winner for DH2016 and has reviewed DH conference submissions for four years. Her research interests include the “brain on trauma” along with movement analysis and using motion capture as a means to studying the memory palace and its key.

Lauren Mark

Lauren Mark is a Doctoral student and Graduate Teaching Associate at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. She also holds an M.Ed in Educational Organization, Leadership and Policy and an M.A. in Dance. Lauren looks for ways to explore interdisciplinary scholarship, stemming from performative pedagogies and embodied learning in her courses, such as: Identity, Performance and Human Communication; Communication and Creativity; and Intercultural Communication. Lauren also draws on her experiences as choreographer/community arts facilitator in Taiwan and Columbus, Ohio, where she completed her thesis on cultivating creative exploration and multigenerational community building through dance. 

Dr. Hannah Kosstrin

Dr. Hannah Kosstrin is a dance historian and movement analyst. At The Ohio State University, she is Associate Professor in the Department of Dance, affiliate faculty with the Melton Center for Jewish Studies and Slavic Center, and Arts & Humanities Faculty Fellow in the Office of Research. She is author of Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow (Oxford, 2017), finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. Kosstrin is Project Director for the Labanotation iPad app KineScribe and Faculty Lead for the mixed-reality dance scoring application LabanLens. http://u.osu.edu/kosstrin.1/

William Hallett

Will Hallett is a certificate student in the Transdisciplinary Research and Practice program at the New Centre for Research and Practice. He holds an MPS from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (’19) and a BA in English from Bates College (’16). Will’s work clusters around overlapping and cross-fading domains between realpolitikal and metaphysical thinking that cohere in black radical, feminist, and continental interpretations of time, currency, labor, and computational space. Will has performed, showed work, and shared research at Baby Castles, Space Gallery, Tisch School of the Arts, The Shed, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Over the coming year, his work and research can be found at the Movement and Computing, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and 1st Annual Mouse conferences, the Estonian Academy of Arts, and in Strelka Mag and the &&& Journal. Will is also an independent affiliate of the Post Human Network (PHuN) and the Gulf of Maine ECOARTS Initiative and is an active educator and creative laborer. His current research and practice considers and articulates currency as a systematizing media object which functions to render ecological percepts via what we might call a geo-graphy or geo-graphics which “writes” borders, borderings, and borderization. Re-valuing the representational arena of identity and identity politics via the new philosophy of the image, he seeks comparative analyses of reproduction, trauma, virtuality, architecture, skeleton, and rhizome.