Shifting Intimacies

Shifting Intimacies is a large-scale interactive/media artwork created during a six-month research residency in England at the Institute of Contemporary Art London and Vincent Dance Theatre Sheffield. Individuals experience 10 minutes alone with the work. They enter a large, dark space containing two circles of projected film imagery, presented within an immersive sound environment. One image floats upon a disc of white sand whilst the other falls upon a circle of white dust. Participants’ unencumbered movements are detected by an array of sensors direct and affect the subsequent realtime-composed series of filmic images and spatialised audio. Throughout the work a layer of dust (an artificial life form) slowly eats away and infuses itself deep into the imagery and consequent ‘granularised’ sound. Continual movement through the space affects resulting speed, quality, balance and flow within the work. At the end of the experience the participant is invited to climb a lit platform and cast dust back onto the images below.----- The project cross-fertlised knowledges of performance and media arts in the pursuit of an expanded and enriched range of interactive experiences for audiences, whilst promoting new opportunities to foster a better understanding of cultural and ecological co dependencies.----- Following its international premiere it has since become a successful touring production with curated showings booked into 2009/10. It has garnered strong audience and critical responses and has been a key case study for two published, scholarly papers, developing the idea of a ‘Grounded Media” form.

http://www.embodiedmedia.com/

The Buddhist Doctrine of No-Self

Initially, this teaching of anatman was a rejection of the Vedic belief that everyone has an undying, unchanging essence called the atman (“Self”).

It was one more way to distinguish the teachings of the Buddha from the teachings of the Vedas. Instead of locating identity in something akin to a soul, the Buddha taught that there is only a sense of self. There is no permanent foundation, such as a soul, to consciousness and experience.

The Five Aggregates (skandhas)
This sense of selfhood arises from the combination of all the elements that make up a person and his or her identity. The Buddha outlined five broad categories that made up this sense of self. These five categories (skandhas, lit. “heaps, collections, aggregates”) are:
Form (rupa), which refers to the physical body;
Feeling (vedana), by which one reacts to perceptions as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither;
Perception (samjna), the recognition of objects;
Mental faculties (samskara), which refer to the collection of features of the mind such as will, memory, ideas, thought, etc., and;
Consciousness (vijnana), which is the awareness of the objects of perception.
The conjunction of these five skandhas results in one’s sense of identity and selfhood. From the body one acts and experiences in the world. Consciousness is the awareness of the world, while perception refers to the process of knowing the objects of awareness. That is, one can be aware of a tree, or a car, or the sky; perception is the act of knowing the sky is the sky, or a tree a tree, etc. The process of feeling is where one develops a liking or aversion to a sensation. Then the mental faculties decide how to act on these perceptions.

"In this book we will focus on one such tradition, that which derives from the Buddhist method of examining experiences called mindfulness meditation. We believe that the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and nondualismo that grew out of this method have a significant contribuition to make in a dialogue with cognitive science: (1) The no-self doctrine contributes to understanding the fragmentation of self-portrayed in cognitivismo and connectionism. (2) Buddhist nondualism, particularly as is presented in the Madhyamika (which literally means 'middle way') philosophy of Nagarjuna, may be juxtaposed with the entre-deux of Merleau-Ponty and with the more recent ideas of cognition and enaction." (VARELA, F.; THOMPSON, E.; ROSH, E. The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 1993, p.21-22)

mindfulness/awareness meditation

Examining Experience with a Method: Mindfulness/Awareness
(Part I: The Departing Groud; chapter 2: What Do We Mean 'Human Experiece'? VARELA, F.; THOMPSON, E.; ROSH, E. The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 1993.)

This book begins and ends with the conviction that the new sciences of mind need to enlarge their horizon to encompass both lived human experience and possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience. (VARELA, THOMPSON, ROSCH, 1993, Introduction)

“Breathing is one of the most simple, basic, ever-present bodily activities. Yet beginning meditators are generally astonished at how difficult it is to be mindful of even so uncomplex an object. Meditators discover that mind and body are not coordinated. The body is sitting, but the mind is seized constantly by thoughts, feelings, inner conversations, daydreams, fantasies, sleepiness, opinions, theories, judgments about thoughts and feelings, judgments about judgments – a never-ending torrent of disconnected mental events that the meditators do not even realize are occurring except at those brief instants when they remember what they are doing. Even when they may discover that they are only thinking about the breath rather than being mindful of the breath.” (VARELA, THOMPSON, ROSCH, 1993, p.25)

“The meditators now discovers that the abstract attitude which Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty ascribe to science and philosophy is actually the attitude of everyday life when one is not mindful. This abstract attitude is the spacesuit, the padding of habits and preconceptions, the armor with which one habitually distances oneself from one’s experience.” (VARELA, THOMPSON, ROSCH, 1993, p.25)

Broken habits:
“From the point of view of mindfulness/awareness meditation, humans are not trapped forever in the abstract attitude. The dissociation of mind from body, of awareness from experience, is the result of habit, and this habits can be broken.” (VARELA, THOMPSON, ROSCH, 1993, p.25)

Joanna Griffin

Yesterday (09/04/2010) I sent an e-mail asking John Vines, Joanna Griffin, Rita Cachao and Taslima Begum to write a report about the draws they made on last 'No Doctor's meeting', Wednesday, April 7 2010. Here, the text Joanna Griffin sent me:
-----------------------------------------------------
9 April 2010, 16:04
Hi Clarissa

I should write this quickly, maybe without thinking about it too much, a bit like when I made the drawing. When I made the drawing I was remembering the text. The text struck me by its idea: that it was proposing a very beginning sensation, a first sensation and then building on this and saying how separate concepts emerged, like comparison, memory and imagination. Now I think about it, it's like a creation story, but talking about the creation of ideas, states of being instead of physical things like the hills and people and oceans, which is a fantastic creation story!!

At the time I know I was thinking about cosmology. I get weighed down with my research with this concept of cosmology - its everything right and so to read about the scent of the rose being everything, entirely everything was just so peaceful. In my drawing I start with the rose, I think it was the scent of the rose the story began with, maybe I'm wrong, and I made a kind of gold fish bowl, not quite complete around it because that was this amazing starting concept - the rose scent as a kind of bubble of everything, of the universe.

I think you draw what you want to draw. I drew the flowers because the names of the flowers that he uses are very known to me - the rose and jasmine that's growing in my mum's garden right now and carnations that are all crinkly. I wanted to draw the flowers because it reminded me of the kinds of things we drew when I was younger, for art projects, I liked doing that detailed dainty drawing of a flower and I wanted to remember doing that drawing when I was thirteen or something. In some ways, there's an analogy there because art for me back then was as simple and contained as drawing a flower. I knew there would be other possibilities out there, but at the time this was sort of enough. Now the art making I do, I can hardly describe what it is, its become like a planet in itself, a complexity of history and time and possibilities opened up.

So my drawing takes me back to when I was 13 and its about the familiarity of flowers and having a delicate area in a drawing balanced by a strong line, then the circle round the rose became sort of moon like and I made it a kind of reverse moon with the night sky inside the moon instead of outside.

I thought the story had a romanticism about it, a kind of Proustian romanticism and that came from choosing flowers and scents, so my drawing has that flowerfulness antiquity.

i love the way the story ends by saying that valuing scents in different ways, according to you, is imagination, that it wasn't about creating images or films in your head, but just that you have that ability to play through ideas in whatever way you want.

I like that you've asked us to do this too, that you are showing everyone that there are other paths to information and that it is possible through drawing to make some kind of indication of what emergence is, you can make some idea of how a person has been touched by something, some indication of what is in a person's head and maybe how little we can really anticipate about the meaning another person makes.

very beautiful ideas you work with,

xx
jo

John Vines

Yesterday (09/04/2010) I sent an e-mail asking John Vines, Joanna Griffin, Rita Cachao and Taslima Begum to write a report about the draws they made on last 'No Doctor's meeting', Wednesday, April 7 2010. Here, the text John Vines sent me:
-----------------------------------------------------
9 April 2010, 16:04
Hi Clarissa,

Trying to get my mind back to when I was drawing the image...

I was thinking about the idea of the systems thinking you had introduced and how that related to my own perspective on design, which is always struggling to understand the relations between the organic (or the human) and the artificial (or the technologicaly). I started off my trying to think of air flowing through a directed passage; from this a jet fighter emerged somehow. The human pilot in this situation is indescribably in common language terms as a psychology, as an organic being and as a definable being; the shadowy figure presents no more than a question mark. This is not to favor the technological over the organic, however, as the technology and organic act together as a transparent system. hence why there are trees and rivers growing on the side of the plane! Hmmm.....

John.

No Doctor’s Day – A Consciousness Generative Process (part 1)

John Vines


Joana Griffin


Taslima Begum


Rita Cachao

No Doctor’s Day – A Consciousness Generative Process (part 1)
Today John Vines hosted an informal meeting of the Transtech researches and some invited ones from i-Dat and the Planetary Collegium as me and Jacques Chueke. As is usual in the official Transtech updates we presented our research's last developments. I used the opportunity to share the ideas of the second version of Instants of Metamorphosis explaining how this work is related to my PhD research aims as a whole. The understanding of the installation not just as a never-ending ongoing process (Rita Cachao mentioned the approach of Umberto Eco in his book The Open Work) but as a Complex Adaptive System – CAD is central to the approach. The point is that, using the complexity sciences framework may help in understanding how the informational flow through the interaction of several actors/elements creates and transforms the entire system in a generative process. There is no intention of considering the question from a mathematical perspective, measuring the amount of information, predicting transformations and emergences in a formal way. The complexity sciences perspective is being used from a qualitative point of view, combining references from philosophy and sociology to help in thing about the installation as a CAS. At this point, Rita Cachao questioned how can I defend that the idea of using this complexity sciences perspective (using systemic measures of complexity and organization for instance), could be valid to analyses a work of art? Why and how a work of art can be described as a complex adaptive system? And at this point, following the questioning moment of Rita, John Vines mentioned some similarities concerning my approach and Guto Nobrega's and Brigitta Zics's ones, in their PhD research works.
After an initial moment of open discussion, I proposed a group activity that is, at a certain level, integrated with the creative process of Instants of Metamorphosis v.02. The activity consisted in to read the Borges tale 'Two Metaphysical Animals' and the considerations about a possible use of some ideas presented and manipulated by Borges (from Condillac and Lotze, to be specific) to stimulate a conversation on how it could works as some sort of inspiration to the creative process and to think about a way or artifice to ‘capture’ emergent meaning from the system. The reading started after the presentation of a 3 minutes video about Instants of Metamorphosis 01.
We spent half an hour talking. Rita Cachao (That was very well performing the role of a doctor in the meeting!) asked me why I'm using Borges specifically. I explained that, one year ago, I was reading Clarice Lispector emergent writing book The Stream of Life because it, as a creative consciousness process it is, could has interesting connections with the main intention of my research of analyzing the interactive digital art installation from a complex sciences perspective.
Reading Clarice Lispector I was at the same time searching for possible connections between her and other fictional authors to help in constructing a fertile dialogue that could works as a base to a creative process (generative consciousness; creative evolution? ) I found some interesting articles on the dialogue between Clarice and J. L. Borges. I started re-reading Borges and was really interested in his Book of Imaginary Beings. Concerning the tale ‘Two Metaphysical Animals’, the intention is not to use it as an academic reference but to use this small part of Borges’ encyclopedic and imaginary universe as fuel to the artistic processes and the study interrelated.
After the ‘reading time’, I invited Rita Cachao, Joana Griffin, John Vines and Taslima Begum to produce individual draws from the central ideas of the 'Two Metaphysical Animals' – draws that could capture the way they apprehended the text, transformed it and turn it into memory. Amazing drawings; completely distinct universes emerged. In the end I asked the researches if they can write me a report, in two or three days, about the drawings they made. The intention is to see how this kind of exercise could help in to map emergences en a process of information interchange. In a few days I'll ask the group to produce new draws, at home, and send pictures of it to me via e-mail.

Nam June Paik // Fish Flies on Sky

Nam June Paik
Fish Flies on Sky
1983-85
3-Kanal-Videoinstallation
Maße variabel
Nam June Paik Estate
museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf

Fish Flies in Sky / pdf

Two Metaphysical Animals

Two Metaphysical Animals*
(BORGES, 1967, The Book of Imaginary Beings)

The problem of the origin of ideas contributes two curious creatures to the fauna of mankind’s imagination. One was invented sometime in the mid-eighteenth century; the other, a hundred years later.
The first creature is Condillac’s ‘sentient statue.’ Descartes professed the doctrine of innate ideas; in order to refute him, Étienne Bonnot Condillac imagined a marble statue shaped like a man’s body and animated by a soul that has never perceived, never thought. Condillac begins by endowing the statue with a single sense – smell, perhaps the least complex of the five senses. The fragrance of jasmine is the beginning of the statue’s biography; for one instant, there shall be nothing in all the universe but that odor. More precisely, that odor shall be the universe, which a second later will be the fragrance of a rose, and then a carnation. Let there be a single odor in the consciousness of the statue, and we have attention; let a fragrance last beyond the moment when the stimulus has passed, and we have memory; let one impression in the present and one from the past occupy the statue’s attention, and we have comparison; let the statues perceive analogies and differences, and we have judgment; let comparison and judgment occur again, and we have reflection; let a pleasant memory be more vivid than an unpleased one, and we have imagination. When the faculties of the understanding have been engendered, the faculties of the Will must follow – love and hate (attraction and aversion), hope and fear. The awareness of having passed thorough many states will give the statue as abstract notion of number; the awareness of being the odor of carnation yet of having been the odor of jasmine will endow it with the idea of Self.
Condillac would then grant his hypothetical man hearing, taste, sight, and, lastly, touch. This last sense reveals to the creature the fact that space exists and that within space, he himself is within a body; sounds, fragrances, and colors will have seemed to him, before that moment, simple variations or modifications of his consciousness.
The allegory we have just retold is titled Traité des sensations, and it was published en 1754; for this account of it, we have used the second volume of Bréhier’s Histoire de la philosophie.
The other creature engendered by the problem of the knowledge is Lotze’s ‘ hypothetical animal.’ More solitary than the statue that smells roses and at least becomes a man, the animal has but one sensitive spot on its skin, on the end of an antenna and therefore movable. The structure of this animal prevents it, as one can see, from receiving simultaneous perceptions, but Lotze believed that the ability to retract or project its sensitive antenna was enough to allow the all-but-isolated animal to discover the outside world (without the aid of Kantian categories) and to perceive the difference between a stationary object and a mobile one. Vaihinger admired this fiction; it is contained in the work titled Medizinische Psychologie, published in 1852.

* First impression – impression – attention – memory – comparison– judgment – reflection – imagination

This text is the main reference to guide the creative process of Instants of Metamorphosis v.02 and I think it could be a very interesting start point/structure to model the methodology based on systemic measures of complexity and organization. A mapping-narrative to help in capturing the flow of information – the emergence/transformations in the subject’s (the trans-actor) level.

As emergences, that represent different levels of organization and complexity of the system, we can have: the whole system/experience(the system as a whole, the installation as a process/Space-temporal structure one could experience through his senses); a second later we can have the ‘first impression’ and, after, a transformation of this impression into a instantaneous memory, according to our references stored. Then, there will be a single impression stored ( something that is ‘printed inside’, candidate to became a memory) in the consciousness of the trans-actor, and we have attention; let this impression “[…] last beyond the moment when the stimulus has passed, and we have memory;” let one impression in the present and one from the past occupy the trans-actor’s attention, and we have comparison; “[…] let the trans-actor “[…] perceive analogies and differences, and we have judgment; let comparison and judgment occur again, and we have reflection; let a pleasant memory be more vivid than an unpleased one, and we have imagination.”




links//
Rudolph Hermann Lotze, Medizinische Psychologie, Leipzig, 1852
Hans Vaihinger
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac,Traité des sensations

Breath

DIXON, Luke. Play Acting: Thirty-two theatre workshop activities that create performance. New York: Routledge, 2005

Speaking and listening are physical activities. All the voice work in this section comes from an understanding of the functioning of the performer’s body, of which the voice is just one extraordinary part. We start with breathing, the activity that keeps the body alive and gives it motion, and the activity that is the basis for all voice work. We explore the infinite variety possible in the use of just one or two simple words before going on to sentences, verse and more complex forms of expression. The voice is constantly explored in relation to the moving actor and the dynamic relationship between body, voice and space. (DIXON, Introduction, p.3)

‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’ The words from Genesis echo those of the Ugandan proverb that says that ‘life is your ability to breathe in every time you breathe out’. In the fifity years between my birth and writing this book I may have taken some for billion breathes. Most of them, unless I have been overexerting myself, or having a lesson in Alexander technique, or rehearsing a troublesome song, I will note have noticed. We breathe in as we enter this world and we breathe out as we leave it. Our breaths are what mark us being alive. To breath in is inspiration; to breathe out is expiration. To breathe is to be inspired. (DIXON, p.53)

John Cage and LeJaren Hiller HPSCHD, 1969

John Cage and LeJaren Hiller: HPSCHD, 1969
Stephen Husarik
American Music, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer, 1983), pp. 1-21
(article consists of 21 pages)
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051496

HPSCHD received its premiere performance before an audience of 6000 on May 16, 1969 at the Assembly Hall of Urbana Campus, University of Illinois. Conceived as a highly immersive multimedia experience, the performance featured David Tudor, Antoinette Vischer, William Brooks, Ronald Peters, Yūji Takahashi, Neely Bruce and Philip Corner playing harpsichords whose sounds were captured and amplified; 208 tapes with computer-generated sounds played through 52 monaural tape players; and an array of movie and slide projectors used to project 6400 slides and 40 movies onto rectangular screens and a 340 foot circular screen. Many of these images, selected by Ron Nameth and Calvin Sumsion, were borrowed from NASA (the premiere took place just a month prior to the first manned landing on the Moon). The performance, which lasted for about 5 hours, was not intended as a static, unidirectional event, but rather as a hypnotic environment where the audience was encouraged to "move in and out of the building, around the Hall, and through the performing area." During the premiere an image of Beethoven wearing a University of Illinois jersey with Cage's face on it was silkscreened onto paper tunics distributed to members of the audience (and onto audience members' garments, including t-shirts, once the supply of tunics ran out). Three large silkscreened posters were created for the event, two of which featured images chosen by chance operations similar to those used in the composition of the music. Some copies were sold to support the event, each for a different price established using an I Ching chart.

Perfect Human //

A reference to the Instants of Metamorphosis v.02 suggested by Graziele Lautenschlaeger:


Perfect Human / 2008
Inspired by Joergen Leth's 1967 short film "The Perfect Human" and Lars von Trier's "The Five Obstructions" (2003). This performance intends to create a sixth obstruction of The Perfect Human, by introducing rules in order to complete the performance as a game.

In preparation for the game the performer receives a suitcase, one week in advance. The artists do not meet or talk with the performer until the day of the performance. The Suitcase contains items selected to help the performer prepare herself for the game. None of the items impose any obligation on the performer. Instead she is free to inspect and make use of them in any way she sees fit. But she must prepare herself. On the day of the performance, the performer must show up at the named time and location carrying the suitcase with all its contents. The game begins as the performer starts putting on the socks, the last item of the costume.

Instants of Metamorphosis 02

Instants of Matemorphosis v.02

“I’m going to go back to the unknown within myself and when I’m born I’ll speak of “him” or “her”. For the time being, what sustains me is the ‘that’ which is an “it”. To create a being from oneself is something very serious. I’m creating myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do. It hurts. But it’s labor pain: something is being born that is. It is itself. It is hard like a dry stone. But the core is “it”, soft and alive, perishable, in danger. The life of elementary matter.” (LISPECTOR, p.35)

Via msn I was talking with Graziele Lautenschlaeger about the seminal ideas of a second version of Instants of Metamorphosis. The ideas I was discussing last Sunday (04/04/2010) with Jacques Chueke here in Plymouth, after our Easter lunch with our friends Fernanda and Marcelo Gimenes – ideas concerning a big organic structure that must have a sensorial appeal and onto which will be projected several video performances activated by the presence of trans-actors via sensors installed in the structure skin and connected to an Arduino board (or similar).

My first idea was to work with different stages of development of a being - the development stages of an embryo, as an exaple. I invited Chueke to work together in this project, as an invited member of the Double Collective, and he started thinking about the video performances from a different point of view, focusing on the intention of to awaken in the one who is trans-acting, the sensation of displacement, mixing spatial temporal dimension through designing the performances considering space (movement along axes, crossing planes, zoom, frames, notions of ground, ceiling and walls, different notions of space as outer and inner space, for instance ) and time (temporal row, slow motion, delay, rewind) to help in blurring the borders between concrete and virtual in experiences that transport the trans-actor beyond the material, experiencing complex space and time.
In the book ‘The Stream of Life’, that continues to be the base to the reflections, or the conception of a consciousness process that is the installation-process itself, Clarice Lispector explores recurrently the relativity in the perception and the self experience of time and space. I search and selected now some excerpts from the book ‘by chance’:
“I’m so vast. I’m coherent: my canticle is profound. Slow. But growing. It’s growing still more. If it grows enough, it turns into a full moon and silence… and a phantasmagoric lunar surface. Witness to the stopping of time. What I write you is serious. It will turn into a hard, imperishable objct. What comes is unforeseen. To beuselessly sincere, I must now say that it’s six fifteen in the morning.” (LISPECTOR, p.34)
“Now is an instant. Do you feel it? I do.” (LISPECTOR, p. 35)

Today (06/04/2010) I awake up thinking about the discussions I had yesterday with Chueke. Thinking about the imaginary beings in the Borge's book (The Book of Imaginary Beings) that brings us, as legends, narratives that explores complex experiences of time and space by the self. I selected three: Two Metaphysical Animals p.15, The Double p.62, AnimaThat Lives in the Mirrors p.18, Thermal Beings 195, Spherical Animals p.20.
Tonight, a few hours ago, I went out with Chueke to have dinner at Mutley Plaine and was talking about this idea of using the imaginary beings to support/inspire the spatial-temporal interactive narratives/performances. He suggested I send him a brief description of the tales I mentioned and he will starts drawing HQ narratives inspired by each one as a start point to the process of creating the video performances.

Right now 01:15 a.m., reading again ‘Two Metaphysical Animals’, I think that to work with this single text is enough. The Borges description is fantastic, describing consciousness processes… really amazing. I remember me and Chueke walking and talking about the origin of the word metaphysics – the title one given to the books Aristotle wrote after the ones about Physics. And remember that tomorrow morning I wake up and started organizing my computer to backup the files and found the annotation I made when I was reading the funny book ‘Aristotle in 90 minuts’:

“It is to Andronicus that we owe the word ‘metaphysics’ – the title which he gave to a group of Aristotle’s works. These originally had no title, and merely came after those on physics – thus Andronicus simply labeled them ‘after physics’, which in anciet Greek is ‘metaphysics’. The works in this section consted of Aristotle’s treatises on ontology and the ultimate nature of things.” (Paul Strathern, Aristotle in 90 minutes, p. 45)

And now (1:40 a.m.), I found an excerpt of Clarice Lispector book, looking for fragments about space and time, in a completely random process , that I think dialogues in a very interesting way with the Borges tale ‘The Metaphysical Animals’:
“The risk – I’m risking the discovery of new territory. Where human feet have never trod. First, I have to pass through the perfumed vegetation. I was given a bridal wreath, which now sits on my terrace. I shall begin to make my own perfume: I’ll buy the right kind of alcohol and the essence of what has been dissolved, and above all the fixative, which has to have a purely animal origin. Heavy musk. That’s the last austere chord of the adagio. My number os 9. It’s 7. It’s 8. All behind thought. If all that exists, Then I am. But why this uneasiness? Because I’m not living the only way that there is for a person to live and I don’t even know what it is. Uncomfortable. I don’t feel weel. I don’t know what the matter is. But something’s wrong and it makes me anxious. Nevertheless, I’m being frank and my game is clean. I begin the game. Only I don’t tell the facts of my life: I’m secretive by nature. What is it, then? I only know that I don’t want deception. I refuse. I’ve looked into myself but I don’t believe in myself because my thought is inverted.” (LISPECTOR, p.34)

Approximately one an hour ago, via msn, Graziele Lautenschlaeger said she liked the idea, and I hope she will join us in this new artistic 'playgroud'. Here, the reference she mentioned:
Perfect Human //
Inspired by Joergen Leth's 1967 short film "The Perfect Human" and Lars von Trier's "The Five Obstructions" (2003). This performance intends to create a sixth obstruction of The Perfect Human, by introducing rules in order to complete the performance as a game.
http://www.kobakant.at/index.php?menu=2&work=5

references:
BORGES, J. L. 2005. The Book of Imaginary Beings. New York: Penguim Group.
LISPECTOR, C. 1995. The Stream of Life. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Translated by: Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz.