Jaime del Val

(Instituto REVERSO, Spain)

 

IJaime del Val (Madrid 1974), is a composer, visual and digital artist, coreographer, performer, writer, independent researcher and director of REVERSO, the Body Technologies Project.

He studied musical composition, piano, conducting and philosophy in Madrid and London, and later concentrated his activity on painting, architecture and dance in Florence and Madrid. Since 2000 he started working with other media like photography, video, electroacoustics, and interactive media, in Barcelona and Madrid. Since 2002 his work concentrates mainly on interactive dance projects.

His interactive dance performances have received several international awards. He regularly teaches the Body Technologies Workshop and has participated in numerous international congresses, festivals and exhibitions in the fields of digital and visual art, music, dance and critical theory. He has published on digital art, dance & technology and critical theory in numerous journals and is the editor of REVERSO, the first journal of queer theory in Spanish.

His work investigates in a critical approach the relationships between art, technology and the body. His Projects, which are mostly presented under the rubric of REVERSO, take place in a diversity of old and new media such as painting, photography, abstract film, electroacoustics, instrumental music, interventions in space, interactive installation and performance, virtual architechture, dance, writing, activism and the coordination of production, research, education and diffusion projects.

website: www.reverso.org

The Institute REVERSO is an independent laboratory and company that deals with research, production, education and diffussion in the convergence of dance&technology, electroacoustics, experimental and abstract film, virtual generative architecture and different fields of contemporary critical theory.

Some main areas of research are in movement analysis, life image and voice processing, sound spatialisation, processing and synthesis, interaction with generative transarchitectural environments, and interactive image processing.

Amongst the fields of theoretical research there is a particular concern for poststructuralist critiques of culture and technology, and in particular concerning the ways of production of subjectivity and corporeality. Beyond specific technical or conceptual aspects of dance-technology performance and research, main areas of research regard two major themes: the body and its construction through technology and discourse (with all the related issues in cyberfemisnt, queer theory, etc.) and the critical insight into communication technologies as instruments of control in latecapitalist societies (and the possibilities to critically redefine it in the context of bodily interaction systems and dance-tech research).

The Body Technologies Workshop is an event that takes place at least once a year, mainly in Madrid, in which all the different artistic, technical and theoretical concerns of REVERSO are put together in the interaction with a wide community of artists, musicians, dancers, writers, activists and more technically orientated professionals and students.