Hi all,

The new dates for the Performance Space workshop (our final!) are now:

Setting up gear and space – July 20th – 26th; then

The workshop – July 27th – August 2nd

At this stage we’ve divided the workshop into 4 sections:

27th to 28th – workshop with Garth and/or Somaya on sound and sonification

29th to 31st – 3 days developing an experience you’d like to offer to our invited guests

1st August – our ‘open day’ invited guests will be able to engage with the experiences we’ve devised

2nd August – Debrief and de-install gear

These dates have been designed to accomodate Lizzie recent appointment as senior lecturer at UTS – and coincides with their teaching break. Lets hope this suits everyone else as well.

Cheers

George Khut

Here are some threads that I’ve pulled out from my Bundanon experience, that Ive been turning around in my head over the past week since the workshop.

George and Lizzie enjoying the view from the workshop space at the Bundanon Trust Boyd Education Centre, Riversdale.

ATTENTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES for an aesthetics of touch, movement and proprioception: having and/or developing the ability to attend to sensations and feelings arising from within their body – ‘knowing how to appreciate’ the significance of what is felt (like appreciating unfamiliar foods and flavors? or music? – needs to develop from social practice?).

This is something Catherine emphasized at the beginning and end of the Bundanon workshop, and through her ‘Distinct Body’ workshops – without this ability to listen and unfold insight from the sensation of our breath, skeleton, muscles and skin, how much can we more can hope to achieve?

We need an experiential vocabulary for thinking through the body, a vocabulary of tactile, proprioceptive and kineasthetic experiences and reflections, that can enable us to move from sylables, to words, from words to sentences, and from sentences to stories. This, like any other language, is something developed over time, with other people.

EXPERIENTIAL NARRATIVES – Dramaturgical Aesthetics of Interaction, Aesthetics of Participation. A focus beyond the technical aspects of the artwork, towards structure of the situation as a whole (location, entry-points, social context and conditions, etc.), and the development of the participant’s experience within it (how it starts, develops and comes to an end).

RELATIONAL SYSTEMS AND STRUCTURES: Human-Human Interactions that explore proximal modalities as their primary modality (touch, smell, taste, temperature, movement, proprioception). ‘Live Art’ intimate performance forms: one-to-one engagements between a host and their guest. Taking full advantage of the incredible emotional intelligence and multi-modal sensitivity that we humans posses (in contrast to our machines). To what extent is my own fixation on exhibiting computer-based interactions a product of a tradition fixated on the so-called autonomy of the art object? Autonomy from what …other humans?
[Note to self:why do I feel obliged to exhibit my work as a stand alone experience - without someone there to guide people into the work, to listen  to their stories, to bear witness (and to value) their experience in the work?]

Maggie invited us to explore various forms of hand-to-hand contact incorporating skeletal sensation and contact

THE ART EXPERIENCE AS INVITATION, art making and curating as a form of hosting, induction, hospitality (hospice?). In connection with Making Strange – offering participants some support along their journey – a base from which explore, or temporary shelter and resting point along the way. [this brings to mind pilgrim cultures: wayside shrines, wells, cairns, storm-shelters etc. I wonder what their contemporary equivalents might be?]

SOMAESTHETIC GYMNASIUM: a place for cultivating somaesthetic abilities/sensitivities – consisting of semi-structured body-focused experiences, that stimulate the visitors capacity for somaesthetic pleasure, beauty and critical reflection.

‘INTELLIGENT’ BODY-FOCUSED INTERACTIVE ARTWORKS – Body-focused interactions that acknowledge, and are sensitive to the emotional dimensions of our physicality: the capacity for movement and touch to facilitate strong emotional recall, release, insight, inspiration etc. Maggie mentioned the idea of interactive art makers process as being one of ‘growing the computer’s neurology’, I think this is a powerful concept – to understand and expand on the computerised interactive systems ability to be in the world – to hold a representation of its environment, and its behavioyr within this environment – regardless of how simple this may be. [The memory of of our brain-mapping workshop comes to mind, with Lizzie's reflection that the maps she drew of her brain, could equally be a map of the world…].

SENSUAL TACTILE AND KINAESTHETIC PLEASURE AND BEAUTY IN HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION
“any use of a new tools and technologies involves new uses (and postures and habits) of the body, which means new possibilities of somatic strains, discomforts, and disabilities resulting from inefficient body use that cultivation of somatic self-consciousness could help  us to reveal, remedy or avoid.” – Shusterman, 2008, p. 13

Lizzie’s note: “What about the somatic pleasures and enjoyment that these technologies might also support?”

George testing a Wii controlled sound design - tracking slow movements

Artworks that depend on specific qualities of human action – tuned in such a way as to draw you into moving, standing, behaviong in unfamiliar and/ort enjoyable ways (in contrast to interfaces that draw you into familiar but painful and frumpy ways of being – i.e. laptops and bad mice).
[Can I imagine an inteactive art experience that was FUNDAMENTALLY, a pleasure and a joy to experience?]

After accepting/imagining this possibility, we  can go on to consider what kind of pleasure that such works might offer (obviously, there are many kinds of pleasure), and the philosophical and ethical ends (no matter how fragile or fleeting the gesture) to which these pleasures might be directed.

Tracing my outline in Catherine Truman

The map I drew of my outline and skeleton in Catherine's workshop

SUSPENDING OUTCOMES-ORIENTED RESEARCH PROCESSES, IN FAVOR OF GENUINE, OPEN MINDED ENQUIRY. Drawings made by feeling, paths made by walking. I’m still a little shocked to see how fixated I was on making a ‘correct’ drawing, going to extraordinary lengths to physically trace the outline of my own body, when Catherine’s instructions, were quite clearly to ‘draw an outline of our body, based on our felt experience’ …some more homework to do in this area!

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Jonathan’s workshop ‘The Situated Body’ invited to develop a response to our experience in the land around us, based on the sensitivities we’ve been developing towards our bodily experience.

I was interested structuring attention across internal and external environments, drawing on experiences of Feldenkrais work, meditation and environmental audio field recording aesthetics – to explore how I might bring the same quality of attention that I would bring to bear on listening to sounds in a remote rural landscape (birds, wind, insects, distant motors etc.) to my internal experience – visceral, postural, muscular, cardio-respiratory and skin sensations. Previously, in the context of meditations and body-scan exercises I’ve had a hard time maintaining my focus on these sensations, being easily diverted by complicated, self-conscious judgements as to whether I was doing things ‘right’ or simply drifting off into daydreaming about what I think I should be doing tomorrow, or something someone told me some time ago etc.

I’ve drafted a guided sensorial scanning experience, that could be presented as a form of listening meditation workshop for a group of people, or undertaken individually. I think it makes a big difference being in a beautiful rural setting like Bundanon/Riversdale, with its abundance of birdlife, rivers, insects, other animals and wide open spaces, but will be interested to see how I go doing this in an urban setting with lots of cars, music, people and various alarms and sirens.

The idea of folding internal and external experience picks up on Lizzie’s observations of the maps we created, when invited by Maggie to create a map of our brains: the maps many of us made, could just as well have been maps of our experience of the world, a diagram describing relations between modes of engagement.

Structuring experience and perception between internal and external environments.

Wet your hands with a little water, and wipe this water onto your face, neck and ears; focus your attention towards the sensation of the air as it moves around your body.
How do you register the direction and intensity of the breeze as it moves around your body? Can you imagine these changes in intensity and direction as changes in air pressure: the wind around you as a fluid moving around and within the landscape surrounding you …the ebb and flow of air pressure systems circulating over the land, and the gradual transformation of these currents from one minute to another; from one sunrise to another; from one season to another; from one year to another.

Now draw your attention inward, toward the sensations arising from your chest, thorax and pelvis, focusing specifically on sensations that describe changes in the state of the various muscles inside this area of your body: the expansion and contraction of the muscles in your chest and ribs that accompany your breathing, and the extension of your breath and subtle, moment-to-moment postural adjustments to the muscles in your pelvis and shoulders: subtle changes in tonus across the volume of your torso.

Consider the irregularities of these sensations as they rise and fall from your awareness, the meandering rhythm of these sensations and reflections, in relation to your recent experience of the air around you.

Directing your attention back outwards now, to the sounds of the environment around you: the birds, flies buzzing around you, the engines in the distance… Can you hold these sensations in your attention and also feel the acoustic quality of the landscape around you: the way that the various sounds you hear travel around the space: the subtle echoes and reverberations that tell you what kind of space you are in  – that you are here, and not in your bathroom; not in an underground car park; a desert, or a cathedral…

Imagine now a circle drawn around you, outward into the land around you, as far as you can hear. Listen for what you can hear that is located directly in front of you, can you hear anything at all? Use the sounds you can hear all around you to identify the presence or absence of sounds directly in front of you – as if a line where drawn from the front of your body, outward to the horizon.

Turning our attention back to the feel of the air around you, listening to the subtle reverberations and echoes that tell you about the place your in, can you imagine this experience as an experience of density? The air around you as a diffuse but tangible and dynamic substance. What do your sensations of your skin, smell, ear, nose and throat tell you about the quality of the air around you, and, by extension, the quality of the land you are in.

Moving back inside your body, turn your attention from the feeling of the air around you, to the feeling of the air inside you: the sensation of each breath on the inside of your nose, your throat, tongue and deep into your lungs, taking care to note the subtle shifts in what comes to your attention, between the sensations on the inside of your nose, the roof of your mouth, and inside your throat, taking time to appreciate the dynamics of your focus as it shifts between these sensations from the different parts of your respiratory tract.

Focusing attention back out the land around you, can you listen to the sounds around you according to pitch, listening specifically to sounds that lay in the higher frequency range: the birds, insects, leaves rustling, grasses. Can you experience these sounds as clusters of high pitched sounds increasing and decreasing in dennsity? Can you imagine the negative form of all the frequencies you aren’t hearing, as defined by what you can hear – where within this spectrum of frequencies is greatest amount of silence?

Maggie introduced her Awareness Through Movement class this morning, with a presentation on neuro plasticity: the structuring of experience within the brain, and the influence of Brain-Derived Neutrophic Factor (BDNF).

I don’t really understand how it works but she seemed to be describing a switching mechanism in the brains neuro chemistry that shift between the development of new patterns and the use of established patterns – well that’s a gross simplification, but it did start me thinking about how I might work in a more detailed way with audience experience at a neuro-psychological level.

After this talk we paired off and where asked to make contact with out partner by sitting in chairs opposite each other and placing out right palms together in front ourselves, and exploring what we do and feel. After a few minutes, Maggie invited us to talk with each other about our experience of this contact, and then asked us to give an account of what our partner told us to  the rest of the group. I enjoyed this test of our listening and recollection.

We then repeated this task with a focus on exploring how we could feel more comfortable within ourselves through postural adjustments, shifting our weight on the chair, initiating the forward/backward motion of our palms in space from subtle movements in our pelvises, and eventually through the inclusion of our sternums in the gentle push-pull action.

Paying attention to my own organisation on the chair, feet on the floor, and feeling through my hand, into Lizzie’s hand, through her hand and into her posture, provided me with a great experience of the Feldenkrais Functional Integration work as an interaction between two nervous systems: two systems, working together as a third system.

In the third part of the lesson we did an Awareness Through Movement lesson that involved ballancing books (folders) on our right foot, and exploring our ability to gently and easilly tilt this book in various axes: forwards/backwards and left/right. Afterwards, I was suprised at how softly this foot fell to the floor when we where asked to plonk it down onto the floor, and how much softer was the ripple effect of this action through th erest of my pelvis and thorax – the other foot by contrast caused a mild jolt through my pelvis upto my head (movement of spine).

…and thinking about observing my breathing.

Attending to the sounds in the landscape, and realising I could bring the same quaity of openended attentivness to sensations inside my body. Observing breath (something I’ve been interested in with a previous interactive artwork ‘Drawing Breath’), listing to ‘the wind’ in the ladscape – realising that the wind it self has no sound – what I can hear is the sound of surfaces being moved by the wind: the leaves, the grass, a stand of trees, etc. Applying this insight to my experience of studying breath – not the air moving in and out of me per se, but feeling how this movement of air influences, and is influenced by various details of my body: stomach, pelvis, trachea, nostrils, tongue, ribs, diaphragm. Sensations weaving in and out of eachother, like my eyes and ears wander through details of the landscape around me.

Seeing if I could attend to both landscape and body at the same time: in counterpoint.

Turbulence, flutter, ebb and flow.

Reflecting on the passage of seasons, multiple time frames, from minutes, to hours, days, years, centuries: in a landscape, in a body, in a succesion of bodies (familly).

This morning’s workshop with Catherine:

Drawing a life-size outline of my body, then filling it in with bones as they felt to me.

We were instructed to focus on drawing from experience, and not worry about what what we think it ’should’ look like i.e. a picture of a skeleton.

Easier said than done, and I immediately started to literally trace my body with the marker, only realizing 10 minutes later that the task was to draw this outline from FELT experience. A beautiful drawing that helped to connect me to an experience pf my self as organized energy; a set of energetic flows and radiations.

While creating this drawing, I was struck by how difficult it was to translate between my felt internal experience of my bones and the outline of my body, and the external, two-dimensional image that was accumulating on the paper before my eyes – a seemingly vast gap or language barrier. Later Catherine remarked that this issue of translation was fundamental to many forms of creative practice: how to articulate a feeling, or to reproduce something so radically internal, by way of an external media (i.e. clay, wood, paint, pixels etc.).

My felt experience of my skeleton was fragmentary, details fading in an out of focus, followed by blank spots of total mystery: what is that shape inside me? Some clues as to a general volume, but few specifics.

I think a complete skeleton mapping would take me a day or two, such was the difficulty I experienced – both in the articulation of the feelings, and in their description by way of a series of marks on paper. Its incredible that form of something so fundamental as the bones upon which we live should be so mysterious and elusive.

Looking at the skeleton Maggie had created, I was struck by the way that the bones in her skeleton seemed to describe lines of force and energy, rather than inert pieces of bone.

This process of articulation and translation: systematically feeling something inside your body, and then describing that feeling by way of some external representation, also raises questions for me about what’s happening on the other side of the process: the task requires a shift in point of view, in a way that you wouldn’t generally experience when drawing something external to yourself, i.e. a landscape before you, a bowl of fruit, another person’s body.

I assumed that this translation requires a shift in point of view from an experience of containment and extension, towards a third-person, externalized perspective, but there was nothing in Catherine’s request that required this – but it could just as well have been a seemingly abstract collection of swirls and knobbly things spread out across the sheet of paper – which makes me want to attempt this exercise again, with a different set of assumptions around what constitutes a ‘drawing’ of a (MY) skeleton, irrespective of whether anyone else recognizes it or not – the emphasis being on the lines and volumes of the drawing communicating my felt sense of various aspects of my body experience.

This workshop struck me as a very connected to the idea of ‘making strange’ – rendering something so fundamental, but taken for granted as our own skeletal system, and generating representations that seem bizzare and fantastic in rellation to how these structures are conventionally represented.

Looking at these drawings, I feel these skeletons inside me – I put on the artwork, and feel my self inside the body represented on the sheet of paper. I feel the peculiar distortions of volume, length and depth decribed through the marks on the paper – this is a big part of their charm and attraction for me, much like the experience maps created by participants in my ‘Heart Library Project’.

I’ve been doing some homework with Somaya on working with Nintendo Wii controllers – lots of great inspiration on the web.

This video from Tom Tlalim and Paola Tognazzi shows a nice wearable design that uses clip on (or velco) neoprene bands that allow the participant to wear up to six (or more) wii controllers.

W_space: the fully wearable Wiimote audio controller. Photo Courtesy Tom Tlalim

W_space: On the Wall: The Wiimotes and Nunchuk attachments fit into elastic sleeves. Photo courtesy of Tom Tlalim

Its interesting to look at the quality of the movement in this video. Seems to me there is common set of movement patterns that people engage in in this type of movement-based interactive sound design.

This reminds me that I’d very much like to do a video-based survey of what movements should/could correlate to different types of electronic sound – a reverse engineering research approach – to survey categories of movement as they relate to peoples experience of sound – I suspect its not as individual as we might assume. At the very least, it will make for some very cute interpretive dance video!

Was thinking about how I could use accelerometers and gyroscopes to track and respond to rhythmic body movements, which got me thinking about Feldenkrais pelvic clock excersises, and then Hula hoop work. Seemed like a realy obvious and fund thing that the Wii people must have thought of, and indeed they have:

Interesting to note how for forceful this woman’s movements are. I think it should be possible to refine the way the animation and sounds respond to the Wii-fit data to attrach people to more gracefull, gentle movements: track velocity amplitudes, and emphasis the quieter actions, and revolutions per 5 seconds, and emphasise slower speeds.

Here’s a demonstration of Wii-Fit excersises from designers at Nintendo:

For the Maxers among us, there’s a thread on the Max-MSP forum re Wii-Fit interfaces for Max-MSP:

Eric Samothrakis:

You could try Osculator:
http://www.osculator.net/wiki/Main/HomePage
It supports Wii-Fit although “Some Wii-Fit balance boards are unfortunately not working properly (YMMV, a model bought in september was working perfectly).”

Oli Larkin:

a colleague of mine has connected the wii balance board to Max on windows using OSC via Glove Pie: http://carl.kenner.googlepages.com/glovepie

i also tried it on Mac using OSCulator, but seemed that not all the data was sent correctly

Chanced on this clip after following up on some links about binaural beat frequencies and the use in the entrainment of brain wave rhythms.

I really enjoyed looking at the faces of the people interacting with the work – the generosity they brought to it – giving themselves over to this peculiar light experience – and the strange sense of expectancy on their faces. Its not something you see people doing very often in contemporary art spaces these days.

Thinking back, I’m reminded of Ulf Langheinrich’s stroboscopic ‘Waveform B’ installation at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art – mesmerising and deeply unsettling at the same time.

There’s a strong history of artists working with technology to access/facilitate radically altered states of consciousness. The machine in this clip was designed by Brion Gysin, a contemporary of William Burroughs. I’ve been very interested in this territory for a long time now – ‘fringe’ media technologies – is a term I’ve used for want of a better name – to encompass the range of devices and systems developed to facilitate/entrain alternate states of being. I’m totally aware that this encompasses a whole host of totally out-there New Age practitioners, UFOlogists etc., and its interesting to look at how these practices are altered by their placement within or beyond official ‘contemporary art space’ contexts i.e. at a dance party, new age workshop, psychology lab etc.

I’m curious about how I can model these different contexts, and interested in how each of these contexts  offer different terms and conditions for audiences to enter into various forms of transgressive, cathartic or otherwise transformational experience.

At a practical level, this has relevance for how we present body-focused experiences – in public or private space: how to support certain extremely intimate forms of engagement and reflection, and examining the boundaries of such  an experience – how long should/could the interaction last, what is the artists/curators/practitioners duty of care in rellation to individual participants, and what resources should we ensure are on hand for followup/debriefing when eliciting potentially cathartic experiences. Knowing a few people who have had serious psychiatric problems after leaving intense meditation retreats, I’m all too aware of the potential risks involved with these types of experiences.

This connects in with some of what Somaya has talked about re post-traumatic-stress-disorder. My intuition tells me to focus on minute sensations, rather than lightning bolt sensorial overload. Somatic bodywork methodologies have a lot to say on this subject – build on the clients capacity to sense, notice, compare small changes. What interests me about the use of parapsychology and body-focused interactions is the possibility of facilitating an intelligent and poetic engagement with our structure and its potential – and to do this in a way that can reverberate throughout a person’s wider life engagements.

I have no doubt that there’s a place for actual violent cathathis and trauma in cultural practice (as distinct from vicarious, as in film), but this is not something that can be easilly achieved between strangers, such as is usually the case in a contemporary art space/live art event. ‘BDSM’ and body modification subcultures provide a very vivid example of the use of intense, cathartic and body-focussed interactions in contemporary urban culture, as undertaken within carefully negotiated and consensual rellationships, but such interactions are far from the distanced anonymity of most contemporary arts centre exhibitions and events programs.

This example of sub-cultural practice brings me back to a consideration of context, institutional values and boundaries, and the plasticity of these values and boundaries in radical creative arts practice. In my own practice, I’ve sought to be inclusive as possible with regard to audiences, but I know in reality, that each gallery that I show with has its own overlapping audience constituencies, more or less permeable to various ‘general publics’ depending on the venue. Often I’m happy to work within  existing curatorial niches i.e. ‘live-art’, interactive-art, body-art, community-art etc., but I do think that if we are serious about supporting ‘critically engaged practice’ – then the terms and conditions of audience/community engagement in ‘contemporary art’ require some re-negotiation. Must our engagement with contemporary art always be at a distance, casual,  fleeting, and anonymous? Or could there be a space for a more intimate, personalized and enduring rellationship between artist, arts organisation and audience/participants, one that unfolds over a period of months or years – one that can encompass the type of enduring, long-term relationship and duty-of-care  akin to that provided by a traditional familly doctor (general practitioner) or local medical practice?

If we are going to engage with audiences at the level that some of us are proposing (cathartic, transformative, intimate, psychological etc.) then these issues of endurance and personalised care will certainly need re-negotiating.

Notebook sketch for movement-tracking video paint brush. Minute (often involuntarilly jerky) shoulder or pelvis rotations are turned into wall-to-wall caligraphic circles around the room.

This is an idea I’ve had for some time now – a basic image in physio and bodywork: imagine your (insert body part here) as a paint brush, painting circles on the ceiling. I was thinking about ceiling projections at first, then imagined using a giant broom to paint horizontal stripes around the entire room.

This could easilly done using a 4 projector array – one on each wall. I’m thinking big, messy super-wide brush strokes, like painting with a broom.  You’d use variations in smoothness/jagginess  of the body movement to control things like brush preassure, saturation, bleed etc. What it needs is an accurate, high resolution way of tracking these minute movements i.e movements within an area of between 1 to 2 square inches, and to bea ble to have an opperator manually zoom into to the appropriate area of the body.  More details soon…