Watch how you can trick your brain by stroking a fake rubber hand and your real hand at the same time. Link from New Scientist online

I’ll be working on presenting this illusion at the Bundanon workshop! I think it opens the door for all sorts of poetic body transformation – wondering how we could include some more subtle/imaginative body metamorphoses… some research has been done on virtual/mixed reality displays and this sort of re-mapping of bodyimage – I’ll follow up soon.

Video demonstrations and discussions by Andrew T. Austin

I would like to explore some of these principals at the next workhop, coming up in January. This research goes to the heart of my inspiration for TTTB, at least in so far as the proposal for ‘explorations of touch and proprioception’ go.

Phantom Limb Pain and The Mirror Box #2

Phantom Limb Pain and the Mirror Box #3

Have just read a great paper by Paul Dourish, titled “Implications for Design”, thought you all might be interested as it relates well to the video-cued-recall workshop that Lizzie led at our Campbelltown workshop.

Really hits the nail on the head re what people (artists, audiences, curators) expect from ethnographic studies and the materials they produce, and getting me thinking about The Heart Library Project and where I should take it next.

Seems like he’s proposing ethnography as a way of understanding and reformulating relationships and understandings between community members and researchers (amongst other things). I think this is what good participatory/community art does already – but more work could be done in relation to the reflections and value these project’s offer their participant’s/communities/users/research subjects. This is a hard thing to measure, but you would hope this is precisely where ethnography and ethnomethodology could make a contribution. How do you evaluate ‘meaning’ and it’s evolution via reflection and dialogue – especially when the ‘meanings’ being evaluated are functioning at a deeply embodied, tacit level? Again – I’m reminded of Catherine’s interest in language and its relationship to bodily experience… I feel I’m on the edge of something big here, but need some help unpacking all of this! Any volunteers?

Those of you at universities will be able to download the paper from the ACM database.

–

Paul Dourish, “Implications for Design”,
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2006. Pages: 541 – 550

“What has traditionally been more complicated has been to establish a deeper, more foundational connection between ethnography and design – to look for a connection at an analytic level rather than simply an empirical one [11]. The analytic contributions tend not to be seen as holding implications in the same way.

It is not that these do not have profound implications for design, because they do; indeed, often more profound than a laundry list of facts and features. Their impact, however, is frequently more diffuse. They provide us with new ways of imagining the relationship between people and technology. They provide us with ways of approaching design. However, they typically go beyond specific instances of design. More to the point, they draw, in general, on the fundamental repudiation of a traditional separation between designer and user, between technology and practice. To the extent that these implications are not formulated as “implications for design,” it is because the categories of design, user, and designer, are themselves in question.”

A couple of weeks ago I obtained a copy of a new book by Mark Johnson, called The Meaning of The Body. Its a great read, and has really helped me to understand more concretely, many of the issues we are dealing with when we talk about thinking through the body in relation to our various practices – thinking and meaning being defined more broadly, as processes and constructions that enable us to adapt to the worlds around and within us. Its only available in hardback at the moment, but I’ll see if I can send all you TTTB-Artlab researchers some excerpts soon.

In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world.

Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world.

Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning’s bodily sources.

Just visited human ethologist Ellen Dissanayake’s website, and came across these brilliant quotes.

Her book “What is Art For?” was a powerful inspiration during my doctoral research when I was re-thinking notions of instrumentality in art practice, and looking to understand my own practice in relation to more encompassing view of the history of art and culture that looks beyond the narrow (and historically anomalous) scope of 20th century Western art history and aesthetics.

“We can begin a discussion of artmaking by noting that from very early (as long ago as 200,000 years), humans have been naturally attracted to the extraordinary as a dimension of experience and that at some point they seem also to have been moved to make the ordinary extraordinary—that is, to shape or elaborate everyday, mundane reality and thereby transform it into something special, different from the everyday.”

“Craft is ineluctably grounded in the life of the body, the physicality of material and material objects—their feel, their weight, their resistance, their fragility or durability.”

“At the core of ritual and art as I have described them is the emotional intersubjectivity developed and practiced in mother-infant interaction. Making and making special are inseparable from the innate human impulse to share feelings and from the need and ability to express ourselves in relationship with others. And we experience the works of others intersubjectively also. The gestural traces in handmade objects, like the bodily signatures in dance and song, contribute directly to another’s reception or appreciation of them.”

“For the perceiver, a made object implies not only a hand, but a person with hands—someone mortal like ourselves who fashioned this object, brought it into being.”

The new dates for workshop 2 will be February 2nd – 8th, 2009, at the Bundanon Trust’s Riversdale residency.

• February 2nd will be devoted to set up and testing of technical gear.
• February 3rd, 4th and 5th will be devoted to the workshop proper.
• February 6th, 7th will be available to those who wish to stay on, and continue working on individual projects
• February 8th will be devoted to packing up, cleaning and travel back to Sydney.

Garth asked a great question today, in relation to the question of our respective desires for the project: not sure exactly what he said – but it was something like – ‘How do we (as interaction designers) get to experience through touch?’

How do we get to experience through the touch we facilitate as makers in responsive electronic art systems? This translated into pragmatic questions around how do we, as makers of senor-based works, get at the processes happening during a tactile,intimate encounter, such as provided during a somatic bodywork session (i.e. the Feldenkrais hands-on work known as Functional Integration). Many of us are hoping that Catherine and Maggie will be able to help shine some light on this – one way or another.

For me this was one of the core motivations behind the development of the TTTB concept in 2006 – so important because its still so relatively unknown.

So what then of the pragmatics? Some areas that strike me as good starting points would be to compile an inventory of fundamental structures and life skills developed during infancy and early childhood: those basic reflexes and motor skills that underpin our ability to sense and act in the world – orienting our selves to the world/self, finding stability, responding to novelty/threat etc. My first experience of Feldenkrais Functional Integration started with a lesson on falling: I was asked to explore ways of falling, and see if I could find a way of falling that felt easy, soft and enjoyable – which seemed odd at first – since I had come because of a problem I was having with abdominal tension. What surprised me was how such a simple process – falling repeatedly – could reverberate so intensely at a much more personal level.

Its this capacity for body-focussed experiences to elicit intense personal realizations that is compelling me towards research into this area of touch and movement sensation

After watching Jonathan’s video-cued retrospective report – he later described the quality of holding those cubes as being like holding a snow dome. This immediately generated strong images for me of snow dome structures as interfaces: intimate hand held devices that comunicate a strong sense of fluidity, delicacy and intimacy, not just in the form of he object itself -but in the quality of contact and engagement we bring to these objects when we pick them up. Beautiful!

Notes from a discussion facilitated by Lizzie 2008 08 16

1) RESONANCE - something that has been raised that resonated especially with me was the concept of ‘People as mirrors’.
The idea of situations where people become the mirrors, instead of machines mirroring people: the process of organizing oneself-body in relation to a task (mirroring) – and how this connects in some way to the work Jonathan is doing with task oriented interactions for physiotherapy – finding out ons position/shape in relation to another – then connections between mirroring and empathizing – how this plays out in social interactions between people.

2) DESIRE - a desire (my desire), for a skill, method, experience etc. that I want to engage with over the coming 12 months.

To facilitate self-discovery and reflection in audiences through the use of touch (touching and being touched) – proximal modalities. To evolve a practice that engages people (and me as both maker and audience) through dialogues involving sensations of touch, movement, and communications (spoken, gestural expressions, graphic communications etc).

3) AN OFFERING – where I can make a contribution
In relation to my own practice as an artist-researcher – bio-sensing – research and development strategies for application in creative arts contexts – working with body experience in exhibition settings, then

Important discoveries regarding:

1. The need for calibrated systems, (how you come to know the material/dancer you are working with – and how this knowledge is translated into the artwork.
2. The limits of what can be achieved in relation to measurement and translation of things like ‘emotions’ i.e. the machine cant tell what you are thinking.

In relation to me as the producer – supporting research and collaborations within the ensemble.

4) Some reflections on the discussion around resonances, desires and offerings:
Communicating out from my own body - Catherine Truman.

This is something I’ve been wondering about in my own process – inside the process of translating sensor data into sounds and visual displays – having a strong sense of physical identification with the sounds I’m manipulating during that mapping process – getting lost in particular sounds, and the pleasure of that immersion/envelopment. When this happens, I’m reminded of the pleasure and deep satisfaction that this practice brings to me as an artist, but then also a sense of frustrations that I’ve not been able to implement this level of unity and fluidity in the artworks to the extent that I want.

This brings me back to the offering – what I now know to be important, only by way of realizing mistakes I’ve made so far: the need for artists to know the sensor data as a material – in the same way as a traditional artist/craftsperson knows their material – as points of contact between me, the work and the participant.

Another analogy that comes to mind is that of a costume maker, making costumes for a dance performance – thinking about the costume as a prosthesis, or talisman/amplifier, that amplifies and/or transforms certain qualities of action/presence. In order to for this costume to work – it has to embrace the dancer’s body in one way or another. Knowledge of the data – is knowledge of the form we are making – that is – knowing the way the participants actions – and the machines subsequent reading of these actions by way of various sensor data variables – are bound to a certain range of possibilities (i.e. my heart wont ever beat at 500 beats per minute, my will bend mostly in one direction only).

Without an understanding of this bounded form – the quality and extent of this contact becomes highly tenuous – this is the problem I’ve been struggling with for the past four years now – and its at the top of my list for the next 12 months, in addition to Thinking Through The Body.