The journal of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Volume 4, number 4 has a very interesting collection of papers of relevance to this project

I thought this article by Edward S. Katkin of the Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York, is an interesting review of G. Ádám (1998). Visceral Perception: Understanding Internal Cognition. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 232.

Edward Katkin titles his review, The last word on gut feelings, which I think is a more than appropriate subject for our consideration.

Thought this new device from Yamaha might interest some of you

Biobeat

Thought this might be of interest to the group

‘Affect and Emotion in Human-Computer Interaction’, a book edited by Christian Peter and Russell Beale is now available online from Springer

[view contents]

About this book

Affect and emotion play an important role in our everyday lives: They are present whatever we do, wherever we are, and wherever we go, without us being aware of them for much of the time. When it comes to interaction, be it with humans, technology, or humans via technology, we suddenly become more aware of emotion, either by seeing the other’s emotional expression, or by not getting an emotional response while anticipating one.

Given this, it seems only sensible to explore affect and emotion in human-computer interaction, to investigate the underlying principles, to study the role they play, to develop methods to quantify them, and to finally build applications that make use of them. This is the research field for which, over ten years ago, Rosalind Picard coined the phrase “affective computing”.

The present book provides an account of the latest work on a variety of aspects related to affect and emotion in human-technology interaction. It covers theoretical issues, user experience and design aspects as well as sensing issues, and reports on a number of affective applications that have been developed in recent years. Written for: Researchers and professionals

Keywords: affect, affective computing, computer game, emotion model, emotion recognition, hci, human computer interaction, robotic, simulated emotion.

Hi everyone,

I was thinking that it would be very useful if everyone were to write a definition of what Thinking Through The Body means to each of us.

What do you think?

Cheers, Garth

a diagramatic representation of some of the discussion on video cued recall.

Cheers, Garth

I enjoyed working with Lizzie’s methodology today – seeking to better understand the process of audience engagement.  It was interesting to think about why interactive New Media Art requires so much information about the artists intention?  Why is it necessary to prescribe the manner of engagement? is it because the genre is so new that the collective conscious has not yet “embodied” affordances associated with interactive New Media Art (NMA).  For instance it is not necessary when performing a musical concert on a guitar, cello, piano etc to begin by telling the audience how the instrument is made, the mechanisms it contains for making sound and the performance techniques that are going to be brought to bear in generating the musical outcomes.

So, are the words of the artist interventionist?  Are they establishing constraints that lead to a constructed experience that coalesces with or is dictated by the artists stated intention?  Can self-reporting have validity in this situation where the audience has been pre-conditioned by the artists statement?

Given this, does the value of interactive NMA really reside in the personification of experience and not in the physicality and technological wizardryof the installation.  Part of the question we addressed today then is that the value of this experience needs to be reflected in archival material.  How does one reflect on an artwork where by the principle value of the work is in individual experience and not in a tangible object, but in a personal agency

corporeal, material, objective, phenomenal, sensible, substantial, tangible

Notions of corporial experience and distributed consciousness are of particular interest to me – how can we sense these things in a meaningful manner using technology so that we might be able to utilise that data in the generation of realtime sonification and visualisation in the context of an art installation?

Cheer, garth

thermographic image of a cold blooded tarantula on a warm human arm!

enjoy…. garth

I would be quite interested to explore the use of thermal imaging as one way of gathering somatic responses in a public installation.

Possible sources for such technologies include:

1. Infratech cameras for medicine
2. Wikipedia on Thermography

cheers,  garth