Following from Maggie, Catherine and Lian, here are a couple of points about my plans for the Sensorium Gymnasium at Pspace.

I’ve been thinking alot about this challenge I have faced all the way through this research project of working as a curator/facilitator without pushing people (or myself) towards “outcomes”.  In Bundanon I made some important discoveries about the relationship between my own curatorial practice and my physical or embodied engagement with artworks/collaborators/exhibition spaces/audiences…  I decided to make a conscious effort at Pspace to “be” (in relation to all these things) rather than to “do” (as I do normally).  Sounds a bit vague  I know – but that’s part of the point.

So i’ve decided to inhabit a little corner of the residency space for the duration of the lab. Picking up on from Maggie and Catherine’s plans I’d like to call it the Living Room.  I’m going to have some comfy chairs, coffee and tea making facilities, lots of books and articles, a heater, lots of documentation of everything we’ve done so far, a bowl of fruit and some other munchies.  I’m going to install myself there and mull over everything we’ve done, do some reading and writing, and be generally availalbe in case anyone needs help or wants to talk about anything.  I hope that you will all come to The Living Room and visit me whenever you want to have a sit down or a think, or look at some photos/books, have a chat, have a cup of teac etc etc…

Ideally that Living Room will be a good friendly place on the last day for visitors to come and find out more about the project too.

Garth – I’d love to borrow your recordings of Bundanon so that people can come and listen to those sounds.

I’m also making a little zine that documents some of the experiences we have had so far working on this project.  There will be enough of these for you all to have some to give away and keep as mementos.

Any suggestions or thoughts on this gratefullly received.

On the internet, there is an interesting article easy to encounter, written by Sergio Roclaw Basbaum, “Consciousness and Perception: The Point of Experience and the Meaning of the World We Inhabit”. He claims that “ consciousness is aculturally shaped phenomena, and that any conception that may emerge about it from a traditional Western scientific approach cannot go further than suggest a model of consciousness that, at best, can correspond to the experience of consciousness in the culture in which this very specific way of dealing with reality is embedded.”

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The anthropological dimension of synesthesia – as a metaphor or as neurological phenomenon- is usually avoided or forgotten. Van Campen alluded to this reality in “Synthetic Indians” with a commentary on the book World of sense by Constance Classen. Basbaum developed this idea of a synesthesia phenomenon conditioned by culture in a philosophical reflexion using references to Classen and Flusser. The last year I had told that we needed informations on synesthesia in the different cultures of the multicultural Mediterranean world. The emergency of an anthropology focused in the sensory worlds of different cultures enabled to put into perspective the western association between seeing and meaning.

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Quotation from the same article by Basbaum:

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“Different cultures emphasis in other senses gives birth to cosmologies based, for example:

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• in thermal sensations, like the Tzotzil’s of Chiapas, Mexico;
• in olfactory sensations, like the Ongee’s of Little Andaman Island, in Bengal Bay;
• in a highly synesthetic cosmology, like the Desana’s of Amazon, which make meaning of their world based on multisensory correspondences experimented under hallucinogenic plants trance; (Classen, 1993: Chapter 6)
• in such an emphasis on aural experience, like the Kaluli people of Bosavi, as to “reckon time and space by reference to auditory cues and entertain a fundamentally acoustic view of the structure of their physical and social universe.” (Howes, 2003:xvii)

These radically different sensorial arrangements (and there are many

more), the meanings they ascribe to the world and the ways of dealing with life that emerge from them, make reasonable for us to talk not anymore about a “point of view”, typical of Western culture, but of a “point of experience”, the kind of hierarchy of the sensorium that structures experiences and cosmologies in different cultures.” – Hervé-Pierre Lambert

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Maggie led a workshop today about attention and the brain.  She described the way we create new neural pathways by actively bringing attention to something new. This is a big part of feldenkrais – but also very reminiscent of John Dewey’s idea of the “work” of art.  An aesthetic experience draws our attention to the nature of our experience of the world in a fresh way, and allows us to make new connections, grow, learn and develop – to “expand”.

Maggie got us to draw a representation of our brains, and then to map onto them how our brain works, what it does, what it doesn’t do… A big task.  While we did this she reminded us, gently, to pay attention to how we were doing it.  As with all of our work here, the point of the task was not the map we were creating (though these were all lovely) but the process of making it, and what that tells us about ourselves and our habits. We were drawing a picture of our brain to help us identify our brain’s preferences, and its limitations.

I drew a mass of neural pathways and connections, then i began to identify things my brain can’t do (maths, map reading, drawing – general spatial and practical tasks), then i  drew the things my brain can do; write, explain, argue…then i wanted to draw love and relationships, family, friendships, general social interaction, then the animals i have relationships with (ruben cropped up in there), i drew listening and art, and money, then my relationship to the buildings i live and work in, the trees and rivers, the birds, sport… on and on it went.  Finally we stopped for a tea break.  I realised that i had begun to draw the whole world.  Then i looked at my picture.  Had I drawn the way the world exists in my brain, or had i drawn the way my brain exists in the world?  This picture reminds me of the wonderful reversibility of these two statements and ways of seeing our relationship to the world.
Look at the difference between my way of drawing my brain and Catherine’s.  She drew the way her brain feels.  I tried to analyse, categorise, and represent everything in it.  Guess who’s having more fun.

my brain

catherine's brain

Today the iron wood ensemble who are in residence over at Bundanon’s other site came to visit.  They are a group of classical musicians who are here to experiment and try out new repertoire and new ideas for three weeks.  They are in a similar head-space to us, wanting to take risks, play, try new things, get to know each other better, make discoveries. There was a surprising number of connections and cross overs in the things we are all doing – they are thinking about playing with and through their bodies more. They talked about flow and the felt experience of playing compared to the imagined or planned experience. I can’t wait to see them play at Angel Place in March and watch their arms and hands and their feet as they put their whole bodies into their playing. It was a real testament to the value of a place like this – conversations can happen here that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

Interestingly for me, they are also being joined by a phd researcher from UWS who is doing think-aloud,  video-cued recall and diary research with them about their playing and learning, similarly to the way i worked in my phd.  More on this later.

Catherine blindfolded us today and asked us to make ourselves in clay.  I thought of myself lying in bed.  I always lie on my side. Unable to see what i was doing my felt-sense of the volume and shape of my body became very vivid.  It was a peculiarly intense sensation, to use my own hands to form my head, my neck, the curve of my back. Later on Somaya gave me a back rub, and I had the strangest feeling that it was the second one of the day.

When we took our blind folds off we saw that almost all of us had sculpted ourselves lying on our sides.  We had also all got our proportions almost exactly right.

The power of the blindfold is very inetersting to me right now.  Our visual sense so dominates our experience of the world – and it feels to me today that it is also linked firmly to my own analytical stance.  I appraise things with my eyes, i judge them.  Unable to see, I felt my way through the clay – i explored its properties, I worked with it and did not try to impose my version of the world on it. What would be the equivalent of a blindfold when I write?  What would help me work with the words and feel my way through them rather than trying to wrangle them into a form that I expect to be pleased with?

Bundanon is a great place to think about (and through) the body.  Fresh air, horizon, river swimming, good food – all condusive to feeling pleasure in being a body in the world.

Today I made two self portraits.  Catherine ran a workshop that made me reflect on the question of how well I know my own body from the inside, and how able I am to represent that from the outside.  We lay for a long time on our backs imagining someone tracing around our body with a marker.  Then we tried to draw an outline of our own body and draw our skeletons within the outline. When we had finished we teamed up with a partner and drew round each others bodies. You learn alot about being a body from doing this – though i’m not sure I can say exactly what i learnt yet. One of the interesting challenges was to get the proportions right. I kept trying to compress myself.  I couldn’t believe how far my knees are from my waist.  I was struck by how much space my body takes up in a room.  How long my limbs and neck are, how long my whole body is.

Later Jonathan took us into the great outdoors and asked us to think about the relationship between our bodies and our surroundings.  Out on the side of a hill, with bush all around me i suddenly felt very small.  The feeling of my largeness vanished. I was drawn to a little hut – because the hut was built at human scale and seemed to help me modulate between me and everything else.  Sitting on the verandah of the hut I thought – i wish i could fly up and see what size i appear to be from the outside, and compare it to what size i feel .  I went looking for sticks that would be the same length as my bones so that I could get some perspective on the relationship of scale between me and the world.  I gathered and measured and gathered and measured and slowly built a copy of my skeleton in sticks on the ground. My vertebrae were made of wombat poo (the driest poo of any mammal! – that’s a true fact). It was so comforting to be able to measure sticks against myself and then arrange them, rather than having to draw the way i imagined myself to be.  When i’d finished my self portrait in sticks i walked up the hill and looked down at it from above.  I am very very small.  Jonathan took a photo of me and my portrait together so that i could check if i’d got the scale right.  Not bad at all.

I worried that to anyone coming along it would look macabre – a stick skeleton by an old hut. But Jonathan thought it would be ok to leave it there.

self portrait with textas

Self portrait with sticks

George and I are currently invited respondents to an online discussion on curating art that “responds to bodily inputs” on the CRUMB list. There’s lots of interesting discussion on there that relates to Thinking Through the Body. I haven’t posted anything yet (mainly because my body has been very reluctant to do any thinking at all – or go near a computer for a month now). But I plan to post something about this project in the next week or so. Several of you may also want to contribute. You can join the list and see an archive of the discussion so far at the website: http://www.crumbweb.org/

In the meantime – here’s a taster of one exchange within the discussion between Adinda van ‘t Klooster (the convener of the discussion) and Brigitta Zics. They’re talking about the difference between active and passive interaction. I’d be interested to hear what the Feldenkrais pros think of the idea of “cognitive feedback art”

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ADINDA:
I think this is a very useful distinction[ACTIVE AND PASSIVE INTERACTION.]
If I understand this right, you refer to the body’s subconscious
physiological response which is reflected in their heartrate, EEG, EMG, etc,
captured by the system. As these are then reflected in audiovisual content
created by the artist or designer of the interactive system, the viewer is
challenged to gain more control over these otherwise immediate responses. I
wonder if in this process of the participants learning to operate the
system, the interaction becomes conscious and thus becomes active even it
started as passive? I have been looking for a word for the whole of the
system of this ‘new’ form of aesthetic experience which differs from
interactive art, but is not purely responsive either. You suggest term
cognitive feedback loop. How would you place this is the context of art,
would you call it cognitive feedback art?
I wonder if this would do enough justice to the body itself, or if indeed we
have then lost it (the body) somehow?
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RESPONSE:
I would not agree with the point that you make about passive interaction
i.e. that through the learning process/control of the user the work become
active. I think we talk about similar phenomena with slightly different
network of terms, which attempt to explain body-mind actions with a diverse
hermeneutic sensitivity. As I pointed out earlier the bodily passive status
means the way the body is used for interaction and not the quality whether
the art work activates conscious-subconscious processes. Passive interaction
refers to a bodily passive status, which activates
a sensitivity towards cognitive responses of the user (like emotions).
The interconnectivity of conscious-subconscious events or, from another
point of view, the relationship between embodied and new knowledge is
crucial to art works. However I describe this not with the differentiation
of active and passive but with the aesthetic conceptualisation of learning
processes in the interactive art work. To account for the learning process
(or as I term the ‘mastering the tool’ processes) means to operate between
embodied knowledge and action and the novelty of technology and content (new
knowledge and. non-predictable actions). As such, the aesthetic conception
of the mind-body nexus implies how we artists design the conscious-subconscious
relationship in the user’s experience.
I think the term Cognitive-feedback Art is too restrictive for me (similarly
Biofeedback Art). I think we already have to work with difficult terms such
as Software Art / Virtual Art or Internet Art which from my point of view do
not bring creditable differentiations to art as they only refer to the
medium but not to the content. I would describe this simply as
technology-based art, which focuses on cognitive qualities, the body-mind
nexus and the embodied/ novel knowledge. I would suggest that this is an
emerging form of interactive art, which introduces cognitive-driven
interaction (if we suggest that bodily status reciprocally provide
information about cognitive states). As such, in my interpretation
‘cognitive-feedback loop’ also refers to a bodily status. Even though the
semiotics of the body do not have particular role in this kind of
interactive works, this is why I called them passive interactions. The
cognitive-feedback loop however is an important term to explain a system,
which builds on cognitive qualities. Thus, the system attempts to evaluate
the data according to a cognitive status and according to this outcome the
‘instant affection technologies’ (see in my earlier email) attempts to act
upon the user to lead him/her to particular cognitive states. Therefore
‘cognitive-feedback loop’ is an interactive system which applies affective
computing and technologies.

In the closing session today I asked everyone to identify one thing that they desired, either for someone in the group or from the group, the project or the process more generally, and one thing they thought they could give.  Right now they are all sitting around me typing up their responses.

Giving and receiving are the basis of learning and of collaborating.  The skills of asking for what we need or want and offering to give something that others may need or want are the necessary corollaries of giving and receiving.  But often people find these things difficult to do.  In this group I think we’ve already established enough trust and common ground that we can begin to ask and to offer.

Her are the two things I desired and wanted to give:

I desired what I described as a “movement critique”.  I want Catherine, Maggie and Lian to bring their amazing embodied understanding of movement and physicality to the analysis of me, and others, experiencing artworks.  I want to listen to them describe and interrogate the way people move in galleries and around artworks.  I want to hear their expertise vocalised whilst I look at moving bodies.

I offered to  try to combine my techniques of video-cued recall with a performative/participatory version of a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement session using some kind of wearable object made by Catherine.  I imagined we could create an artwork/research process – in a kind of Lygia Clark model – where people would perform a series of movements un-encumbered, and then perform a series of movements wearing some kind of prosthesis or object, and, using my methods, describe their experiences and compare them.

I’ve asked everyone to be responsible for pursuing their own desires and gifts over the next hours/days/weeks, either with the whole group, or bilaterally with other individual participants.  Looking forward to see what happens….

Today we all worked on the methods I have developed for capturing verbal descriptions of experience. Once again I notice that the techniques I use are very much based in people’s ability to express themselves, to find the right words, to describe in language experiences that might be amorphous, multilayered and complex.But, once again, I was also struck by how beautiful and how revealing people’s descriptions of their experience can be.  It made me acknowledge something which I sometimes forget.  That language is fabulous, flexible, wonderful, multilayered, amorphous and complex – much like physical movement and bodily sensation.  Like movement it can also be precise and specific.  Like movement it exists very privately and personally for each of us alone, and, at the same time in the field of possibilities for shared communication that exist between people.

Catherine has said a few times that when she is working – when she is making things – words “stick in her throat”.  Words in the throat.  Stuck.  For me this is a very powerful image that conveys the vexed and intimate connection between language and the body.  Our mouths, tongues and throats speak our experience.  Our arms and hands write our experience.  So much of our selves poured through these parts of our bodies.  The work they do.

After a whole day running a workshop my mouth is dry, my throat is scratchy, my tongue is swollen and lazy.  After 6 months of typing typing typing my thesis everyday, just sitting here to write these few words is painful.  I feel the same old muscles, my right shoulder my left forearm, my neck, immediately fall into their habitual weary pattern of strain.  But I also feel good.  I want to type.  I love to make these words, to chose them, to decide on them, to construct sentences that say what I mean.

How can I make these instruments of expression clearer, more free, less painful?  What can Maggie and Catherine’s knowledge of movement, organisation of movement and freedom of movement bring to that.  Are there exercises for the mouth, tongue, fingers, lips, shoulders, throat that can help me “speak” more freely.

Yesterday in her workshop on Laban notation Lian mentioned that the movement exercises we were doing were “fleshing out” our understanding of Laban’s descriptions. The idea stuck with me that what I was hoping to do over the course of this workshop was working to “flesh out” my understanding of experience. What might that mean? How will I bring weight and form to the way I think about experience?