Here’s a summary of developments so far by Catherine and me for our explorations at Sydney Performance Space, July/August 2009

Research Question:

How do we stay in touch with who we are in essence, at the level of the body, when we are using/interacting with technology?

Context:

Along the continuum of travelling between worlds indifferent, imagined & emergent, we are in transit.

Set-up:

“Travellers” have entered the “Sensorium Gymnasium” (SG) via the “Living Room” space where they learn about our (proposed) “Awareness Through Movement/thinking through the body”/mp3 player/voice guided journey” through the SG.

Travellers, tuned in to their mp3 player, leave their personal belongings safely in the “Living Room” and are free to interact with all or any of the SG’s various installations.

The sound track through the mp3 player is a sequence of mini Feldenkrais “Awareness Through Movement” explorations that will draw attention to the felt experience of the body and to the question of “how we stay in touch with who we are in essence, at the level of the body, when we are using / interacting with technology?”. Long gaps between voice-cued mini explorations allow for ease of participating in all that the SG has to offer. The content and timing of the mp3 soundtrack can be refined during our workshop days together. Catherine and I are currently working together to develop the basis before then.

As we’re imaging the SG, we see the Video-Cued Recall (VCR) installation as the finale, an exit point. Prior to that, we imagine the “Transit Lounge”, which can be as simple as 6 chairs lined up in a row. The mp3 soundtrack provides the instruction for what to do in each chair (See below). The traveller begins in chair #1 & goes through the 6 transit processes, then moves into the VCR booth for #7 (The Telling Wave).

If there can/is to be a sensor data component that can reflect in visual and/or sound scape the variations of movement quality in the 6 lounges, fantastic! For example, can there be a generative screen in front of the 6 chairs that can be experienced by other travellers from the other side?

IN TRANSIT: (experience is the test of reality)

Transit Lounges:

1.       The responsive wave

      I am waving just to get someone’s attention: automatic, external aim, achieves end, attention seeking; time is compressed

2.       The conscious wave

I am waving; I am a body waving in time; change of context; there has been a pre-wave influence (an imagined experience of my body/myself waving); there is reflection through the body’s experience

3.       The attentive wave

I am noticing how I am waving; I am attention; my wave is embodied; time is elongated

4.       The passive wave

I am feeling my arm being moved through the waving pathway; unbound experience through the body (in relation to the body of another). 

5.       The integrated wave

I am feeling the sensation of my arm, my whole body, myself waving; I am waving for the experience of waving 

6.       The double feedback wave

I am joined with another person; we wave; shared experience (in response to one another, waving as one)

7.       The telling wave

Reflective wave; considered experience; video-cued recall

EMERGENT: (aesthetic experience is the judge)

Our heat weary bodies gathered slowly, quietly in the day’s cooler opening to travel again to Bundenon. I hadn’t been looking forward to this second part of “The Situated Body” until to my great relief Jonathan invited me to join with him in the landscape where we are to ‘create an intervention’. Biz joined us too & we three wandered along, happy in each other’s company, switching at horse flies. The path, heat, flies, and ever increasing presence of dense bush directed our decision to retreat, and not long after our about face Jonathan prompted us to pause. His fancy was taken by a leaf, folded & glued lengthways by a crafty spider & suspended by a thread from the branch of a bush. We were not the passers-by intended by the fly to interact with its nifty refuge. Alas for it, Jonathan was moved by an urge to direct his nose to the distal end of the leaf and balance it thus. The spider stayed indoors, but this intervention went on, with me and Biz taking turns, and at one point he came out, but only briefly, to investigate. Where do three wanderers go after such an experience? We were, I thought, heading back to laze around on the English lawn, our intervention complete, but, no. Jonathan invited me to go off toward a rocky outcrop in the bush & “find an intervention”. That place again … wide open to a great void inside me, heart rate quickening, skin tingling. Body? What body? It’s indefinable, unfelt. Somewhere in me is accepting Jonathan’s invitation, my legs are taking me, moving mechanically, strangely outside of me and I know I will find me if I stay with this. The experience of transition into felt self has no words for this telling. I was one minute not, next minute there, seeing in the rock a body to be adorned with an exoskeleton of bark. The rest is imagination in motion, playful, timeless, absorbing and connecting. And there, alongside, was Jonathan, playing.

Our afternoon, in my experience, was about MAKING REAL OF SENSING TECHNOLOGY. I was aware of the extent of preparation undertaken by each maker. Each one intently busy, doing, setting up, and I felt touched by this. We gathered around to learn about and interact with each design. Somaya’s ‘gloved’ accelerometers, George’s Wii stick, Lian’s transforming fabric creations and Jonathan’s proximity sensor light display evoked and augmented evolving choreographies. To my surprise my personal experience in each case was embodying, deeply satisfying and aesthetic. In context the conditions relied on invitation. We were invited by the makers to relate through felt experience to interactive designs. We were part of their not knowing and their wish to discover more about themselves, their own imagination and research. I experienced the fusion of the maker and participant through interaction. ‘Astro’ means, as in stars, ‘in composition’. ‘Astronomic’ refers to scale. ‘Technics’ refers to ‘the science or rules of a field of knowledge, especially a technical one’. That’s exactly how I experienced this afternoon. I felt able to interact with a vast field of knowledge about which I know absolutely nothing, to feel wonder and aesthetic pleasure, to be in composition.

We enter a process led by Catherine, in which we are invited to work with clay to create a body. The sensation of drying wet clay on my skin is unpleasant, while the experience of a body growing beneath my hands is exciting. Sitting at the “head end” of people is how I spend a great deal of time as a Feldenkrais practitioner. It’s often how I begin, as I find a place of connection. It’s a tender approach to another human being; the least invasive and the most mysterious. My clay person grows from this intimate perspective; ‘he’ grows from head to toes. Knowing is from my body, my heart, through my hands. The body shapes the clay, becomes a being. Respect for a being enters my touch as I begin to find the shapes in this body described by an active skeleton. The interaction animates, livens the clay. ‘He’ lives while we interact. Afterwards, it’s an interesting piece, enlivening curiosity.

We come back to clay again after an Awareness Through Movement session, and blindfolded, enter into another process, making ‘MY body’. I bring my attention to the feeling of my body in that moment – what stands out? My pelvis is strongly present to me through my sensation, really alive, and so my hands trace into a small ball of clay an impression of what I am feeling. Whereas yesterday, pen on paper, the pelvis remained elusive, frustrating, now excitement rushes through me, into my hands finding the bone-rich forms in 3-D, echoing my sense of this in me, the power of the sacrum and lower spine. Working upward is not possible with clay, and I really want to express the lightness of my spine upward through my chest. I’m lost for a while, feeling the darkness, listening to the sound of George moving rhythmically, insistently, moulding his clay alongside me. I REALLY want to look! Resigned to constraint, I take another small clump of clay and find the form of my shoulders and thorax. Time runs out, eyes are uncovered, and I am surprised by how much I can see in this latter piece.

Monday

We converge at Riversdale, a place of retreat, generous offering, unbelievably beautiful.

My response to Garth’s suggestion is two-fold.

1. On the one hand, I am cautious about finding a description at this point, and I am including my thoughts about that. On the other hand, the question has had me thinking a lot over the past week, recognising the era in which we are living and the place of body-focussed responsive/interactive artworks wherein technology is the crossing point. In that recognition there is a new wondering about the reasons for exploring “thinking through the body” and a sense of how work like Feldenkrais can be a medium for understanding.

In “The Elusive Obvious” Moshe Feldenkrais 1981, he asks with emotion “If you come across something obviously new to you, in its form at least, please stop for a moment and look inward” . He discusses at the end of this book the place of technology in our current world, in terms of replacing slavery; how in the past, “slavery was essential for the growth of cultures, allowing the ‘masters’ to learn, to build, to write, to think” etc. But he recognises the trouble we are in, how we have to relearn, for today’s world needs a new “calibre of brain”. He predicted that “…the middle aged will have to provide for the young until the age of 25 and for the old over 55. We can now see that unless we learn to think about things we know in alternative ways, unless we widen and deepen our freedom of choice and use it humanely, the real abolition of slavery will begin as a disaster” 155

So, “thinking through the body” can be defined as an absolute necessity for our times, as a means of accessing more of ourselves (our brain, nervous system), therefore learning to think in a new way by looking inward, by knowing ‘oneself’.

Feldenkrais as a method asks the practitioner to move with another from within the reality of another’s body – for the sake of re-membering the way of the body’s movement.

[The quotations at the end of this post from “The Case of Nora” address more about the “how”].

2. About my concern about defining just yet. The challenge in articulating what we think “Thinking Through the Body” means at this point is that we might form an “agenda” of sorts, and risk contracting toward our tendencies to shape our experiences to satisfy an end, and all the while we may have strayed, missing possibly …the point …

The subtle nature of the process sparked by our physically coming together in Workshop 1 might be missed. Can we hold the question open, so that we are continually thinking, engaging without knowing and feeling the sensations of being stimulated yet not understanding, seeing what we rely on to know where we are and what we think?

Regarding Garth’s earlier question “How do we (as interactive designers) get to experience through touch?” to George’s iteration “How do we get to experience through the touch we facilitate as makers in responsive electronic systems?” could we find a question around verbalising awareness of sensation of movement as a means to making meaning? Lizzie has provided us with a tool. I am curious to explore ways of applying the recall processes in a Feldenkrais context. I’ll be sending recorded “Awareness Through Movement” lessons to everyone & it might be interesting for others to independently consider how an experiment might take shape.

I recommend reading Moshe Feldenkrais, 1977, The Case of Nora, Harper & Row, in which Feldenkrais unravels… “learning in which quantity grows and changes to a new quality, and not the mere accumulation of knowledge”… Learning that is elusive and “can go on for more or less lengthy periods of time, apparently aimlessly, and then a new form of action appears as if from nowhere”.

I have pasted excerpts below to perhaps mirror something of what I’m trying to say.

Quotes from ‘The Case of Nora’ :

[MS_Moshe is referring to how he is working with Nora (who suffered a severe & unusual stroke) toward relearning the function of writing]

p. 71. “It is a large step to make a body stimulation into a designed movement on a surface of the environment. Just think how simple sensations of movement become meaningful when one can verbalise awareness of the sensation or the movement or both.”

p. 68 “I realized that people can have a sensory experience and have no awareness of it. A sensory stimulation is really not an experience, just a sensory stimulation. There is no meaning to it before there is an internal query as to what one feels. Unless one looks for a meaning, there is none in the stimulation and none in the sensation of the stimulation.”

p. 69 “Stimulations below the threshold of pain have no significance without awareness; awareness gives them meaning. Or maybe the discernment of meaning means awareness”.

p. 72 “Differentiation is discrimination with initiative and is the evidence of the successful process of learning. Note the wording I am using. It is important to follow the steps of action instead of thinking in abstract words. Nora’s action was passive until something grew in her which bubbled over somehow, one way or another. Then the passivity gradually turned into action…Learning is turning darkness, which is absence of light, into light. Learning is creation. It is making something out of nothing. Learning grows until it dawns on you.” [MS_I am reminded here of George’s description of his FI lesson – having the “aha” experience]

p. 78 “The first years of a baby pass in learning to see, to walk, and to speak, and the infant is still largely sensory and auditive”.

p. 79 “We have no inkling of the outside world when we arrive in it. The stimulation of the senses carries no information except that senses are being stimulated. The beginning of our acquaintance with the outside world is sensory and entirely subjective, and so for a long time we know only a sensorial entirely subjective reality. 80 We are, however, never alone; we are always in communication with other human beings such as parents and teachers. Without ever stopping to think, we behave as if all the others have the same subjective reality. Yet there are as many subjective realities as there are subjects… Objective reality …is reality as experienced by all men. It limits and restricts your subjective reality and mine to that on which all others agree. Subjective reality is anchored in us and is as real as our bodies; objective reality is the measure of our sanity”.

p. 91 “Body awareness enables us to know we orient ourselves. In (adults) the complexity is even greater. For an infant orients himself as an animal does, but an (adult) knows how the get “there” and in “time”.”

New experiences. Yoga beginning the day. A much richer experience than my only other class 25 years ago! Leading into our journey through techniques for documenting audience experience. Using ‘Semi-structured interview’ technique, we are to interact with someone who has participated in an interactive art experience. This added layer of interaction is shaped by questions, and there’s a level of skill in finding the right question. Hmmmm. In the context of my own practice I’ve had 21 years of learning how to ask the right question. In the gallery I am a “fish out of water” again, blundering through. Yet, so much unfolded, and as a privileged observer of another, especially in the “Video-cued recall” context, I learned to see possibilities outside of my own cognitive domain. And then over the lunch table, through the telling of my own awkwardness and disconnected impressions, new thoughts emerged, and language structures began to assemble, as if from nowhere. Less disjointed thoughts could be articulated, more personal, more authentic. Reflecting since, I see how being an interviewed participant left me feeling outside of the maker’s intent yet strangely part of the piece. The Thinking Through the Body context has enabled dialogue to continue, to inform, to evoke more questions, self relfection, open new corridors of experiences. One thing is leading to another!

From questions to elicit:

1. One thing that resonates

2. One thing I desire/want/need

3. One thing I can offer

1. So far, it’s immersion in new experience which is non-habitual, quite out of the ordinary, with others and with technology, exploratory & recursive

2. Time for reflection, unguided time, for indirect “seeing, for circling around.

3. Familiarity with movement based interaction

There could be a way of working with others, along with Awareness Through Movement and FI (hands on Feldenkrais “Functional Integration”) that is expressed through new form. Perhaps based on touch, and language emerging from experience of touch, touching, being touched, articulating what is felt through sensation. I’m interested between now and January to explore documentation of experience based on Lizzie’s work.

I’m journeying to a mystery destination with 9 other travellers. None of us speak the same language. What we share is elusive. What’s palpable is willingness to journey together, embrace each other’s origins, knowledge, questions. Our shared charter is to collaborate, bring material from our practices, and maybe unravel from all that’s woven together new possibility. We have exchanged through explorations of Feldenkrais lessons, Laban notation processes, found out about each other’s practices. What stands out for me is how important it is in the midst of all of this to become utterly lost, to fall out of language in the middle of trying to communicate. This is freefall away from the familiar, toward opening to the influence of other views, without losing myself. Fantastic. Maybe another way of thinking is possible. Right now I have no idea what Thinking through the Body is! But I can acknowledge that I danced with an animated wheelchair today! And, I looked upward toward myself projected on the ceiling with my heartbeat animated in sound and visual moving patterns, and felt wonder for some seconds before my analytical mind queried the technology. I am becoming reoriented toward technology, something personal is emerging. I could not have expected this.

I must acknowledge traveller #9, Lucas, who is working “outside” of our interactions, the observing agent (sound & camera), as a major influence on what goes on!