This morning we had an unusually early start, rising with the sun and heading over to Bundanon to resume Jonathan’s workshop. I started off where I had left, walking up the Amphitheatre Track. I passed by the tall spindly tree but it didn’t call to me like the other day. I kept walking up the steep track towards the peeling bark tree, hoping for a rekindling of the sensorial effects of the previous day. I slowed in my tracks to watch a few birds hopping about in the bush. It was quieter today, the insect din not so loud, a few bird calls, the occasional rustle of a larger animal. I started to think about the noise I was introducing into this scene. I walked up the slope as quietly as I could, very carefully placing my feet on the ground, taking note of what was below – crisp leaf, crackling bark, rubble, stone, sand. I was forced to slow down my movements, becoming highly aware of the shift of weight from leg to leg, the articulation of the joints in my feet, the shifting tensions in my muscles, where I placed my arms. My aim was to minimise my intrusion on this landscape, all the while listening to what the bush was singing. This was a possible ‘intervention’ for others to enact.

My reverie was interrupted by a pestering horse fly. It circled me tyrannically. I pelted down the slope back out onto the open pasture. And still it followed me. I walked back past the fence until I neared the garden of the house. I stopped and noticed a large stick that had caught my attention the other day. I picked it up, thinking I needed something to defend myself from the giant flies and other potential dangers lurking in the bush. I proceeded to practice spearing fallen leaves, in preparation for the flies. I took care to involve my whole body in the action, recalling the problem with girls throwing balls of only using their arm.

Broken tip with speared leaves (substitute for flies)

I confess I got bored with the bush. I headed to the river for a swim. The river was perfection. A large still body of water, encompassed by bush and a thin strip of sandy beach. Translucent and warm, an invitation to submerge oneself. I entered slowly, walking straight ahead into the water as the sand slowly dropped away below my feet, the water creeping up my skin in a soothing caress. As the water reached my chest, I felt my breathing become more laboured, the compression of the water. I wanted to keep walking in until my head was under, but as soon as my feet lost the bottom, I destabilised, feeling the contradictory thrusts of gravity and buoyancy.

It was so peaceful in the water, my body felt young and lissome. Little fish cavorted around my ankles, one brave enough to take a nibble. I tried to catch them with my hand. I created structures with my body for them to swim in and around.

temporary intervention - first pass

temporary intervention - second pass

temporary intervention - fourth pass

The Situated Body workshop was lead by Jonathan…. and so we headed off in the direction of the Bundanon homestead to choose a site with which we could find a place that felt familiar, and carry out an intervention on the landscape.

For the first time in weeks, no, months… I’ve had a day of being body-focused. although, its taking some time to switch out of previous work modes and into this one. this morning began with Catherine leading a session centering around the body. for the first time in my Feldenkrais, yoga, meditation or other semi-relaxing session, i didn’t drift off at all.

The first workshop saw us progress into drawing outlines of our bodies (and planting sketches of skeletons within): trying to focus on our felt experience of the body while drawing representations of ourselves.

self image in progress

The switching between the analytical mode of experiencing the world and the “felt” became really predominant during this exercise. so often i resorted to what i think or know about the proportions of my body… and so much harder to draw from a feeling of my body. this only skims the surface of what we are re-addressing at this workshop: for me, that shift into body space, where it has all been head-space in the months leading up to this Bundanon residency.  following on from the self drawn image of body, then the real moment of truth, another person (in my case george) tracking around my body with a different coloured texta. at this point, the confrontation is minimal, although i was hoping that i had exaggerated and proved wrong… but no, my hips really are that wide.

This immediacy of self image really brings both the notion and the reality into the fore of my consciousness. and using simple tools such as texta to drive creativity from my body (whether thats just from physical movement, or my position in space in relation to the object i am creating). repositioning myself alongside and “in” my body was a very necessary excercise to continue with the following workshops.

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?

An opportunity to play with a range of sensor-based prototypes/tools and costume. The session was structured so that each person had 3 minutes to try out a prototype, followed by a quick group discussion.

Somaya offered “Idio”, an apparatus that generates sound in response to accelerometer data provided by two accelerometers, one strapped to each wrist. My impulse was to play with the relationship of the accelerometers on my wrists, to see what effect this had on the sounds generated. It reminded me of an approach to generating movement imparted by my dance teacher, Annetta Luce that had a particularly powerful effect on my own dancing. That is, by relating one part of the body to another, be it elbow to ankle, head to coccyx, or heart to ovaries. The positioning of the sensors on the body can facilitate this.

George had patched together a simple, yet mesmerising sound generator that took accelerometer data from a Wii remote handheld. His motivation was to encourage slow movements. The sounds generated were tinkling bells +. I decided to draw on my Butoh Bodyweather training in bizeku, where you move as slowly as possible. In doing this, I listened to the sounds produced – delicate and meditative – , but did not attempt to influence the nature of the sound through my actions. The delicacy and fragmented phrasing of the sound made me wonder about a group of performers composing a soundscape through the intermingling of their individual effects.

Jonathan had rigged up an array of liquid crystal panels that changed their opacity in response to data from a proximity sensor. The proximity sensor used ultrasound, with the distance calculated from the delay in the reflected wave. In playing with it, I tried approaching from different angles, at different speeds, to see where the envelope of sensing ended and its sensitivity to change in position.

My offering was costume, with a view to body augmentation, wearables and organic? environments. I had draped a skin-coloured stretchy fabric over a beam and stitched the ends together. This created a membrane or cocoon for people to inhabit and play with. The costume consisted of a plain skin-coloured bodysuit that could be stuffed with a variety of padded shapes filled with dacron soft-fill and/or popcorn. The popcorn gave a nice weightiness and texture to the pads. I was interested to see how people would react, explore, experience. And later to imagine the connections between the use of costume and the sensor technologies …

For many, the putting on of the garments was a performance in itself … and very funny.

George escaping the cocoon

Lizzie's big bust

Catherine's corrugated legs

Jonathan testing the limits

Maggie crawling to the cocoon

The first full day of the second TTTB comprised of the ‘The Distinct Body’ lessons with Catherine Truman and my own experimental approach, ‘The Situated Body’. Compressed, expanded, heavy, symmetrical, light, small, large….these are some of the words we have used to describe the raised awareness of our bodies through Feldenkrais methods. These two workshops both asked us to experiment with ways to communicate the tracking of interior shifts in attention in our awareness of the feelings of voids, solids, cavities and densities of our corporeal selves.

For The Distinct Body workshop we used large sheets of paper, felt tip pens and charcoals as drawing tools to map our evolving sense of body image through an experimental Feldenkrais process. The process of drawing our selves at 1 to 1 scale revealed how each of us initially perceived our own anatomy. A distorted view of our sense of scale, proportion and skeletal structure were evident, but gradually refined as our attention to our corporeal selves intensified. Armed with a heightened sense of our physicality we hit the bush for the second workshop!

The Situated Body workshop came about in dialogue with Catherine. I was interested for our group to explore another method to articulate a felt sense of the body through space. Using the landscape of Bundanon as a point of departure, we were asked to explore the experience of our body in relationship to the environment. How does our awareness of scale, distance, proximity, time, temperature, texture, light and airflow change our perceptions of the exterior environment and self? What sort of external typography did we identify and what does it invite us to do? In what form might this be communicated?

Just as I had identified a possible location I was ambushed by a herd of Kangaroos, probably curious about what I was doing, and perhaps I had stumbled too far into their territory? Not wanting to take any risks I hastily retreated. I will be interested to see what will emerge from this workshop when we return later in the week… 

EXPERIENTIAL ANATOMY

In the act of drawing my own body outline and skeleton, i found myself ocscillating between drawing from the felt sense (how my imagination traced the edge of the body, the weightiness of bones and flesh pressing into the floor) and drawing on known anatomical models and ways of depicting bones. My sketchy knowledge of anatomy, the exact shape of bones, was challenged in this exercise. But then, that wasn’t what the exercise was about.

modes of representation, how to draw a bone, limited/limiting resources/skill, falling back on known ways, not really attending to the felt sense of my body

body image – constructed, imagined, lived, distorted

For Merleau-Ponty, the body image is dynamically constructed according to the value of the task.

I had difficulty gauging and translating the actual length or dimensions of my neck (i live with a long neck) into a visual representation, drawn on paper. I drew my neck longer than it actually was, despite using my hand to measure its dimensions. When drawing my body and checking visually what a certain part of the body looked like, I got mixed up between what it looked like in a prone position and what it looked like in a standing position, as the fall and twist of the limbs is different in each. At some point, Catherine made the statement, “what are you trying to do”. I then realised that I was attempting to achieve an accurate visual rendering from the outside, rather than a rendering from the felt internal sense of the body. In response, I began to vary the quality of the linework to suggest the quality of the felt sense of the limbs and bones, in particular, the heaviness or lightness, the torsion.

the felt contour of the body, focus of sensation, wavering line of coincidence, staying with, dropping out

Drawing from felt sense ... or not

THE SITUATED BODY

Wandering in the pastures and bush at Bundanon. Taking note of the effect of the environment on my bodily sensations and in turn, whether the attendance to the felt experience influences or changes my perception of the external environment.

A tall, spindly tree holds my attention. Its surging verticality commands an uplift in my own posture, a rising and thinning, a thin energetic line upwards. The surrounding trees conspire in this uprightness.

A surging sense of verticality

Further along the track, the peeling orange bark like a contagious skin disease rivets me to the spot. I stay a while, watching, listening. The sound of a leaf falling on the dry ground startles me. I feel a grabbing in my chest, the space above my diaphragm spasming. Another leaf or branch drops. I tune in to the staccato cascade of sounds, twitching and turning towards each sound. On the alert, ready to gather and move … my own small drama in the bush.

I stay with this listening. My own foot steps sound clomping and insensitive, out of place in the delicate warble of the bush. The steep slope invites a small musical phrase of footwork. Dry leaves rustle and crunch under my dancing feet.

Monday

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

Danielle Wilde has devised this simple, yet fabulous wearable interface, the hipDisk. I met Danielle at OZCHI2008 in Cairns. The hipDisk consists of two disks that you wear above and below your waist. An array of soft switches is positioned on the perimeter of each disk. A sound is generated when two switches touch. The disks exaggerate and make visible the changing relationships between the torso and the hip in motion. Cap it off with an Esther Williams-style bathers and swimming cap, multiply the number of performers, and you get this wacky musical ensemble playing The Girl from Ipanema.

http://www.daniellewilde.com/iWeb/daniellewilde/hipdisk.html

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