George and Lizzie enjoying the view from the workshop space at the Bundanon Trust Boyd Education Centre, Riversdale.

ATTENTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES for an aesthetics of touch, movement and proprioception: having and/or developing the ability to attend to sensations and feelings arising from within their body – ‘knowing how to appreciate’ the significance of what is felt (like appreciating unfamiliar foods and flavors? or music? – needs to develop from social practice?).

This is something Catherine emphasized at the beginning and end of the Bundanon workshop, and through her ‘Distinct Body’ workshops – without this ability to listen and unfold insight from the sensation of our breath, skeleton, muscles and skin, how much can we more can hope to achieve?

We need an experiential vocabulary for thinking through the body, a vocabulary of tactile, proprioceptive and kineasthetic experiences and reflections, that can enable us to move from sylables, to words, from words to sentences, and from sentences to stories. This, like any other language, is something developed over time, with other people.

EXPERIENTIAL NARRATIVES – Dramaturgical Aesthetics of Interaction, Aesthetics of Participation. A focus beyond the technical aspects of the artwork, towards structure of the situation as a whole (location, entry-points, social context and conditions, etc.), and the development of the participant’s experience within it (how it starts, develops and comes to an end).

RELATIONAL SYSTEMS AND STRUCTURES: Human-Human Interactions that explore proximal modalities as their primary modality (touch, smell, taste, temperature, movement, proprioception). ‘Live Art’ intimate performance forms: one-to-one engagements between a host and their guest. Taking full advantage of the incredible emotional intelligence and multi-modal sensitivity that we humans posses (in contrast to our machines). To what extent is my own fixation on exhibiting computer-based interactions a product of a tradition fixated on the so-called autonomy of the art object? Autonomy from what …other humans?
[Note to self:why do I feel obliged to exhibit my work as a stand alone experience - without someone there to guide people into the work, to listen  to their stories, to bear witness (and to value) their experience in the work?]

Maggie invited us to explore various forms of hand-to-hand contact incorporating skeletal sensation and contact

THE ART EXPERIENCE AS INVITATION, art making and curating as a form of hosting, induction, hospitality (hospice?). In connection with Making Strange – offering participants some support along their journey – a base from which explore, or temporary shelter and resting point along the way. [this brings to mind pilgrim cultures: wayside shrines, wells, cairns, storm-shelters etc. I wonder what their contemporary equivalents might be?]

SOMAESTHETIC GYMNASIUM: a place for cultivating somaesthetic abilities/sensitivities – consisting of semi-structured body-focused experiences, that stimulate the visitors capacity for somaesthetic pleasure, beauty and critical reflection.

‘INTELLIGENT’ BODY-FOCUSED INTERACTIVE ARTWORKS – Body-focused interactions that acknowledge, and are sensitive to the emotional dimensions of our physicality: the capacity for movement and touch to facilitate strong emotional recall, release, insight, inspiration etc. Maggie mentioned the idea of interactive art makers process as being one of ‘growing the computer’s neurology’, I think this is a powerful concept – to understand and expand on the computerised interactive systems ability to be in the world – to hold a representation of its environment, and its behavioyr within this environment – regardless of how simple this may be. [The memory of of our brain-mapping workshop comes to mind, with Lizzie's reflection that the maps she drew of her brain, could equally be a map of the world…].

SENSUAL TACTILE AND KINAESTHETIC PLEASURE AND BEAUTY IN HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION
“any use of a new tools and technologies involves new uses (and postures and habits) of the body, which means new possibilities of somatic strains, discomforts, and disabilities resulting from inefficient body use that cultivation of somatic self-consciousness could help  us to reveal, remedy or avoid.” – Shusterman, 2008, p. 13

Lizzie’s note: “What about the somatic pleasures and enjoyment that these technologies might also support?”

George testing a Wii controlled sound design - tracking slow movements

Artworks that depend on specific qualities of human action – tuned in such a way as to draw you into moving, standing, behaviong in unfamiliar and/ort enjoyable ways (in contrast to interfaces that draw you into familiar but painful and frumpy ways of being – i.e. laptops and bad mice).
[Can I imagine an inteactive art experience that was FUNDAMENTALLY, a pleasure and a joy to experience?]

After accepting/imagining this possibility, we  can go on to consider what kind of pleasure that such works might offer (obviously, there are many kinds of pleasure), and the philosophical and ethical ends (no matter how fragile or fleeting the gesture) to which these pleasures might be directed.

Tracing my outline in Catherine Truman

The map I drew of my outline and skeleton in Catherine's workshop

SUSPENDING OUTCOMES-ORIENTED RESEARCH PROCESSES, IN FAVOR OF GENUINE, OPEN MINDED ENQUIRY. Drawings made by feeling, paths made by walking. I’m still a little shocked to see how fixated I was on making a ‘correct’ drawing, going to extraordinary lengths to physically trace the outline of my own body, when Catherine’s instructions, were quite clearly to ‘draw an outline of our body, based on our felt experience’ …some more homework to do in this area!

-

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

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”

——————————————–
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?
———————————————

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.

Interesting to note how for forceful this woman’s movements are. I think it should be possible to refine the way the animation and sounds respond to the Wii-fit data to attrach people to more gracefull, gentle movements: track velocity amplitudes, and emphasis the quieter actions, and revolutions per 5 seconds, and emphasise slower speeds.

Here’s a demonstration of Wii-Fit excersises from designers at Nintendo:

For the Maxers among us, there’s a thread on the Max-MSP forum re Wii-Fit interfaces for Max-MSP:

Eric Samothrakis:

You could try Osculator:
http://www.osculator.net/wiki/Main/HomePage
It supports Wii-Fit although “Some Wii-Fit balance boards are unfortunately not working properly (YMMV, a model bought in september was working perfectly).”

Oli Larkin:

a colleague of mine has connected the wii balance board to Max on windows using OSC via Glove Pie: http://carl.kenner.googlepages.com/glovepie

i also tried it on Mac using OSCulator, but seemed that not all the data was sent correctly

Notebook sketch for movement-tracking video paint brush. Minute (often involuntarilly jerky) shoulder or pelvis rotations are turned into wall-to-wall caligraphic circles around the room.

This is an idea I’ve had for some time now – a basic image in physio and bodywork: imagine your (insert body part here) as a paint brush, painting circles on the ceiling. I was thinking about ceiling projections at first, then imagined using a giant broom to paint horizontal stripes around the entire room.

This could easilly done using a 4 projector array – one on each wall. I’m thinking big, messy super-wide brush strokes, like painting with a broom.  You’d use variations in smoothness/jagginess  of the body movement to control things like brush preassure, saturation, bleed etc. What it needs is an accurate, high resolution way of tracking these minute movements i.e movements within an area of between 1 to 2 square inches, and to bea ble to have an opperator manually zoom into to the appropriate area of the body.  More details soon…

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.”

Hi all

Long time between drinks

The trip away was fabulous- a clearing of the air inside and out.

There’s one particular day of my travels that stands alone. A day I’d like to tell you about – the day we flew down to Culver City to visit a museum which has a touch of the miraculous about it : The Museum of Jurassic Technology.

On the surface of it I bet you’re thinking: what has this got to do with Thinking Through the Body?

Well, I think it’s a story about engagement and absorption and pure wonder and undefined truths- of being immersed in a wondrous state of not knowing anything, yet at the same time feeling as though all of one’s senses have been tweeked into life.

We booked our flights on the net. A day’s adventure- flying early morning from San Francisco down to Culver City, Los Angeles – coming back on the evening plane.

The getting there took less that an hour. We landed, jumped into a taxi and sped off into the wide bleached yonder.

It’s a dry and dusty part of the world. Wide streets busy with trucks and dirty cars and neon lights flashing Big Burgers at you. One withered wind-blasted palm tree every two kilometres.

The taxi driver is completely mystified. The Moooseum of Jurassic Technology???????Nevrrrrrrrr hrrrrrd o’thaa’ one beforrrrrrrr. Ya shrrrrrrrr ya got the name rrrright? On Venice Boulevarde right?????? Hmmmnnn.

Oh my god! Tharrrrrrrr tis…wow…nvrrrrr did see that beforrrre. Must’ve driven past it a hundred times orrrr morrrre… What the hell is in tharrrr?????

Well what could I say, having never been here myself before.

Just here on a whim. A waft of something entirely curious. Promising.

A strange little façade:

Its announcement to the outside world is a little quirky, but definitely understated compared to the bellowing signage of the fast food industries also sharing the street.

It’s single-fronted, of a different era, with a green door and worn brass door-bell . There’s a wee classic fountain complete with fine reeds and two niches in the walls at either side- one containing and ostrich egg and the other with a storm of dried moths erupting from a stone vase. The glass is smudged with fingerprints. It’s hours of operation are as measured and precious as these strange vitrines.

But we get there just on opening and enter expecting such a small museum will take us off the streets for an hour to two at the most.

The first thing I notice is that the young woman behind the cluttered from desk is completed unmoved by the fact that there is a highly excited middle-aged tourist trying to impress on her the amazing commitment we have made towards getting there…half way around the world just to visit this museum…this day…for these few hours…all that way from Australia. Hmmn…nope…not impressed.

I twig it must happen all the time- people seeking this place. Oh well, I figure I’m here on my own compelling journey anyway, no need for reassurance about that one.

It’s so dark ,the lighting is unique. Small mounted lights aimed at a rickety collection of roughly cut squares of mirror mounted on wire ricochet the light and split eerie beams onto their targets. There are few other light-sources. I realize nothing is direct in here.

The first exhibit :

I walk up to a glass case jutting out at eye-level from a wooden veneer-clad wall and find myself gazing into a magnifying lens trained on a single Carved fruit-stone mounted in a very old-fashioned way on a metal rod and a turned wooden base. Yeah…I think….there’s some carving there…but I’ve see a few of these carved fruit-stones before…..why is this so remarkable??????????? So I pull my head away and look for some explanation. There’s some writing on the wall near by. I look around…there seems to be a lot of text on the walls near strange objects and various doorways leading of in several directions to other rooms. People from all parts of the universe ( some I suspect from other planets) are here sharing the search with me…but I feel alone. Someone occasionally gaffaws with laughter, others have wry smiles, whilst most look completely mystified. People are so interesting when they are lost.

To avoid being lost I diligently read on….

FRUIT-STONE CARVING

Almond stone(?); the front is carved with a Flemish landscape in which is seated a bearded man wearing a biretta- a long tunic of classical character, and thick soled shoes. He is seated with a viola between his knees while he tunes one of the strings.

In the distance are representations of animals including a lion, a bear, an elephant ridden by a monkey, a boar, a dog, a donkey, a stag, a camel, a horse, a bull, a bird, a goat, a lynx and a group of rabbits: the latter under a branch on which sit an owl, another bird and a squirrel.

On the back is shown an unusually grim Crucifixion, with a soldier on horseback. Loginus piercing Christ’s side with a lance, the cross is surmounted by a titulus inscribed INRI. Imbricated ground.

Dimensions: Length 13mm. Width 11mm.

I read and read and read. Hmmn…Peer at the stone again…

Hmnn…(I’m straining now to see the detail)… hmmmn…well…possibly…yeah maybe it’s all there…on this wee stone…not sure….but…maybe…but how would it fit… well…perhaps…hmmmmn?

I think we think too much, there’s always fertile ground in disbelief.

Suspension of belief though is an entirely different ball-game.

But I reckon this is how to access the absolute wonder of this place.

It’s what being human is all about- having the ability to become consciously absorbed in not knowing. Well…maybe?

I’m keen to step further inside … curiousity leads me in deeper…to another question, led by a grain of truth…maybe, maybe not…can I go in deeper still, all senses opened wide.

The second exhibit:

I can hear a howling from another dark room. OOOOhhhhh. It’s eeirie . Dark. The howling. It’s a wild dog…a coyote I think…it’s penetrating.

I’m looking with my ears. Into the dark. Feeling with my ears into a small room and in the middle another glass box. There’s a viewing contraption at one end and at the other a chair inviting me to see this work from a particular angle. I recognise an animal taxidermied and dislocated – a coyote’s head mounted on the glass jutting into the internal space of this vitrine- lips pulled back over gnarly bared white teeth, red angry tongue.

On the floor of this transparent box is a micro-environment of desert terrain, dust stones and driftwood. The howling is relentless and I sift around in my senses for clues. I feel drawn in compelled inside this case and climb into the chair to get closer.

My eyes are met with cubes of glass like clumsy spectacles focused at the place one would expect the coyotes brain would be. I imagine. I look and can hear with my eyes now. The sound of the howling is uncovered. There is a moving picture projected on the side of the animals head….I feel inside it. It’s a small man, sitting on a chair…dressed in white…alone in white and he is raising his head baying in the darkness…howling like a wild dog.

The image is moving. I can still feel it clearly. Haunting. Profound.

Beautiful. Solitary.

On an on:

A sculpture of the Pope made from a single human hair , coloured with a brush also made from a single human hair –on strokes made between heartbeats……on and on……a fully-functioning Russian tea-room complete with exquisite samovar and tea-maid and live lounging Russian wolfhounds….on and on …..the story of………..a tale of…

on and on…….on and on………..

I look at my watch finally….four hours have evaporated and I still want more of this ….not knowing….not understanding.

Am I dreaming?

No I haven’t fallen asleep.

I’m not in the least bit bored or frustrated.

Every neurone, every cell is tingling.

A rare tingling.

I’ve let my body do the thinking.

Catherine Truman. October 2008