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…

Watch how you can trick your brain by stroking a fake rubber hand and your real hand at the same time. Link from New Scientist online

I’ll be working on presenting this illusion at the Bundanon workshop! I think it opens the door for all sorts of poetic body transformation – wondering how we could include some more subtle/imaginative body metamorphoses… some research has been done on virtual/mixed reality displays and this sort of re-mapping of bodyimage – I’ll follow up soon.

A couple of weeks ago I obtained a copy of a new book by Mark Johnson, called The Meaning of The Body. Its a great read, and has really helped me to understand more concretely, many of the issues we are dealing with when we talk about thinking through the body in relation to our various practices – thinking and meaning being defined more broadly, as processes and constructions that enable us to adapt to the worlds around and within us. Its only available in hardback at the moment, but I’ll see if I can send all you TTTB-Artlab researchers some excerpts soon.

In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world.

Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world.

Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning’s bodily sources.

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!

Three foci:

1. Resonances: Experience
2. Desires:  how do we get at physical experience?  How is experience represented in physiology?
3. Offerings:  An experience of Sonic Gesture; knowledge about sensing systems and the qualities and limitations of the resulting data.

I am very interested in delving deeper into the nuance of sensed experience.  To understand better how I can get data from the body that reflects small nuances in changes of body state (felt experience) without being invasive.  Thinking Through the Body represents un-voiced engagements – qualities of interaction that are internal, complex, multifaceted and dynamic. The sensate body…. the sensitised body…. how can we measure the changes in these somatic states.

For my own sake I place here a definition of Somatic  (see wikipedia.org)

The somatic nervous system is the part of the peripheral nervous system associated with the voluntary control of body movements through the action of skeletal muscles, and with reception of external stimuli, which helps keep the body in touch with its surroundings (e.g., touch, hearing, and sight).

The system includes all the neurons connected with muscles, skin and sense organs. The somatic nervous system consists of efferent nerves responsible for sending brain signals for muscle contraction.

In discussion this afternoon, Maggie spoke of hearing the body  – hearing changes.. I understood this to be a reflection of a sensed energetic state – a change in the energy flow in the limb, a realighnment …. this is the kind of interaction I would like to get closer to.

Here is a definition of the autonomic nervous system (see wikipedia.org) :

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) (or visceral nervous system) is the part of the peripheral nervous system that acts as a control system, maintaining homeostasis in the body. These activities are generally performed without conscious control or sensation. The ANS affects heart rate, digestion, respiration rate, salivation, perspiration, diameter of the pupils, micturition (urination), and sexual arousal. Whereas most of its actions are involuntary, some, such as breathing, work in tandem with the conscious mind. Its main components are its sensory system, motor system (comprised of the parasympathetic nervous system and sympathetic nervous system), and the enteric nervous system.

One option then is to look for changes in involuntary/un-concious control (ie. heart rate, digestion, respiration rate, salivation, perspiration, diameter of the pupils)as a reflection of prescribed voluntary interactions – ie. to make the sensing a biproduct of the act of engagement rather than the objective – this may assist in subjugating the technological layer so that it is not seen as thepoint of engagement, the first point of contact that needs to be navigated through in order to experience the art work.

cheers, garth

One thing that resonates from this first workshop is the refreshing openness and intimacy of everyone here. An openness to listen, a willingness to share. The focus on the body perhaps supports this.

One thing that I desire is to make things in the weave and wash of stirring, inspiring conversations. To shift from a focus on the development of design methods and tools, to the application of these methods and tools, together with the methods and skills of others in the project, in the production of an actual interactive work. Or should I say, experimental prototypes! Or perhaps new ways of working to produce such things. I do desire that new spaces are created that draw out and seduce us into more playful, curious and novel ways of moving … that bring an aliveness to our everyday existence.

One thing that I can offer to the group is the ability to mediate between the danced, the felt and the designed. This is an ability that I am still in the process of cultivating. In my design research practice, I am interested in ways of traversing between the felt, experience (particularly of movement) and ways of representing movement that can act as resources for design. Some of the methods and tools I work with include movement-oriented personas and scenarios, Laban floor plans for representing spatial trajectories of people, scenario enactment and movement improvisation scores for prototype and user testing. I am especially interested in the creative potential of the moving body and how we can generate design ideas and concepts from the experiential, moving body. The notion of making strange with the moving body is one approach that demands we interrogate our assumptions about our bodies in movement through a range of movement-based techniques.

I thought this links might be of interest: Here is a new MoCAP system that does not use markers on the body – this seems to me to be a revolution in unencumbered motion capture. 

I saw this system at the Organic Motion HQ in NYC last year and was very impressed at the responsiveness  and speed with which it computer the body form within it.Here are some video examples of it in action  Organic Motion data samples and also some discussion of the  biomechanical motion analysis interface 

Optitrack make a cost effective MoCAP system that seems to be reliable and robust, and is portable so makes more sense than say a VICON system for use with dancers in a theatre and for touring a show.

MoCAP example using Optitrack – thought this might be of interest in thinking about what is missing given our Feldenkrais work. 

One of the challenges  we face (often a factor in communicating experience ) is the imprecision of  language.  It seem then that one of the first steps is a glossary – a common understanding of what the terms being used actually refer to – the problem is of course cyclical, in that the use of a singular communication modality is nearly always limiting.

Most sensing systems have been moving towards multi-modal approaches for this same reason.

One example of this is a difference between David Roekeby’s VNS installation and the tracking systems utilized in the installation Fish Bird. In Fish Bird, 4 video cameras mounted in the roof are used to generate a blob at x,y position for each person in the active space, however as an adjunct to this, laser systems are used to check the presence of a human – that is a solid body, and to cross correlate that information with the video data in order to authenticate each set of data as cogent.  By contrast David Roekeby’s VNS installation utilises a single camera view divided into a grid of rows and colums – the presence of the body in a standing posture caused sound mapped to different rows in the camera view to be played simultaneously – lying on the floor and moving the hand up and down through the rows (higher and lower from the ground) elicited quite different and much more differentiated sonic outcomes that allowed for more intentionality in the performance of the work.

Further considerations over the last 24 hrs have included a contemplation of semantics – for instance when undertaking a Feldenkrais session, it seemed to me that the words  Awareness and Attention were being used interchangabl.  I wanted to think though the difference and where these perceptual conditions reside – for instance, possible not in the rational mind… possible in an extended consiousness … within the skin or the muscle …..

some of the words and concepts I have been focused on include:
Awareness  →  Attention ? What’s the difference – where do they reside?

Constraints….. Probabilities.  The semantics of choice… does usage/language form differing affordances, opportunities, expectations and perspectives on what happens?  Can happen?

Intention … function …  in  Feldenkrais, movement seems to be considered/categorised by function.  How does the fiunation and the intentionallity of the gesture relate/inter-relate?

i feel like there is something bubbling in my brain – somewhere in the unconscious, not too close to the surface, but not too far away either. i can’t put my finger on it – only gesturing towards it seems to be the only way to begin.

during our Laban session with Lian Loke today our mirroring of our partners tasks played out as a little animation in my head. Maggie was the 3-D version of a character smelling the flowers, and i was the black and white 2-D line-drawing animated character… sometimes slipping into a three-dimensional moment… only to realise that while i’d been smelling the (imaginary) roses, Maggie had shifted places and moved onto smelling other flowers altogether.

The other thing that is sitting there in the back of my mind, is that of personality. Mirroring my partner, i realised how much i was not just mirroring her movement and gestures – i was mimicing her presence in the space and her overall personality. Lizzie then spoke of the differences between her natural physical movement and posture when undertaking a “picking up cat” gesture and Catherine’s. The learned body movement that we repeat – these habitual responses to a single stimulus/object.

This for me raises the question of whether my notions of “putting someone into someone else’s shoes” is this really possible? This is the premise behind my Suspect Backpack work – but given that our fundamental body learning and how we exist and interact in space can be so different (with so many variations between people) is it possible to put on someone else’s shoes – or are they always just going to be too big/small, or just not fit “quite right”.

Gee, where to start . Everyone here knows that what we are seeking is not absolute. Perhaps it’s impossible to even achieve an approximation. How do we notate a nuance , a transient gesture in amongst a stream of others and make sense of it? What it is to be human, to be present in that moment…in that movement? As an object maker, in the moment when I am most present to that process of making something…I find I am inarticulate. The words don’t even make it to my throat. They don’t exist anywhere I can access. There’s a short circut somewhere. Yet everything seems to be working in concert in my making moment. How can I tell you the story then? How can I take you inside and let you see all the parts working as one? Not separate. One. I have only been able to tell you of shocking discovery-that I am inarticulate in the moment and I want to share much more. I want to understand much more of others too. Access. How do I access this . What language will deliver the infinitessimal sublties of what it is to be human in these moments?
So this project is an experiment in many ways. Thinking through the body is all I know how to do. How can I tell you about it? The art-making process.Perhaps I have to be willing to let go of something in order to relate.