Monday

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

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

I thought this article by Edward S. Katkin of the Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York, is an interesting review of G. Ádám (1998). Visceral Perception: Understanding Internal Cognition. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 232.

Edward Katkin titles his review, The last word on gut feelings, which I think is a more than appropriate subject for our consideration.

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.

Thought this might be of interest to the group

‘Affect and Emotion in Human-Computer Interaction’, a book edited by Christian Peter and Russell Beale is now available online from Springer

[view contents]

About this book

Affect and emotion play an important role in our everyday lives: They are present whatever we do, wherever we are, and wherever we go, without us being aware of them for much of the time. When it comes to interaction, be it with humans, technology, or humans via technology, we suddenly become more aware of emotion, either by seeing the other’s emotional expression, or by not getting an emotional response while anticipating one.

Given this, it seems only sensible to explore affect and emotion in human-computer interaction, to investigate the underlying principles, to study the role they play, to develop methods to quantify them, and to finally build applications that make use of them. This is the research field for which, over ten years ago, Rosalind Picard coined the phrase “affective computing”.

The present book provides an account of the latest work on a variety of aspects related to affect and emotion in human-technology interaction. It covers theoretical issues, user experience and design aspects as well as sensing issues, and reports on a number of affective applications that have been developed in recent years. Written for: Researchers and professionals

Keywords: affect, affective computing, computer game, emotion model, emotion recognition, hci, human computer interaction, robotic, simulated emotion.

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

Thought this report on BioFeedback apparel might be of interest. Interfaces for biological sensing in art.

The above video interview with Sean Montgomery was recorded at the recent Last HOPE conference where Mr. Montgomery exhibited his line of ‘Vital Threads’ projects.

I have also been using some of the Infusion Systems wireless biosensing systems on another performance project with Hellen Sky.

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?