Following from Maggie, Catherine and Lian, here are a couple of points about my plans for the Sensorium Gymnasium at Pspace.

I’ve been thinking alot about this challenge I have faced all the way through this research project of working as a curator/facilitator without pushing people (or myself) towards “outcomes”.  In Bundanon I made some important discoveries about the relationship between my own curatorial practice and my physical or embodied engagement with artworks/collaborators/exhibition spaces/audiences…  I decided to make a conscious effort at Pspace to “be” (in relation to all these things) rather than to “do” (as I do normally).  Sounds a bit vague  I know – but that’s part of the point.

So i’ve decided to inhabit a little corner of the residency space for the duration of the lab. Picking up on from Maggie and Catherine’s plans I’d like to call it the Living Room.  I’m going to have some comfy chairs, coffee and tea making facilities, lots of books and articles, a heater, lots of documentation of everything we’ve done so far, a bowl of fruit and some other munchies.  I’m going to install myself there and mull over everything we’ve done, do some reading and writing, and be generally availalbe in case anyone needs help or wants to talk about anything.  I hope that you will all come to The Living Room and visit me whenever you want to have a sit down or a think, or look at some photos/books, have a chat, have a cup of teac etc etc…

Ideally that Living Room will be a good friendly place on the last day for visitors to come and find out more about the project too.

Garth – I’d love to borrow your recordings of Bundanon so that people can come and listen to those sounds.

I’m also making a little zine that documents some of the experiences we have had so far working on this project.  There will be enough of these for you all to have some to give away and keep as mementos.

Any suggestions or thoughts on this gratefullly received.

In thinking through what I may be offering at the PSpace residency, I made a rough sketch of the elements to consider in designing the aesthetic experience.

• Contextual activity, tasks, trajectory
• Constraints, strategies
• Attention – internal/external, diffuse/directed
• Action – imagination/physical
• Roles – performer, witness, aide, co-performer

My initial proposal is to develop a work requiring the interaction of 2 people, connected and constrained in different ways. What is it like to move in a fettered fashion? For one participant, their movement is assisted and constrained by a walking frame and extremely high heels. Part of the ritual is having the shoes put on and removed by the witness/aide. Perhaps one person is blindfolded or masked at certain points. The witness/aide gently directs the participant to explore various states of being, through the reading of scripted cues. Cues are for directing attention and generating movement and experiential qualities, perhaps the use of imagery and artefact. Should biofeedback or motion sensors be incorporated? What would their role be? Amplification/extension/distortion?

Production requirements:

• high heeled shoes in a few sizes
• walking frame – OTS or custom
• motion sensors that can be attached to ankles and other body parts, eg. pelvis, head

Here are some threads that I’ve pulled out from my Bundanon experience, that Ive been turning around in my head over the past week since the workshop.

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!

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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.

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?

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… 

Monday

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

thinking through the body people

just to let you know that a selection of the photographs i’ve taken as part of this project, i’ve uploaded to a set on my flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/somayalangley/sets/72157606775570832/

Garth asked a great question today, in relation to the question of our respective desires for the project: not sure exactly what he said – but it was something like – ‘How do we (as interaction designers) get to experience through touch?’

How do we get to experience through the touch we facilitate as makers in responsive electronic art systems? This translated into pragmatic questions around how do we, as makers of senor-based works, get at the processes happening during a tactile,intimate encounter, such as provided during a somatic bodywork session (i.e. the Feldenkrais hands-on work known as Functional Integration). Many of us are hoping that Catherine and Maggie will be able to help shine some light on this – one way or another.

For me this was one of the core motivations behind the development of the TTTB concept in 2006 – so important because its still so relatively unknown.

So what then of the pragmatics? Some areas that strike me as good starting points would be to compile an inventory of fundamental structures and life skills developed during infancy and early childhood: those basic reflexes and motor skills that underpin our ability to sense and act in the world – orienting our selves to the world/self, finding stability, responding to novelty/threat etc. My first experience of Feldenkrais Functional Integration started with a lesson on falling: I was asked to explore ways of falling, and see if I could find a way of falling that felt easy, soft and enjoyable – which seemed odd at first – since I had come because of a problem I was having with abdominal tension. What surprised me was how such a simple process – falling repeatedly – could reverberate so intensely at a much more personal level.

Its this capacity for body-focussed experiences to elicit intense personal realizations that is compelling me towards research into this area of touch and movement sensation

a diagramatic representation of some of the discussion on video cued recall.

Cheers, Garth