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

Working with clay – what a treat! I absolutely loved it. I felt like Auguste Rodin, shaping human form out of a lump of clay, so malleable, yet requiring physical force, an engagement of the whole body not just the hands. Imagining the flesh, the volume, the density, the boniness, the receptivity to touch.

In the first session Catherine asked us to sculpt a body out of clay. In the second session we sculpted our own body while blindfolded. The body was to assume a posture or gesture familiar to us. In between these two sessions, Catherine lead us on a Feldenkrais exercise working with tilting the pelvis, articulating the spine and rotating the entire arm from the shoulder. At the beginning of the exercise, she asked us to register where the act of sculpting still resonated in the body. For me, I felt a glow in my abdomen, lower arms and hands.

My first body sculpted out of clay

The first clay sculpture had an almost chicken-like lower half, swollen abdomen, drumstick thighs. The chest was like heavily whipped water, almost ravaged. I wanted to show the intensity of emotion experienced in this part of the body. The clay allowed a easy translation of the dynamic, emotive qualities of human experience.

My body in clay ... sitting cross-legged

I felt a freedom being blindfolded, not caring so much about getting the visual form “right”. The pleasure in the body moving and making, feeling and stroking the clay, came to the foreground. I sculpted standing up, feeling the force of the earth under my feet feeding through my body and hands into the clay. I took heed of Catherine’s reminders about taking care of my body in the act of making … where was I holding tension, where did it hurt … shifting to a new position.

I notice my sculptures were both incomplete forms, offering suggestions, ambiguity in interpretation.

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.

Was thinking about how I could use accelerometers and gyroscopes to track and respond to rhythmic body movements, which got me thinking about Feldenkrais pelvic clock excersises, and then Hula hoop work. Seemed like a realy obvious and fund thing that the Wii people must have thought of, and indeed they have:

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

all sensored up

finally i make an appearance on the blog again, a number of things have been whirling thru my head, but mostly going in circles without being concrete enough to put down as text.

a few weeks back, george, garth and myself met up at the VIPR studios at UWS to discuss options for the upcoming february workshop. we trialed a number of sensors that are included in the i-cube box. george was focusing on rotation where as i’m more driven towards looking at various emotional states – such as anxiety. we wired me up with a galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor and i tried to build the anxiety within myself (and sometimes with a little help from george) – bring up old traumatic memories for example. i felt i was more stressed and anxious. the sensors indicated nothing apart from i was in the very same state that i began in.

eventually we figured the tech wasn’t working and then decided to try it out on george. immediately the responses were picked up and reflected in garths max patch that was visualising the GSR data.

reasons for this: apparently my skin was far too dry (despite moistening the part in contact with the sensor). so one consideration that is brought very quickly to the fore is the massive differences between different individual’s bodies and they way that sensor systems may really need to be calibrated for the individual and the data doesn’t necessarily reflect what is going on.

what are the repercussions of this in art-work that is designed for a large-scale (non-individual) focussed audience?

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.