Care is a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – and its absence in so much of what we experience in the worlds around us (I get so sad when I see people littering in the street or on trains and busses – dont they care about the spaces they live in – are they so numb to their environment that they couldn’t give a f#%ck?).

We could think of the art experience as an extension of this idea of care (not disimilar to concepts of  ‘conviviality’ or hospitality that circulated around discussion on ‘rellational aestheics’) – coupled perhaps with some flirtation (thinking here about the careful touch of two people dancing) – or the uncontainable  of an experienced enthusiast as they share the source of their joy to a new commer or fellow affcionado (look at THIS! and THAT!). Through this contact we bring something otherwise hidden – out from eachother – and that we together bear witness to for a breif moment that we may or may not call an ‘art’ experience, a lesson, a workshop, a meeting of friends etc.

The question then changes from what we as artists are ‘interested’ in – to what specifically we care about, and how we manifest this care through our actions and foci, through the situations and exchanges we create for other people.

So for me – with this project – I’m trying to articulate how I can extend a caring and enlivening touch to other people (and myself!) through experiences that allow us to become sensitive and aroused by subtle and not so subtle qulaities of touch, movement and proprioception. To this end – I have to temper my habitual impulse towards large intense experience – with the knowledge that its not via extreme, cathartic actions that we learn to refine our capacity for sensitivy and discernment

- but on the contrary -

its only by learning to be still, and attentive to small actions/sensations that we can start to gain a deeper awareness of where we are opperating FROM.

This blog has been written fresh after listening to a wonderful concert presented as part of Liquid Architecture, and in particular – an amzing set by Asmus Tietchens that featured a truely sensual use of dynamic volumes, sounds that caressesed and wove in and our of audibility, with lilting forms that had me swaying on the edge of my seat like a snake charmer’s cobra! The delicacy of this sound was supported by the strength of the sound system (occasional use of deep bass – confidently hinting at its full potential), and the improved listening acoustics (huge curtains drawn around the space at the start of his set). This experience left me deeply touched, and determined to acheive a more considered use of sound and volume dynamics in my forthcomming interactive art show at St. Vincent’s Hospital. To create a situation where to use an analogy – the snail feels safe to venture out of it’s shell – and to extend its ommatophores (eye stalks) out of its head – and into its surrounds (in this instance – a biofeedback system that is an environment that is both inside and outside). To extend this metaphor a little further – one doesn’t get the snail to extend its eye stalks by poking them with your fingers!

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!

-

A seemingly simple exercise in pairs. Sitting opposite each other within arm’s reach, pressing palm to palm. Maggie’s only instruction. We wait …

A listening … tremulous vibrations in Jonathan’s fingertips … tiny shifts back and forth.

Maggie talked about the language of constraints

…

THE BRAIN

We develop habitual paths for action/cognition in our brain. Yet alternative paths are possible, lying dormant. The habitual path is the path of least resistance. To develop new paths or ways of being, we may need to block the habitual paths. Closing off one of the senses, like being blindfolded, assists this process.

attention assists learning

newborn infants have a high and constant supply of nucleus basalis. It is thought to facilitate learning – I need to read up on this, as I didn’t catch all of Maggie’s explanation.

The function of nucleus basalis in the brain

Maggie asked us to draw our brain. Then draw the functions of our own brain that were strongly or weakly developed.

My idea of my brain as a distributed entity, with dark swamps of creative ferment

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?

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.

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.

Her book “What is Art For?” was a powerful inspiration during my doctoral research when I was re-thinking notions of instrumentality in art practice, and looking to understand my own practice in relation to more encompassing view of the history of art and culture that looks beyond the narrow (and historically anomalous) scope of 20th century Western art history and aesthetics.

“We can begin a discussion of artmaking by noting that from very early (as long ago as 200,000 years), humans have been naturally attracted to the extraordinary as a dimension of experience and that at some point they seem also to have been moved to make the ordinary extraordinary—that is, to shape or elaborate everyday, mundane reality and thereby transform it into something special, different from the everyday.”

“Craft is ineluctably grounded in the life of the body, the physicality of material and material objects—their feel, their weight, their resistance, their fragility or durability.”

“At the core of ritual and art as I have described them is the emotional intersubjectivity developed and practiced in mother-infant interaction. Making and making special are inseparable from the innate human impulse to share feelings and from the need and ability to express ourselves in relationship with others. And we experience the works of others intersubjectively also. The gestural traces in handmade objects, like the bodily signatures in dance and song, contribute directly to another’s reception or appreciation of them.”

“For the perceiver, a made object implies not only a hand, but a person with hands—someone mortal like ourselves who fashioned this object, brought it into being.”

1) RESONANCE - something that has been raised that resonated especially with me was the concept of ‘People as mirrors’.
The idea of situations where people become the mirrors, instead of machines mirroring people: the process of organizing oneself-body in relation to a task (mirroring) – and how this connects in some way to the work Jonathan is doing with task oriented interactions for physiotherapy – finding out ons position/shape in relation to another – then connections between mirroring and empathizing – how this plays out in social interactions between people.

2) DESIRE - a desire (my desire), for a skill, method, experience etc. that I want to engage with over the coming 12 months.

To facilitate self-discovery and reflection in audiences through the use of touch (touching and being touched) – proximal modalities. To evolve a practice that engages people (and me as both maker and audience) through dialogues involving sensations of touch, movement, and communications (spoken, gestural expressions, graphic communications etc).

3) AN OFFERING – where I can make a contribution
In relation to my own practice as an artist-researcher – bio-sensing – research and development strategies for application in creative arts contexts – working with body experience in exhibition settings, then

Important discoveries regarding:

1. The need for calibrated systems, (how you come to know the material/dancer you are working with – and how this knowledge is translated into the artwork.
2. The limits of what can be achieved in relation to measurement and translation of things like ‘emotions’ i.e. the machine cant tell what you are thinking.

In relation to me as the producer – supporting research and collaborations within the ensemble.

4) Some reflections on the discussion around resonances, desires and offerings:
Communicating out from my own body - Catherine Truman.

This is something I’ve been wondering about in my own process – inside the process of translating sensor data into sounds and visual displays – having a strong sense of physical identification with the sounds I’m manipulating during that mapping process – getting lost in particular sounds, and the pleasure of that immersion/envelopment. When this happens, I’m reminded of the pleasure and deep satisfaction that this practice brings to me as an artist, but then also a sense of frustrations that I’ve not been able to implement this level of unity and fluidity in the artworks to the extent that I want.

This brings me back to the offering – what I now know to be important, only by way of realizing mistakes I’ve made so far: the need for artists to know the sensor data as a material – in the same way as a traditional artist/craftsperson knows their material – as points of contact between me, the work and the participant.

Another analogy that comes to mind is that of a costume maker, making costumes for a dance performance – thinking about the costume as a prosthesis, or talisman/amplifier, that amplifies and/or transforms certain qualities of action/presence. In order to for this costume to work – it has to embrace the dancer’s body in one way or another. Knowledge of the data – is knowledge of the form we are making – that is – knowing the way the participants actions – and the machines subsequent reading of these actions by way of various sensor data variables – are bound to a certain range of possibilities (i.e. my heart wont ever beat at 500 beats per minute, my will bend mostly in one direction only).

Without an understanding of this bounded form – the quality and extent of this contact becomes highly tenuous – this is the problem I’ve been struggling with for the past four years now – and its at the top of my list for the next 12 months, in addition to Thinking Through The Body.

enjoy…. garth

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