[-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 3

[Garth Paine]

Hi Sue et al (resending to the correct thread....)

I thought it might be useful to respond with some writing around the nature of experience and embodiment - I understand your frame for virtuality, but I am constantly trying to really understand what that is from a kind of direct experience and how it changes based on my conditioning and on the socially/communally understood reference - I am asking myself all the time, to what extent is the accepted paradigm valid - what does it miss, what does it establish through aspiration rather than existent phenomena.

So here is part of a framework (edited down here) developed by myself and several others at WISP2010 which I organised at Critical Path in Sydney in 2010/201.  This section pertains specifically and only to notions of Experience and Embodiment in interactive works and makes a distinction with pre-existing paradigms of performance

Experience and Embodiment contains three subdimensions: 
Porosity, Perception, and Presence.

a) Porosity. The content of the work, or the work itself (the artefact, musical work, play, dance work etc), may be more or less porous or responsive to real-time influence and, correspondingly, more or less sealed. Likewise, the embodied movements of the performer or performers may be (and may be experienced as) more or less open to influence in real time. For instance, in standard mainstream performance a soliloquy in Shakespeare is, to some approximation, a fixed artefact. The words must remain unchanged.

b) Perception. In many forms of interactive performance, the perceptual attention and experience of both performers and audience is more diffuse and multisensory or multimodal. Rather than restriction to sight and sound, embodied interactive performance often draws on and taps in to rich kinesthetic or movement awareness, often aligning or confronting the proprioceptive and motor systems of performers and audience members by way of unusual, collaborative, mediated, or hybrid movement forms. Communication is thus not solely the transmission and perception of explicit content, but taps more implicit, habitual, and embodied forms of sensory-affective memory and experience. The openness or porosity of the work may be more or less available to performer and/or audience, and the evaluation of intention will not be entirely conscious and explicit. The experience and perception of commitment, of flow and focus, is a multisensory engagement with the work.

c) Presence. Performer/s and audience may be more or less immersed or absorbed in the momentary experience of the work, or correspondingly more or less experientially distant or detached. Presence or distance respectively can occur at a number of levels which need not always coincide, and can be more or less free from presupposition and morality. For performers, paradoxically, a heightened sense of presence can sometimes emerge alongside a feeling of detachment, when there is no longer a need for heavy conscious monitoring and direct control of the minutiae of embodied activity, such that the sequences and interactions that arise in real time seem to erupt from outside the conscious self.

Cheers,

Garth Paine
gpaine62 at me.com



On Jul 16, 2014, at 6:23 AM, Sue Hawksley <sue at articulateanimal.org.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Garth
> 
> Thanks for the questions you raise about the fluidity of 'self' and the different layers of awareness of lived-experience. 
> 
> On 15 Jul 2014, at 14:48, Garth Paine <gpaine62 at me.com> wrote:
> 
>> I wonder how we situate our thinking when it is sooo complex to become aware of the point of reference we establish.  I wonder this because I want to find where the virtual begins?
>> 
>> recently a friend shared with me a small experiment probably known to all of you:  Please silently read the following several times - "I can hear the voice in my head reading this sentence"
>> 
>> Which made me think about how virtuality is inbuilt - there appears to be several of me: me reading, me listening, me observing the listener and critiquing the experiment, me in physical form seemingly hosting all of these facets of the self etc - and they all seem distinct and material in some way - so there appears to be at least 4 of me and therefore I am confused perhaps about which is what - ie. where the no-virtual and the virtual transition and which me is embodied and how?
> 
> I have been thinking more about  the virtual in terms of potential, and from a performance and theatrical perspective, in terms of play. This might be a play of or on the imagination, sensation, affect, cognitive processes, neural pathways etc. and playing on the confusion of selves and bodies, the plasticity of the brain. Research into mirror neurons reveals that what you see done by another is as important to the brain as what you do yourself. The tactile-vision substitution system (TVSS) developed by Paul Bach-y-Rita reveals that what you feel done is as important as what you see (as Sophia's research is examining).  Electromagnetic stimluation, or damage to, the temporoparietal junction can create hallucinations or out-of-body experiences or the effect of something being as if it were other - something or somewhere or someone else etc. But if we can already 'be' many bodies, where is 'out-of'body'? or is it just another body, always potentially available, revealed by what
> ever medium facilitates it coming to attention?
> 
> Story can also capture the imagination and generate individual or group illusions, or mass delusions. After the Fox sisters heard ghostly rapping noises in their farmhouse in the 1840s, they approached Phineas T Barnum, and came up with a format for a show which enabled masses of people to 'see' and 'hear' the dead. Playing on grief and fear and hope, the spiritualist seance seems to me to be an example of a shared virtual space, and a form of distributed cognition. The technologies used by mediums to create apparitions were lower-tech than VR systems (candles and cheesecloth secreted in bodily orifices, brought to 'life' by some clever manoeuvres) but it seems to me there is a lot in common in the quest to create surrogate bodies or experiences.
> 
> best, Sue
> 
> 
> 
> SUE HAWKSLEY
> independent dance artist
> sue at articulateanimal.org.uk
> http://www.articulateanimal.org.uk
> 
> 
> 
> 
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