[-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 3

[Sue Hawksley]

Dear Garth and Tamara

Tamara - the project sounds great, the kids must be having a ball!  Garth, thanks for the framework. Picking out a couple of points:

On 18 Jul 2014, at 09:21, Garth Paine <gpaine62 at me.com> wrote:
>  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.

On 18 Jul 2014, at 14:53, Tamara Ashley <Tamara.Ashley at beds.ac.uk> wrote:
> Many of the children had a readiness to give up the 'I' of their selfhood in order to work collaboratively with the technology - it became part of their perceptual and experiential field, again suggesting integrated and systemic processing of information. 

I recently saw Australian Dance Theatre's 'Proximity', in which choreographer Garry Stewart explores phenomenological concepts. The interactive video system by Thomas Pachoud is currently running as an installation piece, which I experienced yesterday (and had a ball!) Susan Hillier at UniSA has been doing research into stroke rehabilitation using the system: <http://w3.unisa.edu.au/unisanews/2014/July/story3.asp> which seems to be exploiting brain's capacity for plasticity. The participants in her study will be engaging very consciously in the system. The kids working with dancedigital, or audience interacting within works like Proximity may well be less explicity conscious of the potential affects of the experience. But if interactive systems can alter damaged brains, presumably changes can also occur in healthy brains. So are performers/ participants physiologically altered by their experience? 

The points you both raise make me return to two of the questions that kick-started the month's discussion:

- As shared VR experiences becomes pervasive how might social conventions shift and the underpinning notions of selfhood and collective evolve?
- What might a collective virtual experience contribute to notions of extended or distributed mind, agency or identity?

 - and to ask you both your thoughts on how 'accepted paradigms' might be changed as a digital generation grows up, people who seem at ease inhabiting porous works, and less phased by taking on more fluid and varied forms of perception and presence. Of course, there is another raft of issues and questions in here as John highlighted:

On 18 Jul 2014, at 00:36, John Hopkins <jhopkins at neoscenes.net> wrote:
> When a child picks up an object and turns it into a 'make believe' toy or companion in play, it is quite a different intensity of process of picking up an ipad that is packed full of protocols that are subtly 'directing' the play. Those protocols, in their power to direct embodied energy (life!) are non-trivial, and I would suggest that in their subtlty, they are more problematic in their ability to 'direct' the social development of the the child than less complex technoogical devices. In the case you describe, the presence of "a larger avatar" to "encourage" the children to move "in creative ways" seemed to be a crucial point in the process.  

Tamara - with regard to scale and the observations you made of the children- Susan Hillier plans to develop her research in stroke rehabilitation, currently undertaken in the large installation environment, to use smaller portable devices, it will be interesting to see how that impacts the results and if there are any correlations.

all the best, Sue




SUE HAWKSLEY
independent dance artist
sue at articulateanimal.org.uk
http://www.articulateanimal.org.uk