----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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 <gpain...@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.ash...@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 <jhopk...@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
s...@articulateanimal.org.uk
http://www.articulateanimal.org.uk




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