Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 3
--empyre- soft-skinned space--OK, so I guess I broke the discussion? Cheers, Garth Paine gpain...@me.com On Jul 17, 2014, at 4:51 PM, Garth Paine gpain...@me.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- 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 gpain...@me.com On Jul 16, 2014, at 6:23 AM, Sue Hawksley s...@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 gpain...@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,
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 3
--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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 3
--empyre- soft-skinned space--what do you mean you broke it ??? what discussion did you broke .. or that i put an end to it ?? sorry if that is what you mean .. On 19/07/2014, at 11:36 PM, Garth Paine wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- OK, so I guess I broke the discussion? Cheers, Garth Paine gpain...@me.com On Jul 17, 2014, at 4:51 PM, Garth Paine gpain...@me.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- 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 gpain...@me.com On Jul 16, 2014, at 6:23 AM, Sue Hawksley s...@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 gpain...@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
