This small symposium brought together the work of media artists and researchers who are interested in notions of embodiment and/or mobility and who work together at the Digital Media department in 2008/2009. This Digital Media (D M) event enabled discussions across departments and attracted a varied audience, with both Faculty and Students from Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Interior architecture, Painting, Photography, the Department of History, Philosophy, and Social Sciences (HPSS), as well as Literary Studies, Music and the Library from Brown. The symposium also attracted participants from the wider arts and music community of Rhode Island, for example from Waterfire.
After opening remarks by organisers Teri Rueb (Department Head of Digital Media) and Frauke Behrendt (Visiting Assistant Professor at Digital Media) the morning session started with Christiane Paul’s (D M part-time Faculty) Keynote “Contexts as Moving Targets. Mobile Media Art, Embodiment, and the Shifting Ground of Context-Awareness”. Paul is Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This session continued with the presentations “Boundaries, Connections, Care and the Mobility of Embodiment” by MIT artist and researcher Kelly Dobson (D M Artist / Designer in Residence), “Thinking Through the Skin: Art for the Sense of Touch” by artist and researcher Erik Conrad (D M part-time Faculty) and “Media Walking as Lefebvrian Rhythmanalysis” by media theorist Frauke Behrendt (Visiting Assistant Professor at Digital Media).
The lunchtime keynote “Embodiment, Subjects and Machines: Some recent projects in performance, installation, sound and architecture” was given by Chris Salter (Associate Professor, Design & Computation Arts, Concordia University), in collaboration with Brown Music Department.
The afternoon session started with “A Feeling for the Environment: Embodiment and Mobility in Design Process” by landscape artist Teri Rueb (Department Head of Digital Media) and continued with “Urban Affordances and Creative Interactions” by artist and researcher Lalya Gaye (D M Artist / Designer in Residence) “Touching Earth” by artist and dance technologist Jamie Jewett (D M part-time Faculty and Technology Research & Computing Coordinator). “The Locative Challenge to Modernist Dualisms of Place and Event” by media theorist Francisco Ricardo (D M part-time Faculty) was the closing presentation, followed by a diverse and detailed discussion of embodiment and mobility issued in Digital Media. This discussion brought together many of the connections that had been made between the different presentations, and continued conversations that had started during lunchtime. The exchange of ideas continued during dinner – after the evening talk by Chris Salter that was part of the “Music and Body” Colloquium at Brown’s Meme program with whom Digital Media co-organised Chris Salter’s contribution to the symposium.
Titles and Abstracts
Contexts as Moving Targets. Mobile Media Art, Embodiment, and the Shifting Ground of Context-Awareness
By Christiane Paul
The talk will explore how different forms of locative, site-specific new media art affect our awareness of social and physical contexts of the environment surrounding us. Among the topics discussed will be different approaches to understanding context, as well as different categories of mapping experience, from media annotations of geographical space to the repositioning of cartography.
Boundaries, Connections, Care and the Mobility of Embodiment
By Kelly Dobson
The concept of care is applied lately to too many things. Eldercare robots that look like children or nurses and say “I love you” question the need for authenticity of emotions, affection and care. Does an emotional response need to be earned to be authentic? What does it mean to care? As machines are fit into roles that people previously held, those roles are altered and we may not always immediately notice all of these changes. I design and build machines that interact through functions analogous to human subconscious, autonomic, and visceral behaviors based on social, cultural, political, psychological and physiological research into what else besides information exchange is going on with us when we interact with machines. In this talk I will share some machines that participate in the mobility of embodiment — the fluidity of what is experienced as part of one’s self or separate from one’s self. These projects are part of a larger process of revealing and making workable crucial but often dissimulated elements of being and care.
Thinking Through the Skin: Art for the Sense of Touch
By Erik Conrad
The “mother of all senses” – touch is the sense which became differentiated into the others, and is the most ancient and largest sense organ of the body. The skin both separates us from our environment and allows us to learn About the environment. Despite being the largest organ of our body, the skin has been generally neglected by both the fine arts and human-computer interaction. In this presentation, I will discuss a tactile aesthetics to foster embodied interactions.
Media Walking as Lefebvrian Rhythmanalysis
By Frauke Behrendt
This talk makes Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis productive for discussing mobile art practices that involve walking. Lefebvre understands rhytmanalysis as a methodological project, where rhythm is a mode, or tool of analysis, not the object of research. While Lefebvre’s understanding of space is largely visual, his rhythmanalysis is concerned with the temporal and has a multi-sensory approach. I suggest that some mobile media artists can be understood as rhythmanalysists in conceptualising their pieces. This concept can be extended to the audience, who by walking the piece can also become rhythmanalysts. In his rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre is longing for “moments of crisis” but feels that as theorist he does not have the right to “provoke an accident”. I argue that this could be the privilege of the artists who can provoke a crisis of the senses with their artworks. This would suggest that walking around the city while participating in a work of mobile (sound) art could question our sensory experience of our media-saturated everyday lives, allowing us to focus on embodied aspects of mobility.
Embodiment, Subjects and Machines: Some recent projects in performance, installation, sound and architecture.
By Chris Salter
This talk will examine recent artistic projects in the areas of new media art, performance and architecture/design that explore the tension between our body’s relationship to dynamic media spaces and how new sensing and computational technologies dramatically transform our concepts of subjectivity and perception. Despite the continued rhetoric that we increasingly inhabit the datasphere and zones of representation (now a move from the VR ecstacy of the 1990s to the seduction of data visualization in the 2000s), I will use several projects to discuss the move towards more dynamic and enactive notions of interaction where perception is seen as action in the world; an active exploration of the environment through our sensory-motor capabilities and a history of interactions taking place among the body, the brain and the environment.
A Feeling for the Environment: Embodiment and Mobility in Design Process
By Teri Rueb
In her biography, “A Feeling for the Organism”, Nobel Prize winning geneticist Barbara McClintock asserts the role of intuition and empathy in the process of scientific discovery. The recognition that scientific insight is not arrived at entirely through rational, linear and quantitative methods would seem obvious to artists and designers, yet still we find our processes fall easily in step with the inherent methodological biases of digital tools that emerge from techno-scientific paradigms. For over ten years my design process has been starkly divided across direct experience with site – especially through extensive walking – and the extreme abstraction of cartesian representations of space in the realms of GPS, topographical maps, programming environments, etc. However, with a recent GPS-based sound walk, “Core Sample”, I began to find alternative ways to combine embodied and mobile aspects of spatial representation in the design process which I will share in this talk.
Urban Affordances and Creative Interactions
By Lalya Gaye
Mainly focused on but not restricted to mobile sound and locative media, Lalya’s work explores the poetic integration of digital technology into everyday environments, behaviours, urban space, clothing garments and other everyday artefacts. She designs devices that enable people to interface with the physicality of their everyday settings and engage in new aesthetic and embodied interactions.
Touching Earth
By Jamie Jewett
This presentation explores an interdisciplinary arts practice grounded in the union of contemporary dance and new media practices. The work explores questions of interactivity, embodiment, the use of media to collide site-specific and theatrical spaces, (Il)legibility, liveness, and Buddhist ideas of emptiness. By underscoring the sensory and human elements of inter-media performance, I will explore how creative practice engages awareness through the connections between materiality and technology. This practice privileges non-linear and abstract narratives, and experiential ways of knowing — thereby troubling any reductionist notion that technology is disembodied or inorganic.
The Locative Challenge to Modernist Dualisms of Place and Event
Francisco Ricardo
As a state of continual engagement, one’s way in the world comprises all that happens on the overlay of personal movement across fixed surfaces. This dualism creates two spaces of memory: the immobility of place becoming amenable to chronicling within historicity, and the dynamism of personal mobility becoming patterned within subjective experience. In many fields and particularly in architecture, this spatiotemporal experience, comprising these two lines of “becoming”, has been dually structured along Cartesian subject-object boundaries, a disconnection that is now critically challenged by practices within the locative paradigm.
