Merleau-Ponty and neuroaesthetics: Two approaches to performance and technology

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Digital Creativity, 23(3-4), 225 - 238, 2012. Copyright @ 2012 Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14626268.2012.709941.Assisted by the rapid growth of digital technology, which has enhanced its ambitions, performance is an increasingly popular area of artistic practice. This article seeks to contextualise this within two methodologically divergent yet complimentary intellectual tendencies. The first is the work of the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, who recognised that our experience of the world has an inescapably ‘embodied’ quality, not reducible to mental accounts, which can be vicariously extended through specific instrumentation. The second is the developing field of neuroaesthetics; that is, neurological research directed towards the analysis, in brain-functional terms, of our experiences of objects and events which are culturally deemed to be of artistic significance. I will argue that both these contexts offer promising approaches to interpreting developments in contemporary performance, which has achieved critical recognition without much antecedent theoretical support

Narrative environments: how do they matter?

The significance and possible senses of the phrase 'narrative environment' are explored. It is argued that 'narrative environment' is not only polysemous but also paradoxical; not only representational but also performative; and not just performatively repetitive but also reflexive and constitutive. As such, it is useful for understanding the world of the early 21st century. Thus, while the phrase narrative environment can be used to denote highly capitalised, highly regulated corporate forms, i.e. "brandscapes", it can also be understood as a metaphor for the emerging reflexive knowledge-work-places in the ouroboric, paradoxical economies of the 21st century. Narrative environments are the media and the materialities through which we come to comprehend that world and to act in those economies. Narrative environments are therefore, sophistically, performative-representative both of the corporate dominance of life worlds and of the undoing of that dominance, through the iterative responses to the paradoxical injunction: "learn to live"

Chapter 2 Sensory Literacies, the Body, and Digital Media

At the forefront of current digital literacy studies in education, this Handbook uniquely systematizes emerging interdisciplinary themes, new knowledge, and insightful theoretical contributions to the field. The chapter topics identified through academic conference networks, rigorous analysis, and database searches of trending themes are organized in five thematic sections: Digital Futures; Digital Diversity; Digital Lives; Digital Spaces; Digital Ethics. This essential guide to digital writing and literacies research, with transformational ideas for educational and professional practice, will enable researchers to position their studies in the field and to generate new themes of inquiry

Sensory literacies, the body, and digital media

This chapter suggests that what is needed in current understandings of literacy practices is systematic attention to the role of the full sensorium evoked in the process of meaning making. Of particular interest is the hitherto neglected realm of the nonvisual senses and their role in children's literacy learning. The chapter demonstrates how the sensorial engagement of the body is intertwined in meaning making with different material presentations of digital and print copies of a picture book and in handwriting and process drama lessons. The e-book version of the Heart and the Bottle and process drama activities that draw on Beware of the Bears invite the reader to participate with the body in sense-making through haptic affordances that open up a rich set of possibilities for vicarious sensory engagement with the feelings and perspectives of the characters

Sensory literacies, the body, and digital media

This chapter suggests that what is needed in current understandings of literacy practices is systematic attention to the role of the full sensorium evoked in the process of meaning making. Of particular interest is the hitherto neglected realm of the nonvisual senses and their role in children's literacy learning. The chapter demonstrates how the sensorial engagement of the body is intertwined in meaning making with different material presentations of digital and print copies of a picture book and in handwriting and process drama lessons. The e-book version of the Heart and the Bottle and process drama activities that draw on Beware of the Bears invite the reader to participate with the body in sense-making through haptic affordances that open up a rich set of possibilities for vicarious sensory engagement with the feelings and perspectives of the characters

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences

Affect Detection from Text-Based Virtual Improvisation and Emotional Gesture Recognition

We have developed an intelligent agent to engage with users in virtual drama improvisation previously. The intelligent agent was able to perform sentence-level affect detection from user inputs with strong emotional indicators. However, we noticed that many inputs with weak or no affect indicators also contain emotional implication but were regarded as neutral expressions by the previous interpretation. In this paper, we employ latent semantic analysis to perform topic theme detection and identify target audiences for such inputs. We also discuss how such semantic interpretation of the dialog contexts is used to interpret affect more appropriately during virtual improvisation. Also, in order to build a reliable affect analyser, it is important to detect and combine weak affect indicators from other channels such as body language. Such emotional body language detection also provides a nonintrusive channel to detect users’ experience without interfering with the primary task. Thus, we also make initial exploration on affect detection from several universally accepted emotional gestures

Chapter 2 Sensory Literacies, the Body, and Digital Media

At the forefront of current digital literacy studies in education, this Handbook uniquely systematizes emerging interdisciplinary themes, new knowledge, and insightful theoretical contributions to the field. The chapter topics identified through academic conference networks, rigorous analysis, and database searches of trending themes are organized in five thematic sections: Digital Futures; Digital Diversity; Digital Lives; Digital Spaces; Digital Ethics. This essential guide to digital writing and literacies research, with transformational ideas for educational and professional practice, will enable researchers to position their studies in the field and to generate new themes of inquiry

Mind and Matter

Do brains create material reality in thinking processes or is it the other way around, with things shaping the mind? Where is the location of meaning-making? How do neural networks become established by means of multimodal pattern replications, and how are they involved in conceptualization? How are resonance textures within cellular entities extended in the body and the mind by means of mirroring processes? In which ways do they correlate to consciousness and self-consciousness? Is it possible to explain out-of-awareness unconscious processes? What holds together the relationship between experiential reality, bodily processes like memory, reason, or imagination, and sign-systems and simulation structures like metaphor and metonymy visible in human language? This volume attempts to answer some of these questions