The Bodies We Write In: Reentry Women Narrate Embodied Experiences of Writing in Graduate Education

This inquiry project explores connections between mind and body in academic writing. What scholars, educators and researchers have noted about the inclusion of the body in academic study illuminates the challenges of understanding the relationship between the two. Using a framework shaped by embodiment and feminist criticality illuminates how the body is elided through schooling and educational systems, reaching a peak in higher education. An interdisciplinary review of the literature supports a broad consideration of embodiment and typical writing practices in academic settings. To better understand the body as a source of knowledge, data construction is holistic, using an embodied methodology with women who reenter graduate school later in life. Mindful awareness of the body guides the relating of writing experiences, and methods are designed with an ethic of care for participants, a spirit of co-creation, and shared experience. A narrative approach to data is used to explore where and how embodiment appears in women’s stories about academic writing. The research process reflects a time of social separation within a pandemic. By better understanding women’s embodied experiences, this project seeks to enrich and enliven the way institutions of graduate study understand writing as an embodied practice and to honor what the body knows alongside the mind

Studying Memes During Covid Lockdown as a Lens Through Which to Understand Video-Mediated Communication Interactions

The purpose of this study is to analyze image macros about video-mediated communication (VMC) created during the time frame of 2020-2021 when people all over the world started using Zoom and VMC for work and school. It is a unique opportunity to study how users\u27 interactions with themselves and with others were affected at a time when a lot of people started using the technology at the same time. Because the focus is on interactions, I narrowed it down to three topics to analyze the memes: presence, self, and space and place to analyze the memes. I chose memes relating to these topics that were found on three popular meme databases: KnowYourMeme, Memedroid, and Memes.Com. Utilizing visual analysis tools and Shifman\u27s format for analyzing memes, each meme was placed in a group and analyzed. The research revealed that users experienced some stressful situations regarding elements of presence, such as feeling isolated and embarrassed at times. Users were also distracted by seeing their image, were overly focused on their appearance (particularly when on camera) and utilized virtual backgrounds for self-expression. Finally, users demonstrated that the collision of private and public space happened when family members or pets interrupted meetings. They also noted that privacy was often intruded upon when other users gained personal information not normally available in face-to-face gatherings. Finally, some took advantage of the changed format to assert power. Most research concerning Zoom and other VMC focuses on how to use it effectively. There is very little research about creative reactions to the usage of this technology and this research fills that gap

Master of Fine Arts

thesisThe questions posed in this research involve the massive effects of the cyberrevolution on the human experience of embodiment and identity formation. Our technologies have begun to merge with the human body in new and unforeseen ways, from the development of smartphones, to new advances in Internet technologies, to the motion capture gaming systems of KINECT infrared cameras. This revolution has affected fields as wide-ranging as dance, gender studies, digital technologies, media studies, music, the visual arts, economics, and socio-anthropology. The hybridity of digital self and corporeality is permeating all aspects of life, from the growing use of projections in music and dance performances to the many permutations of human identity online on sites like Facebook or Twitter. For this research, I have focused on the effect of digitally interactive performance media in the field of dance, and how the performing human body-mind is impacted by virtual spaces and digital performance practice. With a focus on my own work (from digitally integrated live performances like the words we missed to screendance films like we walk blood earth) and the creative work of other dance artists, I've tried to investigate this constantly shifting dialogue between the human body and our digital counterparts. In my creative research with dancers, I've become aware that the ripples of what might be called "active digital translation" are being felt across disciplines and impacting human race, the spiraling, outward momentum of technological innovation. I've posed the questions: can the integration of digital technologies in the practice and performance of dance result in a different kind of embodiment and identity formation, one that meshes the physical and the virtual into an aesthetically, politically, and kinesthetically new sensation? What are the implications of this for the dance field, for performers of the physical arts, and for our corporal bodies within society? I have found that this newfound potential for identity formation, virtuosic transformation, and digital embodiment in the cyber age has put forth many exciting and challenging prospects for the human body

Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface

This volume originated in HASTAC’s first international conference, “Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface,” held at Duke University during April 19-21, 2007. “Electronic Techtonics” was the site of truly unforgettable conversations and encounters that traversed domains, disciplines, and media – conversations that explored the fluidity of technology both as interface as well as at the interface. This hardcopy version of the conference proceedings is published in conjunction with its electronic counterpart (found at www.hastac.org). Both versions exist as records of the range and depth of conversations that took place at the conference. Some of the papers in this volume are almost exact records of talks given at the conference, while others are versions that were revised and reworked some time after the conference. These papers are drawn from a variety of fields and we have not made an effort to homogenize them in any way, but have instead retained the individual format and style of each author

Immersive Participation:Futuring, Training Simulation and Dance and Virtual Reality

Dance knowledge can inform the development of scenario design in immersive digital simulation environments by strengthening a participant’s capacity to learn through the body. This study engages with processes of participatory practice that question how the transmission and transfer of dance knowledge/embodied knowledge in immersive digital environments is activated and applied in new contexts. These questions are relevant in both arts and industry and have the potential to add value and knowledge through crossdisciplinary collaboration and exchange. This thesis consists of three different research projects all focused on observation, participation, and interviews with experts on embodiment in digital simulation. The projects were chosen to provide a range of perspectives across dance, industry and futures studies. Theories of embodied cognition, in particular the notions of the extended body, distributed cognition, enactment and mindfulness, offer critical lenses through which to explore the relationship of embodied integration and participation within immersive digital environments. These areas of inquiry lead to the consideration of how language from the field of computer science can assist in describing somatic experience in digital worlds through a discussion of the emerging concepts of mindfulness, wayfinding, guided movement and digital kinship. These terms serve as an example of how the mutability of language became part of the process as terms applied in disparate disciplines were understood within varying contexts. The analytic tools focus on applying a posthuman view, speculation through a futures ethnography, and a cognitive ethnographical approach to my research project. These approaches allowed me to examine an ecology of practices in order to identify methods and processes that can facilitate the transmission and transfer of embodied knowledge within a community of practice. The ecological components include dance, healthcare, transport, education and human/computer interaction. These fields drove the data collection from a range of sources including academic papers, texts, specialists’ reports, scientific papers, interviews and conversations with experts and artists.The aim of my research is to contribute both a theoretical and a speculative understanding of processes, as well as tools applicable in the transmission of embodied knowledge in virtual dance and arts environments as well as digital simulation across industry. Processes were understood theoretically through established studies in embodied cognition applied to workbased training, reinterpreted through my own movement study. Futures methodologies paved the way for speculative processes and analysis. Tools to choreograph scenario design in immersive digital environments were identified through the recognition of cross purpose language such as mindfulness, wayfinding, guided movement and digital kinship. Put together, the major contribution of this research is a greater understanding of the value of dance knowledge applied to simulation developed through theoretical and transformational processes and creative tools

Rethinking Prayer and Health Research: An Exploratory Inquiry on Prayer’s Psychological Dimension

A brief literature review of cancer survival trials is employed by the author to raise questions on their design and to bring speculatively into discussion concepts such as “worldview”, “intentional normative dissociation”, and “psychosomatic plasticity-proneness”. Using prayer’s psychological dimension as a way to unite such elements opens new fertile perspectives on the academic study of prayer and health. In this context, it is suggested that a consistent interdisciplinary research agenda is required in order to understand those biopsychosocial factors interconnected within the process and outcome of prayer before attempting to decipher the big answers laying dormant probably within the transpersonal and spiritual layers of human experience

The Interface is Obsolete: A Critical Investigation of the Digital interface in Interactive New Media Installations

My thesis proposes a critical framework for understanding the digital interface in interactive new media installations. I aim at dispelling the instrumental, cybernetic, “action-reaction” myth that surrounds the functions of the interface and that constitutes one of the main limitations in its conceptualization today. I argue that a rethinking of the digital interface in terms of its aesthetic and cultural properties is essential if we are to take digital interfaces seriously as devices that inform or even, to some extent, structure our relationship with technology. Theorists who work in the interdisciplinary field of interface studies have historically been preoccupied with the technical and instrumental functions the interface performs – specifically with how it acts and reacts to pre-programmed information. To do this, they have predominantly drawn on computer science and engineering perspectives. Thus digital interfaces have commonly been understood as the symbolic software that enables humans to use computers. My thesis approaches the digital interface from a different direction, concentrating on the aesthetic and cultural aspects of the digital interface, and drawing on scholarship from the fields of art history and media studies. In particular, I focus on critically examining how various interfaces are defined within art environments and how they influence the way subjects, objects, and the relationships and processes that exist between them are understood in these disciplinary fields and practices. Throughout, I propose a more expansive definition of the digital interface in interactive new media installations, positioning it as a dynamic, hybrid, aesthetic and cultural process. I thus reformulate the problem of the digital interface as a problem of making the often invisible aspects of the device legible. Ultimately, I argue that the interface mediates, thus creates, to an extent, relationships between viewer/participants, artists and artworks as well as influences the movements and perceptions of those interacting with it. This reading enables me to conclude that the digital interface can be seen as an important actor in positioning and (re)shaping specific ways in which the self relates to technology, to artistic practice and to other human and nonhuman beings in the current media culture. At the heart of this thesis is the notion that the digital interface matters and that a critical exploration of it in aesthetic contexts can help us understand and possibly reconfigure our human relationship with technology

Sound, Science, Islam: Music as Healing in Istanbul

This dissertation examines the revival of Ottoman-era musical healing practices in contemporary Turkish biomedical research. Linked at once to physiology, Islamic cosmology, and Galenic medicine, Ottoman music therapy is a network of practices built upon makam: the microtonal harmonic system for structuring musical improvisation/composition in Turkish classical music. In addition to physiological and religious healing, the Ottomans practiced music therapy with individual makam-s, each selected for their associations with the biological processes of the body according to humoral medicine. Currently, cognitive psychologists, nursing PhDs, and physicians study the relationship between makam and the body in order to elucidate how our bodies perceive and react to music. Their goal is to prove that Turkish classical music makam performance can be applied in biomedical settings with measurable physiological effects. Through interviews with these researchers and close analyses of their published studies, I ask, how is the contemporary relationship between Turkish classical music/makam narrated by my interlocutors, and how are these narratives situated within the legacy of Ottoman colonialism in Africa and the slave trade? How do these narratives reflect 19th century Ottoman modernization and early Turkish intellectualism and politics? What can cognitive psychology tell us about sound, the brain, and its effects on the body? How do such studies enact a philosophy of the sound-body relationship? Finally, what material and phenomenological shifts occur between historical contemporary practice, and what do they tell us about musico-medical futures? Based on fieldwork in Istanbul, Turkey from 2018-2020, this dissertation demonstrates that such revivals of Ottoman practice signal the ongoing negotiation of intersecting Ottoman-Turkish histories and the adoption of European biomedical epistemologies. I argue that studies on cognition, pain, and pregnancy harken historical frameworks of medical practice while making their own epistemological claim to the body through sound practice. Through their work, I argue that my interlocutors raise difficult questions about music as a material-phenomenological practice that encourage a critical reexamination of how we conceive of sound, the body, and medicine in Turkey and elsewhere

Internet art and interaction: a study into the creation of a taxonomy of interaction in online art works

Using the hypothesis that interaction with net art can be categorised, the primary purpose of the research was to generate a taxonomy of this interaction. Emphasis is given to interactive web based works that require the user to participate by contributing material to the piece. An initial period of contextualisation was required to position net art within contemporary arts culture this included an examination of previous attempts at categorising interactivity and the exploration of connected historical art practices. Most previous attempts at categorisation either characterise types of interactive work, or detail specific interactive characteristics the work itself may have. This aim of this thesis was to take an alternative approach by focusing on the interaction itself in order to create a taxonomy. To establish this characterisation of interactivity, several practical pieces of internet art were created that doubled as data collection tools. The main outcome of this project resulted in the development of my own Connected, Partially Connected and Unconnected ( C.P.U.) model of interactivity. This in turn necessitated the examination of the interactive process which resulted in defining a loop of interaction . This loop of interaction specifies several separate phases to the interactive process, the C.P.U. model of interactivity occupying one of these phases. This thesis primarily provides a platform with which to further interrogate interaction with net art. An unexplored area of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that is specific to net art has been identified and is therefore of use to theorists and researchers working in this area. It is also of use to artists enabling them to better understand how interaction is understood within the context of their own practice

Experience representation in information systems

This thesis looks into the ways subjective dimension of experience could be represented in artificial, non-biological systems, in particular information systems. The pivotal assumption is that experience as opposed to mainstream thinking in information science is not equal to knowledge, so that experience is a broader term which encapsulates both knowledge and subjective, affective component of experience, which so far has not been properly embraced by knowledge representation theories. This is the consequence of dominance of behaviourism and later cognitivism in the XXth-century science, which tended to reduce mind and experience respectively to behavioural expressions and discrete states relating mindful creature to external world, meanwhile the processes of knowing to manipulations with symbols. We support the view that traditional knowledge representation approaches will not suffice to embrace the entirety of mental phenomena. We propose that in order to understand, represent and model the thinking and behavioural processes of mindful entities in information systems we need to look into the phenomenon of experience beyond the boundaries of knowledge. At the same time we propose to look at experience in a more structured way and try to capture it in formal terms, making it amenable to symbolic representation, being aware at the same time of innate limitations of symbolic representations compared to the natural representations in biological bodies. Under the paradigm of mind intentionality, which assumes that minds have this special intrinsic feature that they can relate to external word and thus are about external world, it can be asserted that experience is one in all intentional mind state composed of knowledge that is the intentional contents of this state, the world-to-mind relation, meanwhile its inseparable subjective component is composed of subjective feelings of the mindful individual corresponding to this intentional mind states. If so, we propose that experience can be defined as two-dimensional mental phenomena consisting of mental states that have both knowledge and affective component. Consequently we suggest that experience can be represented as pairs of elements of sets K, and A, where K represents knowledge, hence contents of remembered intentional states of mind (i.e. intentional contents of experience), whereas A represents affect, i.e. the subjective qualitative component of experience. iii Importantly, it does not particularly matter if we define experience as a set of mind states or a mind state process for assessing if the overall relation between knowledge and subjective experience that we have outlined above is valid. Whether there is knowing rather then knowledge or experiencing rather than experience which seems increasingly a contemporary principle, remains a fascinating philosophical, ontological to be more specific, question, however it falls beyond the scope of the thesis and therefore we shall not concentrate on it herewith. Furthermore we propose that the subjective component of experience is also intrinsically intentionalistic, but meanwhile the intentionality in case of knowing is directed outward, to the external world, in case of feeling it is directed inwards to the within of the experiencing mindbody. We tap into the contemporary thinking in the philosophy of mind that the primordial, intrinsic intentionalistic capacity of mind is non-linguistic, as there must be other more primordial, non-linguistic form of intentionality that allows human children, as well as other language-capable animals, to learn language in first place. Contemporary cognitive neuroscience suggest that this capacity is tightly related to affect. We also embrace the theories of consciousness and self coming from brain scientists such as Damasio and Panksepp who believe that there is a primordial component of self, a so called protoself composed of the raw feelings coming from within the body, which are representations of bodily states in the mind, and have strictly subjective character. Therefore we can look at this compound of primordial feelings as a mirror in which external world reflects via the interface of the senses. This results in experience that has this conceptually dual, yet united within the conscious mindbody, composition of intentional contents that is knowledge and subjective component that is built up by feelings coming from within the experiencing mindbody. For it is problematic to state sharply either that this composition is dual or united we can refer to these two separately considered aspects of experience either as components or dimensions. In this thesis we pay particular attention to the role the affective component of experience plays in the behaviour of organisms, and we use the concept of rational agency to discuss the relations between agent experience and behaviour. This role is primarily about motivation and experience vividness, i.e. how easily experiential states can be retrieved from memory. The affective dimension of experience determines the drivers for agent action and influences the remembering and forgetting (memory) processes that experience is prone to. We reflect on how the above presented framework could enhance one of the most popular rational agency models: the Believes Desires Intentions model (BDI) based on Bratmann’s account of practical reason that has dominated information science and artificial intelligence literature. Inspired by Davidson, who opposing Hume’s account that the passions (desires) drive action while reason (belief) merely directs its force, concluded that iv “(...) belief and desire seem equally to be causal conditions of action. But (...) desire is more basic in that if we know enough about a person’s desires, we can work out what he believes, while the reverse does not hold.” (Davidson, 2004) we conclude that in so far as BDI model approaches them, desires are sort of beliefs. Indeed a desire in the above sense is a verbalised desire, i.e. in order for a proposition to be included in the deliberation an agent must have internally verbalize it and accept it by which he converts it into a belief. As a result an agent acquires a belief about its desire. Apart from desires made thus explicit and becoming beliefs there are implicit experiential states that directly influence behaviour, these are not embraced by the Desires set in the BDI and other instrumentalist rationality models as these currently do not have adequate forms of representation. If this is so, the BDI models looses its D creating a gap which must be filled in, which we try to do with the subjective dimension of experience. Under such an account each belief, either the proper one or about the desire, represented formally with a proposition should have an extra component added which would stand for the subjective affective state to this belief. Some preliminary suggestions how this could be implemented are proposed and discussed. The central proposition of this thesis states that experience, broadly understood as the entirety of contents and quality of a conscious mind state, can be satisfactorily represented in information systems, and any information system which objective is to emulate natural agent behaviour with satisfactory faithfulness cannot do without a sound experience representation framework. To achieve this it is necessary to realize and accept, based on convincing evidence from neuroscience, that the missing subjective component of experience is affect that forms and integral part of natural agent’s experience, and determines, or at least impacts profoundly the behaviour of natural agents. Relating affect to knowledge would result in a satisfactory approximation of experience. It is to realize as well that the subjective dimension of experience, classified as affect, is not entirely private, subjective epiphenomenal entity but rather can be studied in objective terms as neurological correlates in the brain following account of emotion and affect as fostered by contemporary neuroscience. By identifying affective correlates of intentional contents of states of mind, which build up knowledge, we can exploit a broader concept experience for the purpose of more accurate emulation of natural agents’ thinking process and behaviour in information systems. This thesis presents and discusses a bulk of evidence coming mainly from three fields: information science, philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience that led us to the above stated conclusions, as well as establishes a framework for experience representation in information systems