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

(Always) Playing the Camera: Cyborg Vision and Embodied Surveillance in Digital Games

As the increasingly ubiquitous field of surveillance has transformed how we interact with each other and the world around us, surveillance interactions with virtual others in virtual worlds have gone largely unnoticed. This article examines representations of digital games’ diegetic surveillance cameras and their relation to the player character and player. Building on a dataset of forty-one titles and in-depth analyses of two 2020 digital games that present embodied surveillance camera perspectives, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix 2020) and Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft Toronto 2020), I demonstrate that the camera is crucial in how we organize, understand, and maneuver the fictional environment and its inhabitants. These digital games reveal how both surveillance power fantasies and their critique can coexist within a space of play. Moreover, digital games often present a perspective that blurs the boundaries between the physical and the technically mediated through a flattening of the player’s “camera” screen and in-game surveillance cameras. Embodied surveillance cameras in digital games make the camera metaphor explicit as an aesthetic, narrative, and mechanical preoccupation. We think and play with and through cameras, drawing attention to and problematizing the partial perspectives with which worlds are viewed. I propose the term cyborg vision to account for this simultaneously human and nonhuman vision that’s both pluralistic and situated and argue that, through cyborg vision, digital games offer an embodied experience of surveillance that’s going to be increasingly relevant in the future.publishedVersio

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

Analysis of the narrative communication characteristics of virtual reality experiences: meaning-making components of the immersive story

Virtual reality is a technology and media that has evolved dramatically in the last decades. Undoubtedly, the medium has developed its own dynamics and narrative characteristics, due to the possibility of interaction and the ability to allow the viewer/user to focus on different levels of action. In this research, the relevant narrative characteristics in virtual reality are described based on a literature review. Secondly, a sample of online experiences of 360º virtual reality, or cinematic virtual reality (CVR), are analyzed to determine the characters and possibilities of narrative features presented. This analysis can help establish parameters and guidelines for the creation of virtual reality and 360º immersive contents in heterogeneous audiovisual and multimedia fields. The results show both the narrative and aesthetic possibilities of the analyzed videos and their technical and expressive possibilities, in terms of the ability to integrate narrative structures, as well as content in the use of innovative formal resources. In this sense, 360º immersive video becomes an added value of considerable dimensions

Digital witnessing and the erasure of the racialized subject

Humanitarian agencies are relying more frequently on remote sensing, satellite imagery and social media to produce accounts of violence. Their analysis aims at creating more compelling narratives for the court of law or of public opinion and has contributed towards a forensic turn, thus complicating the already fraught relationship between the practice of witnessing and political subjects. This article explores how digital witnessing allows us to ‘see’ further and deeper into places that are at a distance from us, whilst at the same time creating the conditions that make certain subjects recede from view. I will discuss these issues in relation to a country I am familiar with and one that has been central to the forensic imagination – Pakistan – although the particular geographies within Pakistan that this imagination works with are not mine. Thinking with non-linear temporalities of violence, I explore how the forensic turn may have actually contributed to the erasure of the racialized political subject

Collaborative narrative generation in persistent virtual environments

This thesis describes a multi-agent approach to generating narrative based on the activities of participants in large-scale persistent virtual environments, such as massivelymultiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These environments provide diverse interactive experiences for large numbers of simultaneous participants. Involving such participants in an overarching narrative experience has presented challenges due to the difficulty of incorporating the individual actions of so many participants into a single coherent storyline. Various approaches have been adopted in an attempt to solve this problem, such as guiding players to follow pre-designed storylines, or giving them goals to achieve that advance the storyline, or by having developers (‘dungeon masters’) adapt the narrative to the real-time actions of players. However these solutions can be inflexible, and/or fail to take player interaction into account, or do so only at the collective level, for groups of players. This thesis describes a different approach, in which embodied witness-narrator agents observe participants’ actions in a persistent virtual environment and generate narrative from reports of those actions. The generated narrative may be published to external audiences, e.g., via community websites, Internet chatrooms, or SMS text messages, or fed back into the environment in real-time to embellish and enhance the ongoing experience with new narrative elements derived from participants’ own achievements. The design and implementation of this framework is described in detail, and compared to related work. Results of evaluating the framework, both technically, and through a live study, are presented and discussed

Digital aftercares: Digital retooling for agency, value, and co-vulnerability as artistic practice

This practice-based thesis develops digital retooling as an artistic methodology that ties together socially engaged practice, speculative design, and digital arts to create original artworks and projects that rescript how dominant digital media functions. Digital retooling is a propositional, practical, creative, and critical method that transforms existing technologies through artistic practice to break from hegemonic structures rooted in digital capitalism and data colonialism. Staying with embodiment and vulnerability, my research and practice centers architectures of agency, care, and community in overwhelmingly nonconsensual and traumatic digital systems. As a practice-based methodology, digital retooling moves beyond image and interface to emphasise infrastructure, contextuality, and the processes by which media acquires meaning and form as it moves in the world. The artistic projects I develop in tandem with critical research innovate at the visual, infrastructural, and social layers to contest default modes and plug-and-play forms of exploitation that come loaded into dominant digital media systems. Through speculative hacking, backend redesign, and an expanded trauma-sensitive approach, my research develops digital retooling as an artistic methodology that integrates speculative, decolonial, and care-based approaches. Drawing on post-colonial, decolonial, and critical race media studies, my art projects stress local contingencies against the grain of universalist computing and the alleged neutrality of digital systems. To understand digital media as a multi-layered affectual, psychological, social, and financial medium my research comingles situated self-awareness as a digital user with an analysis of the medium’s structural, economic, and political layers. In this thesis, I refer to and make use of the multi-layer entanglements brought to bear by digital technologies as ‘nested intimacies’ and ‘strangely intimate digital assets’. For this PhD, my practice incorporates diagrams, writing, talks, performance, and digital art and wearables. This thesis presents four art projects: ‘Bath Motes: Liquid architecture for Pain Relief’ which proposes a fantastical product for technologically mediated self-care; ‘Black Body Radiation: Rescripting Data Bodies’ a collaborative work that retools body sensor networks and blockchain architectures to consider value in performance artworks and in relation to colonial legacies and practice; ‘Virtual Keffiyeh’ which encompasses critical research, advocacy and a digital wearable to draw attention to Palestinian digital rights in metaverse and virtual spaces; and ‘Or:bital Bloom’—a start-up that recycles environmental performance data into digital artworks that express transitions to sustainability and net zero. The research and artistic interventions I present in this thesis are concerned with lived experience, critical research, interfacial and infrastructural design in digital and hybrid worlds with the aim of creating new spaces for ‘digital aftercares’. ‘Digital aftercares’ suggest both speculative aftermaths beyond dominant and traumatic digital systems as well as the discovery of new modes of care in emergent mediascapes and infrastructures. This PhD serves as an example of and provocation to radically retool dominant digital media through artistic practice, recovering relationality, agency, and covulnerability through the digital arts

Archaeology of Digital Environments: Tools, Methods, and Approaches

Digital archaeologists use digital tools for conducting archaeological work, but their potential also lies in applying archaeological thinking and methods to understanding digital built environments (i.e., software) as contemporary examples of human settlement, use, and abandonment. This thesis argues for digital spaces as archaeological artifacts, sites, and landscapes that can be investigated in both traditional and non-traditional ways. At the core of my research is the fundamental argument that human-occupied digital spaces can be studied archaeologically with existing and modified theory, tools, and methods to reveal that human occupation and use of synthetic worlds is similar to how people behave in the natural world. Working digitally adds new avenues of investigation into human behavior in relation to the things people make, modify, and inhabit. In order to investigate this argument, the thesis focuses on three video game case studies, each using different kinds of archaeology specifically chosen to help understand the software environments being researched: 1) epigraphy, stylometry, and text analysis for the code-artifact of Colossal Cave Adventure; 2) photogrammetry, 3D printing, GIS mapping, phenomenology, and landscape archaeology within the designed, digital heritage virtual reality game-site of Skyrim VR; 3) actual survey and excavation of 30 heritage sites for a community of displaced human players in the synthetic landscape of No Man’s Sky. My conclusions include a blended approach to conducting future archaeological fieldwork in digital built environments, one that modifies traditional approaches to archaeological sites and material in a post/transhuman landscape. As humanity continues trending towards constant digital engagement, archaeologists need to be prepared to study how digital places are settled, used, and abandoned. This thesis takes a step in that direction using the vernacular of games as a starting point

Sensitivity analysis in a scoping review on police accountability : assessing the feasibility of reporting criteria in mixed studies reviews

In this paper, we report on the findings of a sensitivity analysis that was carried out within a previously conducted scoping review, hoping to contribute to the ongoing debate about how to assess the quality of research in mixed methods reviews. Previous sensitivity analyses mainly concluded that the exclusion of inadequately reported or lower quality studies did not have a significant effect on the results of the synthesis. In this study, we conducted a sensitivity analysis on the basis of reporting criteria with the aims of analysing its impact on the synthesis results and assessing its feasibility. Contrary to some previous studies, our analysis showed that the exclusion of inadequately reported studies had an impact on the results of the thematic synthesis. Initially, we also sought to propose a refinement of reporting criteria based on the literature and our own experiences. In this way, we aimed to facilitate the assessment of reporting criteria and enhance its consistency. However, based on the results of our sensitivity analysis, we opted not to make such a refinement since many publications included in this analysis did not sufficiently report on the methodology. As such, a refinement would not be useful considering that researchers would be unable to assess these (sub-)criteria