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

Embracing the Inexplicable - Exploring Human Attachment to AI within the Haunting Ambience of Brutalism

Brutalism has evolved from its humble origins—an 20th-century offshoot of late modern/postmodern architectural styles—into a distinct paradigm for a new generation grappling with climate change, global conflict, and an uncertain future that potentially threatens all forms of life on Earth. This illusion and fear both haunt and fascinate us. The material presence of Brutalism has sparked speculation and misinterpretation. This thesis examines the materiality of Brutalism through a series of digitally processed photographs that present altered fragments of images, reassembled into a narrative that examines dreams as a backdrop for collective imagination and the collective unconscious. The central research question posits brutalist architecture as an emotional ark: can it effectively address individual fears and nightmares while fulfilling certain desires? As a relic of the last century, what is its allure today? This thesis draws on Freud’s concept of the uncanny and integrates notions such as the supernatural nature of power and ontological errors. It begins with traditional documentary photography and confronts it with the untapped potential of innovative technologies like artificial intelligence. This creates a discourse in the ambiguous zone between the originality of art and the authenticity of images. The montage narrative approach not only reveals how brutalism serves as a utopian refuge for human desires but also suggests that what we see and hear may not always be true, let alone our own subjective and unique fantasies

Interactive Art and the Action of Behavioral Aesthetics in Embodied Philosophy

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The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

The social poetics of analog virtual worlds : toying with alternate realities

textWhile online virtual worlds draw increasingly wider audiences of players and scholars alike, offline games continue to evolve into more complex and socially layered forms as well. This dissertation argues that virtual worlds need not exist as online, digital environments alone and probes three genres of non-digital gaming for evidence of the virtual: tabletop role-playing games, murder-mystery events, and localized alternate reality games. More broadly, then, this dissertation is about deliberate make-belief: practiced by adults, taken seriously by participants, engaged with for long hours at a time, performed in public, and integrated into everyday social relationships. Drawing on scholars who study games as social activities (McGonigal 2006, Montola 2012) and social institutions (Goffman 1974, Searle 1995), I present three ethnographic case studies that illustrate how complex forms of social gaming can conjure and sustain environments best understood as analog virtual worlds. Through the widespread use of mobile technologies and the concerted efforts of innovators, game spaces are increasingly permeating our everyday lives on- and offline. This dissolving boundary demands anthropologists to revisit questions of how, where, and with whom we play games. Dovetailing Martin Heidegger’s notions of worlding and poiesis to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, this dissertation investigates how new forms of social gaming demonstrate the same qualities of shared intentionality, intersubjectivity, and performance essential to the production of new social meaning and cultural forms. Following, I situate the bold ethnographic case studies of make-belief in dialogue with scholars who figure exclusively online virtual worlds (Castronova 2005, Taylor 2006, Boellstorff 2008) and argue that analyzing both on- and offline virtual worlds together can help scholars better understand the fundamental nature of social interaction and shared intentionality, those everyday mechanisms that both sustain personal relationships on the one hand and maintain our broadest and most serious social institutions on the other.Anthropolog

Early modern extended minds and the Shakespearean subject of the mirror

The use of the mirror in Shakespeare's works, both as a stage prop and as a literary motif, opens a view for us into early modern concepts about cognition and subjectivity and enables the examination of their relation to current embodied, embedded and extended mind ideas. This closing chapter again shows Shakespeare adopting and transforming conventional mirror-motifs. The mirror-motifs provide evidence that characters who attempt to situate their subjectivity entirely within, as a transcendent, autonomous and centralised inwardness, are portrayed as failing to take into account the fundamental role of forms of extendedness and the intersubjective make up of their intrasubjectivity. Third-person perspectives, visual perception and introspection are compared in terms of performing similar functions and the body and passions are shown to be part ofthe loop of reason. Characters are depicted as both intentionally and unintentionally acting as a subjective prop for another character; either as a model for imitation or through providing a supplementary perspective. The intentions ofthe subject holding up the mirror do not necessarily affect the accuracy of the image they reflect, although like a character's introspective reflections they are not certainly reliable either. Since both third-person and first-person perspectives vary in reliability a combination of outward and inward mirrors appears the only way forward for a human subject. The Shakespearean character, like the early modern subject, is depicted as existing in a biological, sociocultural, technological and spiritual universe, in which all factors are at once variably divisible and dynamically in play

The Word: Jacques Ellul\u27s Dialogic Response To La Technique

The focus of this interpretive work is primarily to bring two Ellulian metaphors into conversation with one another: la technique, and “the word.” Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), a prominent French philosopher, sociologist, and theologian, is predominantly known for his critique of what he calls la technique, an underlying system which acts as an all-encompassing feature of necessity, which privileges the values of efficiency, speed, and progress in all societal endeavors, and which serves as the predominant interpretive lens by which we can examine and understand our current historical and cultural moment. Technique had its origination in the value system of the machine, but its tentacles have now reached into every aspect of human lived experience, turning humanity into a means, limiting human freedom, and reconstructing truth in terms of fact. In response to what Ellul calls the Technological Society, he presents the idea of “the word,” a dialogic metaphor which illuminates the intersubjective intentionality in human relation by recognizing the value of authentic “encounter” in a phenomenological space which Martin Buber described as “the between.” Ellul prioritizes dialogue over and against the totality of a world given over to Technique. This dissertation seeks to understand the dialectic between these two oppositions, to bring them into conversation with one another in an effort to understand how Ellul’s dialogic hermeneutic can serve as a response to Technique, and to present some possible solutions which can serve to guide human beings seeking liberation within the tyranny of the Technological Society