Organization, atmosphere, and digital technologies: designing sensory order

We argue technology and organization are inherently spatial phenomenon. We conceptualize this conjunction as atmosphere: a gathering of mood, human practice, material and environmental conditions, and values that has sufficient coherence and distinction to constitute a distinct interior. Atmospheres, however, are not entirely stable and present: the interior is porous to outside influence, and the interior is never wholly ordered. We show this through the study of digitally mediated architectural design practice. We find the technological mediation of atmospheres is constituted in sensory and affective spatial arrangements, and not in rationally calculated configurations of assets and goals. An atmosphere is inherently aesthetic. This allows us to gesture toward a definition of organization as technologically mediated spatial struggle to reconcile interior coherence with outward exposure

Feeling Colors: Reflections on the Creative Process of a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This thesis explored the implications of choice in individual art therapy sessions with a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder, contrasting the creative process of unstructured expression and a more directed book-making activity focused on emotions. Research took place within the scope of six weekly 45-minute individual art therapy sessions with a 12-year-old boy in a therapeutic day school. The design of this study was based on the pre-established presenting needs of the student, focusing on growing skills for self-regulation, addressing social-emotional deficits, and providing an outlet for positive self-expression. The sessions were documented by the clinician, a clinical intern studying art therapy at the Master’s level, in clinical and personal notes. This researcher conducted an extensive literature review and applied analysis via a detailed process of response artwork and reflection. Observations and initial findings suggested prominent themes of space and containment, attunement, and connection. In result, data indicated that both directive and unstructured artistic exploration of emotion may show effective significance with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, with emphasis on the importance of growing self-efficacy in the process

How Art Therapy Can Help Survivors of Trauma Access an Embodied Sense of Safety: A Literature Review

Traumatic stress can disrupt systemic rhythms in the brain and body that enable a person to feel safe in the world. Therefore, the initial phase of trauma treatment must focus on establishing an embodied sense of safety. This literature review examined cross-disciplinary data to assess whether art therapy can help trauma survivors access an embodied sense of safety, and if so, what therapeutic mechanisms contribute to its effectiveness. The data indicated that trauma-informed art therapy can support an embodied sense of safety through activating key therapeutic factors that downregulate instinctual defense mechanisms which can occur as a result of traumatic stress. Results revealed seven therapeutic factors that contributed to feelings of safety: therapeutic alliance; group belonging; synchrony with the natural world; affect regulation; sensory integration; a positive emotional state; and a sense of agency. Additionally, the paper outlines specific art therapy interventions that exemplify each therapeutic factor, and mechanisms that can illuminate how these therapeutic factors support an embodied sense of safety

Designing electronic collaborative learning environments

Electronic collaborative learning environments for learning and working are in vogue. Designers design them according to their own constructivist interpretations of what collaborative learning is and what it should achieve. Educators employ them with different educational approaches and in diverse situations to achieve different ends. Students use them, sometimes very enthusiastically, but often in a perfunctory way. Finally, researchers study them and—as is usually the case when apples and oranges are compared—find no conclusive evidence as to whether or not they work, where they do or do not work, when they do or do not work and, most importantly, why, they do or do not work. This contribution presents an affordance framework for such collaborative learning environments; an interaction design procedure for designing, developing, and implementing them; and an educational affordance approach to the use of tasks in those environments. It also presents the results of three projects dealing with these three issues

Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)

Virtual Reality Aesthetics and Boundaries in New Media Art Practices

This dissertation maps out the epistemological and political coordinates of contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) aesthetics through a hybrid inquiry that combines conventional academic research practices with artistic experiments. Since its inception, both conceptually and technologically, VR has emerged as a model for a techno-utopic paradigm that seeks to construct an autonomous image not only from the mediation of artist, but also from the material, spatial, and by extension social and political determinations of reality. With the differences in the formal techniques and strategies of each instance of the media constellation that this teleological paradigm conglomerates such as cinema, early proto-cinematic devices, stereoscopic 3D, and cybernetics, the objective is always the same: to develop an immediate and autonomous interface shorn of limitations configured according to the subjective and bodily conditions of the viewer. In both practice and theory this dissertation attempts to problematize the question of autonomy and by extension heteronomy, which have been distributed in a binary opposition in 20th century artistic practices. I contend that aesthetic practices emerge within the dynamic and interlocked relation between heteronomy and autonomy. Neither artistic practices nor image technologies are autonomous from the political and historical context in which they became possible both technologically and conceptually. Moreover, I argue that artistic practices become critical insofar that the question of autonomy appears sensibly as a problem. Through a threefold inquiry on the question of autonomy and heteronomy, this dissertation has aimed to problematize the very context that made it possible. First, I problematized the autonomy of art purported to be the grounding gesture of the critical nature of research-creation; second, the autonomy purported to be inherent to VR as an immersive and interactive image technology was called into question; and third, as the extension of the second, I problematized the autonomy of the viewer and virtual images in the VR experience that constitutes the artistic experiment component of the dissertation

Interactive Art and the Action of Behavioral Aesthetics in Embodied Philosophy

https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1004/thumbnail.jp

therARTpIST: an artisitc inquiry on the interplay of identities

This thesis is an embodied artistic inquiry focused on thoughtfully engaging in self reflection through movement, with the intention of discovering how the identities of emerging dance/movement therapist and dance artist inform and interplay with one another. Data was collected through six Authentic Movement sessions with a trained Authentic Movement practitioner. Data analysis occurred through arts-based creative synthesis, which included freeassociation drawing, writing, and movement improvisation. Main themes of bodily knowing and relationship developed from data analysis. Culmination of artistic inquiry occurred through a dance film focused on above-mentioned themes. The dance film can be viewed from the link in the paper. A review of existing research on the role of identity specifically development of body identity and professional identity was crucial to the research. Implications demonstrated the importance of embodiment for emerging dance/movement therapists. 47 pages