The Weird Giggle: Attending to Affect in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) is once again causing a stir, with conflicting assertions over its potential to usher in a glorious posthuman phase of freedom or to immerse bodies wearing headsets in pure and meaningless violence. This paper integrates philosophies of affect and affective experiences in VR by means of a practical application of phenomenological reflection. The combination of phenomenology and affect is valuable for articulating the lived experience of something unprecedented or disorienting, and for expanding the language of critique. The practical affective experiences of VR are from one particular VR artwork: MAN A VR by Gibson / Martelli, which uses captured data from dancers performing the dance improvisation form Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT) to animate the figures the VR world. SRT is also the movement practice facilitating philosophical reflections on the experience of being in the VR world. In this paper, passages directly describing moments of experience in MAN A VR extracted directly from research journals act as affective counterpoints to the theoretical discussion. The result is an expansion of the somatic register of VR, at the same time as a grounding of concepts from affect theory within contemporary digital culture

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

The Lantern Vol. 51, No. 2, Spring 1985

• Electric Pink • Derby Day • Conversation • Seasons of Sonnets • Long After Killing Us • Haunting Memory • Sacrifice • Is This Positive Enough? • My Teddy Bear • A Gentleman of Ten • Hartman Center • Yesterday\u27s Child • Mors Pueris • Momentary Reflections • Children Sleeping • There\u27s No Place Like Home • I Set My Pleasures Adrift • The Beer Can • Fragments of an Epic • Actaeon • She Sleeps • Chicago • Death Light • Tea With Louise • Balance • The Rivers • Chapel • The Hour of Prayer • Une Fille / Une Femme • A One-Way Mirror • Nonconformity • Cada Noche, Lloro • Reflections on an Empty House Down the Street • Evening Melancholy • Abandoned Road • Big Boy • Baby Brothers • Metro Oscuro • Chuchoterhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/lantern/1126/thumbnail.jp

Somatic Materialism or "Is it possible to do a Phenomenology of Affect?"

Change is the goal of much somatic practice. Yet, in the worlds of art, design, and cultural discourse change, or transformation, are simultaneously contested and desired outcomes: change for whom? empty or authentic? at what cost? I will locate the possibility for change, for contingency, within the body and say that we can access and understand it by means of a phenomenology of affect. In this article, I begin by expressing just how difficult it is to write about affect, I then locate affect in an artistic project called AffeXity (part of the Living Archives project and a collaboration with Jeannette Ginslov). I then expand upon the sticky boundaries between affect and the senses, while offering brief phenomenological descriptions of the liminal affective experience of Rosen Method. Finally I posit that sense data can be replaced with affective intensities when doing a phenomenology of affect. This is a response to those Speculative Materialists who seek to escape the limitations of the body: Somatic Materialism reveals that the unknown can be located within the body

The Archival Body : Re-enactments, affective doubling and surrogacy

This article considers archival performances rather than archives as places or repositories. This is done by expanding reflections on affect and by framing three specific archival performance practices: re-enactment, affective doubling, and surrogacy. The topic of The New Human is approached through the complex materiality of contemporary memory practices. This is the scholarly publication associated with the presentation of the same name given at The New Human Symposium co-curated by Medea of Malmö University and Moderna Museet Malmö in August 2016

Embodying the sonic invisible : sketching a corporeal ontology of musical interaction

This contribution to the topic of electronic music is based on the perspective of the dancer in performances with interactive sonic compositions. The method is a variation of phenomenology emphasizing the embodied experience of electronic music. This phenomenology follows the later writings of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A poetic and experiential notion of the sonic invisible is posited. It has four qualities: density, indirectness, collectivity and voice. These experiential qualities revealed by examining the particular context of bodies generating sound in interactive sonic compositions may resonate beyond the world of interactive arts to how we exist more generally in the world

Sinews of ubiquity : a corporeal ethics for ubiquitous computing

This reflection upon ubiquitous computing is written from the perspectives of performance and phenomenology, in particular, the dance and choreographic practices that shape the creation of responsive systems from large public art installations to intimate devices worn under clothes and on skin. The kinaesthetic awareness of dance combines with the corporeal methodology of phenomenology and both play a role in crafting an ethics, but this reflection upon ubiquitous computing is also knitted with an understanding of how we exist within and move through the world. As such, the infrastructure of ubiquity will be considered: not the circuits, local area networks, and software, but the corporeal and philosophical sinews of ubiquity that have meaning on ontological, aesthetic, and methodological levels. Calling the ethical approach offered in this chapter ‘corporeal’ means more than simply considering how ubiquitous systems impact bodies; the aim is to re-embody the very understanding of ubiquitous computing in our lives

Process Phenomenologies

Phenomenological reflection sets in motion a process of translating, transposing, or transgressing lived experience into writing. Usually writing, I should say. Sometimes a phenomenology first produces drawings, scribbles, murmurs, or gestures. My contribution to this edited collection on performance and phenomenology opens up a phase of the phenomenological process that is less polished, less complete, and almost always overlooked. I examine closely the transition from raw experience into scholarly writing. Occurring between live performance and philosophical presentation of text, it usually exists only in a performer’s personal journals or notes shared with collaborators as part of a working process. It is an essential part of enacting a phenomenology, and is frequently what those new to this methodology miss when they seek to understand and implement it for themselves. Relying on Alfred North Whitehead’s understanding of process philosophy and Jean Luc Nancy’s words on listening to provide a philosophical grounding, these phenomenologies come from my own and others’ experiences of capturing experience in note form, fostering a respect for the interim phases of constructing academic argumentation

Re-Embodiment : new strategies for teaching Embodied Interaction

The paper considers the role of the body and embodiment in design education. It offers a “re-do” of the Embodied Interaction course on the Interaction Design Master’s at Malmö University. This conceptual and pedagogic redo coincides with the increasing relevance of this field which now can be seen to include physical computing, wearables, haptics, and networked devices for transmitting bodily data. Three conceptual shifts are emphasised: embodiment redefined as materiality; critical engagement with contemporary politics and economics; methodological awareness and experimentation. This is not an abandonment of previous approaches, but a revision to coincide with developments in practice and scholarship, both within interaction design and in relevant related disciplines. It also reflects current cultural and political educational climate thereby emphasizing a porosity of education, a flow-through between the university and the world outside its walls