Book Review: Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema by Usha Iyer (2020)

No abstract available

Forests Fanned by Waves: Embodied Ways of Knowing in a Mangrove Landscape

This narrative article explores a boatman's intimate relationship with the mangrove forests he had grown up with from his childhood. The author listens to the boatman's stories  about his life when he is in his sixties. How he assessed the author also implied what part of his world the author would be invited to see.  This is a narrative of warmth and friendship built through traversing the mangrove forest in a handmade raft, watching birdlife, lotuses and other mangrove species. The narrative captures the ecosophy of this boatman in his lived and embodied experience

Perception, Temporality And Symbol: A Study Of Man With Cockerel By Ranbir Kaleka (2001-2002)

This article makes an early attempt to emerge a dialogue between neuroscientific theories of perception and video art while proposing alternate lenses to view Kaleka’s installation in the context of Indian contemporary video art. The author proposes that Neuroaesthetics as a field may benefit from studying screendance and audience engagement because the conceptual complexity offered by screendance has the potential to throw light on cognitive and affective systems during emergent aesthetic episodes. Time and symbol, two critical elements that pave the way for new perception, and how these elements transform into materiality in Kaleka’s work are discussed. This discussion reveals in more depth, the illusory loop that Kaleka constructs in order to engage the audience in a deeper and more critical perception of the human condition at the interface of society, politics and economics with the techniques of video art. While the paper places greater emphasis on perception of an artwork by its audience, artists may be able to use the neurocognitive model analysis to develop different engagement strategies with their audiences. The author’s intention is to delve into an expanded investigation of aesthetic experience and perception using the elusive links between art and science

Extended Beings: Screendance as a Reflective and Interrogative Tool During Covid-19

No abstract available

Event segmentation and biological motion perception in watching dance

We used a combination of behavioral, computational vision and fMRI methods to examine human brain activity while viewing a 386 s video of a solo Bharatanatyam dance. A computational analysis provided us with a Motion Index (MI) quantifying the silhouette motion of the dancer throughout the dance. A behavioral analysis using 30 naïve observers provided us with the time points where observers were most likely to report event boundaries where one movement segment ended and another began. These behavioral and computational data were used to interpret the brain activity of a different set of 11 naïve observers who viewed the dance video while brain activity was measured using fMRI. Results showed that the Motion Index related to brain activity in a single cluster in the right Inferior Temporal Gyrus (ITG) in the vicinity of the Extrastriate Body Area (EBA). Perception of event boundaries in the video was related to the BA44 region of right Inferior Frontal Gyrus as well as extensive clusters of bilateral activity in the Inferior Occipital Gyrus which extended in the right hemisphere towards the posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus (pSTS)

Structural and molecular interrogation of intact biological systems

Obtaining high-resolution information from a complex system, while maintaining the global perspective needed to understand system function, represents a key challenge in biology. Here we address this challenge with a method (termed CLARITY) for the transformation of intact tissue into a nanoporous hydrogel-hybridized form (crosslinked to a three-dimensional network of hydrophilic polymers) that is fully assembled but optically transparent and macromolecule-permeable. Using mouse brains, we show intact-tissue imaging of long-range projections, local circuit wiring, cellular relationships, subcellular structures, protein complexes, nucleic acids and neurotransmitters. CLARITY also enables intact-tissue in situ hybridization, immunohistochemistry with multiple rounds of staining and de-staining in non-sectioned tissue, and antibody labelling throughout the intact adult mouse brain. Finally, we show that CLARITY enables fine structural analysis of clinical samples, including non-sectioned human tissue from a neuropsychiatric-disease setting, establishing a path for the transmutation of human tissue into a stable, intact and accessible form suitable for probing structural and molecular underpinnings of physiological function and disease

Navigating Hyperrealities: Tamil Film (Kollywood) Choreography as Screen Dance

This essay discusses the choreographic ethos that integrates technology and dance as an evolving mode of storytelling in South Indian (Tamil-Kollywood) movies by tracing the work of director Shankar Shanmugam. Through analyses of song-dance sequences, I identify three key principles for using screendance techniques, and reflect on how these innovations contribute to cultivating and shaping the audience imagination. The audience is challenged to further engage at multiple levels and grapple with the relationships between human and more than human worlds. In the Kollywood scene, there is a constant quest for new techniques that can embrace inner realities

Reflections On State Of The Art: International Symposium On Screendance 2022

No abstract available