10 research outputs found
Poetics of Reception: a phenomenological aesthetics of bodies and technology in performance
This study examines the provocative claim by Performance Studies theorist Philip Auslander (1999) that there is no ontological distinction between live and mediatised forms because they participate in the same cultural economy. This claim has led to something of a stagnation of debate between, on the one hand, scholars who privilege the live over the mediatised and on the other those who extinguish the live in favour of mediatisation. Moving beyond the limitations of ontology, this project proposes and develops a phenomenological aesthetics in order to investigate the essential structures and modes of experienced phenomena from within audience. The phenomenological approach understands the complexity and dynamism of the relationship between bodies and technologies in performance, reorienting the investigation away from a rehearsal of established and unhelpful ontological positions. The methodology for the project draws primarily upon methods from the N orth-American tradition of practical phenomenology (Herbert Spiegelberg, Edward S. Casey, Don Ihde, and Anthony Steinbock), and the transcendental philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Through a series of specially designed workshops, in which audience participants are trained in phenomenological techniques of bracketing and attention, A Poetics of Reception tests the potential of practical phenomenology to break the ontological impasse set up by Auslander. The method elicits the grasping of experiences of embodiment, kinesthetic empathy, temporality, orientation, imagination and poetic language. Participants were trained and required to write their experiences of the interaction between bodies and performance technologies, creating texts that then underwent hermeneutic analysis. The results of this interpretation yielded six interactive encounters, and revealed the constituted structures and modes of the relational phenomena experienced in performance by the participants. This studyâs methodology has both practical and philoso! phical i mplications, including its proposed use as an audience-based dramaturgy for digital performance, and a method of inquiry into the kinesthetic dimensions of aesthetic experience
Bodily Schemata and Sartre's I and Me: Reflection and Awareness in Movement
Philosophers have faced the problem of self or inner awareness since the self, itself, became something to be known and/or understood. Once dancers âlet go of the mirrorâ (Emily Claid 2006) they too began to face the problem and limits to bodily awareness, developing specific reflective practices to obtain access to their inner bodily selves. But for the phenomenologist, reflection requires an active process of perception, which problematises our grasping of the so-called hidden, organising structures of movement that are unable to be perceived (bodily schemata). For the dancer, then, how is it possible to access and have a deeper understanding of these nonconscious bodily structures? What are the limits to inner bodily awareness?In this article, I draw upon Jean-Paul Sartreâs challenge to Edmund Husserlâs pure ego with his notion of object transcendence in his essay of 1937, Transcendence of The Ego: An existentialist theory of consciousness. I do this as a possible means for understanding bodily schemata and its expression through interactive dance technologies. Using examples from dance, I suggest how bodily schemata can be accounted for if our attention is not directed towards an inner sensing of the body, but towards a site of interaction where objects or materials extend or supraextend our bodies in the form of clothing, costume and digital representations, and where the dancer becomes audience to these distally extended bodily reflections
Bodily Schemata and Sartre's <em>I and Me</em>: Reflection and Awareness in Movement
Philosophers have faced the problem of self or inner awareness since the self, itself, became something to be known and/or understood. Once dancers âlet go of the mirrorâ (Emily Claid 2006) they too began to face the problem and limits to bodily awareness, developing specific reflective practices to obtain access to their inner bodily selves. But for the phenomenologist, reflection requires an active process of perception, which problematises our grasping of the so-called hidden, organising structures of movement that are unable to be perceived (bodily schemata). For the dancer, then, how is it possible to access and have a deeper understanding of these nonconscious bodily structures? What are the limits to inner bodily awareness?
In this article, I draw upon Jean-Paul Sartreâs challenge to Edmund Husserlâs pure ego with his notion of object transcendence in his essay of 1937, Transcendence of The Ego: An existentialist theory of consciousness. I do this as a possible means for understanding bodily schemata and its expression through interactive dance technologies. Using examples from dance, I suggest how bodily schemata can be accounted for if our attention is not directed towards an inner sensing of the body, but towards a site of interaction where objects or materials extend or supraextend our bodies in the form of clothing, costume and digital representations, and where the dancer becomes audience to these distally extended bodily reflections
Faith and doubt: The noematic dimensions of belief in Husserl
In examining Husserl's noesisânoema correlate, which characterizes his intentionality thesis of 1913, this article argues toward âpresentationâ as a sufficient mode of givenness in accounting for religious phenomena by demonstrating how an intentional analysis of faith and doubt is possible if one's regard is directed toward the noetic moment of believing and its corresponding noema: the âbelieved as believed.â This will be shown by directly engaging with the eidetic laws of Husserl's series of belief modalities
A phenomenology of/with total movement: Response to Erin Manning
In âWondering the world directlyâ, Erin Manning criticizes phenomenology by drawing upon Merleau-Pontyâs reflections on the problems of his own project and the criticisms of JosĂ© Gil. Manning claims that phenomenology goes âwrongâ in its privileging of the subject and processes of intentionality: the âconsciousnessâobject distinctionâ. While phenomenology on this understanding alone is inadequate to account for movement and the body, process philosophy has the âability to create a field for experience that does not begin and end with a human subjectâ. This article responds to Manningâs criticism by arguing that phenomenology never intended to perpetuate a concept of subject that fixes an inexorable gap between itself and objects. A historical assessment of subjectivity and intentionality in the work of five different authors, alongside critical points that address Manningâs misconstrual of phenomenology, leads to an understanding of movement that need not âoutrun the subjectâ or become a precarious limit to perceptual experience because of its primacy
Pavements and pathways
A one-day interdisciplinary collaborative performance event exploring Mobility and the city. A Deakin-Monash collaboration in which project participants will engage in the interactive remapping of the City in a creative place-making event