[dance-tech] Re: March discussion forum: dance/performance and participation
- From: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "dance-tech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <dance-tech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 14:42:10 +0000
Thanks Diego for your great response and the information & research you share
with us --
(Only about 90 subjects turn up from the 150 who had signed on; the experiment
went well, nevertheless).
I will get back to this in while, after reflection, need to find my notes on a
Choreolab in Austria a few years back when a cognitive scientist also mentioned
this example of the hand illusion......
and in the METABODY project that my Lab is engaged with (it is an EU-grant
research project involving 13 partners), we have one undertaking, led by Stocos
(Madrid), collaborating with Swiss scientist Daniel Bisig (who works with
neural networs and creates these creatures that respond to movement/human
motion), which is called "Phantom Limb"; next time I may comment a bit more on
that project, as our Lab's designer, Michèle Danjoux, has been creating an
extended hand for it, or rather, a BeakHandSpeaker that can emit sound. We
considered it a small commentary on the ideas of phantoms.
Other phantom pains are perhaps the ones addressed, early on, by Dawn
Stoppiello - when she said we cannot keep up the discourse, there is too much
of it, too much information.
We shall find out here.
This morning I came across someone asking, "My question is about the body. Do
we intend to keep it? The reason I ask, a lot of conflict is framed as
inequality, and a lot
of the discussion about equality is based on a certain consistency of what it
is to be human....." (BishopZ)
So here's a video about keeping up --http://youtu.be/VIPU7EqTCuc
[by Edward Picot]
warm regards
Johannes Birringer
________________________________________
From: Diego S. Maranan [dmaranan@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2015 12:57 AM
To: Johannes Birringer
Cc: dance-tech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [dance-tech] March discussion forum: dance/performance and
participation
Hi Joannes and all,
Thank you for the article reference and letting me know about what you’re doing
at Brunel… I’m going to have to check it out! I’m in Amsterdam right now for a
cognitive science conference, where one of the two day workshops I’m attending
is on “art, affordances, and embodied cognition”. There has certainly been a
(re)turn to the body in many fields of study. I really should find a way to
connect with people at Brunel… 150 subjects, that’s wonderful! That research
seems to be in the spirit of what one of my colleagues is doing; Klara Lucznik
is a PhD student working with psychologist Jon May and dance artist Adam
Benjamin on the "contribution of imagery to creativity, and the roles of
metacognitive strategies and group dynamics in dance choreography”
http://www.cognovo.eu/projects/mental-imagery-dance-choreography.php. There’s
also the work of PhD student Shannon Cuykendall (who works with Thecla
Schiphorst) on the use of kinaesthetic empathy in technology design, (e.g.,
Cuykendall, S., Soutar-Rau, E., Cochrane, K., Freiberg, J., & Schiphorst, T.
(2015). Simply Spinning: Extending Current Design Frameworks for Kinesthetic
Empathy. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible,
Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 305–312). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
http://doi.org/10.1145/2677199.2680567)
Yes you are right: there has been (at least within the kind of circles I mingle
in) a resurgence in interest on this notion of empathy, and specifically
kinaesthetic empathy. I came across the notion of kinaesthetic empathy a little
before Reynolds and Reason (which I am trying to read right now… among the
hundreds of other things on my reading list!!), through neuroscientists' work
on mirror neurons, which looks like really started getting published the late
90s to the early 2000s. I’ve shared a bibliography of mirror neurons +
kinaesthetic empathy on
https://www.zotero.org/diegomaranan/items/collectionKey/GH78EFV7/order/date/sort/asc.
There’s also a really interesting line of research going on in cognitive
science right now that comes from the “rubber hand illusion” experiment. Some
researchers have been able to induce out-of-body experiences through careful
and synchronised use of touch and the clever use of cameras and virtual reality
technologies. They appear to be able to induce the illusion that people are in
someone else’s body, or in a life-sized mannequin’s body, or in a doll’s body,
or in a larger-than-normal-mannequin’s body. There are experimental results
that suggest that people’s judgements of distances and sizes of objects in the
environment are influenced by their body size:
* V. I. Petkova and H. H. Ehrsson, “If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of
Body Swapping,” PLoS ONE, vol. 3, no. 12, p. e3832, Dec. 2008.
* B. van der Hoort, A. Guterstam, and H. H. Ehrsson, “Being Barbie: The
Size of One’s Own Body Determines the Perceived Size of the World,” PLoS ONE,
vol. 6, no. 5, p. e20195, May 2011.
All of these results seem to beg the question: what else of our experience of
the world is influenced by our physicality? What would happen if we experienced
reality in someone else’s body, with their configuration of bones, joints,
ligaments, muscles…?
Keep us up-to-date for sure, Johannes, on your experiments :)
Diego
--
Diego S. Maranan {www.diegomaranan.com<http://www.diegomaranan.com>}
Marie Curie Research Fellow
CogNovo {www.cognovo.eu<http://www.cognovo.eu>}
Cognition Institute
Plymouth University | Drake Circus | Plymouth PL4 8AA, UK
Mobile: +44.7729.889032
On 20 Mar 2015, at 21:40, Johannes Birringer
<Johannes.Birringer@xxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:Johannes.Birringer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
dear all
I had been meaning to respond to Diego's comment on his current work -- can
you tell us a bit more about your research and what you are looking at?
I think the study of empathy has been on the upswing recently, and I remember
traveling up north for a couple of workshops; that research eventually resulted
in the book edited by
Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, (2012), "Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and
Cultural Practices," Bristol: Intellect. Have you come across it, did you
find it helpful?
Another performance artist recently told me about her work on somatics and
affect (affect theory), she just very recently published an article on her
performance and dance work:
Victoria Gray, "Beneath the Surface of the Event: Immanent Movement and the
Politics of affective registers," Choreographic Practices 4:2 (2013), 173-87.
Victoria also wrote
a piece called "Loop", Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 4:2, 2012, 283-95
-- I wonder whether this journal addresses the research field of
somatics/cognitive science in ways helpful to you?
Tomorrow, in fact, I will be quietly participating in an experiment that Dr
Guido Orgs (life science/neuroscience) is conducting at Brunel, we expect about
150 subjects over the weekend, and the
explorations focus on "Synchronous movement cooperation and the performing
arts", an ESRC-funded project looking into dance and "using dance as a means
to study how moving together is linked to liking each other. Similarly,
observing other people move together may be enjoyable because it showcases
successful social interactions. The research will involve “dance workshops” in
which groups of people will be asked to learn short dance choreographies while
cooperation and sympathy between performers and observers of the workshop will
be measured. Motion sensors and neuroimaging methods will be used to identify
brain mechanisms involved in movement synchronization and in watching other
people dance together."
so far so good, I've been to the test rehearsals, and was invited to help
record 3D data (kinect camera system), and we also use a bird-eye view camera
in the space. Maybe later I can report more on the participatory role of my lab
with the scientists from experimental psychology.
regards
Johannes Birringer
[Diego schreibt]
I am a relatively junior member of this list/community, and I have also been
just lurking for the most part. My attention is drawn to Dawn’s observations
around the overabundance of information and avenues for discussion (are we
seeing digital communication and networking technologies being pushed to a
breaking/inflection point?).
I’m also curious to learn more about what “strange places” the the “old gang”
have been to. I myself started off in contemporary dance and in computer
science, and now myself doing a PhD in a psychology department looking at
bodily empathy, and the links between somatics and cognitive science…
Diego
--
Diego S. Maranan
{www.diegomaranan.com<http://www.diegomaranan.com><http://www.diegomaranan.com>}
Marie Curie Research Fellow
CogNovo {www.cognovo.eu<http://www.cognovo.eu><http://www.cognovo.eu>}
Cognition Institute
Plymouth University | Drake Circus | Plymouth PL4 8AA, UK
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