scholarly journals Making touch visible with the suture of fantasy with virtual aesthetician in “The Best Facial Clinic” – The glitchy-score of tele-synaesthesia performance in the age of global pandemic

Artnodes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ada Xiaoyu Hao

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been adapting as fugitives of this accidental encounter with an “untouchable” virus, while being rendered into the shared virtual arena, where our discursive bodies are situated within, embedded in and tele-commuted to. Our increasing dependence on online interaction and video conferencing during the pandemic is not only facilitating social connectedness, but also contemplating the question: How to elongate our somatosensation and echo the embodied experience of touching through the incorporeal virtual connectivity? This essay focuses on the embodied nature of tele-synaesthesia performance, its potential effect of forging a rhythmic connection from one sensuous modality to another, and the concurrent emergences of glitch and internet latency as non-verbal cues of internet-situated communication. In reference to Laura Mark’s theory of haptic visuality, where vision triggers a tactile experience in the body; Naomi Bennett’s concept of virtual touch, in which an affective sensory response of touch can be elicited through non-tactile senses, Paul Sermon’s artistic production of Telematic Quarantine (2020) and Pandemic Encounter (2020), that telepresents the stories of self (isolation), and in relation to Michel Foucault’s concept Heterotopia in the context of internet-situated performance, I examine the performance work I have been developing during lockdown since March 2020: The Best Facial (2021), supported by Centre for Digital Media Cultures Research and School of Art Postgraduate Research at University of Brighton, a number of sessions of 25-minute 1-to-1 participatory tele-synaesthesia performances that take place on Zoom, where I become a virtual aesthetician and use telepresence to perform meditative virtual facial tactics, and to make tele-contact improvisation upon the surface of the participant’s face to trigger tactile experiences through haptic visuality, virtual touching, and auditory fantasization.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 237-266
Author(s):  
Ada Xiaoyu Hao

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an uncanny rift between tact and touch as it expands the virtual towards its potential. Layer upon layer of new information has been repeatedly revising and reformulating our sense of touch. The unconditional freedom of touch needs to be rendered accountable in this rift of time and space. The act of touching entails individual acknowledging the risk of reaching towards the unknown or the known. Tracing with a tactile sense of touch is to be tactful about how, where and what can such act of touching could reach, especially in the context of communicative technology. This article focuses on the possibility of virtual sensibility by challenging ways to feel touched beyond the nostalgic narratives that attempt to indict communicative technology with the loss of touch. To replenish and reinstate touch through tele-synaesthesia performance, I ask: how to elongate our somatosensensation and echo the embodied experience of touching through virtual connectivity? Tele-synaesthesia performance joints telematic and synaesthetic experience together to embody the incorporeality of touch through virtual connectivity. It embodies the injunction of physical contact and challenges what can and cannot be touched by suturing one sensuous modality to another. Inspired by Paul Sermon’s artistic production of Telematic Quarantine (2020) and Pandemic Encounters (2020), that tele-presents the stories of self (isolation), I have created The Best Facial (2021): a series of one-to-one participatory tele-synaesthesia performances, where I became a virtual aesthetician and performed ‘virtual facial care’ on Zoom amid the second wave of the pandemic in the United Kingdom. In this article, I will discuss how tele-synaesthesia performance could trigger tactile experiences in the participants in reference to Michel Foucault’s concept Heterotopia (1986) that allegorically address the incompatible physical places in the society. I discuss how to elicit an affective sensory response from non-tactile senses through virtual touch, as stated by Naomi Bennett’s ‘Telematic connections: sensing, feeling, being in space together’ (2020). I refer to Legacy Russell’s discussion on glitch (2020) to analyse the possible future of tele-synaesthesia performance and its potential for expanding virtual connectivity with an ethical touch of a non-performative refusal of the present.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-170
Author(s):  
Chengpu Yu ◽  
Wanlin Li ◽  
Mingfen Deng

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is hailed as “the holy grail” for infertile patients in the mainstream narrative. The existing studies have clearly demonstrated how external social factors shape how ART is to be used, but they ignore the recipients of the technologies, and especially the experiences of women. Based on an investigation conducted in Z hospital’s reproductive center, this article regards embodiment as the methodological orientation for integrating socio-cultural context with female embodied experience in order to show their bio-social entanglement. As fieldwork evidence indicates, ART in practice is far from simple “hope technology”; instead, it throws women into a paradoxical world in which hope and anxiety coexist. Embodied experience, hope, and anxiety are transmitted through the bodies of women, which reveals the inscription of social-cultural context and technical uncertainty on the female body and, meanwhile, women actively learn strategies by which to cope with the technical uncertainty and moral pressures from local culture (including healing the body, folk religion, etc.), so as to hold onto infertility treatment with hope.


2021 ◽  
pp. 213-225
Author(s):  
Maciej Tanaś

The article presents the enormous scientific, organisational and social achievements of Professor Andrzej Jaczewski – the doyen of Polish sexology, doctor and educator. The author recalls the awarding of the Medal of Merit for the Development of Polish Pedagogy, presented by the Chapter of the Committee of Pedagogical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The author describes and analyses the various fields of the Professor’s activities, referring to available studies and insightful personal accounts. Undisputed, original and significant scientific achievements at the medical and pedagogical junctions, as well as beautiful accounts from his own life and accomplishments set new perspectives for pedagogical sciences, earning the Professor enormous respect from within and beyond his Polish and German academic cohort and peers. The Professor was and remains to many, a physician of the body, mind and spirit. With his unwavering passion and dedication to his students and the scouts, he truly exemplifies and models a path that seeks truth, beauty and doing good. There is a discussion about the shape of Polish education concerning errors in teaching science and biology, wasting children’s abilities in the sciences more than it is commonly believed, the problem of physical and mental “splitting maturation”, the role of adventure in scouting, “becoming” a mature person, the highest grades on secondary school-leaving certificates and young people’s lack of skills in communicating in other languages. In addition, the discussion addresses the competences needed to build social relations, personal courage and responsibility, tolerance and respect for other people, the ability to cooperate and build a community, the catalogue of values in the process of education, integration of education and upbringing processes, theatre, ballet, classical and opera music concerts, popular culture, as well as digital media and human rights to a life of value, sailing and education reforms. The conversation with professor Andrzej Jaczewski at his home in Ropki in the Beskid Niski leads to the conclusion: “We have to invent a new school. A school worthy of our dreams and the fate of our children and grandchildren”. The author treats it as the Professor’s pedagogical will.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jumoke Giwa

<p>This research project undertakes a critical analysis of the use of new media technologies by community activists engaging in local and global communities. Increasingly, community organizations are using digital media to augment their various activities and conduct campaigns. I will consider this development with regard to WorldPulse.com, a global organization whose aim is to foster and facilitate civic engagement. More specifically, the website attempts to function and serve as a global public sphere and vehicle for the expression and discussion of political, social and cultural issues relevant to women. The analysis conducted in this thesis focuses on the website’s digital action campaigns on gender-based violence, girl child education, and women’s access to technology between 2012 and 2014, and its ‘Voices of Our Future’ citizen journalism training program.  This project employs digital ethnographic methods using content and discourse analysis, participant observation, online web survey, semi-structured email interviews and a researcher’s journal to examine the potential of worldpulse.com to serve as a global public sphere for women. The research makes use of critical studies theories and data triangulation methodologies in order to identify and evaluate if, and to what extent, the site facilitates public sphere activity and activism. I have developed an inductive typology to assess levels and kinds of civic engagement that is enabled and augmented by the interconnection of online and offline advocacy. This thesis aims to contribute to the body of scholarly literature researching and evaluating the extent to which new media technologies enable and facilitate public sphere engagement.</p>


Author(s):  
Sara Roetman

This paper engages with feminist political economists to explore questions of affective labour and value-production in self-tracking technologies designed for the female body (‘femtech’). Self-tracking femtech is largely characterised by smartphone applications and smart devices that track user data relating to menstruation, fertility periods, sexual activity, ovulation, hormones, and health and wellbeing. This data can be collected through self-reporting or through automated transmission from sensory devices attached to the body. By reflecting on my own experiences with these technologies, this paper argues that users of self-tracking femtech perform the labour of reproducing our bodies and our affective relations in ways that are amenable to both capitalist and patriarchal structures of power. Situated within the broader shifts of care and social reproduction, self-tracking femtech can be understood as affective infrastructures that re-stabilise gender norms and continue to unevenly push the burden of reproduction onto a class of unpaid women. I explore the ways that affective experiences are shaped and modulated by self-trackers to (re)produce and discipline the fertile and sexual female body to be $2 a productive labouring body and heterosexually attractive feminine subjectivity. The labour of reproduction is further intertwined here with the labour of producing data for digital media industries that generates profit in the advertising marketplace. By examining co-constitutive and paradoxical forms of value at play, I dually situate self-tracking femtech within broader political struggles and locate the spaces of agency in our everyday entanglements with digital media technologies.


2021 ◽  
pp. e1-e19
Author(s):  
Ruff Joseph Macale Cajanding

COVID-19 has emerged as one of the most devastating and clinically significant infectious diseases of the last decade. It has reached global pandemic status at an unprecedented pace and has placed significant demands on health care systems worldwide. Although COVID-19 primarily affects the lungs, epidemiologic reports have shown that the disease affects other vital organs of the body, including the heart, vasculature, kidneys, brain, and the hematopoietic system. Of importance is the emerging awareness of the effects of COVID-19 on the cardiovascular system. The current state of knowledge regarding cardiac involvement in COVID-19 is presented in this article, with particular focus on the cardiovascular manifestations and complications of COVID-19 infection. The mechanistic insights of disease causation and the relevant pathophysiology involved in COVID-19 as they affect the heart are explored and described. Relevant practice essentials and clinical management implications for patients with COVID-19 with a cardiac pathology are presented in light of recent evidence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi A. Patterson

This arts-based exploration offers potentiality and theory to the wider arts-based research field by expanding and naming embodied experience as it relates to mechanical means of transport. The author dubs such a practice of physically moving the body between vast and varied spaces to be a roving art practice. She offers modes of potential, a preliminary list of protocols to contextualize a rover’s manifesto/a and ways to use roving as an educational tool applicable to the field of art education.


Author(s):  
Allakhyarov D.Z. ◽  
Petrov Yu.A. ◽  
Chernavsky V.V.

This article presents reviews of literature sources on the clinical and pathogenetic aspects of the course of a new coronovirus infection in pregnant women, in order to analyze the features of the course of COVID-19 in pregnant women and to assess the impact of infection on the body of a woman and a fetus. Pregnancy is a special physiological condition, during which a number of changes occur in the body, not only in the hormonal status, but also in the immune system. The urgency of this problem is due to the high prevalence of new coronavirus infection among the population. On March 12, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO), as a result of the dynamic development of the epidemic in many countries and continents, declared a global pandemic of the contagious disease COVID-19 caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. According to available studies, pregnant women are more susceptible to a more severe course of infectious diseases affecting the upper respiratory tract. According to various studies, a new coronavirus infection can lead to premature birth, miscarriage, and preeclampsia. Separate studies show increased mortality in pregnant women diagnosed with COVID-19. The SARS-CoV-2 virus does not have a direct teratogenic effect on the fetus, but it can indirectly lead to harmful effects on the developing organism. Special attention should be paid to the issue of vaccination of pregnant women against a new coronavirus infection, at the moment there is no accurate data on the effect of the vaccine on the body of the pregnant woman and the fetus. In this regard, the question of the impact of a new coronavirus infection on the course of pregnancy has become relevant.


Author(s):  
Lorna Ann Moore

This chapter discusses the one-to-one interactions between participants in the video performance In[bodi]mental. It presents personal accounts of users' body swapping experiences through real-time Head Mounted Display systems. These inter-corporeal encounters are articulated through the lens of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his work on the “Mirror Stage” (1977), phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968) and his writings on the Chiasm, and anthropologist Rane Willerslev's (2007) research on mimesis. The study of these positions provides new insights into the blurred relationship between the corporeal Self and the digital Other. The way the material body is stretched across these divisions highlights the way digital media is the catalyst in this in[bodied] experience of be[ing] in the world. The purpose of this chapter is to challenge the relationship between the body and video performance to appreciate the impact digital media has on one's perception of a single bounded self and how two selves become an inter-corporeal experience shared through the technology.


2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-94
Author(s):  
Chittaranjan Behera ◽  
Ravi Rautji ◽  
Ramesh Pratap Anuragi ◽  
Ram Niwas Yadav

Suicide notes are generally written on readily available materials, such as paper, notebook, wall or mirror by means of pen, pencil, marker or chalk. They can also be communicated by telephone, text messages, internet and digital media. A case has been reported where a note was written with henna. Suicide notes written on one’s body are uncommon, and notes engraved on the body with a sharp metallic object are extremely rare. We present two cases where a sharp pointed metallic object was used to write suicide notes on the body.


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