Is my body out of date? The drag of physicality in the digital age

At the 2019 Body of Knowledge Conference at Deakin University, I presented the third episode of performance-lecture series ‘Is My Body Out of Date?’ in collaboration with Melbourne-based artists Bon Mott and Sean Miles. Punctuated by quotes and phrases from a range of theorists, writers and artists including Karen Barad, Caroline Bassett, Laboria Cuboniks, Ian McEwan, Oscar Wilde, Yon Heong Tung, ETA Hoffman, Gilbert Simondon, and my drag character #Sergina, the performance (struck) poses (around) the question of whether, in a world that is increasingly managed and experienced online, our bodies, as our primary mode of interaction, may be beginning to feel out of date. Is our desire for sweaty, messy, fleshy physical co-presence out of whack with the agility, efficiency and value of our algorithms? Performed live at a laptop with Mott and Miles as physical #BackupBodies for my own body that didn’t fly from London for ecological reasons, this physical/digital screenshare performance wove in video documentation from previous #Sergina performances in order to confuse and conflate what was happening now, and what already happened, what was live and what was pre-recorded. Here we played with issues of perception, presence, liveness and the fantasy of the (ex)changeability of identity and ‘drag’ (performance) of physicality within an ever-shifting media present. What follows is a visual essay constructed out of the digital remnants of the performance: a (trans)script, a screen recording, screenshots and links to media located beyond the template of the text. The visual essay touches on key conference themes such as virtual embodiment, human/computer interaction, temporal coupling and time consciousness, knowledge-transfer and how technology affects the way we move, think and desire. Furthermore, the templates of Zoom video communications, of the laptop screen, of Chrome and the wider digital/physical conference model that hosted, directed (and dictated) the boundaries of our presentation reflect on the influence of design, layout and digit/al choreographies on the shaping and ordering of thought, knowledge and embodiment.

Dance as a social practice

This article explores an ongoing group dance improvisation practice which, while primarily an artistic practice, could also be considered a social practice which is brought about by the physical, embodied and intersubjective environment in which it exists. Among others, the ideas of Tim Ingold, Hannah Arendt and Hanne De Jaeghar are used to explore the implications of what happens when individuals share a dancing practice. The article will also describe how the ongoing dance practice has been drawn upon to develop dance workshops for children with disability. The workshops were developed to include a variety of dance activities such as learning movement material, dance improvisation and supported group movement generation (choreography). Through the principle of intersubjectivity, described by cognitive science philosopher, Hanne De Jaegher, as ‘perspectives that are influenced by and co-created by more than one subject,’ dance will be discussed as a social practice as well as a situation in which one participates physically and creatively.

Movement, Narrative and Multiplicity in Embodied Orientation and Collaboration from Prehistory to the Present

The term ‘body of knowledge’ has a double meaning, implying a unified assemblage of knowledge as well as embodied cognition. But knowledge is not naturally unified, as was apparent in the first Body of Knowledge Conference, where the internalist neurosciences presenting themselves as universalist and objective were clearly divided from the externalist performing arts with their more experiential and practice-based character. Assemblage across such divides takes embodied, collaborative, social and technological action. I suggest that bridging of the divides from both sides is now starting to emerge through an augmentation of the dimensions of what Ed Hutchins has called a ‘cognitive ecosystem’ to include a complex multiplicity of culture, history, and exchange. A socio-historical cognitive ecosystem that emphasises the central importance of narrative, collaboration and movement, multiplicity, and orientation in embodied cognitive practises. Building on the talk I gave at the 2016 Body of Knowledge Conference, this paper aims to explore the roles of movement, narrative, and multiplicity in embodied orientation and collaboration, from prehistory to the present. Disparate narratives of movement, multiplicity, collaboration, and cognition that are emerging in a variety of seemingly unrelated disciplines are woven together in three parts: 1) recent neuro-scientific research on the ‘cognitive map’ in the brain; 2) recent reticulated accounts of how hominims moved out of Africa; and 3 how differing knowledge traditions and ontologies can be seen to work together in the case of the chart drawn for Captain Cook by Tupaia, the great Polynesian navigator.

Hidden Worlds

This art project examines non-binary and transgender identity through training machines to generate art based on Greek and Roman statuary. The statuary is binary in nature and appeals to the concept of pinnacles of masculinity and femininity but what of those of us who fall between, what of transgender bodies, gender non-conforming and non-binary bodies and intersex bodies? Image recognition algorithms have a difficult time classifying people who fall outside the binary, those who don’t pass as cisgender and those who present in neutral or subversive ways. As image recognition becomes more prevalent, we need to have a past and a future for everyone who doesn’t fit neatly into one of the only two boxes on offer. We need to open up the categories, allow people to self-identify or to scrap the concept of gendering people mechanically all together. As a spatial installation, Hidden Worlds also explores the embodiment of interactive augmented reality bodies in the space between physical and digital worlds. I have worked with a classifier and some deliberately abstract figure works, generated by machine, to explore where gender is assigned in the process and what it looks like when you aren’t neatly classified, and the disconnect that is felt when misgendered. The generated captions have flipped around gender and as the figure resolves and each section is submitted to the narrative writer you see a different set of pronouns, a disconnection between what you see and what you hear. I will explore the assumptions we make about classical art; the way it can inform how we represent gender minorities going forward and how art can illustrate the gaps that exist in the training of these important machine learning systems.

Unknowingly, A threshold-crossing movement

It is in this special issue that the editorial board holds true to our promise to expand the horizons and readership of idea journal while reaching out to associated and adjacent art, design and performance practices and drawing connections to seemingly distant disciplines. The articles in this issue have provenance in a 2019 conference event, Bodies of Knowledge (BOK), which was guided by a similar interdisciplinary ethos. With an emphasis on cultures of practice and communities of practitioners that offer perspectives on inclusion, diversity/neurodiversity and disability, this conference, and this subsequent journal issue, aim to increase knowledge transfer between diverse forms of embodied expertise, in particular, between neuroscience and enactive theories of cognition.

Sensing space: An exploration of the generation of depth and space with reference to hybrid moving image works and reported accounts of intense aesthetic experience

This article draws on three hybrid moving image works—David Wilson’s Moray McLaren—We Got Time, Christoph Niemann’s bike, and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life—to explore phenomenologist David Morris’s theory that the perception of space arises from bodily processes that generate inner envelopes of depth and outer envelopes of space. A characteristic of these hybrid moving image works is that they set up spatial dynamics that interrupt dominant modes of spatial perception, allowing aspects of spatial perception that we might not otherwise notice to come to the fore. The analysis demonstrates that the perceiver must hollow out envelopes of space around things for these things to show up as dimensional things that occupy their own space. The analysis demonstrates that a breakdown in the capacity to hollow out outer envelopes of space around things reveals the operation of inner envelopes of ambiguous depth where things flatten out or become diffuse, and can be subject to dramatic changes in scale and position. The analysis also demonstrates that the perceiver’s sense of their own location in space can be disrupted by a breakdown in the ability to hollow out outer envelopes of space around things. The article extends the discussion of the power of artworks to interrupt and reveal the dynamics of spatial perception through an examination of spatial aspects of reported accounts of intense aesthetic experience. These accounts include experiences of feeling unusually close to an artwork, or conversely, of feeling unusually distant from the work. I argue that these unusual spatial experiences can be explained as situations where ambiguous, plastic inner envelopes of depth have come to dominate perception.

‘Stim Your Heart Out’ and ‘Syndrome Rebel’ (Performance Artworks, Autism Advocacy and Mental Health)

‘Stim Your Heart Out’ is a set of concepts and beliefs that advocate the benefits of the autistic culture of ‘stimming’, a repetitive physical action that provides enjoyment, comfort and contributes towards self-regulation of emotions. Facilitating the exploration of contemporary movement in the context of stimming and self-regulation, workshops generated a series of movement scores, culminating in a patented choreographic system of stimming performances documented at the www.stimyourheartout.com website and associated film. ‘Syndrome Rebel’ utilises this new choreographic system, where a performative movement score was created. A new stimming symbology/language was then developed and embroidered around the edge of a circular blanket, to record the movement score in this new symbology. The artist then interacted with these symbols within a live integrated movement score stimming performance. Continuing the conversations of Civil Rights and Feminism, the work uses textiles, language and performance to challenge the use of deficit language by the medical academic fraternity, and to protest against social behavioural norms, and the stigma that medical and educational practitioners and society associate with autistic behaviours, due to their medicalised perspective of ‘cure.’ These works advocate for autistic people to be able to celebrate and practise their autistic culture, while sharing the self-awareness of our sensory perception and neuroperspective with the rest of society. The project and performance address the prevalence of mental health conditions among autistic people, raise the discussion of art as a process of social cognition, and speak to the gap between descriptions of embodied cognition and the co-construction of lived experience. ‘Stim Your Heart Out’ project and ‘Syndrome Rebel’ performance make connections across my lived-experience and research practices within the arts and sciences.

Gentle House: Co-designing with an autistic perception

This article discusses the early phases of Gentle House, a spatial design research project that works with concepts of autistic perception and a collaborative design process to renovate the home of a family of four. The family includes a ten-year-old autistic child who is currently being educated via correspondence schooling. In working alongside the family and understanding the uniqueness and complexity of their needs, the goal is to create spaces that are stimulating and enjoyable for them to live in. The autistic child’s experience of the physical world is pathologised as sensory processing disorder. This is a condition where there are differences in the integration of sense modalities that can lead to moments of being overwhelmed by some stimulus and a more highly tuned receptivity to other stimuli, such as texture and smell. This design research rejects a pathological framework for characterising these experiences and uses co-design approaches with the aim of learning from his engagement with the world. In particular, his highly tuned awareness of phenomena that ‘neurotypical’ perception tends to tune out or overlook. The larger implication of this project and approach is a rethinking of our living and working environments towards sensorially richer and more inclusive ends. The early phases of the project have involved a series of spatial, material, and sensory design prototypes, which are discussed in terms of their co-creation and the perceptual richness of space-time experiences. The design knowledge gleaned from these prototypes is briefly contextualised within existing frameworks for inclusive design, before outlining future trajectories for the research.

Musicking as ecological behaviour: an integrated ‘4E’ view

In this article, I bring together research from ethnomusicology, ecology, neuroscience, ‘4E’ cognition theory and evolutionary musicology in support of the idea that musicking, human musicking in particular, can best be understood as an emergent ecological behaviour. ‘Ecological’ here is used to mean an active process of engaging with and connecting ourselves to our various environmental domains – social, physical and metaphysical – and although I will focus on musicking, these concepts may apply to other artistic behaviours as well. The essential ideas from the Santiago theory of cognition, the work of Maturana and Varela and one of the foundations of contemporary 4E cognition theory, are that we as living beings ‘bring forth’ both the inner and outer worlds we experience, and this process (cognition) is common to all life. Music is also a process (not an object), one that emerges from properties of life itself and serves to link body/mind and environment. Understood this way, ‘co-constructing body-environments’ applies to the arts in general.

Re-presenting a dance moment

This visual essay deconstructs a four-second experience within a dance performance, In and out of time, which was performed at Dancehouse (Melbourne, AUS) in 2018. It captures the body’s movement as still moments and re-presents them through a tiled image and a video ‘flip-book’ work. Together with language, the visual essay aims to reveal how, over time, the memory of this experience has become magnified and thickened, drawing out new ways of knowing in relation to an embodied experience each time it is recollected.