P A L G R A V E S T U D I E S I N P E R F O R M A N C E A N D T E C H N O L O G Y

Creativity and Technology in the Arts and Humanities

Edited by SUSAN BROADHURST and SARA PRICE

DIGITAL BODIES

Series editorsSusan Broadhurst

School of Arts Brunel University

Uxbridge, UK

Josephine Machon Middlesex University

London, UK

Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology

This exciting and timely new series features cutting-edge books which centre on global and embodied approaches to performance and tech-nology. As well as focussing on digital performance and art, the series includes the theoretical and historical context relevant to these practices. Not only does the series offer fresh artistic and theoretical perspectives on this exciting and growing area of contemporary performance practice, but it also aims to include contributors from a wide range of international locations working within this varied discipline. The series includes edited collections and monographs on issues including (but not limited to): identity and live art; intimacy and engagement with technology; biotech-nology and artistic practices; technology, architecture and performance; performance, gender and technology; and space and performance.

Editorial Advisory Board: Philip Auslander, Carol Brown, Sita Popat, Tracey Warr.

We welcome all ideas for new books and have provided guidelines for submitting proposals in the Authors section of our website. To discuss project ideas and proposals for this series please contact the series editors: Susan Broadhurst: susan.broadhurst@brunel.ac.uk, Josephine Machon: j.machon@mdx.ac.uk.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14604

Susan Broadhurst · Sara Price Editors

Digital BodiesCreativity and Technology in the Arts

and Humanities

EditorsSusan BroadhurstBrunel UniversityUxbridge, UK

Sara PriceUniversity College LondonLondon, UK

Palgrave Studies in Performance and TechnologyISBN 978-1-349-95240-3 ISBN 978-1-349-95241-0 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95241-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017943465

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: © DAP-Lab 2015

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

v

Foreword

As a researcher working in the field of human–computer interaction (HCI), I have long seen the human body as being a key frontier for cre-ating powerful and deeply engaging ways of interacting with computers.

In part, the rapidly expanding interest in embodied interaction across various academic disciplines stems from the emergence of succes-sive waves of technology that enable new ways of coupling the human body to computers. Much of the early technical focus, from the 1960s onwards, was on broadening human sensory coupling to digital media through the development of interactive graphics and sound alongside specialized hardware that would couple these directly to the senses. This culminated in the virtual reality headset that at the time of writing has (once again) grasped the public’s interest following renewed claims from the industry that it will soon emerge as a viable low-cost and hence mainstream commercial technology—we shall see. In parallel, research into haptic, tactile and kinesthetic technologies has pointed towards pos-sibilities for stimulating other human senses beyond vision and hearing. In turn, mobile and especially wearable technologies promise to enhance our embodied experience of the everyday world around us. Finally, peer-ing in the more distant future, medical experimentation with digital reti-nas and advanced prosthetics and orthotics hint at even deeper couplings between computers and the human body.

This panoply of technologies has also expanded to include many that sense our bodily actions and responses as part of embodied human-in-the-loop experiences. From early mechanical tracking systems, through

vi FOrEWOrD

electromagnetic tracking, GPS and now computer vision (and especially the recent emergence of depth-sensing cameras such as the Kinect), it is increasingly plausible for computers to sense a wide variety of human movements, gestures and facial expressions. These capabilities are now being extended with technologies that sense our physiological responses as part of interactive experiences, from heart-rate and galvanic skin response (sweat) sensors to various emerging forms of brain–computer interface.

This somewhat long list of technologies serves to reveal the wide range of techniques that are available to those who might wish to explore embodied interactions from different perspectives. It is then perhaps no surprise to see that different permutations of technologies have under-pinned visions of new interaction paradigms. These range from immer-sive virtual reality, through augmented reality, tangible interfaces, wearable computing, exertion interfaces, the quantified self and several others. Although superficially distinct—and sometimes apparently even in opposition—these paradigms are underpinned by a shared belief in the importance of embodied experience—that our interaction with comput-ers is not only a matter of abstract cognition, but also reaches out into the physical and material. This is, of course, a line of thought that can be found in branches of the social sciences and humanities, from embodied cognition to phenomenology to somaesthetics, all of which have been brought to bear at one time or another on the challenge of understand-ing and designing embodied interactions.

Of particular importance here, the digital arts have played, and con-tinue to play, a distinctive and important role within this turn to embod-ied interaction. First, the arts are naturally drawn to embodiment, especially the performing arts, and obviously performance arts such as dance where the focus of attention is inevitably on the performer’s body. Consequently, technologies that enhance our appreciation of the body and its performance, or that raw attention to it in new ways, will inevi-tably be of interest to artists. However, artistic interest in embodiment extends beyond the performer to also include the audience too as digital technologies enable the traditional ‘viewer’ to now become an active par-ticipant and hence co-creator of a work. Nowhere is this more evident than with the emerging art-form of computer games—which I personally believe will become a major art form in the twenty-first century—which first creatively explored embodiment through avatars in virtual worlds

FOrEWOrD vii

and more recently has turned to sensing technologies to create fitness games and other forms of embodied physically active play. Second, artists often play a leading role in exploring the creative potential of any emerg-ing technology; and where artists lead the mainstream of the creative industries often follows. It is always informative to see what artists are making with the technologies of digital embodiment. Indeed, it is per-haps no surprise to have seen artists such as Stelarc, whose work explores extreme and provocative forms of embodied interaction, appearing as keynote speakers at major HCI conferences such as ACM CHI.

It is of course, also appropriate and productive to involve artists more directly in the research process, which brings me briefly to reflect on my own work. Over the past two decades I have collaborated with a series of artists as part of a methodology that I have recently come to refer to as being ‘Performance-Led research in the Wild’ (Benford et al. 2013). With hindsight it is clear to see that all of these have explored ques-tions of embodied interaction to some degree, albeit from rather dif-ferent perspectives. ‘Thrill Engineer’ Brendan Walker collaborated with the Mixed reality Lab to explore how wearable physiological sensors might enhance the thrill of rollercoaster rides, initially deploying personal telemetry systems to capture and broadcast video, audio, heart rate, gal-vanic skin response and accelerometer data to spectators so that they could vicariously share a riders’ experience. He went on to create a series of breath-controlled amusement rides including the automated rodeo bull Broncomatic (2011) and the powered swing Breathless (2012), both of which established unusual human-in-the-loop robotic ride experiences in which the rider has to simultaneously battle for control of the ride and their own bodily response. In a different vein, the artists Blast Theory produced a series of renowned works such as Prix Ars electronic Golden Nica award-winner Can You See Me Now? (2001) and also Uncle Roy All Around You (2003), both of which explored how digital technologies can engender new kinds of embodied experience in which digital narra-tives become overlaid on the everyday physical world or, like Walker, in which remote online participants are able to tune into aspects of anoth-er’s embodied experience. The artists Active Ingredient worked with us to create and study mobile games such as Heartlands (2006) that were driven by a combination of GPS heart-rate data in which partici-pants generated virtual worlds as they explored a real city, with the con-tent depending both on their location, but also their physiological state. More recently, the film-maker richard ramchurn of the group Albino

viii FOrEWOrD

Mosquito has produced #Scanners (2015), a movie where the mixing and cutting of layers of video dynamically responds to estimates of atten-tion, mediation and blinking as measured by a brain-computer interface. reflection across these works has led me to explore new concepts that relate to embodied interaction such as the idea of deliberately design-ing uncomfortable interactions and the significance of participants hav-ing only partial control of an experience because they only have partial control of their own bodily responses to it.

I mention these examples not so much to highlight these particular works and concepts, but rather to point to the potential of embodied interaction at the cutting edge of HCI. I am personally excited by the ever-expanding possibilities of embodied interaction and especially by their ongoing productive collision with the digital arts. This is rich ter-ritory to help us develop new technologies and applications and also to understand more deeply the very nature of what it means to be embod-ied in the world.

This book, with its broad interdisciplinary perspective on embodi-ment, is therefore most timely and very welcome. The exciting collec-tion of writings here explores a suitably broad swathe of technologies, approaches and perspectives and places a particular emphasis on the arts which—as I am sure you will have gathered by now—I believe to be par-ticularly important. I would like to congratulate the authors on drawing together this range of perspectives into one impressive volume and trust that you, the reader, will find much to stimulate and provoke your imagi-nation and your own research within these pages.

reFerence

Benford, Steve, Chris, Greenhalgh, Amy, Crabtree, Martin, Flintham, Brendan, Walker, Joe, Marshall, Boriana, Koleva, Stefan, rennick Egglestone, Gabriella, Giannachi, Matt, Adams, Nick, Tandavanitj, and Ju, row Farr. 2013. Performance-led research in the wild. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 20 (3) (July): Art. 14.

Steve BenfordNottingham, UK

FOrEWOrD ix

Steve Benford is Professor of Collaborative Computing in the Mixed reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham. He currently holds an EPSrC Dream Fellowship and is the Director of the EPSrC-funded Horizon Doctoral Training Centre in Ubiquitous Computing. He is also a Visiting researcher at Microsoft research Cambridge and was the first Visiting Professor at the BBC in 2012. Academically, Steve has received best paper awards at the ACM’s annual Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference in 2005, 2009, 2011 and 2012 (with honourable mentions in 2006 and 2013). He also won the 2003 Prix Ars Elctronica for Interactive Art, the 2007 Nokia Mindtrek award for Innovative Applications of Ubiquitous Computing, and has received four BAFTA nomina-tions. He was elected to the CHI Academy in 2012. His book Performing Mixed reality was published by MIT Press in 2011.

xi

contents

1 Introduction 1Susan Broadhurst and Sara Price

Part I The Performing Body: Creativity and Technology in Performance

2 Digital Performance and Creativity 11Susan Broadhurst

3 Metakimospheres 27Johannes Birringer

4 Making and Breaking: Electronic Waste Recycling as Methodology 49Daniël Ploeger

5 Karen by Blast Theory: Leaking Privacy 65Maria Chatzichristodoulou

xii CONTENTS

Part II Designing, (Re)designing: Embodiment and Digital Creativity in Art Practices

6 Bodies in Light: Mediating States of Presence 81Michaela French

7 The Embodiment of Time 97Helga Schmid

8 Machinising Humans and Humanising Machines: Emotional Relationships Mediated by Technology and Material Experience 111Caroline Yan Zheng

9 The Oxymoron of Touch: The Tactile Perception of Hybrid Reality Through Material Feedbacks 129Laura Ferrarello

Part III Digital Aesthetics and Identity: Creativity in Fashion Design

10 Post-industrial Fashion and the Digital Body 147Douglas Atkinson

11 I:OBJECT—Or the Case for Fashion Without Products 161Kat Thiel

12 Critical Interventions in Wearable Tech, Smart Fashion and Textiles in Art and Performance 175Dr. Camille Baker Ph.D.

13 Giving Body to Digital Fashion Tools 191Bruna Petreca

CONTENTS xiii

Part IV Embodied Interaction: Digital Communication and Meaning Making in the Social Sciences

14 Embodied Music Interaction: Creative Design Synergies Between Music Performance and HCI 207Anna Xambó

15 Digital Museum Installations: The Role of the Body in Creativity 221Sara Price

16 Playing at Doctors and Nurses: Technology, Play and Medical Simulation 235Caroline Pelletier and roger Kneebone

17 Methodological Innovation, Creativity and the Digital Body 253Carey Jewitt

Index 267

xv

editors and contributors

About the Editors

Susan Broadhurst is a writer and performance practitioner and Professor of Performance and Technology in the Department of Arts and Humanities, Brunel University, London. She is sole author of Liminal Acts: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance and Theory (London: Cassell/New York: Continuum 1999) and Digital Practices: Aesthetic and Neuroesthetic Approaches to Performance and Technology (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), together with various articles. She is also co-editor with Josephine Machon of Identity, Performance and Technology: Practices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity (Palgrave Macmillan 2006) and Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st Century Performance (Palgrave Macmillan 2009. Susan is co-editor of the EBSCO indexed Body, Space & Technology online journal. She is also series joint editor for Palgrave’s ‘Studies in Performance and Technology’.

Sara Price is Professor of Digital Learning at the UCL Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education. She has a background in psychology, with extensive experience in HCI (Human Computer Interaction). She is lead editor (with Carey Jewitt and Barry Brown) of the SAGE Handbook of Digital Technology Research (SAGE 2013); lead editor with rosie

xvi EDITOrS AND CONTrIBUTOrS

Flewitt, Terhi Korkiakangas and Berit Henriksen of a Special Issue in Qualitative research—Multimodality: Methodological Explorations (in preparation); joint editor with Chris Quintana and Tom Moher of Proceedings for 10th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (Association of Computing Machinery 2011); and guest editor of the Journal of Education, Technology and Society Special Issue (January 2007). Sara’s research involves the design, development and evaluation of emerging digital technologies (mobile, tangible, sensor), exploring ways in which they can enhance learning through mediating new forms of thinking and reasoning; and the development of methodological approaches in HCI.

Contributors

Douglas Atkinson is a research Fellow at London College of Fashion: University of the Arts London. His research explores the sensory and emotional experiences of making fashion artefacts, as mediated or quan-tified by digital technology. This includes the evolution of fashion from a skilled artisan craft into a post-industrial practice developing new approaches and aesthetics.

Dr. Camille Baker Ph.D. is an artist-performer/researcher/cura-tor within various art forms: tech fashion/soft circuits/DIY electronics, mobile media art, participatory performance and interactive art, respon-sive interfaces and environments, and digital media curating. Her other research interests include: video art, live cinema, experience design, media art installation, telematics, networked communities, web anima-tion, and music composition and performance. She has a fascination with all things emotional, embodied, felt, sensed, the visceral, physical, relational, and participatory projects that involve video, communication devices and biofeedback. She has been on a continuous quest to work with new and emerging technologies to explore expressive methods, via art and performance, to connect people with each other, over distance better and in more embodied, emotional ways.

Johannes Birringer is a choreographer/media artist and co-director of DAP-Lab at Brunel University where he is Professor of Performance Technologies. He has created numerous dance-theatre works, films

EDITOrS AND CONTrIBUTOrS xvii

and video installations that have been shown in Europe, the Americas, China and Japan. DAP-Lab’s Suna no Onna was featured at festivals in London; the mixed-reality installation UKIYO went on European tour in 2010. The dance opera for the time being [Victory over the Sun] premiered at Sadler’s Wells (2014). His books include Media and Performance, Performance on the Edge, Performance, Technology and Science, Dance and Cognition, and Dance and Choreomania.

Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X) is a curator, per-former, reader in Performance and New Media and Head of External Development and Enterprise at the School of Arts and Creative Industries at London South Bank University. She is co-editor of Interfaces of Performance (Ashgate 2009) and Intimacy across Visceral and Digital Performance (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). Maria has pub-lished numerous book chapters as well as articles and reviews in jour-nals such as Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly and Leonardo. Maria was co-founder and co-director of the international media art festival Medi@terra and Fournos Centre for Digital Culture and co-director/co-convener of several conferences and symposia. She is currently working on her forthcoming monograph ‘Live Art in Network Cultures’ and an edited collection ‘Live Art in the UK’.

Laura Ferrarello is an artist, architect, researcher, designer and writer. Her work explores the duality of reality between the ‘digital’ and the ‘physical’, as perceived by human mind and body. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the Information Experience Design programme at the royal College of Art. She exhibited her work at the 6th São Paulo Biennale in 2004, and the 10th Architectural Venice Biennale in 2006. She designed the catalogue for the 2008 Beijing Architectural Biennale. She received a Ph.D. in Architectural Design at IUAV University of Venice. She worked in rome, Los Angeles and London on a range of different projects. She teaches and lectures in Italy, UK, USA, Hungary, Switzerland and russia.

Michaela French is an artist, researcher and lecturer working with light and time-based media. Michaela’s research investigates the embod-ied experience of light and wonder. The universal and the intimate are central to her practice which moves between large-scale immersive pro-jection spaces and small light-based objects. Michaela has extensive

xviii EDITOrS AND CONTrIBUTOrS

experience creating moving image for innovative installations in plane-taria, contemporary dance, exhibition design and live performance. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the royal College of Art and lectures in time-based media, animation, motion design and expanded cinema.

Carey Jewitt is Professor of Technology and Learning at the UCL Knowledge Lab, University College London. She has a B.A. in fine art, an M.Sc. in social research methods, and a Ph.D. in technology and education. Her research is concerned with innovative methodolo-gies with particular specialism in visual and multimodal research meth-ods, the intersection of arts and social science methods, and how digital technologies re-mediate interaction. Her most recent research projects include MODE (MODE.ioe.ac.uk) and MIDAS (MiDAS.ioe.ac.uk) and recent books include The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis (routledge 2014).

Roger Kneebone is Professor of Surgical Education and Engagement Science, Imperial College London. He is a clinician and educationalist who leads the Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science. His mul-tidisciplinary research into contextualised simulation builds on his per-sonal experience as a surgeon and a general practitioner and his interest in domains of expertise beyond medicine. roger has built an unortho-dox and creative team of clinicians, computer scientists, design engineers, social scientists, historians, artists, craftsmen and performers. He has an international profile as an academic and innovator and is a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow. roger jointly directs the royal College of Music—Imperial College Centre for Performance Science, exploring (with Aaron Williamon) performance across music, science, medicine, engineering, business and education.

Caroline Pelletier is a senior lecturer at the UCL Institute of Education. Her research is concerned with the significance of technolo-gies in education and she studies by drawing on literature in the soci-ology, philosophy and cultural studies. Her current research focus is simulation-based scientific and clinical education. She is particularly interested in how the realism of simulations is claimed and disclaimed, as well as how simulations are implicated in novel ways of knowing and interacting with objects of scientific inquiry and practice, including the body.

EDITOrS AND CONTrIBUTOrS xix

Bruna Petreca is a researcher in fashion and textiles. She is a Ph.D. can-didate in design products at the royal College of Art. She holds a B.A. in fashion and textiles (University of São Paulo). She is experienced in r&D and implementation, quality control and manufacture of textiles and apparel. She also works collaboratively to design costumes and fash-ion editorials. She is a founding member of the Creative Collective and Co based in São Paulo, Brazil. Bruna is interested in people’s experi-ences with textiles, and more specifically on how to support designers to explore and express the multisensory aspects of this rich experience.

Daniël Ploeger is an artist and cultural critic. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex, and is currently Senior Lecturer and Course Leader Performance Arts at the royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. His artwork has been featured in festi-vals and galleries such as transmediale, WrO media art biennale, Arse Elektronika: a festival of sex and technology, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. His writing has been published in academic journals, including Leonardo and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. He is also principal investigator of an AHrC-funded art-science project on digital performance and the politics of electronic waste. www.daniploeger.org/www.e-waste-performance.net

Helga Schmid is a graphic designer and researcher. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Visual Communication Department at the royal College of Art in London. Her recent research critically chal-lenges today’s societal temporal system of clocks and calendars and pro-poses alternatives based on the human body. Previously, Helga was a researcher at the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has worked internationally as a designer for magazines, museums and as an in-house designer. Her work has been exhibited and featured in publications, blogs and magazines worldwide, and she has received a number of international awards including the Type Directors Award, Art Directors Award, Best German Books Award as well as a Fulbright scholarship and two DAAD scholarships.

Kat Thiel is a London-based artist and designer interested in new ways of making and digital perspectives. She has a strong background in fash-ion design and tailoring. Much of her work is concerned with a criti-cal perspective on the way we operate in fashion and as taste makers and

xx EDITOrS AND CONTrIBUTOrS

considers fashion’s effects on behaviour and social life as much as aes-thetics, materiality and processes. A critical analyst and compulsive (re)creator, she works across the fields of film, installation, performance and digital technologies. research interests include body image/digital self and fashion futures.

Anna Xambó holds a degree in anthropology (UB), an M.Sc. in com-munication and audiovisual media technologies (UPF), and a Ph.D. in music computing (OU). She specialises in computer-supported collabo-rative music, in particular tangible interfaces. Her professional experience includes co-founder of a graphic and web design studio in Barcelona, vis-iting researcher in music computing at the OU in Milton Keynes, and research officer of the Methodological Innovation in Digital Arts and Social Sciences (MIDAS) project at the UCL Knowledge Lab (IOE). Anna is also a producer and performer of experimental electronic music.

Caroline Yan Zheng trained in Paris and London. She is a designer and researcher of physical interaction, wearable technology, in fashion and experience design. Her practice explores new ways to communicate emotion enabled by technology. She designs relational objects and inter-faces between body and space with artificial intelligence, textile and pro-grammable materials. Such interactive material experiences often engage critical reflections of human–machine relations. In her current Ph.D. research at the royal College of Art, she examines the emotional rela-tionships mediated by technology and material experience.

xxi

List oF Figures

Fig. 2.1 Landscape, 2014. Bryony May Kummer-Seddon 19Fig. 2.2 Cuddle performance excerpt, 2014. Francis Marion

Moseley Wilson (fmmw) 19Fig. 2.3 Cuddle installation excerpt, 2014. Francis Marion

Moseley Wilson (fmmw) 20Fig. 3.1 Metakimosphere no. 1, created by DAP-Lab,

Artaud Performance Center, Brunel University London, 2015. © DAP-Lab 28

Fig. 3.2 Vanessa Michielon performing with ‘OrigamiDress’ by Michèle Danjoux, in front of origami architectural structure by Hyperbody. Azzie McCutcheon moves inside foreground gauze. © DAP-Lab 2015 37

Fig. 4.1 Daniël Ploeger, Jelili Atiku, and an unknown boy at an e-waste recycling site at Alaba Market, Lagos, January 2015. Photo Peter Dammann/Agentur Focus 51

Fig. 5.1 Karen by Blast Theory (2015) 66Fig. 6.1 Still image from Flux (1999). Written and directed by

Michaela French, 16mm Film Digital Post-Production 35mm Film, 9 mins 86

Fig. 6.2 Daylight Observation: Thursday 21st January 2016, Hoddesdon England, 124˚ East, 51˚45’ 49”N 0˚1’5”W. Michaela French, 2016 92

Fig. 7.1 Circadian Rhythm Performance. Photography: Helga Schmid 101Fig. 7.2 Circadian Rhythm Performance. Photography: Helga Schmid 102Fig. 8.1 Tangible Emotions installation at rCA Work in Progress show,

January 2016, Caroline Yan Zheng 121

xxii LIST OF FIGUrES

Fig. 9.1 The image illustrates how the oxymoron materiality takes shape (Apples © Laura Ferrarello) 139

Fig. 10.1 Caroline Yan Zheng: Silhouette of Anxiety, Patterns of Emotion pictured alongside traditional tailor’s dummies (2014) 154

Fig. 10.2 Adam Peacock: Brain-Body-Society: The Validation Junky Manifesto Illustration (2012–2014) 156

Fig. 11.1 Kat Thiel, I:OBJECT framework, 2014 164Fig. 11.2 Kat Thiel, Social Compound, 2014 170Fig. 12.1 Hacking the Body 2.0 © 2015. Dancers performing

with DIY wearable sensing devices created by Camille Baker and Kate Sicchio in a week-long residency 178

Fig. 12.2 Hacking the Body 2.0 © 2016. Performances of dancers wearing custom-made etextile garments and electronics created by Becky Stewart and Tara Baoth Mooney under direction by Camille Baker and Kate Sicchio 181

Fig. 13.1 Super technology aspiring to human touch. Illustration Carmem Saito 195

Fig. 14.1 SoundXY4, a tangible musical interface 210Fig. 14.2 Gangsta Headbang, a wearable that augments a fedora

hat presented at the Music Hack Day (Sónar Festival 2015, Barcelona, Spain) 211

Fig. 14.3 Categories of embodied music interaction 213Fig. 15.1 Interaction in the Digital Dragons installation based

on Chen rong’s ‘Nine Dragons’ painting, MODE 2014 224Fig. 15.2 Interaction in the Digital Dragons installation with the

digital depiction of Qui Ying’s painting ‘Farewell to Xunyang’, MODE 2014 225

Fig. 16.1 A high-fidelity manikin in bed, Caroline Pelletier (2012) 237Fig. 16.2 A high-fidelity manikin with face mask, wig and scarf,

Caroline Pelletier (2012) 238Fig. 17.1 A continuum and four categories of methodological

innovation, MIDAS (2015) 256Fig. 17.2 Left research principles and qualities of the project art

and social science case studies. Right Visualising the potential for their interdisciplinary conjunction, MIDAS (2015) 259

1

CHAPTEr 1

Introduction

Susan Broadhurst and Sara Price

Digital Bodies: Creativity and Technology in the Arts and Humanities foregrounds creativity, whilst interrogating the use of technologies and the notion of embodiment within the various disciplines of Art, Design, Performance and the Social Sciences. In so doing it explores a potential and even virtual new sense of embodied self. Technical experimentation creates challenges to human creativity, not least of which is a funda-mental questioning of the former’s usefulness in enhancing the latter. However, from such processes new aesthetic approaches and strategies may develop. As a result of technological inclusions in the creative pro-cess, our perception of reality might well undergo a reconfiguration, in effect recreating our experience in the world.

In offering engagement, from a multi-disciplinary perspective, with digital technologies related to bodily interaction and creativity, this col-lection aims to illustrate the synergies and differences in the theorisa-tion of the body and technology, and how these in turn shape new or

© The Author(s) 2017 S. Broadhurst and S. Price (eds.), Digital Bodies, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95241-0_1

S. Broadhurst (*) School of Arts, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK

S. Price University College London, London, UK

2 S. BrOADHUrST AND S. PrICE

evolving research practices across the arts and humanities. By taking a multi-disciplinary approach a comprehensive view of digital technology research is offered that both extends our notions of the body and cre-ativity through a digital lens, and informs of the role of technology in research and practices central to the Arts and Humanities.

Drawing on our collaborative ESrC funded project: Methodological Innovation in Digital Arts and Social Sciences (MIDAS), which exam-ined a diverse range of methodological approaches to digital creativ-ity, various synergies have arisen, particularly in the way that the body and technology is theorised. The project brought together exper-tise from various disciplines across the Arts and Humanities, from the UCL Institute of Education (IOE), the Contemporary and Digital Performance Studio, Brunel University, the Digital Fashion Studio, London College of Fashion and Information Experience Design, royal College of Art. Since the project had its inception in ‘MIDAS’, rather than purely methodological approaches, the collaborators are more con-cerned with creativity, the interrogation of technologies and the notion of embodiment within our various disciplines.

Contextually, it can be posited that the exponential growth of digi-tal technology has affected the way we think, reflect on ourselves, inter-act with the world, and create. In the technology industries ‘creativity’ has become a familiar portmanteau term for ideas that spawn commer-cially successful products, but has this any bearing on how the term is used in the Arts and Humanities in the context of digital technologies? In this collection we aim to find some answers to this question through the analysis of various case histories within the disciplines of design, fash-ion, performance and social science which set out to scrutinise, in their diverse ways, the process of creation itself, and how an artist’s, creator’s or researcher’s intent negotiates the technological/physical means to produce them.

Central to the virtual/physical interface demonstrated in the genres discussed is an emphasis on the tactile, sensual and even playful nature of the body. The digital body is extended, enhanced, reconfigured and yet identifiable as a body of infinite variability and creativity, that is still linked with our everyday mode of ‘being’ tied to our locatable and tem-poral existence. In particular, Digital Bodies offers an interrogation of diverse creative art works that are indebted to somatic approaches to creativity in all manner of ways, together with works that engage in crea-tive uses of technology to support progressive understanding of digital

1 INTrODUCTION 3

bodily interaction in social science contexts. At the same time it looks to new approaches offered by practices in physical, visual and virtual crea-tive works that incorporate both new and existing technologies.

There is also the phenomenon of what the direct use of physical instru-mentation does to our innate sense of being embodied (sometimes called proprioception). When we build such instruments we consequently project around ourselves a mediated world, in effect our ‘somatic lim-its’ spread to include our created tools. This phenomenon was noted by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. rather, than being separate from the body, technology becomes part of that body and alters and recreates our expe-rience in the world. In many contemporary digital artworks, the human body is shown in flux, a body where contacts are made not physically but electronically where cutting edge multimedia effects explore the inher-ent tensions between the physical and virtual. In social science contexts contemporary digital technology changes communicational resources and communicational space, bringing new forms of interaction and the poten-tial for new creative spaces, and new forms of ‘making meaning’.

Together with the extent of its permeation, the vastly increased interactiveness of technology has already changed artistic genres, design processes, communication and meaning making. In arts con-texts, its capacity to coordinate multi-sensory experiences is a delayed realisation of the Wagnerian notion of the Gessamtkunstwerk, the total, enveloping artwork. In social science contexts its capacity to mediate interaction differently through interfaces that augment sensory engage-ment (visual, tactile) has given rise to new forms of communication that reshape practices in learning, performance and professional contexts. Understanding how the digital reshapes the resources and possibilities of interaction in these contexts is critical in understanding how they recon-figure ways of knowing, ways of communicating and ways of doing to inform educational practices and technology design.

Our first section, entitled ‘The Performing Body: Creativity and Technology in Performance’ begins with Susan Broadhurst’s investi-gation of the notions of bodily presence and digital creativity in digital performance. Whilst highlighting the role of technologically assisted creativity she argues that many contemporary performances by means of their creative engagement can be seen as contemporary manifestations of the aforementioned Gesamtkunstwerke, equally in its Wagnerian connota-tion and in Antonin Artaud’s concept of ‘Total Theatre’. Both provide their audiences with, in varying ways, multi-sensory and multi-layered

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experiences. Johannes Birringer examines the question of designing wearables for use in performative or proactive environments which them-selves are conceived as formative. Following his recent DAP-Lab produc-tions, he investigates how wearables both interconnect with and extend into the atmospheres or unstable states of performative environments that create various possibilities of engagement. Birringer argues that his research productions will potentially go far beyond theatre and are closer to Claire Bishop’s notion of ‘co-productions of (social) situations’.

In his chapter, Dani Ploeger proposes a practice-based methodology to investigate the materiality of electronic waste (e-waste). This is based on his art-science research project: Bodies of Planned Obsolescence: digital performance and the global politics of electronic waste, where researchers participated in e-waste recycling in a factory and on a dump site in Hong Kong and Lagos, Nigeria. Following Tim Ingold’s notion of ‘making’, Ploeger argues that the practical aspect of the research process does not necessarily need to concern the production of artworks, but instead could involve shared participation in labour, which itself is based on a reflective process and, as such, has the potential of creating ‘new research avenues’ for interdisciplinary researchers. Maria Chatzichristodoulou concentrates on Blast Theory’s piece Karen (2015), which is a hybrid between game and drama. Karen invites participants to question how they use media. As such, the capacity to critique is consciously designed into the work, and is manifested through instances of ‘uncomfortable interactions’. Through those difficult encounters, participants are invited to reflect on and develop an enhanced awareness of their own media practices. Chatzichristodoulou argues that Blast Theory’s practices seek to provoke a new media sociality with an inherent practice of resistance, where according to Matt Adams from Blast Theory, heightened aware-ness can produce ‘a new social landscape’.

In our next section, ‘Designing, (re)designing: Embodiment and Digital Creativity in Art Practices’, Michaela French suggests that the findings, creativity and expression emerging from the relationship between bodies and light are inextricably tied to our technological devel-opment. Her chapter examines how the ‘convergence of light, body and technology’ can mediate states of ‘presence’. French draws upon her own artistic research and creative work in immersive projection environments. Helga Schmid goes on to investigate ‘digital bodies’ in relation to our temporal existence. For Schmid, the body is not extended or enhanced, but reconfigured through the embodiment of today’s temporal system

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which is undergoing perpetual change, especially influenced and altered by new technologies. These technologies play a decisive role in deter-mining our temporal experience, and in transforming us into ‘digital bodies’. Schmid argues for an understanding and re-activation of bod-ily rhythms through artistic practice. Thus challenging ‘thought patterns regarding the temporal structure of contemporary, technology driven life’. Following this, Caroline Yan Zheng believes that with the advent of ‘affective’ computing and physical computing, technological arte-facts increasingly mediate human emotional relations, at the same time becoming social entities themselves. Her chapter portrays design research drawing on theories of technology, materiality and making. Zheng’s practice amplifies processes of mediation through her creative work in fashion and experience design. She argues that by creating material play-grounds for technological and human agency, her experiments gener-ate knowledge about new imagined emotional relations resulting from the hybridity of humans and technology. In illustrating the concepts of ‘oxymoronic materiality’ and ‘oxymoronic tectonics’ through a pro-cess based on a ‘feedback loop between human and machine creativity’, Laura Ferrarello explains how touch and the material sensation of physi-cal objects are central to this process. For Ferrarello, digital and physical perceptions of the real are interwoven that create an embodied sense of hybrid reality, with touch as the interface that helps humans to recognise and shape new forms. She believes that machines, ‘including 3D printers, haptic sensors and robots’, engage in a dialogue with ‘our actions, minds and memories, to participate in the formation of the hybrid real’.

Our third section, ‘Digital Aesthetics and Identity: Creativity in Fashion Design’, begins with Douglas Atkinson’s reflection on the work of three emerging designers who apply a post-industrial approach to their fashion practice, in order to explore how digitisa-tion and the loss of material experience newly informs fashion prac-tice. His chapter illustrates, through specific examples, how the digital can bring about new ways of conceptualising fashion and the body, which are central to a post-industrial approach to fashion practice. Situated within this paradigm, Kat Thiel shows how technology can extend notions of ‘what fashion is, moving beyond fashion as cloth-ing, garments and an industry’. Through I: OBJECT she seeks to ‘understand the human form as seen through technology’ and ‘our digital appearances’, and in so doing explores fashion as being about ‘how we inhabit space, human representation, and the multi-faceted

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ways in which we appear in the world’. In this chapter she illustrates how the digital and automatically generated digital data about our bodies/physical beings can be used to re-create (e.g. revisualise) the physical body in innovative ways that can radially move beyond the likeness of its original physical form. Camille Baker’s chapter also draws on bodily generated digital data through wearable apps, such as fitbit, Apple watch. Taking a different approach Baker raises criti-cal ethical issues around commercial companies’ collection and har-vesting of personal body data, to argue for users’ rights of access, ownership, and use of their own body data. From this starting point the chapter details two research initiatives that seek to develop dis-ruptive technologies and explore solutions for raising people’s aware-ness of corporate data harvesting and profiteering of personal data, and to ‘empower them to confront these ethical issues through art and performance’ and to ‘develop more ethical, environmental and sustainable interfaces’. Bruna Petreca picks up on the theme of ‘tactil-ity’, introduced in Ferrarello’s chapter, to engage with critical issues the digital raises, given the central role of touch and the sensory in the context of fashion design. Petreca argues that current technol-ogy obstructs key aspects of human-textile interaction. She goes on to identify key features of analogue touch that can inform the con-ceptualisation of digital tactility. While highlighting the importance of analogical experience with textiles, she examines the value of engag-ing with more embodied approaches to ‘feeling’ to better incorpo-rate perceptual, conceptual and affective levels of experience to inform interdisciplinary research on digital fashion tools.

Our final section entitled ‘Embodied Interaction: Digital Communication and Meaning Making in the Social Sciences’ begins with Anna Xambó’s examination of the design characteristics of digi-tal music interfaces from an embodied interaction perspective. This chapter sits within the human computer interaction (HCI) para-digm, drawing on research methods from both social sciences and the arts to explore creative embodied music performance to inform technology design. Here she examines how different digital inter-faces—tangible, mobile, wearable, gesture sensor-based, and laptop-based—foster embodied interaction, specifically in terms of ‘body, materiality, input control, sound output, coupling physical-digital, vis-ibility/feedback, shareability, and situatedness’, to inform the applica-tion and design of digital music interfaces. Continuing the theme of

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embodied interaction Sara Price takes a multimodality approach to examine ways in which a whole body interactive museum installation fosters young children’s creative narrative development. Specifically she explores how the digital resources promote bodily forms of com-munication and expression, and how their meaning is transformed through creative expression and interpretation to lead to the develop-ment of new narrative. Notions of play and interactive story-telling are then picked up by Caroline Pelletier and roger Kneebone, but this time in the context understanding of simulation-based clini-cal education. The chapter argues for thinking about medical simu-lation as a form of play (as primarily an imaginative phenomenon), which foregrounds the ‘importance of imagination, fantasy and dra-matic conventions in maintaining the credibility of simulation’. Thus, medical simulation appears realistic as ‘a consequence of the imagi-native work of participants—work enabled by practices of acting and pretending, dressing up and mimicry’ and ‘the meaningfulness of the practices they facilitate’. In our final chapter Carey Jewitt closes with some methodological reflections from the MIDAS project. She draws on this ‘ethnographic study of the similarities and differences in how the “digital body”, was understood and researched across the arts and social sciences’. Through this she highlights broader debates of the body and method within qualitative research and their mutual call for social science to engage with and imagine more inclusive and creative methodological possibilities; and argues that ‘social science engage-ment with the arts and the relatively unmapped terrain of the digital body has the potential to open up new spaces, questions and methods that can inform social science methodological innovation’.

We have here assembled an international collection of writers, per-formers, designers and academics renowned in their field, each of whom explore notions of digital creativity in their thinking and practice. This collection of chapters is distinctive in the diversity of disciplines on which it draws, which at the same time engage with similar digital technologies around the body and real-time interaction. It offers the reader exten-sive insight into the relationship between digital technology, the body, creativity and research. In the contemporary digital world of ubiquitous technologies this scope is fundamental in providing a broad ranging per-spective of technological design, implementation, adoption, and emer-gent culture, and highlights the importance of both interdisciplinarity and artistic creativity in this increasingly complex area.