Shifting Immediations: Fields of Experience across Media Art and Design (original) (raw)
Related papers
Philosophy of Photography, 2014
Rapidly changing intersectional processes of globalization, media and technology generate an urgent need for the reconsideration of experiential conditions involving time, space, place and the body. In Senses of Embodiment, editors Mika Elo and Miika Luoto have assembled nine essays from a diverse group of authors and artists in order to explore questions concerning the relationship between diverse and evolving media forms and the embodiment of 'sense'. Of course, sense, in the context of contemporary art practice and media studies, is a multifarious concept that refers to questions of ontology, affect and bodily perception. Elo and Luoto define the collection's approach through what they call 'mediality of sense', a phrase that denotes intersections between artistic presentation through new technologies, bodily capacity and aesthetic experience, and the reflexive interaction that may occur between the individual subject and technology.
Dancing in the Streets: The Sensuous Manifold as a Concept for Designing Experience
This article builds on the binary rhythms of transparency and reflectivity described by Bolter and Gromala (2003) as being central to the design of interfaces in digital artifacts. It starts from the concept of experience design and suggests that the experience of the interface might better be considered in terms of the ‘sensuous manifold’. The authors present the interactive kinetic light installation, Dancing in the Streets, as an example of how this sensuous manifold could be seen to work in practice. Many participants described this work as being ‘transparent’ and ‘magical’. The article analyses elements of the installation in relation to transparency/reflectivity to assess the reasons behind these descriptions, and to explore how the sensuous manifold experience was achieved for participants. The location of the installation is defined as a ‘non-place’ whose uncanniness contributed to the potential for ambiguity and liminality. The use of light as a medium for urban scenography was also a critical factor in the design of the interface. The images and their behaviour in relation to the participants created the final element of the artwork. The installation was successful in getting the people of York dancing in the streets. In doing so, it foregrounds the concept of the sensuous manifold as a useful concept for experience designers. Palmer, S.; Popat, S. (2007), International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media 2(3), pp.297-314 ISSN: 14794713
"Towards a Media Ecology of Sense Acts"
Aesthetics in Dialogue: Applying Philosophy of Art in a Global World, edited by Zoltán Somhegyi and Max Ryynänen, Peter Lang, Berlin, 2020
The chapter offers notes towards an analysis of the forms of sensing and making sense that emerge at the interface of the organic and the technological. I argue that these forms have the capacity to productively challenge and expand our understanding of the key notions of aesthetics – aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment – and with that, to rethink the prevailing anthropocentrism of aesthetic tradition, shifting attention to the phenomenon that was at the roots of the aesthetic project, namely aisthesis, or sense-perception. One useful context for such an inquiry is a media ecological approach, with its emphasis on relations between different agencies and the shifted role of subjectivity. The questions then include: How can the aesthetic perspective complement the existing theories of forms of cognition within biological and technical systems? What are the best terms for the analysis of the qualitative aspects latent within the interpretative procedures that happen in living and nonliving matter? And vice versa, how can the "microperformances" and sensorial acts at the cellular and molecular levels affect how we conceive of human perception? Looking at the operations of relating at either human or nonhuman levels through the prism of a medium that underlies them helps to ground this discussion in a particular way. The chapter features particularly the aesthetic strategies exercised by a number of contemporary artists that bring to the fore the mediatic operations as sensory events and exemplify ways of engaging with the broader ecology of media sensorium, still to be discovered and cognized.
What's the Matter? - Deconstructing the material lives of experience driven artworks
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies
This paper, which is part of the fruit of the Ph.D The Artwork Is Not Presentan investigation into the durational engagement with temporary artworks, the fundamental role that material plays in experience-driven ephemeral artworks, specifically temporary artworks. A temporary artwork, as defined in this research, is a physical work of an intentionally temporary duration that is created only once. A temporary artwork can be seen as more than a physical and stable object. Rather, it is an experience-driven artwork. Through deconstructing how the material shapes the artwork, we might understand when an artwork is indeed temporary and how the experience of a work is impacted when the work is physically unmade. The process of mapping out the role of material within experience-driven artworks shapes our understanding of the overall significance of material and the manner in which it constructs how a temporary artwork is experienced as present or absent.
Ultra-sensing: moving beyond 'work' and 'venue' in intermedia art
EMS14 Proceedings, 2014
Drawing upon Vivian Sobchack’s notions of “ultra-hearing” and “ultra-seeing” (a re- interpretation of Bachelard’s sensory hierarchy), this paper explores the possibility and nature of moving from the ‘work’ (in electroacoustic musical and contemporary choreographical senses respectively) to an intermedial conception of a multisensory and ‘live-digital’ ‘event’ which moves from, through and beyond the ‘concrete’, towards a rhythmical space that is, in the words of Don Ihde ‘a deliberate decentering of (the) dominant tradition(s) in order to discover what may be missing’. The authors’ investigation into the taxonomies between sonic worlds, image generation and movement making, in a recent and on-going collaboration, therefore engages in the imaginative potential of an ‘event’ (in Massumi’s terms) where the modulation of acousmatic sound, image and movement becomes enlivened beyond the fixed dimensions of each respective discipline. Moreover, besides exploring the potential connections between sound, image and the body, the authors have been searching for a way to create environments that stimulate poetic relationships beyond the normal compositional opportunities afforded by each of their respective areas. This has encouraged a situation were technological and technical processes leads one to respond to the qualities of things, which in turn has encouraged an epistemology of materiality – not fixed in form – but open to the nuances that flow between them. Indeed, in terms of the integral nature of ‘fixing’ movement and image qualities in determining the nature of the ‘live’ or ‘performative’, there have emerged some interesting connections with post-Schaefferian musical practice. As Hansen describes, “At the heart of this endeavor is a conviction that today’s microtemporal digital technologies do not simply impact human sensory experience from the outside, but rather materialize a potentiality that characterizes sensory experience from its very origin...”. In consequence, a central concern has been how each of the constituent parts of the unfolding ‘event’ can then remain in flux, or better said remain un-fixed (the term ‘event’ and not ‘work’ is used purposefully here to avoid the idea that what is created is a fixed piece of work) in order to tap into sensory experience proper. Parallels relating to affect, interpretation and meaningfulness between electrocoustic and live-digital dance practices and audience experiences will be drawn. Notions of intimacy, central to this ongoing work, will be explored in relation to the conference theme; that is to say, between ‘live’ and digital, between eye and ear, between movement and digital image, and between performance and intermedia ‘environment’ and audience. Given the centrality of space as well as temporality in this endeavor, the authors continue to explore where such practice should happen; it seems already not in the concert hall or traditional dance venue...http://www.ems-network.org/spip.php?article36
Leuven University Press, 2020
Google Preview: https://books.google.co.il/books?id=nVfTDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs\_ViewAPI&hl=iw&redir\_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false Early 21st century media arts are addressing the anxieties of an age shadowed by ubiquitous surveillance, big data profiling, and globalised translocations of people. Altogether, they tap the overwhelming changes in our lived experience of self, body, and intersubjective relations. Shifting Interfaces addresses current exciting exchanges between art, science, and emerging technologies, highlighting a range of concerns that currently prevail in the field of media arts. This book provides an up-to-date perspective on the field, with a considerable representation of art-based research gaining salience in media art studies. The collection attends to art projects interrogating the destabilisation of identity and the breaching of individual privacy, the rekindled interest in phenomenology and in the neurocognitive workings of empathy, and the routes of interconnectivity beyond the human in the age of the Internet of Things. Offering a diversity of perspectives, ranging from purely theoretical to art-based research, and from aesthetics to social and cultural critique, this volume will be of great value for readers interested in contemporary art, art-science-technology interfaces, visual culture, and cultural studies.
Re-New Digital Arts Forum. Conference proceedings
What are the perceptual elements at play in sensate sites? As a new media curator, I work with artists creating and staging multisensory media environments largely in Aotearoa / New Zealand. These installations contain complex interactivity and participatory requirements that activate simulated synaesthetic and kinesthetic properties. Works by Raewyn Turner, Marcia Lyons and Mark Sagar will be examined from the perspective of enactive cognition, cross-modal sensing and multimodal interactivity. In essence, these ‘black box’ installations experimentally engage with our sensory perception requiring a high level of embodied cognition. The resultant machinic sensor ‘mapped’ spaces define the territory in which the conditions of perception, and the resultant physical, social, emotional and cultural reactions, occur. The body of the viewer becomes the site where meaning is enacted and becomes a traceable event in and of itself.
Experience: Under the Influence of Things
2015
Experience is a process where people undergo the influence of things. In the creation of experiences, active and productive roles are played by materials such as hi-fi equipment, volume, light, exhibition design, staircases, hallways, clothes and communication technologies. A wide range of materials play active roles as mediators of experience. However, the agency of mediators does not happen without negotiation. An exhibition, for example, may seek to offer a specific kind of experience, but entities such as mobile phones, enactment costumes, or printed information material may interfere with the intended agency of the exhibition. How experiences actually occur is a matter of socio-material negotiation. Informed by a theoretical approach from science and technology studies (STS), the enactment and negotiation of experience is unfolded here through an empirical example from the museum of natural history, Naturama, located in Svendborg, Denmark. Ethnographic accounts of visitor engagements show how an exhibition is mediated into distinct modes of engagement and experience.