This article enacts a re-presencing of Telematic Dreaming, theinfluential telepresence art installation by Paul Sermon from the1990s. Revisiting an often-cited text I wrote in 1994 called‘Spacemaking’, which spoke from the experience of being aperformer in the installation, I fill in what was missing, downplayedor unwelcome in the discourses of the time: that nobody isanybody (i.e. in technological environments bodies are never neutralor universal); and that artistic works are deeply contextual andintersectional. Taking a strongly political and contextual approach toTelematic Dreaming, I first reflect on the dual states of wonder &entitlement characterising digital experimentation of the 1990s thenI consider the cultural structures and material infrastructures of theinstallation, assessing the scope for ontological expansiveness andgender crique they afforded. Beyond a particular instance of timetravel,this article proposes a new methodological framework forexamining past performances. By turning to critical phenomenology,with contributions from feminist archaeology, media archaeology,and an unexpected appearance of Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy, Ioffer an approach that paves the way for future researchersinterested in engaging reflexively and critically with historicalphenomenological

Workshop ideation activities are often described with little attention to the role of the facilitator – a role often portrayed as following a recipe, and not getting in the way of the process. Our experience tells a different story. In this provocation, we argue that the role of facilitator needs to be carefully considered and performed. We propose an active role for facilitators where they may encourage or challenge the process, allow risk, handle vulnerabilities (including their own), and assist in articulating the unknown, unclear, and hazy, as it emerges. To do this, facilitators acknowledge their own presence and concerns, while simultaneously handling processual ethics and iterative consent. We counterbalance the tendency to offer workshop guidelines by offering instead ten permissions for design activities that acknowledge the role of the facilitator and, inspired by Judith Butler’s thought on accountability, open up to moments of unknowingness.

This article reconfigures Merleau-Ponty’s “Problem of Passivity” into the potential of passivity. It contributes to Claude Lefort’s strong claims that Merleau-Ponty’s Passivity course from 1954-1955 published in the volume of course notes Institution and Passivity (2010) provides an «attack against the root of modern ontology», and that the phenomenon of passivity has largely been «neglected by most philosophers». Reflected in these assertions is a 21st century perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s work, with relevance to current performative, corporeal and political reworkings of phenomenology. The article's aim is to chart how Merleau-Ponty’s work on passivity, sleep and the unconscious represents a powerful critique of the Husserlian intentional model and the phenomenological concept of constitution, at the same time as opening potential for viewing consciousness as plural, culturally situated and diffracted.

This paper traces different conceptions of the body in HCI and identifies a narrative from user to body, body to bodies, and bodies to more-than-human bodies. Firstly, this paper aims to present a broader, updated, survey of work around the body in HCI. The overview shows how bodies are conceptualized as performative, sensing, datafied, intersectional and more-than-human. This paper then diverges from similar surveys of research addressing the body in HCI in that it is more disruptive and offers a critique of these approaches and pointers for where HCI might go next. We end our paper with recommendations drawn from across the different approaches to the body in HCI. In particular, that researchers working with the body have much to gain from the 4th wave HCI approach when designing with and for the body, where our relationships with technologies are understood as entangled and the body is always more-than-human.  

This chapter explores a methodological, practical and fundamentally corporeal connection between phenomenology and performativity. Central to this exploration is a research project into using mobile media to archive the artistic processes of choreographer Margret Sara Gudjonsdottir. Her somatic performance practices produce a compelling combination of physical stillness and affective intensity, making her work rich ground for phenomenological enquiry. At the same time as the viewer constitutes her work in the act of viewing, her choreography requires that the dancers perform a variation of phenomenology for its development and performance. Approximately one year of exposure to Gudjonsdottir's performances and processes acts as the experiential ground for this reflection, encompassing two performances and time spent with the dancers in the studio performing her myofascial somatic practices. This chapter presents an expansion of phenomenological method to account for affective experience, juxtaposed with an account of Gudjonsdottir's studio and choreographic processes. A parallel is drawn between these reflective processes. The wider context for this research into the performance of somatic states and the use of digital media for archival purposes is the political crisis associated with the non-consensual capture, analysis and manipulation of networked social media data of tens of millions of people (by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica). An argument is made for the performance of opacity within mediated archiving, demonstrating how concealment can be a form of resistance.

The Bronze Key art installation is the result of performative re-materializations of bodily data. This collaborative experiment in data encryption expands research into practices of archiving and critical discourses around open data. It integrates bodily movement, motion capture and Virtual Reality (VR) with a critical awareness of data trails and data protection. A symmetric cryptosystem was enacted producing a post-digital cipher system, along with archival artefacts of the encryption process. Material components for inclusion in the TEI Arts Track include: an audio file of text to speech of the raw motion capture data from the original movement sequence on cassette tape (The Plaintext), a 3D printed bronze shape produced from a motion captured gesture (The Encryption Key), and a printed book containing the scrambled motion capture data (The Ciphertext).

Virtual Reality (VR) is once again causing a stir, with conflicting assertions over its potential to usher in a glorious posthuman phase of freedom or to immerse bodies wearing headsets in pure and meaningless violence. This paper integrates philosophies of affect and affective experiences in VR by means of a practical application of phenomenological reflection. The combination of phenomenology and affect is valuable for articulating the lived experience of something unprecedented or disorienting, and for expanding the language of critique. The practical affective experiences of VR are from one particular VR artwork: MAN A VR by Gibson / Martelli, which uses captured data from dancers performing the dance improvisation form Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT) to animate the figures the VR world. SRT is also the movement practice facilitating philosophical reflections on the experience of being in the VR world. In this paper, passages directly describing moments of experience in MAN A VR extracted directly from research journals act as affective counterpoints to the theoretical discussion. The result is an expansion of the somatic register of VR, at the same time as a grounding of concepts from affect theory within contemporary digital culture.

A re-materialisation of the visual in terms of viscosity is provided by this article. The argument is grounded in practical design processes from on-going research in the integration of archival material into AR/MR environments (Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality). This is an approach to emergent materiality not because new materials are invented but because existing visual, digital and traditional craft materials are re-configured. The archival material we use for this project is visual rather than textual, and it portrays moving bodies. The re-materialisation happens through experimentation with materials, affect and perception. Visual materialities, in this case viscosity, rely on a phenomenological approach to vision whereby design materials cannot be separated from the active perception of the designers, the participants and even the materials themselves. This article outlines the final iteration of the AffeXity project where glass was used as a design material to enhance viscous materiality. Viscosity is experienced as depth, layers, stickiness, reflections, motion, and an affective quality of dreaminess or the passage of time.

This chapter reflects upon social aesthetics from the perspective of dance, in particular, improvised dance events that reposition the roles of performers, audience members, and the practices of life that occupy the terrain between performance and life. The relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud acts as a starting point, but it is necessary to turn elsewhere to develop the ideas of relationality and improvisation so that they are meaningful for a corporeal approach to social aesthetics. This repositioning and deepening is achieved by looking to Jacques Rancière’s writing on aesthetics and Jacques Derrida’s reading of the anaesthetic within the aesthetic. This philosophical discussion is situated in the experience of two performances: “Small Acts,” a choreography by Ben Wright and “IntuiTweet” a mobile media improvisation by Keinanen, Kozel and Rouhiainen. The term ‘devices’ is resonant both of the act of devising and mobile networked devices.