This article enacts a re-presencing of Telematic Dreaming, the influential telepresence art installation by Paul Sermon from the 1990s. Revisiting an often-cited text I wrote in 1994 called 'Spacemaking', which spoke from the experience of being a performer in the installation, I fill in what was missing, downplayed or unwelcome in the discourses of the time: that nobody is anybody (i.e. in technological environments bodies are never neutral or universal); and that artistic works are deeply contextual and intersectional. Taking a strongly political and contextual approach to Telematic Dreaming, I first reflect on the dual states of wonder & entitlement characterising digital experimentation of the 1990s then I consider the cultural structures and material infrastructures of the installation, assessing the scope for ontological expansiveness and gender crique they afforded. Beyond a particular instance of time-travel, this article proposes a new methodological framework for examining past performances. By turning to critical phenomenology, with contributions from feminist archaeology, media archaeology, and an unexpected appearance of Sara Ahmed's feminist killjoy, I offer an approach that paves the way for future researchers interested in engaging reflexively and critically with historical phenomenological analyses of artistic performance and of wider lived experiences.

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.  

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.

This collection brings together academics, archivists, artists, and activists whose thought and practices make critical intervention into cultural phenomenon of open data. The sub-title of this publication – politics /practices / poetics – reveals a close entwinement between thought and practice, between thinking and making. The contri-butions offer critical perspectives combined with implications for practice, or they in themselves are practices (such as performances, discussions, acts of care, or visualisations). Each contribution is an open data project in action. Openness is part of the Living Archives research project.http://livingarchives.mah.se/ https://medium.com/the-politics-practices-and-poetics-of-openness

A political, performative and affective landscape is revealed in this chapter as a way of approaching the topic of performing the digital: from the macro of the upheaval caused by Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass data surveillance to the micro of a phenomenological account of a crisis following an artistic performance using mobile media. “Performing Encryption” is a response to working as a dancer and philosopher with mobile networked digital media that can be read as a part of a larger narrative of transitioning from one state to another. The state of viewing the fine interweaving of mobile technologies in our lives as a positive expression of social choreographies gives way to a state where it is impossible to regard the potential for surveillance and capture of daily activities as anything but provocative, troubling or even threatening. The risk is not just the “capture all” aspects of dataveillance, but of increasing control over gestural and affective exchanges in urban life. In saying networked technologies, I point not just to mobile phones but also to the Cloud and the Internet-of-Things which, in combination, are potentially devastating from the perspective of embodied agency. This narrative of questioning and transition is typical of others arising at the beginning of a century, let alone a millennium. It is no longer possible to avoid asking what we have created. And how we can respond to the technological and cultural conditions of our world.

This article reveals a multi layered design process that occurs at the intersection between postcolonial/decolonial theory and a version of digital sketching called Embodied Digital Sketching (EDS). The result of this particular intersection of theory and practice is called Bitter & Sweet, a Mixed Reality design prototype using cultural heritage material. Postcolonial and decolonial strategies informed both analytic and practical phases of the design process. A further contribution to the design field is the reminder that design interventions in the current political and economic climate are frequently bi-directional: designers may enact, but simultaneously external events intervene in design processes. Bitter & Sweet reveals intersecting layers of power and control when design processes deal with sensitive cultural topics.

This Preface to the Living Archives publication on Openness raises questions and controversies around open data and publication as an academic and expressive process. It begins by asking: why produce a publication on openness? Or, rather 3 versions, because the collected articles appeared as a series on medium.com (1/3), as a freely downloadable PDF (2/3), and finally as a limited hand bound print run of approximately 30 volumes (3/3). These are iterations on openness comprising 18 peer-reviewed contributions existing, to cite Jean Luc Nancy, “between exposed thought and knotty intimacy” within a Commerce of Thinking (Nancy 2009, 3). These 3 versions travel across materialities. They are re-mediated, but to me it feels like a sort of de-mediation – a stripping away – as we moved over time from the digital versions toward the print version. Video had to be unspooled into image frames, audio into fragmented text transcriptions. These iterations render Nancy’s argument multiple both in form and in voice, without a doubt “born in agitation and anxiety, in the fermentation of a form” (ibid) but not in search of anything as unified as a coherent style or position. The contributions demonstrate the political groundedness of research data, and its cloudiness, rather than the collective fiction of the transparency of data in the Cloud.

The paper considers the role of the body and embodiment in design education. It offers a “re-do” of the Embodied Interaction course on the Interaction Design Master’s at Malmö University. This conceptual and pedagogic redo coincides with the increasing relevance of this field which now can be seen to include physical computing, wearables, haptics, and networked devices for transmitting bodily data. Three conceptual shifts are emphasised: embodiment redefined as materiality; critical engagement with contemporary politics and economics; methodological awareness and experimentation. This is not an abandonment of previous approaches, but a revision to coincide with developments in practice and scholarship, both within interaction design and in relevant related disciplines. It also reflects current cultural and political educational climate thereby emphasizing a porosity of education, a flow-through between the university and the world outside its walls.

This article considers archival performances rather than archives as places or repositories. This is done by expanding reflections on affect and by framing three specific archival performance practices: re-enactment, affective doubling, and surrogacy. The topic of The New Human is approached through the complex materiality of contemporary memory practices. This is the scholarly publication associated with the presentation of the same name given at The New Human Symposium co-curated by Medea of Malmö University and Moderna Museet Malmö in August 2016.

This is a contribution to the discussion of open data. Two atypical stances are taken: the first is that open data cannot be assumed to be defacto a good thing, as such, the consideration needs to broadened to the philosophical, political and social qualities of openness. The second stance is that the topic of openness can be addressed through the concrete relation between bodies and mobile devices. A phenomenological and political narrative is offered in this article resulting in the description of a performative workshop called Performing Encryption where full body movement improvisation became the basis for generating a digital encryption key. The result is that the topic of openness is approached through closure.

Phenomenological reflection sets in motion a process of translating, transposing, or transgressing lived experience into writing. Usually writing, I should say. Sometimes a phenomenology first produces drawings, scribbles, murmurs, or gestures. My contribution to this edited collection on performance and phenomenology opens up a phase of the phenomenological process that is less polished, less complete, and almost always overlooked. I examine closely the transition from raw experience into scholarly writing. Occurring between live performance and philosophical presentation of text, it usually exists only in a performer’s personal journals or notes shared with collaborators as part of a working process. It is an essential part of enacting a phenomenology, and is frequently what those new to this methodology miss when they seek to understand and implement it for themselves. Relying on Alfred North Whitehead’s understanding of process philosophy and Jean Luc Nancy’s words on listening to provide a philosophical grounding, these phenomenologies come from my own and others’ experiences of capturing experience in note form, fostering a respect for the interim phases of constructing academic argumentation.

IntuiTweet (2009-2010) was a dance improvisation project using Twitter as a platform for movement exchange: tweets were written by small group of dancers to promote kinaesthetic and corporeal exchanges in public spaces. Geographically disparate bodies were linked only by a set of improvisatory practices and by Twitter on their mobile devices. The improvisations left traces in the form of words. Making sense of this project in the context of mobile media narratives, two questions fold back on each other: why consider mobile media narratives through a project based in dance? And why consider dance through the lens of mobile media narratives? In pursuing these parallel but inverse lines of questioning, both the sense of narrative and the understanding of the movement practices are transformed. Yet, the scope of this chapter extends beyond narrative and dance: in exploring the qualities of these embodied micro-narratives and what happens when they are exchanged, we can learn more about how we live in the world with our mobile media.

This contribution to the Vetenskapsrådet 2013 Årsbok emphasises artistic research at the intersecting domains of choreography and philosophy. The popular term 'relational aesthetics' is given a grounding in dance and choreography by reflecting upon the performance of "Small Acts" by British choreographer Ben Wright at Skånes Dansteater in Malmö. The perspective of an audience member is the vehicle for the scholarly discussion, thereby demonstrating how phenomenology can be a relevant methodological perspective for both audience members as well as performers.

This reflection upon ubiquitous computing is written from the perspectives of performance and phenomenology, in particular, the dance and choreographic practices that shape the creation of responsive systems from large public art installations to intimate devices worn under clothes and on skin. The kinaesthetic awareness of dance combines with the corporeal methodology of phenomenology and both play a role in crafting an ethics, but this reflection upon ubiquitous computing is also knitted with an understanding of how we exist within and move through the world. As such, the infrastructure of ubiquity will be considered: not the circuits, local area networks, and software, but the corporeal and philosophical sinews of ubiquity that have meaning on ontological, aesthetic, and methodological levels. Calling the ethical approach offered in this chapter ‘corporeal’ means more than simply considering how ubiquitous systems impact bodies; the aim is to re-embody the very understanding of ubiquitous computing in our lives.

Change is the goal of much somatic practice. Yet, in the worlds of art, design, and cultural discourse change, or transformation, are simultaneously contested and desired outcomes: change for whom? empty or authentic? at what cost? I will locate the possibility for change, for contingency, within the body and say that we can access and understand it by means of a phenomenology of affect. In this article, I begin by expressing just how difficult it is to write about affect, I then locate affect in an artistic project called AffeXity (part of the Living Archives project and a collaboration with Jeannette Ginslov). I then expand upon the sticky boundaries between affect and the senses, while offering brief phenomenological descriptions of the liminal affective experience of Rosen Method. Finally I posit that sense data can be replaced with affective intensities when doing a phenomenology of affect. This is a response to those Speculative Materialists who seek to escape the limitations of the body: Somatic Materialism reveals that the unknown can be located within the body.

This discussion of affect and performance is based on early research for an artistic project called AffeXity exploring the use of Augmented Reality to embed affective choreographies in urban spaces. Affect is understood in terms of intensities and contingency, while performance is defined as a triangulation of bodily movement, emergence and shimmering. After a brief reflection on how technical development and artistic processes impact each other, the middle section of this article contains ‘an inventory of shimmers’ which are words from the processes of dance improvisation, video capture and editing. A methodological perspective is proposed. It is called affective sensibility.

This article examines the work of expressionist dance artist and choreographer Pina Bausch through the lens of basic phenomenological principles drawn from the work of Maurice Merlea-Ponty. It is a reprint of an article published in 1993-4 and is included in this edited collection on Pina Bausch representing significant work over the decades celebrating her work from aesthetic, critical and academic perspectives.

This contribution to the topic of electronic music is based on the perspective of the dancer in performances with interactive sonic compositions. The method is a variation of phenomenology emphasizing the embodied experience of electronic music. This phenomenology follows the later writings of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A poetic and experiential notion of the sonic invisible is posited. It has four qualities: density, indirectness, collectivity and voice. These experiential qualities revealed by examining the particular context of bodies generating sound in interactive sonic compositions may resonate beyond the world of interactive arts to how we exist more generally in the world.

Prototyping Futures gives you a glimpse of what collaborating with academia might look like. Medea and its co-partners share their stories about activities happening at the research centre – projects, methods, tools, and approaches – what challenges lie ahead, and how these can be tackled. Examples of highlighted topics include: What is a living lab and how does it work? What are the visions behind the Connectivity Lab at Medea? And, how can prototyping-methods be used when sketching scenarios for sustainable futures? Other topics are: What is the role of the body when designing technology? What is collaborative media and how can this concept help us understand contemporary media practices? Prototyping Futures also discusses the open-hardware platform Arduino, and the concepts of open data and the Internet of Things, raising questions on how digital media and connected devices can contribute to more sustainable lifestyles, and a better world.

Artistic research is a convergence of materialities; sometimes a clash, other times a smooth flow, occasionally it is as if different rhythms play in counterpoint pulling the researcher in different directions. In contrast to many of the contributions to this anthology on artistic research this chapter takes a kinaesthetic rather than a visual approach, addressing the convergence between the virtual and the physical in research in dance and movement improvisation. When working across bodies and digital technologies not only is the concept of knowledge restructured but, of necessity, our modes of perception and notions of materiality also shift. Further, the methodologies used need to be chosen in a way that is faithful to the research, and the voice and output may defy convention. This area of artistic research offers distinct challenges but is increasingly compelling as digital technologies become ever more ubiquitous, from tiny chips inserted in common objects to vast and interconnected networked applications impacting how we communicate, create and socialise. Perhaps the most contentious claim in this chapter is that research is a form of performance, but this is a by-product of the primary focus which is an application of phenomenological method to performance with technologies revealing an alternate construction of knowledge. What emerges is a reciprocity between models of knowledge and research practices: the practices point to different models of knowledge, and the models offer up refinements of the practice.

"Alone or Not" was a social choreographic experiment using Twitter. It linked 20 people, unknown to each other, for 3 weeks of movement exchanges via short messaging through the Twitter platform and a customised SMS interface. The movement improvisation became more of an exchange of bodily states than of standard choreographic content. In this article, curator Camille Baker discusses the project with the artist-researchers who created it: Mia Keinänen, Susan Kozel and Leena Rouhiainen.

This paper is located at the juncture of philosophical and artistic research, offering the second in a series of phenomenologically informed methods relevant to the design and creative use of mobile digital devices called the Intuitive Improvisation method. It is also part of a larger philosophical and artistic project in Social Choreographies which contributes to the ever developing field of social aesthetics by providing a perspective uniquely coloured by dance and phenomenology. Philosophical reflections upon relational aesthetics (Rancière, Bourriaud), method and intuition (Deleuze, Bergson) are contextualized by discussing the IntuiTweet project in dance and networked social media.

Creative use of networked wireless communications devices (such as mobile phones) contributes to a vibrant strand of media art called locative media, and has captured the imaginations of geographers, media artists, architects, engineers, and philosophers. Now it is time for dancers and choreographers to contribute to the critical and creative activity around corporeality, expression, and mobile technologies in social contexts. This paper proposes an emergent area of research in combining dance and mobile technologies called social choreographies, and considers artistic research methodologies relevant to this newly framed domain that are rooted in improvisatory studio practices and drawing a choreographic sensibility into urban environments.

In Closer, Susan Kozel draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. Trained in dance and philosophy, Kozel places the human body at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing, asking what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers—as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching. Performance, Kozel argues, can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foster a collaborative construction of new physical states, levels of conscious awareness, and even ethics. We reencounter ourselves and others through our interactive computer systems. What we need now are conceptual and methodological frameworks to reflect this. Kozel offers a timely reworking of the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This method, based on a respect for lived experience, begins by listening to the senses and noting insights that arrive in the midst of dance, or quite simply in the midst of life. The combination of performance and phenomenology offered by Closer yields entwinements between experience and reflection that shed light on, problematize, or restructure scholarly approaches to human bodies using digital technologies. After outlining her approach and methodology and clarifying the key concepts of performance, technologies, and virtuality, Kozel applies phenomenological method to the experience of designing and performing in a range of computational systems: telematics, motion capture, responsive architectures, and wearable computing. The transformative potential of the alchemy between bodies and technologies is the foundation of Closer. With careful design, future generations of responsive systems and mobile devices can expand our social, physical, and emotional exchanges.

Situated in the domain of research into mobile, wireless, networked and wearable computing, this exploratory paperintroduces the embodied imagination method and explains how it can contribute to the design process by creating an elastic space of performance that incorporates daily life and personal imagination into the design process. It is based on a study called Placebo Sleeves which was an experiential design phase of a larger project in wearable computing called whisper[s]. The innovation offered by this research is twofold: an integration of previously distinct methodologies, and an interdisciplinary theoretical framework relevant to the design of devices for affective, networked communication. The methodologies are shaped both by user experience models and by performance practices. We also articulate a domain of public dreaming, located at the conjunction of the private, public and secret within human existence, and suggest that shared use of mobile technologies has the potential to be situated there.

My contribution to the Close Encounters gathering on artistic research in dance at the University College of Dance in Sweden addressed an area of contemporary research gaining in physical, social, and philosophical momentum: the use of mobile devices in our cities. I concentrated on mobile phones but many communication and mobile media devices could have been considered. This area has been called ‘locative media,’ and has cap- tured the imaginations of geographers, media artists, architects, engine- ers, and philosophers. Now is the time for dancers and choreographers to contribute to the critical and creative activity around bodies and mobile devices in social contexts.

Our cultures are like our proprioceptive systems. Sever the cultural context from any activity and you have disembodied the person. So innate that their full influence is often overlooked, our cultures shape who we are, and how we move through the world. This chapter reflects upon cultural issues in dance by arguing that digital technologies as examples of how the embodiment and culture are interwoven. The claim is made that technologies in performance are both embodied and cultural.

This article is a dialogue across the practices of philosophy and live performance. Martin Heidegger's 1955 lecture 'The Question Concerning Technology' is used increasingly to problematize practices of computational art, in this article his ideas are grounded in the improvisational practices of two art projects: the wearable computing installation called 'whisper' and the performance using 3 different motion tracking and capture systems called 'immanence.' These projects demonstrate an approach to technologies in performance that enhances otherness and the unpredictability associated with improvisation, thereby lending weight to Heidegger's claim that one turns to art to better understand technology because "the essence of technology is nothing technological".