Emotional Skin. Performance-Space Expression
Research area: the Body as Interface and Human/Environment interaction


How can you have some kind of identity that simultaneously allows you to know something, allows cells to configure their own relevant world, the immune system to generate the identity of our body in its own way, and the brain to be the basis for a mind, a cognitive identity? All these mechanisms share a common theme. (F. Varela, The Emergent Self, 1991)

As a media artist and architect, it fascinates me to explore how human beings experience space. How we, as perceivers, reconstruct the internal and external world by means of our sensory system. And how our senses achieve the process of consciousness in order to identify these worlds. I'm interested in knowing how we individually generate empirical concepts of the world, thus relating new impressions to existing ones. In other words: how the interaction between a person and his/her surroundings arises.
The core of my exploration is the creation of real-time systems in order to instigate interactive processes. Against the rationalist notion of objective space and body, my work includes sensory and perceptual mechanisms in immersive and augmented environments.

The last few years, I have been specifically interested in a field of research concerning the body as an interface, while at the same time developing a ‘performance-space expression' in which the personal experience of space is an illusion, and in which gestures, visuals and sound also play an important part. When I say ‘performance-space expression', I am referring to the creation of artificial spaces, each segment of which contains potential realities. And I'm referring to artificial spaces mirroring or not something which we interpret as already existing in nature. Indeed my investigation deals with a quasi-obsession which exercises illusion in searching for ways of transcending local event s. A quasi-obsession to reveal our existence as a potential attractor and container of interconnected events.

Lately I've been developing new works in relation to my investigations. The results are environments created by way of devices which in real-time register the range of the human performers' body signals . This cause to continuously generate mutations of the environmental initial conditions. My concern was with realizing that the boundaries of self extend beyond our skin. The idea of what skin consciousness is, how presence, proximity and touch can re-direct the way we understand ourselves and others is specifically what I'm interested in. Focusing on the subject of the body as an interface, my inquiry into sensors and interfaces led me to experiment with electric field-sensing technology. Its ability to detect presence, proximity and touch has enabled an exploration through the interaction between the body and space. This investigation results in a knowledge both sensory and kinaesthetic. The generated visuals and sound are a way to draw one in, but the interfaces are about the moment of sharing and contact, when the interaction occurs through our senses.
A mutual element of the works is an experimental praxis revealing a sense of instability and impermanence. With a peculiar interest into mathematic models, I was searching for new way of visualization, observations of behaviors, explorations in a psychoanalytical way of looking at things. Interactivity is been used to explore the possibility to distance oneself from its personal environment. As to play with ones own identity, developing a certain freedom to provoke experiences of extension. From our lonely subjective position to gain access to undiscovered imaginative shared phenomena…

An objective reality of matter doesn't exist. What exists is a reality continuously created by the presence and observations of man. (Quantum Mechanics Fundament)




AGAINST THE RATIONALIST NOTION OF OBJECTIVE SPACE AND BODY

Rationalist notion of reality
Objective Space and Time: homogeneous, permanent, absolute, linear exteriors
- Spatial inertia / Independent observer
- Inert objects with simple localization in Space and Time
- Dualism presence - absence / subject - object
Representation

Notion of reality as a learning process
Relative Space-time: heterogeneous, multidimensional, not linear system
- Generation of the exterior / Conscious observer
- Presence in the Space as modality of Time / Sensorial positioning
- Latency / Expression
Cognition

These two definitions are based on fundamentally different conceptions of space. The origins of the rationalist notion of space are to be found in Descartes’ mind-body dualism: neither reduction nor representation could happen without the homogeneity of the Newtonian and Cartesian space. Diametrically opposed to the objectification of space as alienated and homogeneous ‘outside’, the notion of reality as a learning process has as its chief features heterogeneity, movement and consciousness.
Descartes’ conception of space revolves around the central opposition between the empirical dimension, defined has having spatial features, and the transcendent or spiritual dimension, which characterizes mental features. We can doubt about everything, he writes in the Meditations, except that we are thinking being, because, even if we think that we are not thinking, we are still thinking. Thought is self-supporting, internally justified, autonomous from all kind of empirical support: though is absolutely primary and independent of anything is extended in space.
To make a transition from philosophy to architecture, for Descartes any thinking being exist in its own perfection and balance, completely independent from the space. The mind injects space with forms and, in turn, the absolute emptiness of space does nothing but receive them. This is the extremepolarization of activity and passivity, in terms of mind and body, form and space, which was essential in the history of the representationalist architecture. (see G. Borradori, Against the technological interpretation of virtuality, en AD Profile 141, 1999)
From Descartes the West inherited the belief that the mind can transcend the body’s passions and distractions to achieve a purely form of knowledge. (Karen A. Franck, It and I, 1996)

Con-Scio-Us-Ness
From Latin: Con (together) Scio (discerning, knowing). English adds to this a nice feeling of togetherness: Us-Ness.
One of the most revolutionary aspects of the emerging ‘Theory of life’ is the new conception of mind, or cognition, it implies. This new conception was proposed by Gregory Bateson and elaborated more extensively by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in a theory known as the 'Santiago theory of cognition'. The central insight of the Santiago theory is the identification of cognition, the learning process, with the process of life. Cognition, according to Maturana and Varela, is the activity involved in the self- generation and self-perpetuation of living systems. In other words, cognition is the very process of life.
It’s obvious that, implicitly, this is a radical expansion of the concept of mind. In this new view, cognition involves the entire process of life, including perception, emotion, and behaviors, and does not necessarily require a brain and a nervous system. At the human level, however, cognition includes language, conceptual thought, and all the other attributes of human consciousness.

The Santiago theory of cognition is the first scientific theory that really overcomes the Cartesian division of mind and matter, and will thus have the most far-reaching implications.
Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories but are seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life: the process aspect and the structure aspect. At all levels of life, beginning with the simplest cell, mind and matter, process and structure are inseparably connected. Thus, for the first time, we have a scientific theory
that unifies mind, matter and life.

Guides to the notion of reality as a learning process:
- Our perception doesn’t identify the outside world as it really is, but the way we are allowed to recognize it. Around us, the space in which we are immersed is silent and void. But void space
it’s the place where the most complex fluctuations of energies are happening. We experience electromagnetic waves, not as waves, but as images and colors. We experience sound waves, not as vibrations, but as sounds. They don’t exist, as such, outside our brain.
- Cognition is a matter of interacting in the manner in which one is capable of interacting, not in processing what is objectively there to be seen. Cognition is a conseguence of structurally-determined and structurally-realized interactions.
- Individual organisms' cognitive activities are functions of their embodied experience. Cognition is a result of circularity and complexity in the form of any system whose behavior realizes maintenance of that selfsame form.




HOW WE EXPERIENCE THE SPACE. BODY AS SUBJECT

(a) We become ‘observers’ through recursively generating representations of our interactions, and by interacting with several representations simultaneously we generate relations with the representations of which we can then interact and repeat this process recursively, thus remaining in a domain of interactions always larger than that of the representations.
(b) We become ‘self-conscious’ through self- observation; by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process. (H. Maturana and F. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 1980)

- Systems that live in a continuous exchange with their environment are called open systems. All living systems are open and in stable state. This means that they are never in a stationary equilibrium but always in a state of flux.
- Living systems (cells, multi-cellular organisms, societies, ecosystems), because they are open systems, are characterized by inputs and outputs and elements of transition. The relationship between input and output characterizes a flow of information throughout the system. A physical energy may influence the changes that may have an influence on other systems or system elements via the output.
- Living systems are units of interactions; they exist in an ambience. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambience with which they interact: the niche; nor can the niche be defined independent of the living system that specifies it.
- The central concept to system dynamics is to understand how all parts of a system interact with one another. The various elements in an organizational system interact through ‘feedback’ loops, where a change in one over time affects the others, which in turn affect the first.
- We become observers through constantly generating our interactions, we become self- conscious through self-observation. By interacting with several stimuli simultaneously we generate relations from which we can then interact and repeat this process continuously, thus remaining in a domain of interactions always larger than that of the stimuli.

Human reactions to the environment are complex and best understood in terms of three psychological stages of human behavior: perception, cognition, and spatial behavior.
- Perception of the environment, in its most strict sense, refers to the process of becoming aware of a space by the acquisition of information through the sensations of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste.
- Cognition is the mental processing of this activities of thinking about, remembering, or evaluating the information.
- Spatial behavior refers to responses and reactions to the environmental information acquired through perception and cognition. We need to create environmental stimuli to direct these psychological stages as well as the secondary processes of motivation, effect and development.
How can you have some kind of identity that simultaneously allows you to know something, allows cells to configure their own relevant world, the immune system to generate the identity of our body in its own way, and the brain to be the basis for a mind, a cognitive identity? All these mechanisms share a common theme. (F. Varela, The Emergent Self, 1991)

Of special interest to psychology, Varela extends his ideas about autopoiesis to the biological bases of cognition as well. He refers to his perspective as ‘embodied’ or ‘enactive cognition’, which includes the following:
- Embodiment: The human mind is not confined within the head, but extends throughout and even beyond the living body to encompass the world outside of the organism's physiological boundaries.
- Emergence: human cognition emerges through self-organized processes that span and interconnect the brain, body and environment in reciprocal loops of causation.
- Self-Other Co-Determination: because open boundaries exist at all levels, which include the social, the individual human mind does not emerge in isolation, but instead is embedded within an interpersonal context. Through ongoing, dynamic interaction, self and other create one another at the most fundamental levels.

This view of cognitive autonomous functioning places the body, physical environs and even the interpersonal environment all within the purview of subjectivity.