Performative spaces and the body as interface.
How to redefine the way we understand interaction in contemporary
art?
[lecture at "UM, Experimental & Mixed Media", Extended
bodies within Mixed Reality Spaces and Places, a conversation with
Professor Paul Sermon (UK), Lisbon (PT), June 2008]
I choose this title because it highlights those that are my first and
most recent approach to do art. And then, a critical question, a subject
of discussion.
I was trained as an architect, and then I choose the electronic art field
to investigate not anymore how to "realize space", but to investigate
the way we as human beings can make "experience of the space",
how we perceive the space reconstructing our internal and external worlds
by means of our sensorial system. I have always been interested in various
forms of "making" art in order to visualize "things"
that are not in themselves visual. And one of my goal of my artistic research
has always been to highlight both the concrete and the metaphorical ways
in which we, as human beings, interact with one another and with our environment.
Over the years, my work has fused all these elements into interactive
works that are at the intersection of architecture and performance art,
and in which the personal experience of space is an "illusion"
and in which movements, gestures, images, sound, objects, interface and
"computer controls" play an important part. These are artificial
spaces, each segment of which contains potential realities, some mirroring
natural phenomena, some not.
THE SPACE
As I said, I was trained as an architect, and when I say "I was trained"
I’m referring to what has been my first passion, the "space",
this immense "not void" that surrounds me, and in which I’m
immersed, immersed as "body" and as "agent of emotions".
In my studies of architecture, I began to do experiments within the same
context of the digital space, I mean using the "parameters"
of digital space. In the real world of "architecture" the functionality
is essential, like the gravitational restrictions. But detached from those
restrictions, and I began to think to an "ideal" space within
the "black" space of the computer, a space that, like the same
physical space that surrounds us, is not an "empty space" but
the place where the most complex fluctuations of energy are happening.
And it is like this that likely it happened my "passage" from
"architecture" to "art": when while drawing my models
I felt free from physical constraints and without a precise purpose. Therefore,
in a certain sense, you are speaking more about you. You are expressing
yourself.
My objective was to stimulate and to investigate the implications of spatial
experience, conceiving the space not like an "inert receiver",
a homogenous and permanent "external", but like a "generator
of perceptions". The mind doesn’t inject forms in the space,
and at same time the "absolute void" is not "inert"
and only receives them. If it was so, every thinking being and every shape
would exist in its own perfection, completely independent from the space.
This conception takes a functioning character in the "representation"
of the reality.
Against the rationalist notion of the objective space and "representation",
my purpose was to study how we, as human beings, experiment the space
and perceive our environment, and at same time to reveal the process of
identification activated to perceive it: interaction human-environment.
For this reason my work explored the applications of dynamic and real-time
systems, focusing on evolutionary and interactive strategies, on not-linear
behaviors, on processes of movement and algorithmic events. Communicative
space, which reveal emotional states, and which utilizes the participation
as continuous mutation of the initial conditions, so that removing the
concept of the Architecture of the invariables.
So, why it is so important to enrich our perception with a different "spatial
sensibility"? Because in effect we cannot identify the external world
in the way it really is, organic, fluid, center of probabilistic waves,
but only in the way in which we are allowed to recognize it. We experiment
electromagnetic waves, not like waves, but like images and colors. We
experiment vibrations like sounds. And we experiment chemical compositions
like smells and flavors. Colors, sounds, smells, taste are products of
our mind, built from our sensory experiences. They don’t exist,
as such, outside our brain. Where everything is "dynamics",
also the Universe it is, also human beings, and these fields of probabilistic
waves interfere each other.
My digital models utilize parameters like vectors of transformation, flux,
transition, interference. The main theoretical line behind their creations
is that the "movement comes before the space".
THE BODY
As you heard before, talking about "space", I say immersed as
"body", because I, as "existence", "I don’t
have a body", but "I’m a body", a body like vehicle
of communication. Therefore, the future necessity to work with it in my
work is obvious.
The body puts us in contact with the outside world. The human being, thanks
to his own "poroi", that in native Greek means the "ways
in" and the "ways out", and therefore by means of the own
senses, is in fact in contact with the world. The body is understood like
"space-centered", and it is placed in the space that is not
an inert receiver, but a generative unity; the relation between space,
body and mind is an infinite and continuous interaction.
The systems that live in a continuous exchange with their environment
are called "open systems". All living systems are "open"
and in a "stable state". This means that they are never in a
"stationary equilibrium" but always in a "state of flux".
 |
THE BODY AS INTERFACE Over the last years, tired of objects representing interfaces between myself and my external world, I concentrated my energies in a field of research focused on the "body as interface", realizing some projects that registered the body as "input" in the space. "If you are close to me" is the work that satisfies the main objective, because here, finally, is the "body" the real "interface". The main point of departure was the desire to show that the "boundaries" of the "self" extend beyond our skin and at the same time to measure "human encounters", "intersections" of our being with our "beings". Encounters that are visualized and sonofied thanks to the changes of proximity and to the contact of the bodies. A last point, a point I really care about, is that this work problematizes the distinction between active performers and passive spectators. The fact that the audience is requested a full bodily commitment that includes movement and touch, besides sight and hearing, makes that the boundaries of passivity and activity are blurred; everybody becomes a potential performer. Visitors leave the role of observers and slide in the role of creators of an autonomous reality. If this is the introduction, naturally we arrive to the idea of "body" as object and subject. Having lived abroad for more than 10 years it made me think about loneliness. For some reason, this became the central idea in this work. Through this piece I tried to visually express a kind of chemical reaction that takes place when people mingle with each other. Perhaps revealing into the open what was kept deep inside me or what somebody else felt and was trying to express to me; there is a big difference in reactions. The differences in the culture of communication from country to country somewhat influence the way people judge the work. People in countries like Spain or Italy have a very strong culture of physical intimacy. People in these countries seemed to have approved the meaning of the work, and they didn’t seem surprised about intimacy between people. Whereas in Japan, the audience was somewhat hesitant about scenes of interacting or being intimate with strangers. That is probably why the viewers in Japan felt more surprised than in any other country regarding this theme. Also, in China people often came to see the show in large groups but in contrast, in Japan, people mostly came in pairs. CRITIC |
Emotional Skin. Performance-Space Expression
Research area: the Body as Interface and Human/Environment
interaction
[pubication, Rijksakademie Doc 04 (with DVD), Amsterdam (NL), April
2007, interview by Moniek Toebosch]
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.
