thinkingthroughthebody.net
Thinking Through The Body – ArtLab ‘08 is an interdisciplinary research project exploring the use and potential of touch, movement and proprioception (the sense of one’s position and volume in space) in body-focused interactive art practices.
The project has been supported through the Australia Council, Inter-Arts Office’s ‘ArtLab 2008′ initiative, and generously supported by Campbelltown Arts Centre, The Bundandnon Trust, and Performance Space.
The past five decades have seen a growing body of research around the potential of the body in contemporary culture, as examined through a myriad of highly specialized disciplines, from philosophy and sociology, to contemporary arts, health-care and human-computer interaction design (i.e. haptic displays, bio-metrics, robotics etc.).
Despite this proliferation of research around the body, the lived experience of the body-as-subject remains largely unexamined. In an attempt to redress this imbalance, artists and interaction designers have been exploring unconventional body-based interactive systems since the early sixties. To date, much of this work has been technologically driven, and has tended to focus on the technologies’ ability to respond to user’s actions or presence within the system, or synaesthetic potentials of digital media to translate information between sensor systems.
