What is it about?
Participatory art allows for the spectator to be a participant or a viewer able to engage actively with interactive art. Real-time technologies offer new ways to create participative artworks. We hereby investigate how to engage participation through movement in interactive digital art, and what this engagement can awaken, focusing on the ways to elicit improvisation and letting go. We analyze two Virtual Reality installations, "InterACTE" and "Eve, dance is an unplaceable place,” involving body movement, dance, creativity and the presence of an observing audience. We evaluate the premises, the setup, and the feedback of the spectators in the two installations. We propose a model following three different perspectives of resonance: 1. Inter Resonance between Spectator and Artwork, which involves curiosity, imitation, playfulness and improvisation. 2. Inner Resonance of Spectator him/herself, where embodiment and creativity contribute to the sense of being present and letting go. 3. Collective Resonance between Spectator/Artwork and Audience, which is stimulated by curiosity, and triggers motor contagion, engagement and gathering. The two analyzed examples seek to awaken open-minded communicative possibilities through the use of interactive digital artworks. Moreover, the need to recognize and develop the idea of resonance becomes increasingly important in this time of urgency to communicate, understand and support collectivity.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
.
Perspectives
When we move, create and express ourselves with the body, we activate our sensorimotor system, our emotional state, our relationships with the environment and with others. We stimulate and reflect on body parts, the way they influence each other, in the whole-body ecosystem. Body parts resonate among them, within the environment and within others, as a wide resonance chamber made by the body-brain-environment ecosystem. The engine of this resonance could be movement, understanding that movement is already generated in the ascertainment of the presence and the intention, and develops through improvisation when creativity is let go. The substantial fact lies in seeing the body, or bodies, as an active and proactive participant in the vital movement of this resonance chamber. The core of these perspectives, which make us ask "why" we detect the existence and effects of resonance, is perhaps now sliding towards a more complex area: we propose the idea that resonance ripples are enhanced between perception and action as waves in human bodies through presence and movement. Humans, like other animals, continuously generate body movements, but only conscious movements are connected with our state of being present. When we improvise and experiment with creative body movements, we create movement beyond the conventional, we awaken the "being present" and rouse intuition, facilitating adaptability towards change, renewal and freer expression. The analyzed examples come to light in a social moment which reveals a struggle of humanity to understand and support one another to achieve peace, having an effect on interpersonal, local or global scales. On another level, the same question about the emergence of resonance reveals the current emergency of open-minded communication in contemporary societies. Perhaps it is up to artists to trigger the urgency of resonance: to find ways to elicit it through artistic practices such as improvisation and letting go, using contemporary media such as interactive digital art, in order to actualize communicative and collective possibilities which are already present, but still need to be empowered.
Margherita Bergamo Meneghini
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Let's Resonate, July 2020, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3401956.3404194.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
