
UTC, Time Zone Fri, Jan 24, 2025 at 5:00 pm
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As early as the 1960s, artists have used sensors to detect changes in the body as a means of capturing physiological data to alter the outcome of visual and performing art forms. Today, artists and innovative technologists push creative boundaries utilizing computational tools to augment the body itself in artistically expressive ways. Through the exploration of how systems and sensors transform aesthetic experiences, artists address issues such as multimodal human-computer interaction, sensory perception, identity politics, embodied experience, and interpersonal relationships to the body itself. Artists have used body sensing to create augmented dance and music performances, wearable computing, motion capture, interactive installation artworks, robotic art, interactive screen-based works, virtual environments, and even 2D artworks. The integration of machine-learning approaches has widened the scope of possibilities in this experiential art form. This session includes artists and technologists discussing their research and creative endeavors that utilize body sensing. In the discussion, we will take a critical approach and consider the ethical issues related to data capture and utilising the body’s inner biometrics in the name of art.
Presentations may consider
- critical perspectives on wearable technologies and data
- somatic practices (Ex. Feldenkreis),
- practical work on embodied interaction
- creative computing applications
- biophysical music and augmented performance
- audiovisual interaction
- sound and music computing
- design of HCI systems
- affective computing
- real-time systems

This talk will focus on several dance performance works that incorporate sensing technology on the body. Through various custom devices these choreographies have included touch sensors, biosensors, and position sensing to allow for movement data to contribute to other elements of the performance. Beyond the sensing, these dance pieces also include bespoke technology for interactions such as wearable haptic devices and robotics. Through working with dancers who are expert movers, much can be discovered about embedded sensing systems and haptic responses. By discussing the use of sensors through the lens of performance, new dramaturgies can arise, providing new meanings within dance work, computer human interactions and more.

My artistic practice of 20+ years has been primarily concerned with how different technologies can interface with or be worn on the body to enable new types of communication and connection, with the body as the site of knowledge and inter-relation, and involving a range of modalities explored in performance and installation. My work crosses over disciplines, but focuses now primarily on performative, immersive and sensorial experiences connecting to the body through bespoke sensors and haptic interfaces. I use these devices and interfaces as a means to explore the invisible, corporeal stories around women’s health concerns. Since 2019, I have created two XR works that both incorporated a bespoke haptic garment embedded with vibration motors that are triggered at critical points in the storytelling to bring the attention of the immersants back to their bodies and make the experience more intensely and viscerally embodied. This talk will present my practice working sensors and haptics in interactive performance and extended reality installation art.

In this talk, Daiane discusses her latest project HeartBeat, in which two dancers wear electromyography devices (EMG), capturing the electric signals coursing through their muscles. These signals are filtered, cleaned, and then emitted through speakers, allowing both the dancers and the audience to sense and hear the internal dynamics within the body—the kind of raw energy that is otherwise hidden. The sound pulses through the space, revealing a landscape of muscle tension, release, and the rhythmic beat of the heart, hinting at both vulnerability and strength.

This short talk theorizes four technologic interventions imagined through the lens of The Movement Undercommons: Technology as Resistance| Future Archives, an art-research project that precisely charts (with motion capture technology) the poetics of gestural traits passed down and transmitted through generations and over migratory distances. These interventions scrutinize the motion capture systems premised upon values built into the technology itself: for example, high definition and verisimilitude, a presupposition that the movement of the body can be captured and reconstructed and represented in digital form without loss of fidelity.

Mark-David Hosale’s talk will focus on the integration of art-science collaborations, audiovisual concepts, and data application in immersive environments, highlighting how interdisciplinary approaches that combine research and creation can help bridge the gap between scientific inquiry and creative expression focussing on challenges specific to biophysical sensing, which lies at the intersection of performance, art, biomedical engineering and psychophysiology. Hosale will discuss techniques for translating biophysical data using data-driven audiovisual content to create compelling sensory experiences and deepen audience engagement.

My work explores the edges of perception. To do so I experiment in direct and visceral ways with human bodies, mine and those of others, through somatics, psychoacoustic, performing arts and robotics. My research necessitates intimate encounters with yet-unimagined body technologies. In the past 15 years, motivated by a nerd passion for making and by my own disability, I invented, designed and handcrafted improbable machines, such as biophysical music instruments, AI-driven robotic prostheses and artificial organs of perception. These machines sense the body not to quantify it, but to undermine its functions, force unfamiliar modes of perception and physiologically alter its experience. Ultimately, and purposely, these prostheses are useless to normative regimes, be they medical, transhumanist, fascist or capitalist; they reveal their value only when experienced as agents of artistic subversion.

Since 1972, I have used body sensors, EEG- electroencephalograms, EKG-electrocardiograms and sound to express the synchrony between two or more participants, by using a PDP-12 computer in 1973 to prove that non-verbal communication existed between them. I will show the evolution in biotechnology with BrainWave Drawings, and new advancements in this area of joining mental and physical entities and displaying them digitally. Working collaboratively since 1972 with systems engineer Michael Trivich, we joined Dr. M. Barry Sterman at his Neuropsychology Lab in Sepulveda, Ca. in 1973 to record participants using a video camera and EEG real-time readout from a Grass Valley EEG machine. This presentation includes excerpts from a BrainWave Drawing installation at The Computer Store (1979) and featured RadicalSoftware: Women, Art and Computing 1960-1991 at MUDAM, Luxembourg and Kunsthalle in Vienna (2025). Brainwave Drawings is a real-time bio-informational system display, reflecting the mental and physical communication between participants via EEG, EKG and sound through digital interpretation.

“Morphai” (2022-24) is an interdisciplinary media art project that explores the agency of the dreamed self in dialogue with the mythical concept of metempsychosis — the transmigration of the being across bodies. In Greek mythology, a “morphai” refers to the human shape that the God of Dreams sends to the sleeper. Implementing Unreal Metahuman as an extension to the self in a continuous landscape of consciousness, the digital Morphai is animated through the sleep performer’s physical motion, and the scenic elements are animated through the neurological data during sleep. First presented in Montreal group exhibition “Insomnolence” produced from the residency at Sociability of Sleep, the work continues to evolve as a new media investigation of if and how sleep can be performed as a ritual, fusing digital media and performance. The presentation covers the creative journey of Morphai, including motion-captured sleep performance, neurological signal streaming between a physical body and Unreal Engine 5, and AI-generated motion based on narratives of dreams.

LILM investigates newly emerging artificial intelligence cinema driven by Large Language Models. A volunteer audience member’s facial muscles drive the soundtrack. The piece reveals hidden and devastating aspects of the algorithmic processes underlying the use of AI in human perception, cognition, memory, and identity. The work focuses on epigenetic or inherited traumatic memories of cultures of diaspora that changes an individual’s inherited rDNA structure that are passed from generation to generation. Using the Laion 5B visual data set of Stable Diffusion, LILM compares and contrasts an original narrated English language video of an epigenetic memory into a representation of an AI induced cognitive aphasia. This cinematic performed biometric opera shows AI, using different linguistic prompts or scripts in Yiddish, Chinese, Tamil, and Xhosa reinterpret intergenerational memories, changing or obliterating their inherent semiotic and semantic references. EMG sensors on a human volunteer power the soundtrack for livetime co-creation with an audience member.

Full-body controlling raises urgent questions of sensitivities and expanded fields of embodied processing. This talk approaches the ethical turn of engaging body as controller within the field of affect, as it can be offered up by BIPOC artists. In particular, SLIPPAGE projects that engage affective dimensions of Black caste in the context of the United States underscore a need to consider how embodiment resonates among competing social forces.

Elizabeth Johum is an Associate Professor in the RELATE Research Laboratory for Art and Technology at Aalborg University in Denmark. Her research uses the visual and performing arts as catalysts for re-thinking how we design and implement robots and other assistive technologies. From industrial robots to exoskeletons, Dr. Jochum’s work involves transdisciplinary collaboration in human-robot interaction, health, and engineering to develop creative, value-sensitive, and human-centered approaches to ensure the technologies we build address the real needs of people. She coordinates the European ABRA project on Artificial Biology, Robotics and Art, and the ImprovAIze project on machine learning, dance improvisation, and wearables for artistic practice and rehabilitation. She was named one of the top 50 Women in Robotics by Robohub in 2021.

Alan Macy (alanmacy.com) is the founder of the Santa Barbara Center of Art, Science and Technology (sbcast.org) and R&D Director, and cofounder of Biopac Systems (biopac.com). His recent research explores ideas of sensory extension and autonomic regulation. As an applied science artist, he specializes in the creation of cybernated art, interactive sculpture and environments.

Bonnie Mitchell is a new media artist and Professor at Bowling Green State University in Digital Arts, in Bowling Green, Ohio, USA. Mitchell is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH History and Digital Arts Committee where she focuses on the development of the SIGGRAPH archives and coordination of the SPARKS lecture series. Mitchell’s artworks explore spatial and experiential relationships to our physical, social, cultural, and psychological environment through immersion, interaction, abstraction and audio. Her current creative practice focuses on development of physically immersive environments using sensors and special FX to reveal environmental and psychological change over time. Her work has been exhibited internationally at numerous venues.