Abstract

This practice-based research project is an exploration of two things: first of the ‘bodiliness’ of vision – around the relationship between the eye, the mind and the body – and second, of relational modes of interactivity within new media art. The presence and movement of the body is central to both of these concerns, as are the notions of relation and interplay between a body and its surroundings; the perceptual interplay between a person and their environment and the emergent interplay between a participant and an interactive artwork. Although I have drawn on a range of thinkers from the fields of systems theory, cybernetics, embodied cognition and process philosophy, my aim has been to think these things primarily with the body. The three artworks I am presenting consist of a single channel video, audit, and two interactive works, closer: eleven experiments in proximity and metacognition. By focusing on small fragmentary moments of everyday life, these works seek to foreground life’s immediacy and to bring attention to the moment-by-moment ways in which we inhabit and make sense of ‘the world’. My thesis argues, as explored in my artworks, that vision is thoroughly entangled with other, especially tactile and kinaesthetic, sensory modalities, and with the active and skilful movement of the body. I have discussed the interactive works as ‘responsive video’, a phrase that reflects a rethinking of interactivity towards an approach that is deliberately simple, understated and subtle. Central to the experience of the interactive artworks is the bodily process of discovering their responsivity, and the relational interplay that might subsequently unfold between a participant and an artwork. The participant and the artwork are not predetermined but co-emerge immanently from their performative encounters within a relational ecology.