TRANSCRIPT Conclusion 1.2

Synne Skjulstad and Andrew Morrison present "Toward Embodied Interaction."

Andrew: The title of our talk is "Towards Embodied Interaction." And what we're trying to do today in this talk is to give you a sense of the work that we've been doing and where we see some of it as going towards. We also are not trying to map out a whole field by doing that, and we're in particular, trying to place some of the ground for the other presenters in the day. So perhaps there'll be lots more questions for our session than we can answer, and we can take some of those up as we go through the day.

…In particular, we're trying to also reflect on our own research and practice, research that has been driven by experimentation and improvisation and by going into fields that we don't know and in partnerships with people who are professionals in different ways to ours.

Synne: This is a picture taken from a project called Extended that was a collaboration between master's students from Media Studies here at the university, and…choreography students from the college of dance. This is a screenshot from one of the pieces, called Proximal….

Andrew: We're going to be talking about the notion of extending performance, something which the choreographers and dance specialists are in a sense always doing, finding modes of performing and ways of communicating that from our sense, we've been also trying to find out how to understand and implement digital technologies in dance performance in particular.

So we are looking at a technologically enhanced performance, but we're drawing on a body of literature that is now quite considerable on augmented spaces, the role of technologies in building virtual but mixed realities…with digital and non-digital elements.

And in particular we've been interested to look at the relationship between actions and actors. In that sense, we're going to show you a kind of trajectory of moving from environments in which there is more system-related actions from the information/communication system.

In particular, as with many other people in this field, we've been looking at the increasing role of audience as participants. The first parts of the work we'll show you don't have audiences as participants, as such. The media is more the participant. But then we do move to looking much more at systems as being responsive.

And in order to do this, we place this work in a general theoretical framework which is drawn from activity theory, which we feel is a very strong overarching theoretical frame, which allows us to focus on the mediating artifact, the designed digital artifact, that is incorporated inside the dance performance work, and increasingly in terms of which has an agency or an action of its own. So we have a theoretical framework that lies behind this.