Intersecting Art and Technology in Practice

Techne/Technique/Technology

Camille C Baker, Kate Sicchio, Camille C Baker, Kate Sicchio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317390145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

This book focuses on the artistic process, creativity and collaboration, and personal approaches to creation and ideation, in making digital and electronic technology-based art. Less interested in the outcome itself – the artefact, artwork or performance – contributors instead highlight the emotional, intellectual, intuitive, instinctive and step-by-step creation dimensions. They aim to shine a light on digital and electronic art practice, involving coding, electronic gadgetry and technology mixed with other forms of more established media, to uncover the practice-as-research processes required, as well as the collaborative aspects of art and technology practice.

Theme 1
Artistic Process/Challenges

1 Intuition and Creative Process Methodologies in Digital Performance

Camille C Baker

Introduction

This chapter is a result of many years of reflective and practical exploration and examination of my own creative process in the context of my practice, as well as within an academic context. It describes the difficulties created by the tension between the iterative interaction between myself and my performance practice, and the academic methodological framework governing my master’s and doctoral research studies within which I needed to describe the creative practice. I then describe how I resolved this dilemma, sharing my own creative process in the hope of reassuring others of the value of maintaining an intuitive approach to their art and design practice within an academic framework. It was born out of frustration of first encounters with the academic framework of research during my postgraduate studies, having spent much time ‘jumping through the hoops’ of the academy, while simultaneously fighting it, and also wanting to mentor other artists through the process.

This chapter’s main areas of focus are:

• what is art or practice as research for the artist/designer;

• how phenomenology or first-person lived experience methods can be helpful in framing reflective practice in one’s creative development;

• the writing voice as part of the creative and research practice;

• the development of a personal approach to creative process in my practice in performance and interactive art-as-research¹ and the influence of Susan Kozel as my longtime mentor in phenomenological methods in performance.

I also explore the idea that all art practice-as-research can be thought of as knowledge-making, as well as aesthetic creation.

Even though art-as-research has become prominent in UK, Australian, European and North American arts and design PhDs – particularly in crossover disciplines like digital and electronic arts PhDs – it remains an evolving area of both academic and artistic practice. I share my own exploration and understanding of art-as-research processes I have developed for digital participatory performance projects over the years, beyond and outside of academic art and performance making, as well as art and performance making that involves cross-disciplinary thinking.

During the making of most of my art projects, my personal life and experiences² have always greatly influenced my thinking, intuition, experience and understanding, influencing the choices and approaches to making artwork. I developed my own creative process of linking my embodied vision for each work with ‘experience, practice and theory to produce situated knowledge’ of my own,³ which has included learning facilitation and techniques of organizing people from earlier creative work, as well as through yoga and meditation training. This further evolved into devising performance activities used in many of my projects. Intuitive and embedded knowledge gained from experience is an approach used in designing most of my participatory activities, to ensure they become meaningful experiences, and to deeply connect each participant to their own inner world, in an emotionally safe way.

I will discuss the following artists in relation to my own practice: mainly Susan Kozel, both as a postgraduate supervisor and mentor, and as collaborator on several projects; Thecla Schiphorst, having great influence during my master’s studies; Kate Sicchio, my long-term collaborator; the artists mentioned below by Barrett and Bolt (2007), such as Stephen Goddard; as well as other artists elsewhere in this book, like Kristina Andersen. Their ideas and experiences support much of my thought processes and aspects of my practice.

Context

Some artistic processes can be conducted like scientific experimentation, especially in media art or technologically manifested art, which directly relates to my own experience. I have found that working with technical aspects in a work as well as creating the performance dimension, involves making or planning an element, then testing it and iterating it – this approach can be said to borrow from the scientific and technical process of experimentation. Marilyn Burgess, formerly of the Media Arts division of the Canada Council for the Arts, observed that media artists usually work beyond traditional art practice methods, and incorporate ‘lateral thinking, repurposing and invention’, borrowing from sciences to measure their outcomes:

such as ‘collaborativeness, algorithmic thinking, interface innovations, philosophical commentary, adaptability or robustness, humour, critical commentary and scalability’, which point to the specificity and radically different artistic paradigm of new media arts … The artist’s role is to challenge, critique and investigate existing conventions.

(Burgess, 2002: 2)

Burgess proposed a hybrid practice-based approach as a standard in media arts and performance practice. As such, my own intuitive approach, which was further developed in my MINDtouch project (discussed further on), is not always conscious, it involves working according to the needs and requirements emanating from the work-in-progress itself, and is then acted upon as each requirement arises, rather than according to a step-by-step path.

When working with materials, Barrett suggests: ‘Materials, methods and theoretical ideas and paradigms may be viewed as the apparatuses, or procedures of production from which the research design emerges … forged in relation to established or antecedent methods and ideas’ (Barrett and Bolt, 2007: 137–138). Barrett additionally asserts that this approach

explores the complex interrelationship that exists between artistic research and other research and scholarly paradigms … Acknowledging the emergent and subjective dimensions of artistic research, Stewart describes this method as a process of continuous discovery, correspondence contradictions, intuition, surprise and serendipity.

(Barrett and Bolt, 2007: 12)

Evaluating the approaches of these artists and practitioners over the years has helped to clarify my own practice, approach to each work, thinking and overall practice. They validate my own use of an embodied and embedded knowledge to guide the process – as opposed to following a formulaic methodology merely for the sake of it – I allow the work and experimentation to guide the next steps. This has meant being sensitive and open to taking new directions from the work and improvising to the next level. As such, even though it may start with a first-person or observational approach, methods and tools from other approaches are then additionally applied to it to help balance the process out. The participatory and improvisational nature of the activities I devise for the work echo the process of the overall project and evolve organically, like an iterative interaction between myself and the work.⁴ Thus, this openness to allow anything to arise in the work is necessary to help move the development along, but can also enable new directions to surface. However, keeping all the other different interdependent aspects of the work in sight is also important. If one aspect does not work then I will improvise and trial the next solution to make sure that all the other interlocking aspects continue to work as well. Therefore one rigid, predetermined method is not effective. The process is a balance of working with technology, creative ideas, people and performances: each with their own systems, ecologies and needs.

In ‘Correspondences Between Practices’, Stephen Goddard describes how to approach writing: ‘Rather than relying only on the written component … to demonstrate a reflective process, it can also be reflexively performed with the practice itself’ (2007: 117). While it could have been intriguing to ‘write’ an analysis of my practice or process, such as in the MINDtouch project, using the mobile video itself as a self-reflexive mode of further exploring theory, there was already enough going on in my practice, so this was saved for a future project. Goddard further discusses the writing process in art practice as research:

As a methodological strategy, it was useful to integrate the narrative of the research process into both the practice and the exegesis … The overall narrative of the research process includes the story of the practice–exegesis relationship, and the ways in which both the practice and the exegesis reflect upon the chronology of the research process.

(Goddard in Barrett and Bolt, 2007: 118; my emphasis)

I have thought of the ‘narrative’ as the phenomenology of process. This narrative is critical to the work as it unfolds; it is the investigation as much as the more practical, hands-on aspects. I tend to write throughout my creative process and the writing responds to the practice and IS the practice as much as the final physical, technological or performance work itself. The writing, especially through journaling, helps me to clarify the devising process and the overall concept of the work itself.⁵

Goddard uses the creative practice as investigative approach (2007: 119). He muses that his process is that of finding the method within the practice as it evolved: ‘I was attempting to trace the ways in which writing and video technologies mediated and recorded my memories, stories, annotations and analysis’ (Goddard in Barrett and Bolt, 2007: 118). This resonated greatly with me when considering my process during my last few years of project development.

MINDtouch: Mobile Media Research

Within the MINDtouch project, I explored embodied, non-linguistic⁶ interaction using wearable, biosensing devices and mobile phones. These technologies served as the ‘interfaces’ to enable me to remotely connect participants’ media experiences within the various performative social events that I staged. I wanted to investigate how people might ‘connect to each other’ through technology, in alternate ways: as a simulation of synaesthetic, telepathic, dream⁷ exchange. Through the project, I sought to understand how bodily sensations, perceptions and responses might be meaningfully utilized, and find unique ways to visualize the body/mind activity, and to enable people to experience that activity in a collaborative performance context. The project proposed that the mobile phone’s video camera become a new way to communicate non-verbally, visually and sensually across distance. In it I explored notions of ephemeral transference, distance collaboration and participant-as-performer, in order to study ‘presence’ and ‘liveness’ mobile technologies within real-time performance contexts.

The project was a performative research in which I developed a series of live, iterative and in-person participatory social events, using mobile technologies. The five performative social events took place from July 2009 to spring 2010. These performance experiments involved me facilitating participants’ improvisation, while aiding them in generating live, collaborative visualizations on the web and on their phone’s screen. I guided participants through specific activities, developed to intensify their embodied interaction and engagement. Pre-recorded and live-streamed video clips in a remote database were triggered and mixed via the biofeedback sensor data gathered from participants’ bodies. I combined the live, in-person participation with that of the remote interactors, by a daisy-chain of technologies in virtual networked space. Each aspect was woven together by computer and mobile code that enabled the phones and sensors to communicate with one another, in as close to real-time as possible. Using this live body data (breath, muscle activity, temperature and galvanic skin response), I had concurrent streams of mobile video mixing together into a multi-threaded, non-linguistic, collaborative, visual dialogue that enabled an embodied, meaningful and personalized exchange between the remote participant groups.

For MINDtouch, I brought together diverging areas of new media research and media art/performance practices, and provided additional methods for working with wearable devices and mobile phones, using participatory activities, and video in performance. I developed a new participatory performance process to aid people to tune into their bodies, to translate their sensations and perceptions visually and playfully using their mobiles devices, and as such I revealed a new mobile media screen aesthetic. This changed people’s relationship to mobile devices, in order to enable a new non-verbal interaction.

This research also revealed the methods I developed in order to embody technology and transmit presence and emotion remotely to loved ones and friends through a new mobile visual modality. I discovered that this extension of presence can be done consciously, and that directed emotional, interpersonal connections can be transferred through mobile devices when facilitated by certain activities. With intent and desire to connect, participants demonstrated that they could send and transform their presence through the device, as one does through Internet engagement. Thus, it became clear that we can embody or send our presence over distance through our mobile technologies, beyond the typical voice and text modalities.

First-Person Perspective in Art Practice

A first-person voice is often used in art-based research, which is in direct contrast to the scientific third-person voice. I prefer to use a first-person voice if the work comes from me and I feel it to be most authentic to use a subjective perspective as it is the only one I have to encounter the world with in the most immediate and empirical sense. The immediate, intuitive approach to writing by artists commonly rejects the use of a removed, third-person voice characteristic of traditional academic contexts, since the work in development is lived by the artist in the first person. In the same way, artists often choose a phenomenological approach in their artistic practice. The entrenched academic traditions and constraints of disassociation and so-called ‘objectivity’ imposed on investigative practice to lend scientific credibility and reproducibility of experiments, is foreign and antithetical to art practice, where ideas originate from the artist, and there is often little desire for reproducibility within art. There is an evident paradox or tension here between scientific and artistic cultures of knowledge.

I try to experience my own encounters with ideas first through lived experience, as pure sensation and expression as they surface, and then to express this in my writing and in my work. It is then possible to contextualize with others who have had a similar sensation, thought or experience. Thus, I argue that an individual experience in one’s own life and art practice has its own dimensions, lived insight and nuance differing to that of others’ work and ideas, which can be added to and contextualized amongst those other, more prominent ideas. Regarding the academic practice of crediting others, Barrett makes a similar argument: ‘An innovative dimension of this subjective approach to research lies in ...