Digital arts and technology studies
Andrea Giomi, Temporary Lecturer, Digital Arts and technologies, Univ. Gustave Eiffel, Paris, France
The paradigm of embodiment has always dwelt at the center of my research, proving to be a pivotal notion both in my philosophical approach and my practice as an artist-researcher in music and the digital arts. I first became particularly interested in this notion within the context of embodied music cognition, as well as the philosophy of technology. In fact, it should be noted that the theory of embodiment – originally emerging from Merleau-Pontien phenomenology – has been, in the last thirty years, the object of various applications in domains such as the neurosciences, psychology, anthropology, gender studies, human-machine interaction, and the arts. It has thus become a cornerstone of contemporary thought.
The popularity of this notion might be explained by the fact that, in the 20th century, the body garnered a remarkable importance in the arts, culture, and sciences, becoming not only an object of privileged study but also the original site of all phenomena of expression and knowledge. The fact of “being body” thus becomes the prerequisite of our experiential opening to the world. By this, the term embodiment refers to two major processes that describe our primary relationship to the world. On one hand, this notion suggests that the totality of knowledge, communication, and affective processes, including high-level cognitive processing such as language, depend on the essentially embodied nature of perception. More specifically, it is thanks to the body, and to bodily movement, that I gain access to the world and others in it. On the other hand, corporeality is not a fixed structure, but rather a dynamic network capable of integrating alterity, including technical objects, into its own sensorimotor system. From this point of view, embodiment identifies our capacity to constantly redefine our bodily and kinesthetic habitus by way of the external world.
In my research on technologies in art and on the relationship between gesture and sound, I have worked on the notion of embodiment in order to interrogate the role of technology in performative artistic practice, all while developing approaches to interactivity that center technology’s capacity to incite sensorimotor and proprioceptive awareness of the body. I am also interested in this notion as it relates to embodied listening. According to embodied approaches, activities linked to musical sensory development emerge from the mutual interaction between perception and action, all while noting the central role of the body and bodily movement in knowledge processing.
Within the scope of my postdoctoral work as a part of the Performance Lab, I have had the opportunity to make use of this approach in several practical experiments concerning the relationship between gestures and sound traces. In particular, during a workshop co-directed with Gretchen Schiller and Brazilian researcher Ivani Santana, we experimented with the use of automatic learning algorithms in order to archive a certain number of ordinary gestures (those of daily life), which we then associated with particular sound samples. The system allowed us to evaluate, in real-time, the coherence between the executed gesture and the previously recorded gesture, producing sound feedback specific to each one. In the context of this workshop – in which nearly ten members of the Performance Lab participated – we were able to experiment with how sound permitted participants to relocate a desired gestural quality, which also functioned as a kind of auditory trace soliciting the body’s embodied memory. This experience suggests that the listener finds themselves implicated in an “interactive loop” with the sound environment, in which the action/prediction coupling – that is to say, the relationship between musical gesture (in the case of a gesture oriented by the sound trace) and cognitive patterns of action representation, channeled by the act of listening – is reinforced by the kinesthetic sound incorporation process.
More from this author:
Andrea Giomi, “Virtual Embodiment. An Understanding of the Influence of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Technology on Performance and Digital Media”, Chiasmi International, 22, « Mirrors and Other Technologies », 2021, pp.297-314 [online] : https://www.pdcnet.org/scholarpdf/show?id=chiasmi_2020_0022_0297_0315&pdfname=chiasmi_2020_0022_0297_0315.pdf&file_type=pdf (03/11/21)
Andrea Giomi, “Pour une approche de l’écoute incarnée. Corps, technologies et perception”, Hybrid. Revue des Arts et Médiations Humaines, 6: « L’écoute », 2019 [online] : https://hybrid.univ-paris8.fr/lodel/index.php?id=1300 (03/11/21)
Cite this item: Andrea Giomi, “Embodiment”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177819
