Movement and Emotion as Computational Interfaces

workshop :: speaker series :: June 6th - June 12th, 2016

York University • School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design • Toronto, Canada

-::: REGISTRATION EXTENDED TO JUNE 6th, 2016!! :::-

Evening of.. Philip Beesley/ PROTOCELL FIELD
Philip Beesley with Mark-David Hosale and Alan Macy
May 18th, 2012, 21:00 to 23:00 • Gouvernestraat 133, Rotterdam DEAF2012 Exhibition, May 17-June 3.
A quasi-metabolic ‘happening’ that uses collective neurosignaling to grow next-generation Hylozoic Series protocell formations.

Lead by an interdisciplinary team that have backgrounds in performance, computational media art, and bioengineering, the workshop will be a point of convergence for fields that are working in the larger domain of emotive research both internationally and within Canada. This includes consciousness hackers who explore how technology can positively change the way we think, feel, and live; performers and others who use somatic awareness as a tool for the recreation of authentic emotion; and computational media artists, who use technology to explore questions of human and machine through artworks that critique our techno-scientific world. The workshop is targeted for a diverse audience including students, emerging scholars and other highly qualified personnel from both the academic and private sectors. Participants are welcome from a variety of fields such as performance, somatic movement and awareness, computational media arts, entertainment, gaming, computer science, architecture, and other art/science collaborations.

Recent research in bioinformatics suggests that it is possible to generate reasonably solid, actionable vectors to indicate the real-time emotional state of an individual using a layering of complex data sets sourced from physiological variables that contribute to an individual's emotional valence (range of pleasantness to unpleasantness) and arousal (range of activation and deactivation). Arousal and valence data of a performer could hypothetically be used to develop co-collaborative applications that would be able help us increase our somatic awareness, make mediated emotive and somatic connections with each other, mediate the bi-directional emotive connection of a performer with an audience, and help mediate the affect of an individual within an environment. The potential for this research is the development of new modalities for human-computer interaction that hold the promise for the seamless integration of emotive and rational control over complex computing systems.

This workshop will explore how technology can help us create deeper connections with the world around us, each other, and ourselves by combining the latest advances in bioinformatic sensing technology with modes of physiological awareness found in somatic performance practice. Primary outputs of this workshop will result in first principles in the creation of new and novel interfaces that integrate complex physiological data in performance and computational art contexts.