{"id":176,"date":"2019-12-01T20:57:15","date_gmt":"2019-12-01T20:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/?p=176"},"modified":"2022-10-15T17:23:01","modified_gmt":"2022-10-15T17:23:01","slug":"decembre-2019-in-the-intersection-of-emotion-biosensors-and-sound-emerging-corporealities-in-emoveres-interaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/decembre-2019-in-the-intersection-of-emotion-biosensors-and-sound-emerging-corporealities-in-emoveres-interaction\/","title":{"rendered":"D\u00e9cembre 2019 – In the Intersection of Emotion, Biosensors and Sound: Emerging Corporealities in Emovere’s Interaction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
This article aims to reveal how corporeality emerges from the meeting of the body with technologies, specifically in the context of the creative process for the interactive dance and sound piece Emovere (2015). Emovere\u2019s creation process focused on configuring artistic material by exploring the biology of emotion, through experimenting with induction of emotional states based on corporeal patterns, using the Alba Emoting method, developed by the chilean psychologist Susana Bloch. At the same time the project involved experimentation with physiological sensors to modulate a sound environment by the dancers, creating an iterative process between embodied listening, sound composition and dance movement. A series of perceptive, sensory and affective practices had to be carried out in order to integrate the materials suggested by the experience with the emotional induction and the interactive and sound environment, arousing the emergence of new patterns of movement rooted on this new corporeal configuration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Emovere Project1<\/sup> began in 2014 in the University of Chile\u2019s Faculty of Arts under the direction of the academics Francisca Morand and Javier Jaimovich, as an interdisciplinary collaboration for researching and developing artistic creation by looking at new technologies and interactivity. After more than five years, the collaborative has brought together students, artists, professionals and academics from different disciplines, such as dance, sound art, visual arts, engineering and theory, among others, to work with and discuss their areas of interest in multiple formats: creative works, workshops, residencies, seminars, conference presentations, organization of colloquiums and publications. This project has a major ingredient of technology, but always in relation to the body, a body approached from its biology, including its physiology, emotions, voice and biosignals as essential materials of the interactive process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The project\u2019s first interactive interdisciplinary piece was premiered under the name Emovere<\/em>2<\/sup> in October 2015. Emovere piece, has \u201cemotion\u201d at its center, in order to generate a work which, by using corporeal processes, built a dramatic poetic based on the biology of emotion, by intermingling the different materials and corporeal, subjective, dance, sound, lighting and technological procedures within an interdisciplinary artistic process. The work premiered in the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center had a season of 18 performances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The project\u2019s creative process involved experimentation with these technological devices as well as methodologies for inducing emotion. This article aims to reveal the corporeality3<\/sup> that emerged from this meeting of the body with technologies. This meant that a series of perceptive, sensory and affective practices had to be carried out in order to integrate the materials suggested by the experience with the emotional induction and the interactive and sound environment. The design of the interactive platform, based on a system of physiological sensors, sound objects and the performers\u2019 bodies, required a complex experimentation process to integrate each one in a configuration where all the elements had their own agency and expressivity. For the performers, the \u201cdestabilization\u201d (Choini\u00e8re, 2013, p.101) generated by the encounter with these new technologies demanded somatic processes in order to move with these stimuli and to understand how to access new patterns of emerging movement. Emovere required a performer who was sensitive and imaginative, as well as decisive and bold when addressing the experience with these new materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As part of the group of performers, consisting of four dancers, and as the director of the choreography for Emovere\u2019s creative process, I was always in a state of surprise, open to what emerged and making decisions that always tried to integrate the different members of the project\u2019s team, their knowledge and potentials. I decided to guide as well as perform, so I experienced the processes first and third person while developing this new knowledge. From my discipline perspective, I was excited by how the dancers\u2019 corporeality was transformed by the encounter with the multiple and powerful experiences involved in Emovere\u2019s creative process. The rawness and vitality of the pure emotions, the perception of corporeal internal processes facilitated by the system of physiological sensors, the chance to regulate the different surrounding sounds and the embodiment of these sound qualities, and the constant inter-subjective dialog of the creative process, generated a complex, unstable and physically intense environment that transformed us on artistic and human levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Emovere we decided to approach emotion using a method of emotional induction that made us test and live this phenomenon first hand: the Alba Emoting4<\/sup> system of induction developed by the Chilean psychologist and physiotherapist Susana Bloch. With this method basic emotions may be experienced and formed at will, by the voluntary activation (bottom-up) of certain respiratory rhythms, muscle tone, posture and facial and body movements, all related to basic emotions: fear, anger, sadness, eroticism, affection and happiness. \u201cIf a person correctly reproduces the specific breathing-posture-facial patterns of a basic emotion, the person enters into that emotion, regardless of the circumstantial, relational or historical context. Therefore, Alba Emoting is a universal accultural system that in practice functions based on the internal coherence of very precise physiological patterns.\u201d (Bloch 2002,163)<\/p>\n\n\n\n William James was the first to develop a theory of somatic feedback, which has been revived and expanded by Antonio Damasio and Jesse Prinz (Ledoux, 1998). The somatic feedback theories suggest that the relation between the physiological signals generated in emotional states (changes in heart beat and frequency, breathing rhythm, visceral movements, changes in muscle tension and facial movements, among others) are really what produce emotional or affective states; without body there is no emotion. These physiological changes can be measured and monitored by physiological sensors, like those used in Emovere to design the interactive platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Specifically for Damasio (Damasio, 2005) the emotions are part of a primitive automated system that allows us to react to the world, immediately and without thinking. Emotions are part of that complex machinery that makes us want to eat, drink, have sex; crucial acts in the process of regulating a living body. Emotions achieve their aims by generating actions or physiological responses, such as the behavioral changes that Bloch used as effectors or entrances to the basic emotions and mechanisms for producing and adjusting these emotions on several levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The experience with the Alba Emoting method led to self-inducing and adjusting basic emotions, as well as to moving in different directions and dimensions the effector body movements that lead to the emotion. The experience of the emotion from corporeal processes made memories and images emerge that nourished the experience, although it was the exploration of these effector movements that really led the experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCorporeality in Emotion: \u201cemotions are not expressed, they live\u201d. (Bloch 2002, p. 256)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n