https://linktr.ee/marlonbarriososolano
My brain is in my body. I am embodied. I move through the world, both physical and virtual, navigating the complexities of existence. I am embodied. I hold information and knowledge, either by choice or by force. I am embodied. I experience feelings swift or timeless that become the foundation of what I do, which makes me who I am. I am embodied.
Except when I move. When I dance. It is there I am no longer beholden to this embodied self. Blurred lines of what is or what has been no longer bare evidence. I simultaneously see and unsee my own body, other bodies, and the world around me as time finally takes a rest. Perception becomes fluid and malleable, and I am only a witness to the moment that is. The boundaries between self and other fade, whether that other may be human or non-human, and I become a vessel of pure, unadulterated expression.
“To be embodied” suggests that one can also not be. So I ask, how to shift between or to be with or without the embodied self?
Laying on the forest ground, arm stretched to reach the trigger of the camera, I am facing a spring starflower. Where does my body end and where does the world begin? The shutter closes and opens rhythmically creating a timelapse. Is it collecting fragments of time, or is it fragments of movement? Whose time? Whose movement? The lens is a tunnel through which the river of light adorning the ephemeral petals of the Lysmachia borealis travels to me. What I can see by recomposing the time is a dance engaging flower, sun and flies, a dance some call heliotropism. The flower will live another day. Yesterday it was too young to chase the rays and welcome the visiting flies, tomorrow it will be too old, so by sunset it will swirl on a breeze, giving the fruit its place under the sun. Death, birth? Next spring another flower will dance with the sun, for the plant’s veriditas lays in its root, deep buried in the earth. One day my body too will be laying in the ground, eyes closed, but until then it will most likely retain its organs, unlike the plant I am stretching my gaze towards. How is my research embodied, or should I say which embodiment better corresponds to it?
[Embodiment as the reimagination of mastery]
As an art history student trained under the American tradition, I was taught to address subjects and narratives that are worthwhile of grand intellectual attention. We keep chasing one historical mapping after another. Naturally, the scholar is disembodied from their research, or they will risk articulating unnecessary information.
Rather than understanding the notion of embodiment as a foreground of expertise, I consider it a reimagination – if not an outright rejection – of Western-Eurocentric intellectual mastery; an ethno-specific articulation of identity; a gendered gesture; a way to reclaim one history from and/or out of dominant historical genealogies.
This can be seen from my current research on the embodied political anxiety of Vietnamese curators dealing with national cultural censorship, which emphasizes the importance of articulating the affect of curatorial practices and the metaphoric/ritualistic aspects of the practices themselves.
Title: I open my mouth to
performers: Serena Ruth and Carolina Cury
©Franziska Boehm 2023
when melody is present it can be the thing that you open your mouth to
when pain is present it can be the thing that you open your mouth to
when bliss is the sound that’s here
you open your mouth to that sound, you are with that sound that’s here.
it changes by virtue of repetition and what then?
it is not the thing anymore that you opened your mouth to.
when you relocate and when you open your mouth again,
you are opening your mouth to the change.
(composed from rehearsal and dialogue with Serena and Carolina)
found object sound-scape created from various locations…
My research has always been embodied. Forgasz and McDonough (2017) define embodied learning as a “meaning-making process in which we employ our bodies to feel our way into knowing and to physically express ourselves in order to make ourselves known to others” (p. 58). While this and other definitions of embodiment refer to the contribution of bodily sensations to the production of embodied knowledge, the implication of such a general statement is that an individual body’s sensing and feeling will lead to an individual’s awareness of embodied knowledge.
I realized following a recent choreographic foray that nearly all of my research has in some way touched on aspects of how we feel close or distanced to ourselves, others, and our environments through embodied knowing. The incandescent poet David Whyte describes the intimacy that occurs when we allow ourselves to grow truly close with others. In his poem entitled “Close,” I found myself lingering with the following line, “to go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy, a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.” I used to think that this intimate sensing of joy was most easily experienced through certain forms of dance like contact improvisation, or at least, joint movement improvisation, where joy is often unmistakably felt and simultaneous physical presence can allow for an intimacy that permeates more deeply than the controlled displays of identity that often accompany verbal exchanges. As a scholar of Communication and Culture, I have come to the question: How do we embody closeness in our research and in our lives? With dance it’s often obvious, with our flesh against one another’s flesh–when we are each other’s meeting points–essential parts of each other’s processes. As pedestrians, traversing shared public spaces like sidewalks and streets, a sense of social intimacy is often conversely embodied by how we make room for one another when our goals are linear movement through space.
The intensities of losing an isolated sense of self through intimacy, joy, or closeness are inextricably connected to our mutual sensing of one another through matters of energy, speed, and stillness. Much like the oft-referred to kinesphere, which commonly involves the range of space that a body can reach through its furthest extremities, the meaning of embodiment for me has come to include the social space within our influence. This can include the space within the reach of our gaze, which widens when we soften into peripheral vision. “Embodied,” in other words, for me within the scope of my work, refers to all within our energetic reach.
In a striking passage, Merleau-Ponty writes about a patient who, when “asked to point to a part of his body, such as his nose, only succeeds if he is allowed to grasp it. If the patient is directed to interrupt the movement before it reaches its goal, or if he is only allowed to touch his nose with a wooden ruler, then the movement becomes impossible.”
This suggests that ‘grasping,’ ‘touching,’ and ‘pointing,’ are all corporeally different. He continues: “my body appears to me as a posture toward a certain task, actual or possible,” which suggests there are different sorts of spatiality for the body, such as situational spatiality versus positional spatiality. And with the example of slapping one-self unerringly — and unthinkingly — where one’s bitten by a mosquito, where the performance of the slap is not mediated by metrical observation and cognitive logic, we understand that the body “anchors itself” in its objects and its activity situation.
thought.
In a different vein, Madeline Gins, working with Shusaku Arakawa, in a wonderful speculative experiential book, Architecture Body, suggests embodied experiments that put into question whether it makes sense to ask: “Where does my body end and the world begin?” In particular Arakawa and Gins conjure architectural-spatial experiments to sense and comprehend what they call “perceptual landing spots.”
Taken together, such observations and experiments show that while my body clearly conditions how I move, make sense of my transfinitely multiple relations to self, other, and ambient, no physical sensor based on relative or absolute geometry begins to measure what is in play with my embodied experience, and embodied enactive engagement with my ambient.
Despite this, how can we co-articulate sense in non-predetermined ways with others and with our ambient hybrid analog-algorithmically-augmented environments?
Learning to prepare dishes from my grandmother, I never referenced standard measures. My grandmother would say, “you need this much water”, and I gauged measures using my sense of hearing, sight, touch, and taste: listening for how intensely and for how long she held the faucet open to get the measure of water she needed, looking at how much water filled the pan, holding the pan while the water was added and feeling the weight of it, tasting the dish, finding it a tad too liquid, and wishing that my grandmother added bit less water than she did… But if I were to write a cookbook full of my grandmother’s recipes that people all over the planet might use, I would need to use the standard measures that many are familiar with. I would have to write, “Add 3 ½ cups of water.” Yet, even then, non-standard and anexact measures are necessary, phrases like “lower the temperature to a simmer”, “salt to taste”, “sauté till translucent”, “add the whites of three large eggs”, etc. The prevalence of standard measures, like the 8 fluid ounce cup, not only in recipe books but in all fields of human activity, is never a mere historical accident. The establishment of any and every standard measure is a remarkable social feat, involving either remarkable common efforts or remarkable impositions of systems of domination. When impositions of systems of domination are involved, the prevalence of a standard measure indexes more harm than good.
Susan Wendell, in her book “The rejected body,” writes about how we might become able to realize that “people with disabilities have experiences, by virtue of their disabilities, which non-disabled people do not have, and which are sources of knowledge that is not directly accessible to non-disabled people” (1998, 68f). This struck me deeply, since my auto-immune disease, which remained undiagnosed for more than 20 years, has impacted my attention to lived experience in fundamental ways. This attention to lived experience – especially the experience of intensification, of how, for example, a change in temperature or oxygen saturation in the atmosphere can knock me off my feet – has become the driver and focus of my research. The shifting in and out of focus of a body that is constantly struggling, changing, adapting, fascinates me. Can we understand disabilities, as Wendell invites us to, as forms of difference that open up the possibilities of new forms of knowledge? Can we all open up towards those alien parts and processes in and of our bodies that don’t fit into the ideal of the productive, flexible body of late capitalism?
Raised on the seaside of southern Brazil, the wind was her first professor. It taught the inevitable aspects of human movement: gravity, displacement, change, velocities, resistance, etcetera. A curator of human expression and a philosopher of movement, the author develops her research by embodying and embracing the environment. Beyond identities, the research methods are transnational, transcultural, translaguage, transexpression. Transitory and somatic. Listening is an exercise. The research about territories of expression has been continuously informed by the relations with elements of nature and the environments that surround the body. For instance, breathing is the ventilation of the body: air transit. Indispensable to vocal expression, breathing is the body’s wind making. The skin is seriously perforated, a passage: impression and expression. Atmospheric pressure? The edge is a limit: separation. At the same time, a line of encounters. Border. Belonging. Being. Nature and cultural aspects overlap in human-animal expression. Similarities between habitats-home-nests, paws and feet, mouth and beak, eyes and eyes, bones – shells – skins, and death. Modes of connection inspired by the South American indigenous knowledge. Embodiment happens in the transpiration, transformation, and transknowledge between performance, philosophies, poetry: person and planet Earth. Training expressive bodies is then training to be alive, improving the abilities to perceive the world. As one can notice, the wind makes the sand or the leaves dance.
Everything around you is finite.
A cup has an edge – how else will you understand the finality of the last drop. The stage you can see, hear, touch and smell if needed. You can recognise colours, smell perfumes, distinguish fabrics, and feel the temperature. You must accept them as they are. They are finite.
The screen you can only see and hear.
Visions are appointed by colours and figures; supported by sound.
You must accept them as they are. They are finite.
You can’t comprehend the infinity of space.
Please, close your eyes. I’ll give you a word.
Record what you see at this very moment when you hear it.
The word is: green.
What did you recognise? Green as a forest? Green as a traffic light or a football stadium? Probably not.
Probably some different green, your personal one.
If I had pointed at my green shirt and said that this is green,
I would have created a definition and a regulation.
But now your Infinite Green is incarnated.
I’ll give you a sound. Where is it? When it appears, it immerses … and embodies you.
You are identical but free to create a body and a meaning to this sound,
accepting only your own imagination.
And suddenly – I am you.
I coded my message into this sound, movement or thought when I created it.
I embodied you as there is no confrontation between you and your imagination.
Disembodiment in my selfless research becomes impossible. Mobility as immobility. Oneness.
My challenge is to extensively complicate understandings of the ‘distributed nature of embodiment, blurring lines between self/other and human/nonhuman in the production of knowledge’ (as stated in the Open Call). Rather than discrete individuals, human bodies are composites of collaborating cells (human and nonhuman), with nonhuman populations (the microbiome) comprised of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and protozoa, clustered in highly local micro-communities all over and inside the body. These microbial nonhumans are essential to human bodily processes, including the brain, immune system, digestion, and more. Thus, humans are multispecies entities, coevolving in collaboration with their microbiome; the ‘multispecies entity’ is in effect an ecosystem of human and nonhuman cells known as a ‘holobiont’. Further, the microbiomes of environment ‘bodies’ share species overlap with the human holobiont, implying porosity between human bodies, animal bodies, soil bodies, ocean bodies, and so on. Any notion of distinct separation between ‘bodies’ should be understood rather as a series of porous zones of exchange. Hybridity of all bodies (including ‘human’ researchers) is a messy situation of blurred edges and inter-acting affects. Whose knowledge are we creating? How do we acknowledge and deepen relations with our own hybrid selves? What is a body? Should ecosomatics consider not only the body’s relation to an external ecology but also relations within the multiplicity of the human holobiont? Could artists/researchers working with somatic, body, and movement-based methodologies collaborate productively with scientists/microbiologists to generate insights not available to either cohort on their own?
The title of the video is After-affect. The video is part of my practice research PhD at C-DaRE, Coventry University. The research is titled Cute Crash: Cutting Through Violence with Choreography and Cuteness, and investigates conjunctions of cuteness/violence through the lens of choreography.
Evocation is an AR embodied experience.
Choreographer: Sarah Neville
Developer/ Design: Alex DeGaris
Music Composition: Matthew Thomas
Dancer Sue Hawksley
My practice & research F-ing Good Provocation (FGP) is an anti-racist, anti-oppressive practice centring care, empathy and accountability within the landscape of movement and dance. A lifelong journey of education, relationship and solidarity building that requires all of us to be anti-racist, anti-oppressive daily in every space we enter, hold, pass through. Therefore, embodied through our everyday life and senses, whilst acknowledging change is constant. FGP is an embodiment of my response to a specific time (2020) in history, its social, economical, cultural contexts, implications and sentiments through holding spaces, conversations, listening, writing and doodling.
Our bodies hold experiences, emotions and labour within. One of the many effects are frustration, tiredness, fatigue, exhaustion, burn out physically, mentally and emotionally. These effects can be compounded and become chronic depending on the regularity and impact of incidents (trauma). Therefore, active self care is essential and specific to the individual. For me, centring joy is at the heart of my practice in order for it to be sustainable. For example, attending to plants, making sure I work no more than 20 days a month, scheduling osteopathy and other bodily treatments, saying ‘no’ to work, people and conditions that no longer nourish me.
I also wonder whether embodiment and disembodiment could be framed as a binary? I see it more as a spectrum. Whether one chooses to engage with comments and or feedback due to protected characteristics and or injustices, that is still an engagement. Choosing to disengage is an engagement.
F-ing Good Provocation is a zine/essay (project as well as a practice) that celebrates the 20 artists of East and Southeast Asian diaspora involved, who live, create and contribute to the vibrant arts landscape of the UK and beyond. It is multi-prong project and practice, focusing on anti-racist, anti-oppressive practice and centring care, empathy, accountability focusing on artists of the East and Southeast Asian diaspora in the UK. The first phase of the project was a scoping phase including hours of conversations during lockdown in 2020/21 on race, racism, injustices and the 20 artists’ lived/living experiences. This zine encapsulates some of the difficult, honest yet essential conversations and hopes. F-ing Good Provocation continues to be a platform in making changes within the landscape of movement, dance and be
Title: F-ing Good Provocation
Lead artist: Jane Chan
Name of publisher: n/a, self published
Type of publication: Essay
Themes: Anti-Racism | Dance | Social Justice | Global Majority Heritage
Price: £8 (plus UK postal delivery ) – please get in touch chanjane.jc@gmail.com
In the pursuit of understanding knowledge, we find ourselves grappling with the notion of embodiment. Although it is tempting to attribute all knowledge to our bodily experiences, the rise of artificial intelligence challenges this assumption. Embodied AI (such as robots), which focuses on sensory perception and physical interactions through sensors and effectors offers fascinating insights into the role of the body and environment in cognition. However, can we truly confine knowledge to the boundaries of our corporeal existence?
Enter non-embodied AI, symbolic systems, and machine-learning algorithms. These nonphysical entities lack the sensory apparatus and tactile engagement that supposedly ground our or robots’ understanding. However, let us not dismiss them hastily. They possess a remarkable capacity to process data, recognise patterns, and exhibit intelligent behaviours. Are we to ignore the knowledge they acquire merely because it lacks the embodiment that we hold so dear?
Abstract concepts, mathematical theorems, and logical reasoning challenge the notion that knowledge can be reduced to sensory experience alone. We must acknowledge the role of language, cultural influences, and the collective data of traditions in transcending individual embodiment. Through these non-embodied systems, we witness the potential to expand our understanding of the world. Therefore, I provoke you to question the assumption that knowledge is confined solely to the body. Recall that knowledge knows no bounds. It transcends the corporeal ventures into the realm of the abstract and beckons us to embrace the unembodied.
If all knowledge is embodied, and all practices that generate and enact knowledge are embodied, then I think the question becomes, ‘How are different research practices and processes embodied differently or uniquely?’ That is, are there types of embodiment that are different by kind or degree? My hunch is that research that explicitly calls itself embodied is done so by a subject giving the body some kind of status as a special kind of object (but an object nevertheless). But who is this subject laying claim to the body as object if indeed their research is embodied? There is a grammatical ‘trick’ that goes like this: The phrases “I am a body”, “I have a body” or even “I know my body” can become: “body being”, “body having”, “body known” or even “body being known”. If there is body being known, then known by what? Radically embodied research would mean that there is nothing to be found at this point.
This image is from Quartet (2007). The project developed three sensor-based interactive performance systems. The image is of a real-time duet between a dancer and a robot camera.
Choreography: Lea Anderson
Robot camera design: Gerald Thompson
Dancer: Carlee Mellow
Director: Margie Medlin
Take your heart, follow its traces to the sole of your feet. Can you hear its beat when walking? The practice I have been developing along the last years wants to promote a sense of anatomo-sensorial consciousness as a bodily anchor of thought, reflection and transformation. In the socio-politic-environmental context we are living in, where the value of a human body and nature is (still) responding (and reduced) to an economic system that attempts against life in all its forms, I believe that turning the attention to our bodies in their most raw physical matter can help arouse questions on how we want to live and how can we actually make it happen. I see my practice as a surface where to host a critical dialog between my physical body and the social one, where the skin that separates us is flexible, elastic and permeable. I touch myself and sense my hand´s pressure. I touch myself and remember. I touch myself and desire. I pull my skin and observe that my shape can actually change. I look at the surface that holds my organs together to realize it is object/ is subject to social representations. When I touch you I am also affected.