Multimodal Metaphor and Intersubjective Experiences: the importance of eye-contact in Davisons graphic novel The Spiral Cage and

in Annie Abrahams net-project On Collaboration Asuncin Lpez-Varela Universidad Complutense Madrid alopezva@filol.ucm.es Abstract
Multimodality has been studied within many different disciplines: cognitive linguistic, conceptual metaphor theory, sociosemiotics, interface design, and human-computer interaction. Up to date very few studies concern themselves with the way humans perceive the interplay between the modalities, that is, how do we acquire information and how do we integrate it, an ability termed intermediality (on the differences between multimodality and intermediality see Lars Ellestrm 2010). The research developed within the program Studies of Intermediality and Intercultural Mediation (SIIM), funded by Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Comunidad de Madrid, the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacin, in cooperation with Prof. George Landow (Brown University) explores the dynamics of empathy in interpersonal and intercultural environments in online multimodal communication, and focuses on the role of art forms as critical tools to simultaneously explain and interrogate the world. Gaze behavior can reveal the paths of cognition and information seeking processes in multimodal environments. It can be used to track processes to focus attention in the interaction with media, where information in multiple formats appears simultaneously. Some studies (Holsanova 2006) are beginning to investigate the rationality behind online users' behavior expectations and attitudes. However, many of the questions related to cognitive and cultural aspects have not yet been addressed in contemporary research. Questions such as: When we have two or more continuous streams of information in multimodal formats, how, where and when does the semantic unification take place? Do the streams of information overlap or do they follow sequential patterns? How much of human interaction with media depends on common perceptual capacities and how much on socio-cultural aspects? Many of these questions require interdisciplinary research. The following lines cannot answer all these questions. They only offer a brief revision of approaches to the study of multimodal metaphor and cognitive science, with a focus on human perception and on the intersubjective coordinated patterns that move humans to inter-action, also understood as production and engagement with media. Practical results of the research program rely on involving scholarship to develop a methodology for training and assessing online intercultural empathy as well as concrete measures to evaluate the impact of such a program on education and professional practice. (for an in depth description see http://www.ucm.es/info/siim/)

Introduction to Multimodal Metaphor Studies Rather than a rhetorical device characteristic of literary language, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) holds that metaphor (and metonymy which is particularly relevant in multimodal communication) is a ubiquitous cognitive phenomenon that frequently manifests itself in ordinary discourse, whether spoken and signed language, written texts, multimodal communication (co-verbal gestures, cartoons, advertisement, film, etc.), visual representations (photography, painting, sculpture, etc.), the performing arts (theatre, dance, etc.), and material culture (landscapes, architecture, etc.). The model proposed by Johnson and Lakoff in 1980 relies on experientialism placing the human act of cognition in the center. It presents cognition as vitally dependent on metaphor, which they define as a mapping of conceptual structures from one domain onto another. Lakoff (1987) argues that experience is made possible and structured by pre-conceptual structures-- "directly meaningful concepts" roughly the same for all human beings that thus provide "certain fixed points in the objective evaluation of situations". He divides them into basic-level structures and image-schema structures, and acknowledges there may be other kinds. Basic-level structures arise "as a result of our capacities for gestalt perception, mental imagery, and motor movement" and manifest as basic-level categories such as hunger, pain, water, etc. (Lakoff 1987: 302). Image

schemas are spatial mappings such as source-path-goal, center-periphery, and container. It is out of these basic cognitive tools that more complex cognitive models of reality are constructed. The literal provides the building blocks of thought but it cannot, however, capture the order of all domains. In domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual structure to our experience, we import such structure via metaphor. Metaphor provides us with a means of comprehending domains of experience that do not have a preconceptual structure of their own. CMT research shows that the examination of the lexical structure of languages throws some light on the relations among various aspects of mans conceptualization and perception of the world. Examination of gesture (i.e. Kendon 2004) is another mode via which conceptual metaphor can be manifested. Furthermore, findings on the nature of gesture are consistent with the claim that understanding metaphorical events partly engages imaginative simulation processes in which people think of themselves physically performing the actions described in these events. Thus, people imagine themselves moving in fast and slow ways when thinking and reading, events that are purely metaphorical and do not specifically refer to real motion (e.g. the fast track to success). It would also seem, according to Jordan Zlatevs findings, that capacities and metaphors of active phenomenal embodiment involving interactions with the inanimate environment such as artefact manipulation, and social interactions like mother-child relationships, develop first as motivations for metaphorical transfer. Later stages of semiotic and representational development continue to typically conceptualize the non-physical in terms of physical, although the socio-cultural factors involved in embodied metaphorization cannot be downplayed in favour of biological reductionism (on this see Lpez-Varela 2010a). Within Conceptual Metaphor Theory, one body of research (Kvecses 2005; Gibbs & Matlock 2008) highlights the situated nature of metaphor, findings which are also supported by metaphor analysts in neighboring disciplines, such as cognitive and psychological anthropology (i.e. Kimmel 2002). Due to this common physical grounding some metaphors are culture-free while others are culture-specific. Human physical conditions are the cause for the similarity of phenomenological perceptions, although personal factors can also hold a relative weight on perception and cognition. For example, because of our experience of gravity, we attribute a vertical up-down gradient to the environment. We all have retinas that are structured neuro-biologically in similar ways and, except for blind people, who can only appreciate space kinesthetically (in terms of position, motion, speed, force and weight), we all experience the visible spectrum of light. Since the geometry of angles and space is tactile and kinesthetic as well as visual, the sentences "What is your perspective on this?" and "What's your angle on this?" are understandable in the vocabulary of bodily motion. The boundary of human skin seems to separate us from the world and we are able to distinguish between the interior and the exterior of our bodies, a fact reflected in many of our language container metaphors (i.e. The ship is coming into view; I have it in sight; It is out of sight now; Lakoff and Johnson 29-30). The right-left symmetry of human bodies causes us to experience moments of physical equilibrium and, thus, to understand experiences of non-animation and passivity as well as experiences of movements and action. Dynamic experiences (such as movement and the experience of time) cannot be captured in language except in spatialized form: thus events are conceptualized as objects, activities as substances, and states as containers (i.e. He is out of the race; Hes immersed in washing the windows; Lakoff and Johnson 31). Meanings and ideas are conceptualized as objects, linguistic expressions as containers and communication as sending. In terms of structure, metaphors are mappings (set of ontological correspondences between entities in a source domain and entities in a target domain) across conceptual domains. For Lakoff, image-schema structure of the source domain is projected onto the

target domain in a way that is consistent with inherent target domain structure (Invariance Principle), so that mapping are from parts onto parts and wholes onto wholes, containers onto containers, paths onto paths, and so on. The generalization, in Lakoffs view, would be that all metaphors are invariant with respect to their cognitive topology, that is, each metaphorical mapping, taking place below the level of consciousness, preserves image-schema structure, and abstract/conceptual reasoning is a special case of imaged-based reasoning. In a metaphorical expression like to be in the dark about something, language and conceptual structure from the source domain of vision is used to depict a situation in the target domain of knowledge and understanding. Particular elements of the source and target domains are picked out through a combination of the source language used ("in the dark") and the relevant conceptual metaphor, a 'mapping'presumably stored as a knowledge structure in long-term memorywhich tells us how elements in the two domains line up with each other. Although mappings are generally considered static correspondences in mathematics, computer science, and information processing psychology, commonly represented by algorithms, Lakoff thinks it is a mistake to consider metaphorical mappings represented as real-time, sequential algorithmic procedures, where the input to each metaphor is a literal meaning. He adds that these attempts will fail for simultaneous mapping cases such as the case of time and movement, mapped following a SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema, and commonly represented in the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor because the concept of causation is based on the prototype of direct manipulation, which emerges directly from our experience. (Lakoff & Johnson 75), a metaphor arising from a fundamental human experience: namely birth/emergence of the event/object from the state/container and where, for instance, difficulties in life are experienced as impediments to move forward (progress). Words referring to time are drawn metaphorically from spatial words with great frequency: a long/short time, the near future, far ahead in time. Typical mappings for ontological time are the following ones: times are things; the passing of time is motion: future times are in front of the observer; past times are behind the observer; time is structured as an object moving towards us (i.e. time will come when; time flies; etc.). However, if we experience ourselves moving in the direction of the future then time appears as fixed location and remains still (i.e. There's going to be trouble down the road; He stayed there for ten years; We're getting close to Christmas, etc.). Multimodal perception, where image, text, sound etc.are involved can be contemplated along the lines of Talmy0s (1996) motion event structure, where the calling attention to certain repetitive patterns (windowing of attention in Talmys terms) foreground the event of multimodal perception. It is important to point out that, according to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphorical mappings are not inherent but interactional capacities and that conceptualization takes place in terms of a multidimensional gestalt of properties where the dimensions are perceptual, motor activity, purposive, functional, etc. (119, 181; 121) They add that human experiences emerge from our interactional experience, which depends on a number of variables, participants in the event, parts, stages, causation, purpose, and on our understanding of situations (Lakoff & Johnson 167, 171). This awareness opened the way to cultural interpretations of CMT such as those developed in Blended Theory by (Fauconnier 1985) and more recently by Fauconnier and Turner (2008). In Blended Theory, the basic unit of cognitive organization is not the domain but the 'mental space' , a partial and temporary representational structure which speakers construct when thinking or talking about a perceived, imagined, past, present, or future situation. Mental spaces represent particular scenarios which are structured by given domains. CMT posits projection between two mental representations, while Blending theory (BT) allowed more, enabling the move beyond the mapping of shared physical characteristics, and opening a line of inquiry into the role of cultural and sociological bonds in metaphorical projections. Fauconnier and Turner spoke of

several levels of cognition: a Cross Space Mapping, which connects Input Space X, that is the perceptual (sound, text, images) and its projection or mapping, Input Space Y, that is cognitive elements (perceptive elements + ideas), to a Generic Mental Space, which contains what X,Y Inputs have in common a socio-cultural perspective (common knowledge, cultural background, sociological environment, co-text, context), and The Blended Space XY, which connects the three spaces just mentioned (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 49). Concepts like analogy and association, and their opposites such as difference and ambiguity, play vital roles in the configuration of the blended space and they are related to their psychological equivalents (mainly association and displacement). According to Fauconnier and Turner, interpretation arises in the blend as an emergent structure integrated by the compositions of projections from the inputscompletion based on independently recruited frames and scenarios, and elaborations where the readers imagination is put to work (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 48). In the last few years, research on multimodal metaphor has extended some of these findings and theories to scenarios where we no longer have a receiver of information, described as receptor, reader, audience, etc., according to the material format of the information being transmitted (audio, text, audio-visual, etc.). As we move into digital formats, the receptor first becomes a user and gradually turns into a participant in the communication process. The participant engaged with digital formats of information can do more than just interpreting it. He or she can manipulate it. In the Humanities, where metaphor studies are mainly located, Reception theory provided, for a long time, much of the input for allowing the movement towards the person situated at the other side of the communicative act. Many of these approaches were in fact formulated by semioticians, such as Umberto Eco. This has been so because semiotics (the study of sign processes and systems) embraces interdisciplinary research coming from areas as distinct as linguistics, philosophy, literary studies, anthropology, art, psychology, and biology. In my 2010 paper Exploring Intercultural Relations from the Intersubjective Perspectives offered through Creative Art in Multimodal Formats I have argued that some of these perspectives are not enough to enable the explanation of complex mental process, including those where emotions are involved. This is so because although schematic or narrative organization, that reflects spatial/temporal and causal relations, is a primary scheme by means of which human existence is made meaningful, categorical (or taxonomic) organisation of conceptual knowledge, that centres on similarity relations is important in what concerns, for instance, visual or scent processing. Both types of information processing are operative in human memory. For instance, although human rational (conscious) mind organizes information following narrative patterns, human unconscious processes, such as those present in delusions and dreams, are frequently nonnarrative and rely on fragmented experiences often based on disconnected perceptions (whether images, isolated sounds, smells, etc.) Furthermore, a number of studies in multimodal metaphor (i.e. Forceville 2006; Forceville & Urios-Aparisi) suggest that the visual, tactual, olfactory and auditory perceptual modes allow for various metaphorical mappings between different sensory modalities, and thus, that in processing visual metaphors, perceptual similarity between two objects may enhance the conceptual (metaphorical) linking of the two. In what concerns visual information, it has been found (on this see i.e. Taubs research 2001 on sign language for the deaf) that iconicity, that is, the fact that there is a close relationship between the form and the meaning of a sign, would play an important role in metaphorical processing in individuals with no vision impairment. This is so because iconicity directly provides visual imagery, and vision is task-oriented and concerned with obtaining information for discrimination and identification of objects, playing an important role in guiding action (Land & Tatler 2009; No 2004; Wade 2010). Perceptual similarity

(involving sound, color, shape, texture, etc.) between instantiated source and target may help in creating conceptual associations, that is, as motivations for metaphorical transfer. The complexity of these issues is such that it is impossible to summarize them in the space of this paper. However, in order to provide an example of the direction in which this discussion should move, in the following lines I will offer a brief analysis of two different communicative environments: a graphic novel, and a hypermedia project. In the analysis of these two multimodal structures (the first one includes text and image, and the second adds audio and video), I will focus on the concept of intersubjectivity and I will try to prove how it is ontologically foundational to both intrapersonal cognitive understanding, and transpersonal experiential semiotic engagement. The concept has been approached from various areas and with different methodologies, but basically it refers to a comprehensive emotional, intentional/motivational, reflective, and behavioral experience of the other, which emerges from shared emotions (attunement), joint attention and awareness, and congruent intentions (for an extended theoretical discussion see my 2010 article). The importance of eye-contact in creating empathic responses across media Al Davison was born with spina-bifida (from Latin split spine). His parents were told he would never walk but by the age of five he had taught himself to do so. He became an artist and illustrator. The story, first published in USA in 1988 by Renegade Press (Titan 1990 and Active Images 2003) reflects Davisons feelings and struggle to forge and identity for himself as a disable child and young man. It does so by relying strongly on visual elements, a characteristic of comic milieu. The book raises many questions on self-representation and the visualization of the fragmented, disabled and abject (on this term see Kristeva 1982) male body in relation to society and body politics. Despite his handicap, Davison practised martial arts for 30 years and gained a couple of black belts. He became a theatrical choreographer, set designer and film maker. He teaches drawing skills and storytelling techniques, and runs a comics shop in Coventry (London) called The Astral Gypsy (<http://www.astralgypsy.com/>). He has worked in the comic industry for over twenty years, creating his own graphic novels and writing and drawing for DC Vertigo and others, drawing the new Doctor Who comic, and is currently working on Scar Tissue, a sequel to The Spiral Cage. The Spiral Cage is a truly groundbreaking piece of storytelling which, for the first time, uses the comic format to present an autobiography that goes against the traditional assumptions of masculinity largely maintained by the comic milieu dominated in the 1980s by superhero fever (for more on the subject of masculinity in The Spiral Cage, see McIlvenny 2001). Like good art, the story captures the ambiguous nature of life, by being shocking and funny, poignant and uplifting. The jacket copy of the 1990 edition reads that Doctors considered him a hopeless case, condemned for life to the inescapable spiral cage of his own DNA, and Davisons story manages to escape from the cage of his physical disabilities and essential biology. Thus, it is worthwhile to use this graphic novel to explore several aspects related to CMT. On the one hand it would allow me to question to what extent physiological make up and shared biology is determinant in understanding experience in terms of universal capacities, and also to question the impact of a presupposed a common worldview by virtue of people sharing the same social and cultural environment (the conception of masculinity pointed above). Within the wider scope of the volume I prepare ( Technopoesis of Culture), works such as The Spiral Cage offer the opportunity to explore the development of intersubjective capacities. My inquiry in the volume I prepare focuses on various forms of physical and social mirroring and on intersubjectivity, that is, the notion that individuals come to perceive and understand themselves by their comprehension of how their conduct is

perceived, received, and understood by others. The following lines will offer only a very general panorama of the wider implications I pursue. In terms of metaphorical structures The Spiral Cage does not follow linear narrative patterns that would enable the A LIFE IS A JOURNEY structural metaphor. Like many 20thcentury stories that break patterns of linearity (for a revision see Lpez-Varela 2008; also 2010b) it is almost an anti-narrative experience, composed of black and white sketches or snapshots from Davisons life, interlaced with philosophical aphorisms. The narrative jumps back and forth and it seems to give up any desire for complete cohesion and closure, a metaphor of the unclosed spinal cord. In a similar way to the non-sequential multimodal experiences of hypermedia, progression avoids textual (narrative) means and relies on images and gestures, the cohesion of which follows, inevitably, linear patterns in the mind of the reader/viewer. In the vignette below, the childs cot metaphorically suggests a prison-cell with the questioning gaze of the child staring at a world that somehow lies beyond his reach, outside the cot and outside the class window.

Davisons early experiences would allow the mapping of movement in terms of SOURCE-PATH-GOAL in a different way to the one experienced by the majority of people. The concept of causation continues to be based on the prototype of direct manipulation but, in this case the category of force would be a fundamental motivation for metaphorical transfer and the idea of movement, as shown in the vignette below.

If spatialization metaphors hold a dominant position in the conceptualization and verbalization of any proposition, temporal progression (narrativity) becomes in the vignette above a speech act based on force and gesture. Textual units appear even more marginal than in ordinary comics, to the point of becoming unframed, placed outside the vignettes and in small typography. The expressional movement of the story-space is orchestrated by the interplay between the movie-like progression of moving images, and the emotional activity on the side of the viewer. Dynamic activation of metaphoricity is enabled by a kind of dialogue across perceptual modalities, realized qua expressional cinematic movements (performance), which model the viewer's affective experience (see Kappelhoff 2004, 2008). In other words, due to the lack of motion inherent in Davisons experiences, as he conveys them to the viewer, metaphoric explanations for action require attention to agentive and intersubjective properties, rather than contemplating factors as situational. There are several ways through which Davisons manages the connections between psychological phenomena and activity. One of the crucial ones is by focusing attention in aspects such as intentionality, task-orientation, and shared attention. The depiction of objects, their size and shape, their orientation, viewing perspective and distance establish Davisons pictorial space as a performative stage for the development of empathy. In The Spiral Cage space, eye connection is a fundamental intersubjective way of communication. Eye-contact enables the viewer to automatically feel as if the teller is talking to him or her. Furthermore, eye-contact is here a deictic pointer that, more than telling, shows how the author/artist feels in order to engage the viewers empathic response (for the neuro-scientific basis of deixis, see Glickstein & Doron 2008; it has been found that the brain is very rapidly engaged by someones direct gaze, on this see for instance George & Conty 2008; work by Anne Papafragou shows that eye movements in subjects monitored without being required to speak are similar regardless of what language is spoken, but when people are asked to describe what they see, the eye-tracking patterns change because humans attend to aspects of the world that are relevant for our native language; for a good summary of eye-research see Wade 2010). In both of the vignettes above the staring eye is the focal point. By means of a cinematographic close-up there is a moment, in both vignettes, where all objects disappear from view and we find ourselves staring at Davisons eye. Once eye-contact is achieved, the viewer is able to move into Davisons own time, different from that of a person in charge of all his/her capabilities for movement. The work becomes a performative space, rather than a narrated storyline. It forces the viewer to seek contextual understanding of Davisons situation, that is, to pay attention to all the elements of the scene and to the relationships between objects, reflecting on the images in a holistic way. Davisons own gaze directs the viewer in his or her narrative movement, achieved by the visualization of the spatial configurations of the scenes, preserved in memory. Thus, it can be concluded that eye movements play a functional role in visual mental imagery and they are stored as spatial indexes to mental memory images. Imagery is here used as heuristic for comprehending textual meaning. so that in order to instantiate not just ideas/concepts but also expressional empathic responses on the part of the viewers, attention needs to be directed towards perceptual features of instantiated experiences, where memory would play an important role in anchoring meaning. As the viewer follows Davisons scenic progress, he or she comes eventually to be able to re-enact his specific exploratory perceptual behaviour, and thus appropriate it in order to explore the imagined object of experience, in this case Davisons struggle with mobility. Eye-contact and virtual collaboration

Researchers within the sociosemiotic framework have suggested how medium layout (i.e. on newspapers see Kress & van Leeuwen 1996 on multimedia see Mayer 2005) influences eye movement and participants interaction with the medium. For Web designers, for instance, it is important to take into account participants entry points when programming an interface, but also their reading paths and ways of navigation, reading depth and local design factors such as color, pictures, headlines, quotes, links, etc. As with printed texts, two behaviors can be distinguished: deep reading and surface reading or scanning. It is interesting to see whether these behavior patterns are the result of differences in layout, navigation structure and purpose of reading (for more on reading differences between printed and online texts see LpezVarela 2008b). These differences not only call into attention crucial aspects which should be considered with respect to the fundamental question of the delimitability of individual media and thus with respect to the status of medial specificities, differences and borders in the context of intermedial practices in a given medial configuration. A fundamental understudied aspect for research would concern the critical meeting of the material, the perceptual and the social, at a time when the proliferation of social-networks is probably the most significant aspect of the Web. SIIM research program would be concerned with questions such as: are collaboration and cooperation online different than offline? What are collaboration's advantages, and what difficulties might result? What does it mean to co-create? On collaboration is a project by Annie Abrahams, pioneer of networked performance art <http://aabrahams.wordpress.com/>. Born to a farming family in a rural village in the Netherlands in 1954, Abrahams obtained a doctorate in biology in 1978 and found that her observations of monkeys inspired her to investigate human interactions. After leaving an academic post, she trained as an artist and moved to France where she became interested in using computers to create her installations. She began experimenting with networked performance in the mid 1990s. Her work has since concentrated on interrogating the possibilities and limitations of communication on the Internet. She has performed and shown work extensively in France, including the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and in many international galleries such as Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castell (Spain) the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), and the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (Yerevan), as well as festivals such as the Moscow Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, and on online platforms such as Rhizome.org and Turbulence. On collaboration <http://www.bram.org/collaboration/> includes net art, video and performances that interrogate social networking and communication as a transparent process. By focusing on the human gaze, the camera eye creates a feeling of agitation and apprehension. Abrahams tries to sensitize participants and audiences with the tensions of collaboration in virtual environments mediated by machines, and where individuals are physically separated. The project includes several installations and performances, many of which took place during 2010 in several locations, in February in HTTP London, Gallery in Kawenga (Montepellier), several experiences between January-March at CNES La Chartreuse-Centre National des Ecritures du Spectacle, Villeneuve les Avignon, and a workshop in October 2010 <http://bram.org/huisclos/oncollaboration/indexang.html>. Performances are concerned with questions of co-existence and collaboration across media. The online description of one of these is as follows:
Six actors perform, each in its own webcam station or with a portable webcam station or from home, a performance protocol. The images and sounds of their webcams are brought together in one video projection. From their isolated positions, scattered in space, they share a space of expression and responsibility, a playground, a laboratory. The actors, on the edge between performance and theater will evolve in an erupted yet shared presentation space, they will work out their privacy in a public presentation space and become manipulators of their own image. In the workshop we worked specifically on the notion of the spectator as a material, and the actor as an interface . <http://bram.org/huisclos/oncollaboration/indexangCECN.html>

Before their webcams in different locations, women from different parts of the world try to organize a unified sound performance despite the inevitable delays that result from the international live feed. One of the texts used as documentation is transcribed below:
"There is freak, there is "I do not know how to deal with it", there is "a mark of a withdrawal, a piece of utopia, a private memory [...]". It is the sound of a machine that turns here and this noise that gets lost in the depths of cold rooms that shelter the servers. Sharing crackles; collaborative work is a flow of 0v and 5v and triggers the back and forth of the arms of hard disks on the circular mirrors saving data. The collaborative work is not modulation but rupture and fracture of the modulation. When the human will become as impeccable as a machine, it is diverted and that's where it gets dangerous. You can find excellent examples of this in history, the twentieth century in full of it. The collaborative work is imperfect but is not nothing, is not silence. The collaborative work, the sharing is not always, does not always start at the quarter-turn, does not always work ... The noise is there, is part of life, the noise is there, that is the living, the living part of technology; imperfections are the human part in technology, "the weakest link is always behind the keyboard." Without fans for more silence and less maintenance. <http://aabrahams.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/documentation-workshopcecn/>

Collaboration (August 13th 2010 5PM) is the eigth 9 Domestic Streaming performances in the frame of A Meeting is a Meeting is a Meeting; the first series of online remote conversations between Annie Abrahams and Antye Greie aka AGF. <http://bram.org/9meetings/> Traces of the performances will be online afterwards on: <http://meetings.poemproducer.com/recordings. html> 6 min of Huis Clos / No Exit - On Collaboration, a 60 min telematic performance /

experiment investigating communication and relational dynamics in a dispersed group with 6 actors. 15 October 2010 CECN, Le mange . mons/Technocit, Carr des Arts, Rue des Soeurs noires 4a, 7000 Mons (BE) <http://bram.org/huisclos/oncollaboration/indexang CECN.html>

As already mentioned, the project shows the frustrations experienced in interpersonal relations mediated through virtual environments, mainly computer interaction, at a time when social networks celebrate the potential for intersubjectivity, connectivity and collaborative practices. Abrahamss performances show that communication guided by digital machines does not follow the same rules nor uses the same abilities as communication in real environments. She refers to the Internet as a public space of solitude, where people can experiment multiple sides of their personality, opening up a whole new area for human behavior. Given its importance in intersubjective communication, it is significant that Abrahams begins her skeptical inquiry into collaboration by focusing on the human gaze. As pointed above, human physical movement would begin with the human gaze as a deictic pointer, offering both a physical and imaginary scenario of the common path to follow. However, in the videos recorded as a result of Abrahams experiments, eye-contact is seldom maintained. The viewer does not get the impression that the person at the other side of the video is looking

at him or her, engaging with us in the search for a common understanding. There seems to be no real eye-contact. The performers eyes move around engaging in a loop of forever looking at but never looking in(to) Others eyes. The gazing space is a Neverland, a Meeting is a meeting is a meeting, as one of the experiences is named. People always fail to meet the eyes of Others. SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema, Quests and Questions Like Davisons The Spiral Cage, On collaboration is an art work that seeks to create certain responses in the audience/participants. If the Davisons sought to engage the empathy of onlookers, Abrahams piece of net-art tries to do precisely the opposite: to stage the breaking of communication and point out the many borders created by the apparently transparent interface windows that continue to separate each viewer/participant in its own digital prisoncell. In the acknowledgement that Annie Abrahams quest would deserve a much larger discussion space than the one I am able to offer in this brief paper, I would like to provisionally close my already over 5000 words paper (sorry) by asking the following: Isnt this questioning precisely the common visual clue that repeats itself in the different gazes in Abrahams project? Each eye inquires, seeks, and does not seem to understand. Furthermore, is this problem only in the eyes of the performers, or is it also in the eyes of the beholders? Is it because of the way we look, or a consequence of the digital medium? Communication is not just about human ability to create mappings of mental spaces, to create correspondences and similarities, but also differences, to project ourselves cognitively into the past and future, into hypothetical and counterfactual situations, and construct new conceptualizations of the world. Communication is not just about our minds. It is basically about encountering and interacting with other people. What good is a medium that does not allow us to do so? If the problem is the medium haunting the message, perhaps we should take a closer look at it, see into it, and try to improve it among us all. Works Cited
Abrahams, Annie 2010. On collaboration <http://bram.org/huisclos/oncollaboration/indexangCECN.html> The project benefits from financial support by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and from a residency at the CNES La Chartreuse, Villeneuve lez Avignion <http://www.chartreuse.org/>, supported by /CECN <http://www.cecn.com/>, HTTP Gallery, London <http://www.http.uk.net/>, Kawenga territoires numriques (Montpellier) <http://www.kawenga.org/>, ConnaiSciences (Montpellier) <http://www.connaisciences.fr/papyrus.php> and Nu2s (Barcelone) <http://www.nu2s.org/cat/index.php> Technological partner : Thtre Paris-Villette / x-rseau <http://www.x-reseau.fr/> Davison, Al. The Spiral Cage. Active Images, 2003. Ellestrm, Lars (Ed.) 2010. Media Borders: Multimodality and Intermediality. Basingstoke, UK: PalgraveMacmillan Ltd., 2010 Fauconnier, Gilles. 1985. Mental Spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1985. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2008. Re-Thinking Metaphor. In: Gibbs (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Forceville, Charles. 2006. Non-verbal and multimodal metaphors in a cognitivist framework: agendas for research. In Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives, Gitte Kristanssen, Michel Achard, Ren Dirven, and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibez (eds.), 379-402. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006.

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