Through the Prism of the Senses: Mediation and New Realities of the Body in Contemporary Performance. Technology, Cognition and Emergent Research-Creation Methodologies

First published in the UK in 2019 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2019 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd

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Cover photo: Image created in a collaborative artistic process between Isabelle Choinière (chorégraphe et conceptrice-auteure en art médiatique [choreographer and media art designer-author]) and Stéphan Ballard (infographiste et artiste média [computer graphics designer and media artist]). Performer: Alyson Wish

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Acknowledgements

Isabelle Choinière wishes to extend thanks to the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et Culture (FRQSC) for a postdoctoral fellowship in research-creation (2017–19) and the Programme Initiatives de la Faculté des arts (UQÀM)—Volet stagiaires postdoctoraux that allowed her to devote time to the research, writing, conception and direction of this book. She also wishes to thank Emmanuelle Lescouet, Emmanuelle Leduc (for the meticulous revision of the manuscript in French), Martyne Morin and collaborating colleague Enrico Pitozzi, along with special thanks to her postdoctoral supervisor Joanne Lalonde, for their constructive comments and feedback that contributed to enriching her research-creation process.

Additional thanks to the Università di Bologna, Dipartimento delle Arti—visive, performative, mediali (DARvipem), Figura—Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire contemporain, ALN | NT2—Le Laboratoire de recherche sur les œuvres hypermédiatiques at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connection Program, for having contributed to make this publication possible.

Andrea Davidson wishes to extend thanks to the University of Chichester and Pierre Leroux.

Finally, the authors would like to thank all those who supported, assisted, inspired and believed in this collaborative and collective transdisciplinary research project, including the team at Intellect Books and especially Amy Rollason, who trusted in this journey of reflection and experimentation.

Contents

Note on the book’s internal system of references

Introduction: Through the prism of the senses

Isabelle Choinière, Enrico Pitozzi and Andrea Davidson

I. The state of art: The organization of thought in an analytical perspective

II. On the virtual: Corporal potentiality and corporeality

III. Technological devices

IV. Immersion: Multisensory environments

V. A logic of transformation

Chapter 1: The prism of perception: Corporeality between intermedial stages and environments

Enrico Pitozzi

I. In praise of spirals: Notes on a method

I.1. Fields of application: The mediated body and role of technology at the intersection of the arts

II. On corporeality

II.1. A reservoir of potentialities

II.2. The transition to action

III. The anatomy of particles: New forms of abstraction

III.1. Modelling technology: The principle of transduction

IV. Figurations

IV.1. The trace of the imaginary

IV.2. Extending the body in medial networks

IV.3. The architectural brain

IV.4. Bodysoundscape

IV.5. Choreographing cognition

V. New forms of corporeality: Emergent realities

VI. An archeology of sensations: Immersive environments

VI.1. Extending perception

VI.2. Inhabiting sensation

VI.3. Reorienting the senses

VII. Notes on the notion of immersion

VIII. Strategies: Silent transitions

VIII.1. A logic of transformation

Chapter 2: Seismographies of mediated bodies: A logic of creation

Isabelle Choinière

I. Complexity as a method of creation

I.1. The problem with conceiving of the body as an extension of the physical world

I.2. Experiential complexity: Integration of the somatic in creative processes with technology

I.3. Research approach: A practical-theoretical axis

I.3.1. Artistic, theoretical and methodological results

I.3.2. Goals of my research-creation

I.3.3. The collective body: A schematic description of the experimentation

I.4. Multiple intelligences: First founding principle of a method of complexity

I.4.1. Somatic intelligence: A corporal modality of experience and form of embodied knowledge

II. Points of articulation: Body/technology/the body-technology relationship

II.1. The somatic: An experiential study of corporeality (first axis of articulation)

II.1.1. The lived body: An embodied philosophy of becoming (second axis of articulation)

II.1.2. Nietzschean philosophy as a modality of discovery The loss of bearings as a foundation of the performative attitude

II.2. The ontology of the body: Contextual elements of change

II.2.1. Technology as an environment

II.2.2. Sensory-perceptual destabilization as a condition of ontological change Awareness of the body’s internal references in transformation (third axis of articulation)

II.2.3. Contact with technology: A renewal of the ontology of the sensory linked to the ontology of the body

II.2.4. Lived technology as a coevolution (fourth axis of articulation)

II.2.5. The body as perceptual environment

II.3. Stages of the creative process

Invisible forces of the body as a principle of composition

II.3.1. Development of an aesthetic approach to interfaces

II.3.2. Sound: An aesthetic, intrasensorial and physiological strategy of a culture of flux

II.3.3. The three key elements of somatic education: Activation tools for the integrative process and principle of composition

II.3.3.1. Sensory emergence (fifth axis of articulation)

II.3.3.2. Self-organization of the body in a technological context

II.3.3.3. Augmented Rest as a first integrative principle

II.3.4. Elements of my method in the research-creation process

II.3.4.1. The importance of daily physical contact with technology during practical experimentation

II.3.4.2. Five stages of my method with the performers

II.3.5. Touch and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ in a technological era

II.3.5.1. An ontological relatedness of the body and world

II.3.5.2. Forms of invisible touch: Embodied access to a system of perception

II.3.5.3. Kinesthetic emergences

II.4. Activation of the carnal body: ‘Flesh’ as a phenomenal site and experiential modality of discovery through the experience of technology

III. A method of complexity: Other constitutive elements

III.1. A transdisciplinary structure for addressing complexity

III.2. The two operating axes of this method

III.3. A moving ecosystem of interaction: The interrelationship of embodied perception and embodied thinking

III.3.1. Embodied perception and the perception of the other through the somatic (sixth axis of articulation)

III.3.2. Interaction with theorists: An experimental space of resonance and empathy

IV. Towards a definition and experimentation of the collective body: An ontological shift of the body

IV.1. A dance of tactility as a general practical framework: Its radicalization as a specific practical application of the collective body and principles of composition

IV.2. Towards a methodology based on lived phenomenology as aform of reflexive practice

IV.2.1. Description and start of the integration of strategies of validation

IV.2.2. Processes and strategies of validation: Integration of the dancers’ and research-theorists’ accounts as members of the research team

IV.2.3. A process of synesthetic composition: Body spasms for the collective body

IV.2.4. Cannibalism as a radical integrative principle of embodiment of a different sensory reality

The embodiment of others

IV.2.4.1. Fieldwork as a transdisciplinary strategy of embodiment

IV.2.4.2. Processes of validation and synesthetic composition

IV.3. Metabolization as a seventh axis of articulation and perspective for the future

From collective intelligence to the collective body…

Chapter 3: The mediated/mediating body

Andrea Davidson

I. Context

II. Part 1: The body

II.1. Body/embodiment; inscription/incorporation

II.2. The animate body and kinesthesia

II.3. Somatics and somaesthetics

II.4. Corporeality in performance

II.5. Mediation

II.6. Situatedness: New alliances of artist, artwork, audience and critic/theorist

III. Part 2: Sōma and technē

III.1. Mediated/mediating bodies

III.2. Dramaturgy: The staging of perception and presence

III.3. The question of perspective

III.4. Embodied perspective

III.5. The device

IV. Part 3: Examples of works

IV.1. pH (1989), Dumb Type (multimedia performance)

IV.2. Body Paint—50 inch/Male/White (2015), exonemo (mixed media artwork: acrylic paint on LCD display, video imagery)

IV.3. Huang Yi & KUKA, A Duet of Human and Robot (2013–15), Huang Yi (robotic performance)

IV.4. Pixel (2014), Mourad Merzouki with Adrien M/Claire B (dance performance)

IV.5. Solo Date (2015), Tainaner Ensemble and Pao-Chang Tsai (dramatic performance)

IV.6. Ear on Arm (2015–), Stelarc (prosthetic art)

IV.7. In guise of a conclusion

Conclusion

Isabelle Choinière, Enrico Pitozzi and Andrea Davidson

I. Meeting points of embodied perception

II. A logic of the technical 226

III. The device as atmosphere, perspective and multisensory mode

IV. The method: A science of nodes

Postface

Derrick de Kerckhove

References

Notes on Contributors

Note on the book's internal system of references

From a methodological point of view, and in order to highlight the internal system of references linking the book’s three chapters, we adopt a graphic system composed of a sign in parentheses, followed by an arrow, the author’s name, and chapter/section number: for example [→ Pitozzi Ch.1: point(s)] or alternately, a keyword [→ Device], as a means to establish references to themes contained in the other chapters, the introduction or other texts. This allows us to trace a continuity in the book’s underlying currents by following emerging concepts, their resonances and internal relations, while, in parallel, organizing our knowledge around a reoriented lexicon.

The argumentative structure developed in the book is based on a method and logic of intersection that takes into account the complementary nature of each author’s original perspective. The internal organization of the book is thus structured around a framework of analysis that develops on three correlated levels or methodological approaches resonating amongst themselves. Certain concepts are analysed in interaction, and their development and analysis are reframed and complexified on the basis of preceding chapters or sections in order to offer a substantive understanding of the book's three essential nodes: embodied thought (Pitozzi), embodied perception (Choinière) and embodied perspective (Davidson). In order to fully grasp the scope of this analysis, please read the chapters in order and from the beginning.

Introduction Through the prism of the senses

Isabelle Choinière, Enrico Pitozzi and Andrea Davidson

I. The state of art: The organization of thought in an analytical perspective

Over the past decades, the contemporary stage has experienced the effects of a fundamental epistemological rupture—a shift of perspective in/on the arts, particularly the performative arts—which redefines notions of representation and performativity under the influence of new technologies. If mediation and digital technologies have extended dramatic, narrative and semiotic possibilities, revealing, amongst other things, new and multiple relationships of the senses and modes/levels of perception, they have also challenged and transformed conventions surrounding spectatorship and the understanding of corporality in performance. Here, the term ‘performative arts’ is to be taken broadly, encompassing both the live and media arts as well as other creative works organized around concepts of mediation, environment and device, which have infiltrated the conception of new contemporary stages in the arts and performance integrating technology.

From the outset, one might ask: why do artists choose to engage in experimentation with technologies? One possible answer might be that interest in research-creation involving technology can serve to reveal previously unknown, hidden or unusual aspects of the body and, at the same time, reflect a different vision of ourselves and the functioning of our imagination. For example, these processes can stage and reveal invisible internal circuits of the body, provoking an internal reorganization of elements through contact with technologies that both constitute and continually transform our bodies, the environment and, in the context of the arts and performance, the bodies of performers and spectators. We argue that the body that emerges in a context of technological evolution constitutes a new reality: a contemporary body, with performers and spectators who act and define themselves as subjects in a changing, sometimes challenging contemporary world.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the ubiquity and adoption of a new digital norm. Bearing consequences for all levels of human activity and thought—science, philosophy, sociology, medicine and art—technology is creating an ontological shift away from former worldviews anchored in a culture of knowledge based on representation, to rather evolve towards a world of ‘machine-based modes of worldmaking’ (Hörl 2008): a world based on a science of modelization, algorithms, simulation, emulation and the binary code. Requalifying a centuries-old understanding of technē with respect to Platonic distinctions of technē (art/the artificial) on the one hand, and epistemē (nature/the natural) on the other, the classical understanding of representation as mimesis no longer holds sway—in the arts as in the sciences [→ de Kerckhove Postface]. Or, as Roy Ascott notes, ‘[o]ur personal neural networks merge with global networks to create a new space of consciousness’ (Ascott [1966–67] 2003a: 379).¹

Technologies are not simply means (an instrumental perspective). They constitute an environment, a logic and thought processes (a constitutive perspective). In the context of artistic projects, and from an analytical point of view, this means that on a technical level—the technological development and staging of artistic projects—technology is subordinate to the aesthetic level and not the inverse. Only in this way can technology be understood in its original sense as a logic of technicity—or technē—and not as a simple spectacular application. And only in this sense can an aesthetic of mediated art and performance be approached and understood as a unique form of aesthetic knowledge that is communicated through perception and sensory experience.

This book thus proposes a reframing of notions and conditions of representation by considering new contemporary performative stages via the prism of the senses, and specifically, as they concern and confront the sensate, somatic body. It is precisely from this perspective, which is emergent, that a poietic of the prism of the senses imposed itself for us, the authors. This perspective highlights the presence of things and bodies surrounding us, whose existence we clearly sense, but also, those of other presences, less perceptible, with which we are not necessarily preoccupied but that nevertheless act and modulate our perception in depth. This form of expanded and relaxed attention—reception—occurs at the periphery of the gaze, registering the presence of entities without ever being in direct or conscious contact with them, such as distant sounds at the limits of the audible or flashes of light that traverse the air… Our book’s title emerges from this observation. It is organized around the aptitude/capacity of the senses to capture the imperceptible and transform these sensations as perceptible gestures/actions. In other words, our senses are prisms capable of detecting infinitesimal levels of sensation at the limits of perception and of translating them as behaviours. We therefore speak of implicit perceptual faculties which can modify our fields of experience and therein, endow them with a quality of sensible evidence [→ Corporeality].

The first and primary meaning of embodiment (incorporation) we analyse in the book involves immersion in the body—one’s own body—in order to perceive oneself in depth. This process allows movement artists (dancers and other performing artists) to access involuntary or habitually unconscious sources of their movement and performative behaviours and to change the imaginary forms associated with them. This process can give rise to original movement, a new quality of gesture or different ways of investing space based on unexpected types of action. The technological mediation we examine is based on this particular sensitivity. We argue that it is conceived of and invested in by artists as a concrete method of cognitive inquiry that focuses on the formation of corporeality. With mediated and immersive devices, performers complete projects of action via input stemming from different sensory channels and on different levels: (1) on a proprioceptive level, through input implicating internal sensory-perception concerning the movements and position of the body—primarily, through sensory nerve terminals in muscles, tendons and the fibrous capsule of joints, combined with input from the vestibular apparatus²—and (2) on an exteroceptive level, through input received from external sources or agents. These processes stimulate imaginative potentialities including movement previously unavailable or unaccessed [→ Biofeedback] [→ Device]. Considering methods that work at the limits or degrees of ‘resolution’ of the sensory organs’ capacities in such a way allows us to place perception at the centre of our thought while also examining its role in the organization of new behaviour, which we designate with the term emerging corporeality [→ Emergent Reality].

The book thus adopts a dialogue with technology which is simultaneously productive and critical: a methodology that is both open—implying and comprising the various disciplines it traverses—and specific, in the sense of describing and analysing works that are complex. This position allows us to change the point of departure and basis of a particular reasoning most often associated with conventional and instrumental interpretations of technology, as well as its relations and founding concepts. It rather proposes to consider a structure of reasoning and possible discursive developments that can change the ways in which certain terms are habitually understood through redefining them. This is, of course, an ambitious task because nothing is more difficult than to change the angular concepts and founding principles supporting an entire intellectual edifice. The whole structure of the system of thought in question finds itself overturned, transformed. This is what one must be prepared for.

If technology modifies cognitive processes, it is also influenced by creative processes, particularly in the fields of mediated art and performance, which introduce new needs and knowledge. This detail is important from the point of view of the methodology we are proposing. One must consider the consequences of technological progress—and the arts are an excellent observatory to do so—by being attentive to the direction and nature of the research at hand. In this sense, our approach presents an ethical and anthropological dimension: a type of ecology of technology. On this level, interesting interconnections between the living machine of the body and the artificial machinery of technology can be found: a fruitful alliance, and, through the arts, a particular accounting of the impact technology has on human life and being.

The book takes the form of a multi-voiced narrative that establishes interrelations of theme and subject matter, while also presenting subtle shifts of focus. Its main architecture is organized around three texts by Isabelle Choinière, Enrico Pitozzi and Andrea Davidson, whose reflections/proposals constitute its foundations. More broadly, the project was conceived of in the form of a network—a figure of thought designating a set of intertwined lines and figuratively, a set of relations. By extension, this network also forms an interconnected set of components and their interrelations, allowing for alternately continuous or discontinuous circulations of flux or of finite elements.

To compose a book with such a structure meant establishing relations between the various texts and forms of research found in its pages, endowing them with an internal dynamic and organicity, while also highlighting differences of point of view and theoretical reverberations in and between each author’s text along with each author’s particular intellectual sensitivity and multimodal process. As such, it proposes a method that deviates from the logic of a collection of texts, rather proposing a reading (parcours) radically centred on the interrelation of texts while following theoretical nodes.

This network constitutes the first level of the book’s composition. The principles underpinning the method of organizing this network aim to connect thematic perspectives which, although not always immediately recognizable, nevertheless create emergences as in a crystalline and multimodal structure (Figure 0-1). As this process unfolds, its development reveals a second level: a space in which the various chosen themes enter into relationships with one another across the entire book. They react to one another and influence the reader through the feedback and perspectives they open up, as in a true chemical process.

Each relationship implies a change of scale, a rapport and a variation of state.³ To approach these transitions of scale and to better immerse oneself in the reading of the book, two distinct interpretative lines can be adopted: the first, describing its internal editing and functioning, and the second, following its lines of tension as signs, by suspending them and looking at the filigree structure that runs throughout the logic of the text.

Research-Creation Project Book-Network

Figure 0-1: Research-Creation Project Book-Network, 2018 © Isabelle Choinière.

In order to highlight the internal system regulating relations between different sections of the book, we adopt a graphic system of references composed of a sign placed in parentheses followed by an arrow, the author’s name and chapter, or the theoretical notion alluded to: for example [→ Embodiment]. Each notion corresponds to a thematic principle lying at the heart of our propositions and to themes contained in the book as a whole. This organization of the results of our research around a reworked lexicon allows us to trace the book’s guiding principles through its underlying concepts, emerging concepts and resonances, as well as their internal relationships. At the same time, the network proposes a lexicon of notions constituting something more than a simple glossary. It carries within it interpretations and different points of view—sometimes dialectical in nature—while developing certain perspectives in new and unusual directions. Not only does this system allow the reader to deepen his/her understanding of the concepts and themes outlined, but its internal logic also lends an organic rhythm, a kind of breath.

The book’s logic of variation is also reflected in the three languages (French, English and Spanish) that encompass the publishing project as a whole. Each language brings out specific shades and particular colours, a depth of meaning and inherent nuances resonating at the periphery of the eye to the rhythm of thought and redefining the geometry of sensation in unique ways: a true prism of the senses.

As with the prism, this method also allows for a multi-faceted understanding of the principles underpinning contemporary artistic production involving technology, and in parallel, related issues pertaining to questions of perception, presence, cognition, immersion, perspective, subjectivity and embodiment [→ Subjectivity]. It concentrates its analysis on two main axes in interaction. The first axis consists of the analysis of technological devices conceived of as tools that allow the performer and spectator to explore the new perceptual processes underpinning and generating the composition of works in their aesthetic, scenographic and technological dimensions. With respect to this last point, the subtle dimension with which technologies function can be simultaneously approached through three levels of analysis: (1) a consideration of how technologies operate cognitive changes from the perspective of anthropological development (de Kerckhove and Miranda de Almeida 2014); (2) an examination of how creative processes are able to change and influence technological (technique) development; (3) a consideration of the extent to which the creative process can become a territory for generating new understandings of technology.

The second axis, closely linked to the first, consists of the analysis of the conception and experience of the performative body in the relationship(s) it entertains with technology. We propose to consider these relationships as being evolutive. They provoke what we call a complexification of self through the experimentation and development of new modes of perception and reception of a multimodal and multisensorial type [→ Complexification of Self] [→ Subjectivity]. But why the need to invest in a multimodal and multisensory exploration, one might ask? The technological age we live in appears to be operating a break with the distancing objectivity of the Renaissance ‘era of vision’ (de Kerckhove and Miranda de Almeida 2014) [→ de Kerckhove Postface]. We now inhabit multisensory universes, apprehended with an instant awareness of the whole (Weissberg 1989, 1999). Digital technology has activated a process of sensory renewal through a permanent destabilization of the senses produced by, amongst other things, electronic media that have brought together different universes (Rolnik n.d. a). Provoking an acceleration, a constant reorganization of the senses—our sensory maps—, this situation places humans in an exacerbated state of being, living and presence; a state of openness and multi-sensory-perceptual activity that conditions the contemporary experiential. In a word, we are experiencing a fracturing of the monopoly of the visible.

The nature of things is thus not what lies under or before our eyes. It rather corresponds to what is hidden: a principle of internal transformation of elements at play. We are experiencing a dynamic that we qualify here as epiphanic, or what French contemporary philosopher Stéphane Vial (2013) calls ‘digital ontophany’⁴ after Gaston Bachelard’s (1953) term ‘phénomènotechnique’,⁵ as a phenomenality of the technical. The multimodal approach we adopt for our analysis attempts to understand the different levels of adaptive learning skills and multiple channels of perception required to understand different emerging phenomena. The contemporary body perceives in multisensory and multimodal dimensions in a state of constant transformation [→ de Kerckhove Postface]. This emerging body is the new state of the contemporary body. Accompanying this contemporary perspective, different levels of time-space, presence, consciousness and reality, as well as different types of bodies are also emerging.

A fundamental question then arises: at what level of ‘resolution’ do we perceive and live reality? The book attempts to answer this question by reflecting on the different methods adopted by artists and researchers to inscribe the mediated body and its manifestations in the contemporary arts and performance. The analysis of different compositional strategies involving digital technologies—which may or may not be interactive, but nevertheless affect the body and perception—allows us to formulate and describe a new geography of perception. Special attention is given to the phenomena of sensory immersion and alternative cognitive experiences at play in these works, as well as to the nature of their relations from an intermodal perspective. And if aesthetic paradigms such as the transitional, flux and non-matrixed representation appear to underpin this experimentation, they also testify to an investment by artists in processes that are evolutive, transversal and/or emergent, whose modes and stages of transformation this book proposes to trace.

The intersection of these transversal perspectives also marks the starting point of a new methodology we propose for analysing emerging forms of contemporaneity. For example, a concept such as the complexification of self can be alternately examined from the perspective of: (1) devices that stage physical and symbolic time-spaces which have become increasingly hybrid; and (2) the changes these devices induce in the physical body. Emerging forms of contemporaneity can also be analysed from the point of view of a dissolution of theatre’s fourth wall, thus calling into question issues concerning relations between the subject/object, spectator/performer, physical/mediated body, and leading to, amongst other perspectives, a consideration of the dissolution of psycho-physical boundaries separating the performer and audience, and to contemporary forms of intersubjectivity (Rolnik n.d. b, 2006; Berthoz and Jorland 2004; Brett 2004; Iacoboni et al. 2005).

This original method of analysis was conceived to consolidate our argument. One of its roles—also underpinning the experimental approach developed by Isabelle Choinière in her research-creations—was to develop new knowledge through the observation of emerging forms of understanding (Easton 2011: 24) and to open up a space of questioning that allows for approaching the creative process from perspectives that are both practical and theoretical. This integrative approach describes a logic of interconnection in which different forms of intelligence act complementarily, and moreover, where bodily knowledge and embodied understanding—embodied thinking—a notion explored by Enrico Pitozzi and Isabelle Choinière in their respective chapters, govern. The novelty of this method lies in a dual approach of practice and theory by practitioners who are also theorists. On the one hand, this approach promotes proprioceptive experience and corporal intelligence as guidelines for research and reflection on the body—both for the individual and as a topic/means of analysis. It generates an empathic space of corporal resonance, along with proposing the means to explore a potential modification of corporality in any investigation of technological mediation in performance. On the other hand, once the relationships connecting all aspects of a composition and its related skills/practices are understood, the emergence of elements and realities in flux (Ascott [1966–67] 2003a; Godard 2006 cited in Kuypers 2006: 62) can be observed. The latter are related to the living body and also highlight the more or less stable connections, logics and configurations characterizing a concept (pensée) of complexity (Morin 1977: 16–17). Unexpected relationships can thus emerge from the alignment of what had hitherto appeared chaotic, and certain relationships become suddenly clear. All that is needed is a change of perspective and method. It is also in this context of analysis that the term ‘aesthetic’—from the etymological point of view of ‘knowledge’—can be understood in reference to an event concerning the body and perception, which is activated and renewed through the senses and the development of perceptual skills.

This said, and as Mark Hansen (2004: 1–18) argues, this process is only possible if one redefines the conceptual framework of media art by tracing a new methodological perspective capable of establishing connections between the different disciplines involved in these types of works and their modes of experimentation. In our view, such a constellation of references brings into play a politic of knowledge that can profoundly renew the humanities through the connections they entertain with technology. A complementary relationship between different types of intelligence can be re-introduced, and, as per the context of our analysis, a predominant role of kinesthetic intelligence and embodied cognition (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 2010; Després 1998; Berthoz and Jorland 2004; Godard 2006 cited in Kuypers 2006: 58; Fortin 2009; 2011: 184). This approach characterizes the implicit methodological program underscoring our analytical work, which aims to discern the key issues and stakes of the hybrid territories of media art and performance.

As a consequence, and inevitably, a reassessment of certain terms employed in contemporary debates surrounding this area of research became necessary—terms which, today, seem banal, abused or void of meaning. Another goal of our analytical work was thus to redefine a lexicon—that we organized around such concepts as mediated corporeality, sensoriality, immersion, empathy, intersubjectivity, potentiality, emergent reality and embodiment—in order to situate these concepts as being of utmost relevance for a contemporary reflection on the topic.

Additionally, we approach new performative stages and devices integrating technology both as technological environments and as complex systems conceived and tested with a structured set of knowledge, skills and practices of the body. The dynamic of this integrative approach constitutes a flexible but comprehensive basis for examining physical and mediated interactions and distinguishing emerging forms of performative behaviour. Our analysis notably takes into account the ways in which technological devices establish new relationships with the performative body, and further, how these interactions can provoke and induce a modification of corporality involving an evolution of perception and a multiplication of the forms of corporeality [→ Transformation].

Two intertwining key concepts—corporality and corporeality—form the basis of our reflection on the body. In the field of French contemporary dance, these concepts were taken up and developed by Michel Bernard in De la création chorégraphique (2001). For Bernard, corporality refers to the quality of what is corporal: the physical body in its materiality.⁶ As for the concept of corporeality, he explains the term in the following manner:

Thus, despite or beyond differences of approach, contemporary philosophers and aesthetic theorists agree to radically subvert the traditional category of ‘body’ and propose an original plural, dynamic and random vision as an unstable chiasmic play of intensive forces or heterogeneous vectors. A vision which is now appropriate to designate by a term with more plastic and spectral connotations: ‘corporeality’.

(Bernard 2001: 21)

For her part, French dance scholar Julie Perrin proposes a complementary definition of corporeality that highlights its reflexive, mutable and fundamentally sensorial nature:

It is the entire problem of classical ontology, which views the body as being full that needs to be reassessed. The body is no longer considered a closed and intimate reality referenced as an essence; neither can it be reduced to its biological reality. Corporeality must be thought of as an opening, like a crossroad of influences and relationships; it is a reflection of our culture, of our imagination, of our practices, and of social and political organization. The term ‘corporeality’ (corporéité), with more plastic connotations, intends to communicate a changing, mobile and unstable reality, made up of networks of intensities and forces. Supported by the thought of artists (Cezanne, Artaud, Kandinsky, Bacon, Cage) and of thinkers (Mauss, Merleau-Ponty, Ehrenzweig, Deleuze and Guattari), Michel Bernard (2001) elaborated a concept based on the analysis of the framework underpinning sensoriality.

(Perrin 2008: 101–02, original emphasis)

In digital performance, multiple bodies are staged: a plurality of physical, mediated, sound, vibratory and light bodies. The book therefore adopts a multimodal methodological framework capable of revealing, like the prism, existing theoretical perspectives explaining this multi-faceted understanding of the body, while also questioning and re-interpreting the body from the perspective of corporeality. From this central axis, we examine the impact of technology and, specifically, relationships between the body and technology that involve intermodality; for example, in which the body is experienced as a changing reality that is ‘dilated’ and composed of intensities, networks and forces, becoming ever more complex through its contact with technology and the activation of corporal potentialities. To understand the consequences of this position, we analyse the role of perception, and in parallel, the foundations of the concept of potentiality, or more specifically, the notion of corporal potentiality, a subject of capital importance for our argument. We notably argue that in technological environments, the body, far from being lost, becomes more complex through the activation of this corporal potentiality.

To account for the intermodal perspective just described, and as complemented by the interventions of the various other authors who responded to our request, the organization and internal logic of the book develops three correlated levels of analytical perspective in resonance. These levels—which correspond to the book’s three chapters—are organized as follows:

A first approach, developed by Enrico Pitozzi, correlates a theoretical framework with the observation of artistic practice; specifically, from the point of view of the body and the experiential. This perspective constitutes an aesthetic and philosophical analysis emanating from, and taking into account, the researcher-theorist’s physical experience and critical observation of artistic processes integrating technology. An expression of embodied thought, this approach leads Pitozzi to propose an emerging philosophy of the contemporary stage linked to the two methodological frameworks described above.

A second approach, developed by Isabelle Choinière, constitutes an axis of theory/practice based on a methodology that Choinière, as a transdisciplinary choreographer, elaborated and tested in the context of a personal creative process. Rooted in the experiential,