Bodynet - How to make a network of bodies? Call for Projects

> Introduction
> Topic
> Phases of the workshop
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Texts by Jaime del Val

Introduction

METABODY - Media Embodiment Tékhne and Bridges of Diversity
Metabody will be a laboratory and observatory of cultural diversity that will highlight the importance of non-verbal communication and embodied expressions as a primary substrate of naturecultures. The project will generate an understanding of the threats posed by the homogenising processes of globalisation and Information Society. Furthermore the project will produce new cultural, communicational and technological paradigms through interdisciplinary developments in new media and the arts, which foreground embodied expressions and interactions.

The project will elaborate a critique of the tendencies of both homogenisation and preemption (adaptation to the new, assimilation of the new and programmed diversification) that information technologies operate in perceptions, affects, and subjective formations, where the irreducible and changing differences of embodied expressions and relations are reduced to linear patterns of simulation and standardised processes of media contagion, within a mechanisict tradition where movement is reduced to measurable coordinates.

At the same time new concepts and pragmatics of space-time, relations, corporeality, cognition, perception and affection will be elaborated for new technological paradigms exceeding machanicism and computation, that will take into account movement as multiplicities of intracorporeal sensations and affections irreducible to localizable points and trajectories, to measurable coordinates of space-time or form-pattern.

The project will embrace a novel transdisciplinary field, from dance and music to experimental architecture, from visual and media-arts to cognitive sciences, from philosophy to alternative mathematics, from communication technologies to history of emotions, from disabled to gender and cultural minorities, that will develop over five years a novel concept of interactive, performative, multisensory space and design based on movement.

Topic

The topic of Metabody Phase 1 is Bodynet - How to make a network of bodies.

Metabody, the body-network, is the Reverse of Internet as presumed disembodied network of minds. Metabody will pay attention to the differences and changes of bodies, movements and contexts in order to generate the conditions for a sustainable and plural society.

• How is corporeality implied or produced through contemporary Internet and Informational paradigms?
• Movement analysis (beyond the mechanicistic tradition) in Human Computer Interaction.
• How to overcome reductionisms in emotion analysis in contemporary affective computing systems.
• Perception technologies as metacommons: how the way in which we construct perception makes reality appropriable (or not). 
• Perception, movement and cognition. The affordance of the Interface and the ecology of relations.
• Bodily difference and embodiment.

Participants will work together or independently in building one or more prototypes of the experimental and trandisciplinary body network of the Metabody project.

The 5 project can take the form of:

• new concepts for digital Internet Information networks.
• other kinds of bodily networking
• theoretical work on the proposed topics
• software or hardware, sensitive interfaces

Phases of the workshop

The workshop has two phases:

1. In the first one participants will take part in the introductory meeting of all institutions participating in the METABODY project that will take place between 24th and 26th July, with a public conference on the 27th. This will allow the participants to situate themselves in the framework of the project, understand its specificty and participate in the start and organisation.

2. In the second phase, 28th-31st July participants will work on their ideas and prototypes for the proposed theme of Phase 1 of the Metabody Project. Presentations of the work will be done July 31st evening. 

Participants will be given the opportunity to keep collaborating with the project afterwords through the Metabody group in Medialab-Prado.

On June 14 a new call for collaborators will be issued for all those interested in taking part in the development of selected projects.

With the support of the European Commission

Submission form