Peribiophoty

Abstract

Creative practitioners inside academia are often tasked with explaining how their embodied practices constitute research. The Peribiophoty project reverses this paradigm to ask: how does academic research constitute embodied practice?  By considering the personal and intellectual contexts (peri), surrounding academics and their biographies (bio), through audio-visual representation (photy), we investigate how academic thinking is embodied thinking. The notion that “traditional” research only involves the brain is challenged by the audio-visual representations of thoughts and ideas embedded in objects, experience, time, and interactions. Peribiophoty makes its propositions about academic thinking through embodied presence and rhythmic juxtapositions of gesture, things, place, text on screen and voice. It evokes the narrative pasts and selves of the project’s literature, history, and digital games scholars as substantively entangled with their ongoing research programs and demonstrates that their academic research is necessarily an embodied and embedded practice.

Keywords

• history
• literature
• creative research
• embodied cognition
• digital games
• narrative self