Body, Space & Technology Journal (Jan 2011)
Performing Sleep/Wake Cycles: An Arts-Science Dialogue through Embodied Technologies
Abstract
This paper describes an arts-science collaborative project titled Standing Waves, which creatively entwines data drawn from the rhythms of the body in sleep/wake cycles with sensor-based technology for synaesthetic performance. The project partners situate their practice and research in the fields of choreography/dance, sleep science and media art and design. Our work explores how the non-literalness of scientific phenomena can be embodied in interactive performance and made meaningful for audiences. The aim of this collaboration is to create a unique performance ecology, by bringing together elements of the collaborators’ respective disciplines and expertise and experimenting within the areas of intersection. The Standing Waves performance system involves wearable electronic sensor technology to allow a dancer to interact with a malleable sound environment. Sensing the body, its gestures, and its environment through the measurement of light and acceleration, the ‘sensor suit’ allows the dancer to intuitively control sound. In turn, the sonic feedback influences the emerging choreographic score, inducing constraints and generative cyclic patterns for movement. This feedback loop between movement and sonic state creates waves of sensation heightening the experience of the space as a perceptible field of embodied technology. The performance exists at the threshold between the figurative and the factual as it takes data and information from the lab practice of a sleep scientist and reinterprets this within the condition of a performance environment, effectively making visible the dynamic processes of subtle physiological phenomena.
