Duality of Embodiment and Support for Co-Creation in Hand Contact Improvisation

Abstract

The goal of this study is to capture the relationship between the bodies of two performers who improvise expressions while keeping their hands in contact (hand contact improvisation). Therefore, we developed a system that measures the motion of the hand and the center of pressure (COP) of ground reaction forces of the entire body's motion. Some of the participants of our experiments were skilled in improvised physical expression and some were beginners. The experiments showed that the period during which the motion of both subjects' entire bodies preceded the motion of their united right hand was long in the trial for which subjects reported that sympathetic embodied awareness was generated. This indicates that the implicit process of each subject operated prior to an explicit process that created their hand motions and both processes of each subject operated between the two subjects synchronously while sympathetic embodied awareness was generated. Next, we focused on fluctuation as a mean of enhancing the implicit process of embodiment. Therefore, a device was developed to present load fluctuation to the hands of test subjects during hand contact improvisation. The effects of load fluctuation were evaluated using measurement results of the entire body. The results indicated that by presenting fluctuation that has little effect on the subject's consciousness, the implicit embodiment of a performer can be activated, and the connection between both can be strengthened. We also obtained ideas for designing an interface to support the co-creation of expression.

Keywords

• co-creation
• embodiment
• sympathetic embodied awareness
• joint action