Thesis and Portfolio in fulfilment of the Doctor of Philosophy (Interactive Composition) at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne

Contemporary digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), teleconferencing, social media and Mixed Reality have shifted how we perceive the human body. Transcending the material world and no longer limited by spatiotemporality, the body becomes a fragmented and distributed multiplicity. Fragmentation and multiplicity are hallmarks of a network culture, where the entangled nature of our interconnected life has led to new post-digital conceptions of identity. Individuality has become less important than our function within a network and the entangled links between people, between machines and between machines and people. Although there has been substantial research separately on interactive embodiment for sound-making, participatory practice and network culture, there is scant literature on their intersection – in particular how expanded conceptions of the body necessitated by new technologies and network thinking have provided novel affordances for sound-making and artistic expression. Throughout my practice-led investigation, the spectre of the networked body kept reappearing in many forms, provoking questions that led to discoveries through making and presenting. This dissertation outlines the questions and discoveries that arose through the process of creation, realisation and evaluation of six works, where I used interactive design, participatory design, networked technologies and multimodal forms to reveal this networked body. In turn, the concept of the networked body became an instigator for creativity, sparking new ideas for interactive sound design that invited collaborations with choreographers, dancers, neuroscientists, gaming technologists, coders, performing musicians and artists. I draw from network culture, participatory culture, and post-humanist philosophy to present a methodology for designing interactive systems for sound-making through an expanded, networked concept of the body.