#Background to the Research
We use the word "everybody" interchangeably with "everyone" (Cambridge Dictionary 2024), assuming that a body is essential to being human. Having a body and being subject to its needs is perhaps the most fundamental commonality that we share, even if that body differs vastly among different people.
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The first sounds we make the moment we are born are through our body – our vocal tracts, our motor movements and our bodily functions. The first musical instruments augmented what we could do with our body to create a greater variety of sounds, requiring physical movement of fingers and limbs to hit or rub objects together, or for breath to be regulated through pipes and other resonating chambers (Montagu 2017). As we moved from analogue to digital technology however, sound-making became abstracted away from the body, reducing sound to samples that can be created or triggered by lines of code, or simply streamed through a playlist.
This divorce of body from sound in the latter half of the 20th century has, conversely, induced a contemporary shift towards reconnecting once again, with a significant amount of current research and art-making in the field of sound-movement computing, gestural control of musical instruments and embodied sound (Holland 2019) (Stern 2013). Some of the impetus for this shift can be attributed to a need for greater performativity beyond the tyranny of the screen, or a more instinctive and expressive way to manipulate sound (Mainsbridge 2022). Perhaps the biggest driver is simply the development of increasingly powerful and accessible technologies to extract data from our bodies, spurred by the needs of commerce and politics. From accelerometers and gyroscopes to biosensors, infrared and LiDAR sensors, and now computer vision, our bodies are continually tracked individually and en masse through our smart watches, mobile phones and surveillance cameras.
However, the contemporary body is no longer the analogue body of the past, anchored in its material aspect. Like the splintering of our identity into schizophrenic fragments (Jameson 1991), the body has unmoored from corporeality, disappearing into the network to conjoin with other bodies and machines, unlatched even from any coherent temporal sequence.
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#Aims of the Research
The aims of my research are to investigate how this expanded concept of the body can instigate, inspire or enable novel forms of participatory interaction that reflect the contemporary digital world that we live in. Once we remove corporeality from the equation and think of the body as multiplicitous and becoming (Massumi 2002), how do the possibilities for embodied interaction similarly multiply?
Further, how does an undisciplinary approach intersect with network culture to create multimodal works that draw on repurposing and remixing new technologies with new ways of thinking about the self and identity? Through the research, I draw on ideas from cybernetic theory, post-humanist philosophy, conceptual art and media and social studies. These ideas are combined with explorations into diverse technologies such as generative AI, scraping algorithms, teleconferencing and computer vision in an artistic method that embraces a form of network thinking – connecting people, connecting forms and connecting ideas in an open lattice that always reaches out rather than in.
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Finally, how does participation involving an expanded body enable sound to be an instigator for multi-layered meaning-making? There has traditionally been a dichotomy between sound art and experimental music, with the former thought to be more aligned to space and conceptual art, and the latter to time and auditory aesthetics. In my practice, both the aesthetic qualities of sound and its ability to evoke socio-political meaning are equally important. By using a participatory approach with a networked conception of the body, is it possible to blur these distinctions between space and duration, composer and audience, visual and performance, and conceptual and aesthetic, thereby enabling us to explore socio-political structures or contemporary anxieties within a musical context?
#Significance of the Research
This research contributes to the discourse on participatory culture in relation to sound practice. While there has been substantial research on the socio-political aspects of participatory art in general, scholarship on participatory sound remains marginal (Keylin 2023), despite the growing prominence of both sound art and participatory art.
Putting aside media-specificity, this research introduces a new perspective on the expanded conception of the body in participatory art. Embodied interactions have been the subject of much research both in the creative arts and Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) fields. However, these have tended to assume a traditional corporeal embodiment and focused on material issues such as movement analysis, mapping strategies and user interface design. This study proposes a methodology for heuristically thinking about the body in terms of different networks to instigate novel interactions.
Lastly, this research contributes to scholarship on undisciplinarity and multimodality in creative practice, reflective of contemporary networks that draw on and feed back into diverse fields. The blurring of boundaries between cultural forms as well as the increased embeddedness of these forms in everyday life due to networked technologies (Jagoda 2016) make it virtually impossible for the contemporary artist to work homogenously, necessitating further research into this area of study and its implications for contemporary creative practice.
#Methods & Methodology
This thesis is grounded in practice-led research (PLR) methodology, which is well-established in the literature (McNamara 2012). Through the making of the creative works included in the accompanying folio and reflecting on them, my practice has profoundly changed. From working primarily with scored notation and acoustic instruments, my practice has expanded to include diverse artistic fields across dance, installation, new instrument-making and new media. As I branched further, new questions and collaborative opportunities emerged in an ever-expanding lattice. This necessitated a huge investment in technical skill development, as well as human resource and production management skills. At the same time, the aesthetic focus of my work evolved from solely musical or compositional considerations to include socio-political meaning-making as I explored contemporary anxieties surrounding human creativity and connection. The broad approach to my research, investigating across multiple fields of study, combinations of art forms and presentation formats, allowed me to discover different aspects of the networked body. My method was reflective of and in response to the fragmentary yet omnipresent network itself. Through the research, I discovered new knowledge that can be applied to the design of participatory interfaces within performative and installation contexts, both specifically for sound-making and more broadly to other art forms.
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I have adopted the term undisciplinary to describe my approach of working across boundaries of form, genre and discipline that can at times be interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary or even postdisciplinary. Other researchers have also used the terms alterplinarity (Rodgers and Bremner 2011) or indisciplinarity (Mitchell et al. 2009). While there have been many authors who have expounded on the differences between these approaches (Darbellay 2019) (Gates-Stuart and Wolmark 2004), I have preferred the term undiscipline as it embraces a certain freedom and rebellion against institutional straightjackets (Marshall and Bleecker 2010). The contemporary need to create spaces of unknown possibilities have seen a shift away from disciplined-based practice to issue or project-based approaches (Rodgers and Bremner 2011). Rather than starting from a position of knowing, a researcher is encouraged to embrace irresponsibility in order to question popular conceptions and deep-rooted habits (Krippendorff 2016).