George Poonkhin Khut

Intimate Aesthetics and Facilitated Interaction

With the recent emergence of intimate Live Art and performance practices in the past decades, involving artists and audiences interacting in close physical proximity and one-to-one communication, the body is brought centre stage as the site and material of aesthetic experience. Artists working with these modes of address aim to heighten and intensify the experience of the artwork, through the charged energy of face-to-face confrontation, exchange and close bodily proximity. Our particular interest as artistic practitioners is in intimate body-focused aesthetic experiences, mediated by digital technologies that explore the interactions between physiological processes, bodily sensation and subjectivity. In contrast to autonomous art objects that can be experienced by an individual without any assistance by others, we propose a model of aesthetic experience in which facilitation by artists and witnessing by others are integral components. The guidance and facilitation by artists through an experience is intended to provide safe structures and pathways within which a participant can surrender to the potentially immersive and reflective states of consciousness offered by the artwork. Our framework describes four stages of audience experience and participation that can be used to develop and evaluate body-based Live Art encounters: (1) Welcoming, (2) Fitting and Induction, (3) The Ride, and (4) Debriefing and Documentation. We show the application of our model through two case studies from our artistic practices, illustrating our particular perspective on evaluation as a form of facilitated critique and reflection for audience, as well as artists.

Cardiomorphologies: An Inner Journey through Art

Biofeedback as a form of physiological human-computer interaction and interactive art offers a wide scope for future creative development, with obvious potential for applications beyond the art gallery, including therapeutic and health-promotion applications. Participation in this arena requires an appreciation of the full interactive experience, since these systems engage the body not simply as a data set but as a living subject, experiencing and responding to the world according to the persons felt sense, motivations, and curiosities.

Bodily experience and imagination: designing ritual interactions for participatory live-art contexts

We are exploring new possibilities for bodily-focused aesthetic experiences within participatory live-art contexts. As artist-researchers, we are interested in how we can understand and shape bodily experience and imagination as primary components of an interactive aesthetic experience, sonically mediated by digital biofeedback technologies. Through the making of a participatory live-art installation, we illustrate how we used the Bodyweather performance methodology to inform the design of ritual interactions intended to reframe the audience experience of self, body and the world through imaginative processes of scaling and metaphor. We report on the insights into the varieties of audience experience gathered from audience testing of the prototype artwork, with a particular focus on the relationship between the embodied imagination and felt sensation; the influence of objects and costume; and the sonically mediated experience of physiological processes of breathing and heartbeat. We offer some reflections on the use of ritual and scripted interactions as a strategy for facilitating coherent forms of bodily experience.

Surging verticality: an experience of balance

In our approach to body-focused interactive art, the tangible material with which we craft interactional aesthetic experiences is body experience. Touch and proprioception become primary materials for exploration and embedding in technology-mediated interactional situations. We applied the Feldenkrais Method of somatic bodywork in the development of a prototype interactive artwork, Surging Verticality, to pursue our understanding of how to craft audience experience, where the artwork offers a framework for critical reflection and self-enquiry. The Feldenkrais Method is based on an appreciation of musculo-skeletal organization as a fundamental component of our self-image and subjectivity. Our preliminary reflections on our experience of making, testing and evaluating body-focused interactions reveal the importance of the contract between artist and audience, the care, skill and sensitivity required by the artist and the receptivity of the audience.

Re-sensitising the body: interactive art and the Feldenkrais method

This article describes interdisciplinary research undertaken by a group of artists, designers, curators and somatic bodywork practitioners to explore a human-centred approach to the potential of touch, movement, balance and proprioception as modalities for interactive art. Somatic bodywork methodologies such as the Feldenkrais method provide highly developed frameworks for attending to these very phenomena. Re-sensitising the body through somatic investigations allowed us as makers of body-focussed interactive art to translate the subtle shifts in attention and nuances of felt sensation into the audience experience of sensor-based interactive artworks. We describe the results of a yearlong project through our experience of the making of one specific experimental artwork, surging verticality. We reflect on the conditions for audience engagement and the profound connections we experienced between Feldenkrais somatic bodywork and art practice as modes of enquiry into the world.

Embracing First-Person Perspectives in Soma-Based Design

A set of prominent designers embarked on a research journey to explore aesthetics in movement-based design. Here we unpack one of the design sensitivities unique to our practice: a strong first per ...

Designing Biofeedback Artworks for Relaxation

For the past twelve years I have been exploring the aesthetic and cultural potential of biofeedback interactions as a means for facilitating experience of, and reflection on, the physiological dimensions of our embodiment. Information extracted in real-time from heart rate sensors, relating to specific modes or qualities of engagement and nervous system orientation, modulate the various layers that comprise works visual and sonic appearance i.e. brightness, size, hue, timbre, pitch and harmonies etc. The biofeedback information displays used in these works need to support modes of interaction in which parasympathetic nervous system activity can be voluntarily increased and sympathetic nervous system activity i.e. stress/excitation responses, are decreased. This paper describes some approaches used in these works to address these competing requirements.

Developing BrightHearts: a pediatric biofeedback mediated relaxation app to manage procedural pain and anxiety

The objective of this study was to develop a child‐friendly biofeedback‐mediated relaxation device called BrightHearts.

The Feasibility of Using the BrightHearts Biofeedback-Assisted Relaxation Application for the Management of Pediatric Procedural Pain: A Pilot Study

The objective of this pilot study was to assess the acceptability and feasibility of using BrightHearts, a biofeedback‐assisted relaxation application (app), in children undergoing painful procedures.