Thinking Through the Body

A collaboration with George Khut
July 2008—July 2009
Project Website

Thinking Through The Body was an interdisciplinary research project exploring the use and potential of movement, touch and proprioception in body-focussed interactive art and design.

For 14 days between July 2008 and July 2009, eight practitioners working across the disciplines of art, design and somatic bodywork came together over the course of three intense workshop-events to discuss and explore new approaches to ‘the body’ in contemporary art practice – with a special focus on the phenomenology of body-focused interactive experiences in art and somatic bodywork.

Developed in response to a call from the Australia Council for the Arts, Inter-Arts Office, for open-ended ‘blue sky’, interdisciplinary research and development projects (Art Lab initiative), our aim has been to create a laboratory for the creation of hybrid practice-based research work combining approaches from interactive art, somatic bodywork and experiential aesthetics.

At the final ArtLab-funded workshop at Performance Space (Sydney, July 2009) we presented a collection of interactive art experiences (The Sensorium Gymnasium) – devised as ‘offerings’ to an invited audience. These prototype artworks and the collaborative processes we have used to devise them, provide the foundation for our continuing explorations.