This book draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. The human body is placed at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing. The author asks what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers—as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching. Performance can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foste ... More

This book draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. The human body is placed at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing. The author asks what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers—as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching. Performance can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foster a collaborative construction of new physical states, levels of conscious awareness, and even ethics. We reencounter ourselves and others through our interactive computer systems. What we need now are conceptual and methodological frameworks to reflect this. The book offers a reworking of the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This method, based on a respect for lived experience, begins by listening to the senses and noting insights that arrive in the midst of dance, or quite simply in the midst of life. The combination of performance and phenomenology yields entwinements between experience and reflection that shed light on, problematize, or restructure scholarly approaches to human bodies using digital technologies. After outlining her approach and methodology and clarifying the key concepts of performance, technologies, and virtuality, the author applies the phenomenological method to the experience of designing and performing in a range of computational systems: telematics, motion capture, responsive architectures, and wearable computing.