Investigating the self and other in improvisational dance-making using 360° immersive technology

Abstract

Dance-making processes that engage with posthuman thinking have the potential to offer artists new perspectives and ways to relate to the world. This practice as research study develops choreographic making using 360° digital immersive technologies. This method of making employs a posthuman lens to destabilise anthropocentric thinking within the creative process. This approach is described as an ecological practice using improvisation as the tool to develop the relationship between the body and the nonhuman. The practice takes place in a range of outdoor environments. 360° dance film offers opportunities to observe the self and to develop a consciousness that provides an expanded state of awareness. Using 360° digital technology the research considers the ramifications of one’s own double embodiment, both being and seeing the body in the digital space simultaneously. The practice plays with the idea of body-object and body-subject (Merleau- Ponty, 1962) to generate an allocentric perspective and an autoscopic experience. In so doing, the 360° immersive dance-making process shifts subjectivity and generates the ecological self. This type of subjectivity encompasses four experiential bodies throughout the process. These bodies are not static, they are in a perpetual process of becoming, the body is understood in an expanded sense (Haraway, 1991). The practice creates a larger ecological network, the boundaries between bodies are unclear, the moment of improvisation enables practitioners to make change and be changed. They can move in the world and simultaneously become moved by it, this practice is charged with both autonomic and visceral changes. The practice creates experiences, reflects, immerses, and reexperiences to consider lived experience in relation to the nonhuman. There is a twofold interaction between the body and the sites, the body and the other, it is affected, and its movement also produces changes in the world. This creates a continuum between the body and the environment, between nature and culture (Massumi, 2002). The 360° dance-making practice offers a way to extend subjectivity, to embark on a process of viewing the body as the other, to develop a new subjectivity, the posthuman cyborg.