Experiential Sculpting
A multimedia installation integrating empirical research knowledge and choreographic compositional practices. Empirical research forms the foundation upon which digital choreography is created and interpreted. The work is one staging post in the ongoing continuum of artistic research inquiry on methods of digital choreography.
Experiential Sculpting
Experiential Sculpting is the first artistic component of Hanna Pajala-Assefa’s doctoral research on choreographing emergent corporealities in interactive, mediated performance environments. The multimedia installation attempts to re-organise the critical findings of a study examining the audience experience of a movement-based virtual artwork. By reorganizing empirical research knowledge, this installation explores extended choreography, influencing artistic practices and inspiring a deeper understanding of embodied experience. The guiding question of the working process has been: How does the experience of the ’other’ inform digital choreography?
Artistis Team:
Conceptual design and research: Hanna Pajala-Assefa
Visual Design : Tomi Paijo
Sound Design: Jaakko Autio
The Artwork
The juxtaposed visualisations are set to convey the modes of thinking, perceiving and epistemic agency, which are at stake when the living body is in contact with interactive technology. The different modes; the analytics of causalities, and surrendering to the corporeal thinking-through-the-body, alternate individually in each perceiver.
The installation is a performatively layered, media art constellation. As visitors step into the immersive world of this multimedia installation, they are greeted by a fusion of visual and auditory elements. The independently arranged audio and visual components perform their gestures yet occupy the shared space. Audio and visual agents transmit sensory impulses performing both as singular and plural, actuating potential transfer in our focal attention from events of a single display to the relative interpretive betweenness of the elements. The circular spatial constellation of the performative figures are relational to the viewers’ bodily orientation. The audience is invited to self-organize, attend to bodily perception and let the potential interpretations unfold in conjunction with all elements. Hence, suggested to engage and encounter this digital exhibition corporeally and let the body shimmer through the layers of digital matter.
The Synergy of Empirical Research and Choreographic Composition
The movement data digitised in the artwork was collected during an audience study conducted in June 2022. There I examined the qualities and nature of experiencing a virtual, movement-based, open-ended VR artwork Skeleton Conductor XR Art, where the viewer is conducting the audio-visual virtual environment through their gestures and movements while immersed in a digital space. This agential frame of the SC artwork places the viewer in the position of performer, they are the perceiver and actuator in the spatiotemporal event of the artwork. Through a phenomenological approach, I aim to further understand what is at stake when the body is in contact with a lived and enacted digital environment and how that informs the extended choreographic practice.
Therefore, the Experiential Sculpting artwork, which remediates the knowledge gathered from the study, was constructed through a choreographic process. The somatic bodily processing and choreographic composition were methods to transpose, translate, and transmediate qualities of the viewers’ bodily experience into a new medium, a media art installation. The digitally processed moving images, designed collaboratively with visual artist Tomi Paijo are derived from the mocap data collected from the case study, and the situated interactive sound designed by Jaakko Autio, are all outcomes of a process of digital choreographic composition.