Installation and Performance – sounding reflections of unseen body movements.
Creation: Jules Françoise, Yves Candau, Sarah Fdili Alaoui
There is no stillness in human movement. Even in apparent immobility, the body is constantly moving, falling, catching up, and subtly adapting to the environment. While a still body might be seen as immobile, there are a myriad of inner bodily sensations that remain unseen to the eye. And unlike some movement qualities, shapes or spatial forms that are apparent and communicated, qualities of breath and weight shifts are micro-movements in stillness that are hidden but that connect us to the force of gravity and to the ongoing flow and natural rhythms in time.
still, moving is an interactive installation that creates a sonic experience that heightens self-awareness of our micro-movements in stillness. The artwork reflects and extends the inner bodily experience, by exposing the unseen through sound. It invites the audience to deeply connect to the inner self. Sound creates an intimate envelope that nurtures self-reflection and the experience of inward sensations. The design of the relationship between movement and sound is evolving along the experience. First, the sound feedback will act as a reflective artifact of participants’ inner body, strengthening their awareness of their sensorial self and proprioceptive sensations. The piece will then evolve and invite the audience to explore more challenging weight distributions, postures and thus muscular patterns.
In still, moving, the audience is equipped with two Myo Armbands that capture their movements as well as their muscular activity. Biosensing technologies allow to capture movement that might remain hidden from the human eye at the physiological level. The physiological signals such as muscle tension and subtle accelerations are analyzed and mapped to a sound environment in order to increase perception of the inner self. The design of the relationship between movement and sound is evolving along the interaction, shifting the soundscape from reflective to challenging, guiding the audience in an exploration of novel and gradual relationship to weight and understanding of the complexity of the silent body.
Exhibited and Performed at:
Score + Traces at One Art Space, NYC
Evening Performances at MOCO’17
Guide to experience:
The sensors respond to gentle movements of
walking, swaying and standing.
You could try walking, delicately or decisively.
Listen to your feet articulating on and off the ground.
Listen to your movements flowing into sound.
Or envision your body as a myriad of shifting atoms.
How do you shift weight from one foot to another?
Listen to the pressure changing in the soles of your feet. Listen to your weight flowing down like water.
Listen to the sounds responding as you sway.
You could come back to stillness.
Be curious of your silence. It is endless and rich.
Listen to yourself still, moving.
Publication:
Jules Françoise, Yves Candau, Sarah Fdili Alaoui, Thecla Schiphorst, ” Designing for Kinesthetic Awareness: Revealing User Experiences through Second-Person Inquiry”, In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Denver, 2017.
Yves Candau, Jules Françoise, Sarah Fdili Alaoui and Thecla Schiphorst “Cultivating kinaesthetic awareness through interaction: Multiple perspectives from somatic practices and embodied cognition”, In Proceedings of the International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO), London, 2017.