Paula Gardner, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada;
Steve Surlin, OCAD University
Hart Sturgeon, OCAD University

Denver 2015: Visual and Sensory Approaches

Body Editing is a biofeedback performance installation wherein participants can move in a 20×20 space, with audio and visual feedback responding to their movement and biodata.  Data captured by movement, gesture and from biometric devices (eg accelerometer, ECG or EEG), is processed and returned as biofeedback. The agile software system allows operators to program music or sound and video responses (paintings or cumulative drawings resembling fractals) to participants’ real time movement and biodata.  The installation queries how digital subjects might engage in apperceptive or unthought (in Deleuze’s terms) movement with our own data.  It seeks to unfold moments of intra-activity, in Karan Barad’s terms, where participants are entangled in communication with the interface. The project creates a space where the embodied apperceptive might manifest in between rule structures and felt aesthetic response; here, the mover responds to the interfaces’ rule structure, as it feeds back an aesthetic that is felt sensationally, and experienced as realtime musical, ambient, sonic, and visual creation.