“Affect & Media(ted) Experiences: E.motional Perturbations” presented by Neumark and Miranda
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Critical Interaction Design Sessions: The Aesthetics of Interaction and Behavior
Presentation Title:
- Affect & Media(ted) Experiences: E.motional Perturbations
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
As digital culture and media develop and re/shape experience, they also colour e.motions. The aim of this paper is to explore e.motions in media(ted) experiences of digital culture. Emotion, or e.motion, can be understood as the movement of embodied affect– within and between bodies– as feelings that are in bodies and that move bodies. We jump with joy, we recoil with fear and when sadness weighs down our hearts, our limbs turn to lead. E.motions also move between bodies and machines and relay through networks, perturbing everyday life. We will engage with these perturbations through two or three case studies of electronic and new media artwork, including our own work in the pataphysical new media art project, The Perpetual E.motions Project.
In this project, we have set up a fictive institute –the Institute for the Study of Perpetual E.motion. The Perpetual E.motions Project involves both a networked performance and an internet art work, which take as their starting point an understanding of e.motions as physical as well as cultural. We are also interested in the way recent neurobiological attention to emotion is reminiscent of an earlier concern with measurement of motion; in particular the work of Etienne-Jules Marey. Many of the e.motional machines in the internet work are Marey machines that re-map the e.motions which were left out of Marey’s original motion studies. The Perpetual E.motions Project also involves a networked performance, Sea.nce, which focuses on emotions in networked relay. Seances and ouija boards, which historically were popular ‘parlour games’, can also be understood as ‘networked’ events (networking across the ether between the living and the dead). In the discussion of The Perpetual E.motions Project we will focus on the ways that networking and media(tion) perturb and are perturbed by the relays of e.motion.
