Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article elaborates a reflection on the challenges faced in the scope of the performance spectacles that dialogue with science and technology within the scenic space. Such elements may be present in the scenographic composition, be applied in clothing and, in many spectacles, may appear as essential narrative element of the work. This subject is directly related to the third chapter of our doctoral thesis entitled The application of real-time visual effects in the construction of narrative of projecting in spectacles (2017) and carried out with the support of FAPESP scholarship under process nº 2014/0296-0, which was based mainly on Steve Dixon’s Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (2007), which tells the story of artists who have been involved in this subject since the early 20th century. In addition, we collected information on the work of Cesar Ustarroz (2011), interviews with brazilian and spanish artists, and also on our personal experiences derived from field research.

The dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Maya Deren can be seen as one of the pioneers of screendance. Her experimental films have challenged conventional plot- driven mainstream cinema by emphasizing an ambiguous experience, open for multiple interpretations. For Deren film viewing is a socially determined ritual embodying intersubjectively shared experiences of participants. This makes her films particularly interesting for today’s neurocinematic studies. Deren’s ideas also anticipate the recent enactive mind approach, according to which the body-brain system is in an inseparable manner situated and coupled with the world through interaction. It assumes that both private, such as perception and cognition, and intersubjective aspects of human enactment, such as culture, sciences, or the arts, are based on the embodiment of life experience. Reflecting this discourse, Deren’s film At Land is analyzed as an expression of a human body-brain system situated and enactive within the world, with references to neuroscience, neurocinematic studies, and screendance.

This paper draws on a dynamic bridge between the visual arts, neurosciences and design, in the development of an artistic project (Emerging Self) in the intertwines of the biotechnological/artistic/skin artefact. The artistic research explores the idea and matter of the body (human, animal, digital) presenting, testing, articulating and imagining relationships between biological needs and cultural behaviour, society challenges and the emerging of a sense of self, interaction and memory. The body is considered an archive, surface and interface, as drawing and state of becoming. The skin is taken as interface between emotional and physiological states, between surface of sociocultural demarcation and self-expression, between a map of lived experiences and a mask. The tattoo is introduced briefly in its relation with permanence, identity and in its proximity to the biotechnological interfaces. I argue that when the emotions and memories are directly connected with body changes and visible to the other, the perception of the collapse of distances may push to a self-reflexivity and changes in the collective behaviour.

The article discusses a relationship between the concepts of affordance and enaction in interactive media, from a phenomenological view. Situation of a communicational intentionality deposited in the elements of interactive art and a perceptual intentionality of consciousness, done action, in relation to the same aesthetic objects. This meeting arises from the experience of the self in the world, without the process of construction of meanings.

The history of technology is also the one in which culture allowed the externalization of human potentialities through instruments and machines. The emergence of computers seems to give continuity to that process of the expansion into the environment, or extra somatization of our brains and cognitive abilities. It is interesting in this study to consider that automated systems, based on the use of Artificial Intelligence, especially those used in interactive art works, can be understood as extra somatization of a special aspect of the cognitive processes: the unconscious automatism. Computational languages live at the heart of this process, understood here as part of a phenomenon of cultural complexity. The aim is to reflect on the creative role played by intelligent automatic processes, performed by interactive systems, understood as the technological possibility of realizing, in machines, complex unconscious actions, a kind of machinic gesturality, from a a machinic unconscious.

This article presents an extended reading proposal on the photographic device, being the photographic camera an important element in the construction of a thought in photography. By looking at the camera as a body not reducible only to its technical possibilities, we see that its resources guide displacements in space, being fundamental in building a certain point of view in relation to a subject. From these initial considerations, several examples are presented in the context of photography as an artistic language, with the aim to offer a reading about the presence of the camera in the photographic production, in the theoretical studies and the consequent influence and dialogue with the image itself.

In this issue of DATJournal - Design Art and Technology, we travel between the processes, attributes, and intensities of the body/object/space relationship, both in the theoretical contributions and in the artistic propositions that participate in the gallery of images that we include in the third part of this issue. We intend to make evident the hybrid condition of languages that extend the boundaries of the corporeal organism to technology, design, performance, cinema, fashion, and art.

This article aims to discuss issues common to experimental cinema and poetry: self - awareness of language, attention to the materiality of signs and means and interest in the hybridization of languages are the main points in common of these two fields of experimental creation. But above all experimental poetry and cinema are marked by the tension between the physical-corporeal limits of human perception and the desire for an art that presentify the virtual. This article proposes to think the question based on the concepts of intersemiosis and holosignia.

This article reflects on the action of making art as an activity that is, and should always be an instrument of opening the doors of perception, of showing new poetic and aesthetic assemblies, of unveiling sensibilities, of fighting against stereotypes, of expanding sensory aspects and of intensifying the cognition of the lived moment. In this way, by emerging at the level of consciousness, these aspects can cause transformations. Such transformations will be effective if they are based on the techniques that propitiate the action of making things. In this context it is important to reflect on the outcome of this production thinking of how to present it to the public, in space and time. In the article computer art, architecture, drawing, and sculpture are considered as different aspects of the poetic reality enmeshed in them, aiming to make visible the potential latent in the body, in the materials, in numbers and their relationships, in interfaces interweaving body and machines, among many related aspects.

In the context of technological art, there is an approximation between poiesis and praxis, which then don’t oppose, it may occur to things that are (re) fabricated by work in the process of creation, product and result of an intentional act inscribed in the field poiesis and praxis, in an attitude of dialogism. The text discusses these issues and describes work in progress carried out in collaboration between the teams that make up the Media Lab / BR network.