Phantoms of the Paradise

Back in Budapest. 

After first week of exploration and revisiting exercises from our last meeting, we arrived at the point where many of the roads we took before came together to create a potential playground for the phantomic sensation to become present through movement, words and touch.  

Curious to experience the tangential point of phenomenological and physical body* we were experimenting with the space between attention directed to various places on the body and actual tactile stimulation. Through this practice we observed the life cycle of  sensation transformed to movement.

To keep the clarity of the work, we dealt in the beginning with the touch which remained simple and quite constant with its quality. That satisfied our curiosity for sensing and feeling, but awaked a desire for more stimulation – a touch that would deliver reacher motivation and prompts for action. As we noticed, a variety of touch qualities (as knocking, pressure, sliding on the surface, etc...) evokes not only somatic sensations but inevitably the non verbal, yet non conceptual somatic imagery. That realm of imagery opened up our field of inquiry.

What happens if we do not only constrain the response to embodying images in movement but allow any arising associations deriving from touch, to enter our consciousness and to be verbalized and spoken out loud? Taking this question into practice, we discovered that verbalized and embodied sensations and images can create multimodal realities including touch, movement and words. Though rather then collection of elements the multimodal realities become eclectic set with the inner logic of relations involving narrative events.

This practice enables us to access particular state which might unfolds many different phenomenological existences, disguised by a physical body. 

Following this direction we can play with a physical body as an interface which runs and displays different programs of phantomic being. 

* inspired by Hilti and Brugger (2009) definition of phantom sensation as "dissociations between physical and   phenomenal body shapes".