- · Brugger, P. Phantom limb, phantom body phantom self in: Blom, J., Sommer I. (eds.), Hallucinations: Research and Practice, Springer 2012, pp 203-218
- · Dieguez, S., Blanke, O. Altered states of bodily consciousness in: CardeƱa, E.; Winkelmann, M. (eds.), Altering Consciousness: Multidisciplinary perspectives Vol. 2, Praeger 2011 , pp 237-262
- · Feldenkrais M. Awareness through movement, Harpercollins 1990
- · Giumarra M. et al. Corporeal awareness and the prorioceptive sense of the phantom, British Journal of Psychology 2010, p. 791-818
- · Hurtley L. Wisdom of the body moving. North Atlantic Books, 1995
- · Inui, N., Masumoto J. Effects of visual information on perceived posture of an experimental phantom foot, “Experimental Brain Research” 2013 May; 226(4), pp 487-494
- · Massumi B. Parables for the Virtual Movement Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press 2002
- · Noe A. Varieties of presence Harvard University Press 2012
- · RamachandranV., Blakeslee S. Phantoms in the brain Harper Perennial, 1998
- · Srivastava A. et al. Stroke with Supernaturary phantom Limb: case study, review of literature and pathogenesis Acta Neuropsychiatrica 2008 (20) Journal compilation Blackwell Munksgaard, pp. 256-264
- · Sacks O. Hallucinations Picador, 2012
- · Sacks, O. A leg to stand on Touchstone, 1998
- · Stevenson R., Wallace M. Multisensory temporal integration: task and stimulus dependencies. “Experimental Brain Research” 2013 Jun; 227(2), pp 249-61
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Phantoms beyond the brain
Movement research on phantom sensations within Visegrad Artist Residency Program Performing Arts
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Some readings that came along
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Workshop and open moment in SIN 21.08.2013.
workshop hours 3-6 pm
open
moment: 7pm
In “Phantom Sensation” project we work at the intersection of dance and neuroscience, dwell and examine in practical and theoretical terms the phenomenon of phantom sensations. What we try to understand is if and how the phantomic experience of reality can inform the movement improvisational practices, and whether it can create a distinctive frame for thinking about some aspects of performance. It is a transdiciplinary venture.
To the workshop we invite everyone who would like to experience and play with what we call “phantomic sensation”. Through exercises involving touch, words, work with partner and eyes closed we will investigate different modes of sensorial, attentional and physical engagement in body awareness processes. From this point we will explore our moving-selfs.
In the open
moment we will share and discuss our
research - concept of phantomic sensation and address the specificity of work
emerging from the dialog between experience and neuroscientific knowledge.
Reporting resonance of touch in the body to the other who ilustrates it on the paper
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
If I were a mountain
Floating thoughts, and many questions.
What body appears, what body interests us ?
There is a desire to enter a state of potentiality. A state or even a temporary cosmos where the differentiation between moving body and self melts. State in which a new organization may offer not yet quite familiar functionality. As if dance would derive from testing and learning new ways of functioning.
Body that may transgress a common, daily formation.
Body that dwells a certain “thing”, something that describes a body. So the body may become “something”, where the “something” might be an action as well, or a memory or a creature. And that something is being processed while moving.
Body that listen also through touch.
What happens when the stimulation comes ? How do I allow a stimulation to be translated? So we often touch each other. The touch we work with is also that which I have learned from Rosalind Crisp. For the stimulation we are borrowing, and using her tools. There is a vast of information that might be transferred through touch. Stimulating touch – one that contains variety of qualities and potentiality of movement may trigger an imaginary world for the receiver. Allowing appears to be an issue. It is up to the receiver what she ( as we are three females working in the project) will do with the stimulation, how she takes it into movement, or will be taken by it.
Sometimes we work with as least informative touch as possible, kind of a pancake or a tart. It is not very exciting, but we value, it gives warmth, and with time the information melts to the body, does not give much stimuli, but it is up to the receiver what she might do with that place under the pancake.
Within the phantomic sensation research we are also searching and finding something underneath, that may underlay performative presence, and movement – something else to the will, something that leaves a trace, and triggers difference in a body schema, evoking mental images as well...
And that difference in the body schema may become visible for a viewer, when the body image changes.
Body that is reformulating itself while moving. Body that can surrender to the image from within – a proprioceptive image, by inhabiting for instance different qualities of touch that it receives. Body that discovers its functionality a new.
Where are the borders of the body, and how they change in this practice ? Reference to phantoms certainly point that aspect. How do we feel, and experience as real that what emancipates itself in loss?
There is also a certain pleasure in a state where the body comes in a contact with an environment (understanding that term after Lisa Nelson). When coming in contact with an environment a relation happens. Relation within – with self, with a trace of the stimuli, with an image that may arise, with the desire which might be fulfilled in movement, with the space we share, with time. (We did not work with focus on relation to space and time directly, as for some of us it was already supportive issue) We worked mostly with translating various touch-stimuli, observing images that may arise, letting them go either in movement or in saying stories – that might be touch-stimuli-image reports, or memories, or streams of associations, or others.
Coming in the contact with environment gives a possibility to experience something pleasent, something profound– forgetting oneself, a potential of union...
The selfs we work with
Engaging
into the topic of phantom sensations which is in neuroscience often
debated in terms of neural body representations (body image, body
schema), the question we needed to consider right at the beginning
was „what body we work with?”- how the body is defined as a
material to shape with experiences.
We
chose our working body to be available and accessible for stimuli and
any kind of responses, alert to its constant transformation,
reorganisation, a fluently changing sensual form, which is uncertain
or even does not know its own shape or constitution. Informed by
reports of sensations in phantom limbs, in which the body schema
built from sensory and proprioceptive information creates another
body structure than the representational body image, the body we work
with could only be the one adaptive to sensory input, which
re-constitues itself due to sensory re-mapping.
Along
the researching process, we found suspected support in somatic
approaches, neuroscience and experiential reports. For instance, in
Body-Mind Centering
"the
'mind' of each cell, body tissue, and fluid, expressed in feeling
states, posture, and movement patterns, is by nature open to the
constant flow of momentary change”.*
Interestingly,
it is the 'mind' of cells which has the property to allow constant
transformation. Here the concept of the body meets one of the fresh
definitions of the mind in neuroscience, the view of mind as a
„process that regulates the flow of energy and information”**.
This
definition entails that mind is subject to ceaseless recreating its
content, continuously formulating its matter. Moreover, it has a
sense of intentionality – being a process heading somewhere, even
if the goal realises rather in sequences (streams) of temporary
states, than any arrival point.
As
dance artist Gill Clarke states, „mind in a sense IS motion”***.
The
integrity of the body and mind concepts invites to employ rather one
consistent entity than analyze two separate processes. Following Gill
Clarke, this entity may be the self which encompass integrated body
and mind, defined with the described qualities. In this case not the
body and the mind, but the self is undergoing or designing its own
constant transformation of the matter.
While
the term "self" allows us avoid the dualism, it brings up
another broad territory of psychological and philosophical discourse.
However, it may function well when working with multimodal events,
where sensations, stimulations, images, cultural associations,
memories, bodily states, movement, gesture are all mixed together and
inseparably bound with each other.
*
Hartley, L. (1995). "Wisdom of the body moving". North
Atlantic Books
**
Siegel, D. "Mindful brain. Reflection and attunement in the
cultivation of well-being"
***
Clarke, G. "Mind is as in motion".
www.independentdance.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/MindIsAsInMotion.pdf
Saturday, August 10, 2013
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".
Friday, August 2, 2013
Phantomic experience [01 definition]
I think of
phantomic experience as the delicate aspect of memory, that is connected with traces or echo of sensations and movement,
and how they coexist with the present moment.
Sensations of touch
and weight.
The touch of the other but also the
touch of attention.
Weight as it shifts and swings within
own body, or is normally distributed through some constellations of it, but also weight that one gives towards
certain things (value).
Movement as a term mostly understood as a physical action experienced by the
performer (and/or reflected by the spectator via mirror neurons), but also movement of the thinking process and the question which
is not pursued by the answer (even though question awaits the answer, the
answer does not appease the question, it can only stop the movement of it), is a self stirred movement of going to
the bottom, uprooting, coming to the surface, opening, hiding again, turning,
steeling away[1]
I call it
phantomic experiences because though in many ways the nature of these traces is
ungraspable, the studies in phantom sensations show how very much the
subjective experience of a phantom sensation can be objectified or shared with
the other via the image of brain activity. Though in medicine phantom studies
are mostly occupied with developing ways of treatment, thanks to which patient who
undergo amputation or stroke would develop the “better match” between the
feeling and the body, some scientist propose that the demystification of the
current-day concepts of “the self” will be amongst the foremost future
prospects of phantomology.” (Balnke, Matzinger 2009, Brugger 2012)
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