TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

In 1983, Donna Harraway suggested that we are all already cyborgs.  Technologies are so intimately woven into our lives hat categories like “human” and “machine” are, at best, illusory, and often become tools of social and economic domination.  More recently, Marco Donnarumma (2017) and Allison Kaefer (2013) have argued that mainstream technocratic approaches to body technologies both “elide the pre-conscious aspects of technological incorporation” and play into ableist and transhumanist motifs that encourage conformity to technocratic notions of “progress.”

In this project, we intend to build on Donnarumma’s notion of “automaticity,” which he defines as the “subjective form of psychic attunement with particular technical instruments” (2017), by exploring how ritual and dance can reconfigure human|technology relations to allow for a more coherent engagement with each other and our shifting world. We are motivated by our research into the effect of long duration spaceflight on human performance, where partial and zero-g environments will cause astronauts to have an erroneous inner sense of their orientation. Our research shows that while sensory augmentation using technology (vibrotactile feedback) slightly enhances performance, participants feel perceptual conflict between their erroneous inner sense of orientation and the correct orientation indicated by the vibrotactile feedback. We propose ritualized bodily aesthetic practice as a way of bridging this gap.  Our goal is to first use ritual and dance to help people feel a sense of oneness with their cybernetic devices and second determine how to help a group of people feel a similar sense of oneness or community through devices and ritual over vast distances.

Building on Sara Ahmed’s discussion of spatial and personal orientation (2006), and on our previous research into gravitational cues and how sensory stimulation can be used to convey embodiment information (2017), we are currently developing a series of cyborg sensory augmentations to translate tilt information through vibration across vast distances (see tech details).  Placed at key points around the body, these vibrotractors can send and receive information about bodily orientation among multiple participants.  When a lead dancer tilts, that information is felt as vibrations on the bodies of the other dancers.  However, current participants struggle with “attunement.”  Thus, we are concurrently developing a set of ritualistic practices designed to explore new ways of developing hybrid relational corporealities.  We are also inspired by Jonathan Sterne’s work on medically assistive devices (2021) and  Aisen Caro Chacin work on sensory pathways and “assistive device art” presented at previous incarnations of the TTT (2023).  Our goal for this conference is to present both the theoretical underpinnings of this project and to provide a technological and art demonstration of the vibrotactors through ritualistic dance.