Intimate transactions (stage 1)

Description

Intimate Transactions was a research project developed in three distinct stages and outcomes with this stage completed in 2003. It sought to cross-fertlise knowledges of performance and media arts in order to expand and enrich a range of highly embodied interactive experiences for audiences. Stage 1 resulted in single-site interactive installation that allowed one person to interact within a complex, generative, audiovisual environment using only their bodies - using a radical new form of tangible interface melded with a hybrid furniture form called the ‘Bodyshelf (Ver 1)’. This tactile and camera based interface required participants to perform variations upon a series of simple formal gestures in order to navigate within a landscape of ghostly bodies, dynamic texts and emergent sound. The work included a substantial package of custom software and a large array of visual and nonlinear audio materials. It was presented to numerous groups of participants who subsequently engaged in recorded conversations that informed the next major stage of this work.-----
Intimate Transactions (Stage 1) was underpinned by theories of ecological subjectivitiy and it aimed to promote an investigation of self that was intimately relational, embodied and embedded. Participants could experiment with different modalities of these subjectivities in order to understand their effects upon everything within the environment, in relationship to embodied sensation. In this way the work hinted at the possibility of a personal re-imagining within interrelated worlds as the fostering of better understandings of cultural and ecological co-dependencies.