Media and Communication

Affexity is a play on both 'affect city' and 'a-fixity' using location and image based videos, tagged to city environments via  Aurasma, an Augmented Reality application for use on smart phones and other mobile devices. AffeXity is an interdisciplinary augmented choreographic project, that explores affect, screendance, choreography and live performance with AR. 

Since its inception in 2011 it has had several outcomes: AffeXity in Malmö: the pilot project that used screendance shot in urban spaces were tagged onto QR codes (2012), DansAR 01 & 02 in collaboration with Skånes Danseteater and Lund's Gymnasium (March 2013) where screendance video were tagged inside Skånes Theatre, a children's park and a skate park and most recently AffeXity: Passages & Tunnels (Oct/Nov 2013) where screendance and archival footage were tagged onto Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copehagen and explored affect, memory and somatic materiality in urban spaces.

This paper is about: the developmental stages and outcomes of the AffeXity project, the interdependence of the collaborators, the relational field of aesthetics and the techne that brings viewer and screendance closer, the complicit, playful and dynamic formation of technical and human interventions, the encounters of the carnal, the haptic and the digital, the dialogic and temporal scaffoldings and  encounters of techne: the hands that capture affect in city spaces.

The research covers areas such as affect, memory, the implicit body in augmented choreographies, emotional and kinesthetic amplification using the "omnivorous" camera, digital and somatic materiality, immersive, interactive and mixed realities as well as networked augmented performance and choreographies.

Jeannette Ginslov, Medea’s Artist in Residence Spring 2012, gave a Medea Talk: AffeXity - Capturing Affect with a handful of techne 14 May 2012 Medea Talk #19 16:00-18:00 http://youtu.be/KAYsl98e2cI

Keywords: Affect, Temporal, Relational, Interhuman, Carnal, Dialogic, Scaffolding, Techne

Living Archives affiliate Daniel Spikol presented a paper at Ideas in Mobile Learning 2014, an event that brought together practitioners, industry players, and researchers to exchange visions of how to use mobile technology to change the way we teach and learn. http://livingarchives.mah.se/2014/03/paper-presented-at-ideas-in-mobile-learning/ and

The paper Using Augmented Reality, Artistic Research, and Mobile Phones to Explore Practice-based Learning is co-authored by Daniel Spikol, Camilla Ryd, Jacek Smolicki, Susan Kozel, and Jeanette Ginslov. In short, the paper argues that the design of practice-based learning activities can benefit from integrating artistic research, both in the development of these activities and when carrying them out. Spikol’s presentation is embedded below (or here on YouTube). The slides are available here.

Main Author: Susan Kozel
Co-author: Jeannette Ginslov
Abstract: This discussion of affect and performance is based on early research for an artistic project called AffeXity exploring the use of augmented reality to embed affective choreographies in urban spaces. Affect is understood in terms of intensities and contingency, while performance is defined as a triangulation of bodily movement, emergence and shimmering. After a brief reflection on how technical development and artistic processes impact each other, the middle section of this article contains ‘an inventory of shimmers’ which are words from the processes of dance improvisation, video capture and editing. A methodological perspective is proposed. It is called affective sensibility. - See more at: http://twentyone.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-150-affexity-performing-affect-with-augmented-reality/#sthash.4ZHvrJbz.dpuf

The rapid evolution of technology and social media has brought significant changes to human communication. Since the efficiency of social networks depends mainly on the processing of their huge amount of collected data, they are all in search not only of the latest artificial intelligence but also of the creation of more evolved one. Advertising, digital marketing and customer service of social media is in the first line for this demand, yet the rapid progress in the AI field constantly change the ways of communication and the ramifications of this change are more than modern society can absorb and reflect on. This paper focuses on the latest innovations of AI in the social networks and the impact of AI on society and personhood.

This paper analyses the interactions between Australian mainstream media and social media political influencers and how these interactions amplify ideological misinformation. Social media, particularly YouTube, is increasingly a primary source of news and information for people, principally in the younger 18-35-year demographic. Yet while social media has opened up horizontal networks of mass self-communication that allow anyone with an internet to communicate on a mass scale, it has also precipitated a significant rise in the dissemination of reactionary right and extremist messages.

Introduction Mobile devices like smartphones, tablet computers, and wearable devices have been widely adapted and new technologies are constantly consumed. Pachler and colleagues (2010) clearly positioned that mobile learning is a rapidly emerging field of education research and practice and that developing theoretical and conceptual frameworks to explain the complex interrelationships between learning, everyday life and new technologies is a complex endeavour. Cook (2010) argues that one of the aims of design research is to identify and model technology-mediated, social learning and behaviours in order to design tools that support and promote the practices under investigation. While Adams and colleagues (2013) illustrate that these types of research activities for mobile technologies as boundary crossing that negotiate between different communities and context as a means to support and investigate technology-enhanced learning. This paper the use artistic research practices as means...

S: P(AR)ticipate: body of experience/body of work/body as archive and AffeXity are two AR (Augmented Reality) and Screendance works that attempt to capture, amplify and share affect and memory using AR, mobile phones and audience participation. P(AR)ticipate is an immersive, autobiographical, participatory and live installation work comprising: text, analogue hieroglyphs and gestural Screendance videos, tagged to the hieroglyphs, using the AR app Aurasma, within an interaction design. The work explores the porosity between analogue and augmented gestures, personal somatic memories and mediated experiences, of living in an apartheid and democratic South Africa. AffeXity on the other hand, is an interdisciplinary choreographic project examining affect, dance on screen and cities. AffeXity, a play on both 'affect city' and 'a-fixity'. It is a collaborative project drawing together dance, visual imagery, AR and mobile phones, that audiences use for the viewing of choreog...

In this research article, I argue that Deep Flow is an embodied materiality that may be experienced by exploring performative phenomenologies, entwining two different sets of research practice: phenomenological methodologies and artistic practice. In Deep Flow the practitioner entangles phenomenological methodologies, methods and research practices performatively such as embodied dance practice, the felt senses, drawings, verbal feedback and their analyses in relation to biometric data, from an embodied heart rate monitor. By looking inwardly, the practitioner experiences embodied phenomena and reveals these experiences in artistic practices in relation to the worlding in which they find themselves. These outcomes are considered as being differing materialities, flowing and converging through relational and phenomenological practice, Deep Flow and through this they become embodied by the practitioner, where new forms of embodied materialities emerge. I argue that in my practice, thi...

In this article I propose that augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) have the potential to expand the notion of a Screendance archive. This takes the form of a hybrid installation, where visitors are invited to download an AR app onto their mobile phones, or tablets, to access a Screendance archive tagged to images in an installation space. This type of archive, is conceived as a piece of artistic work for hybrid installations, and is intrinsically related to collaborative artistic, philosophical and technological research. It has the ability to highlight temporal shifts between past and present and demonstrates how archived somatic states may ripple outwardly across technologies, bodies, and space, to audiences who embody these states within the wider somatic feld. For these MR interactions to work, methods in relation to flming, editing, and archiving are re-examined. Documentation and archiving methods are reviewed through a phenomenological lens and once distributed with...

TITLE "tentacular worlding" an assemblage of dance, technology and lived experience through embodied relational biofeedback and materials of the human and non-humankind. I am a practice as research final third year PhD Creative Technologies Candidate at London South Bank University with Full Scholarship from the Applied Science and Arts & Media Departments. Currently I'm collaborating with Dr Daniel Spikol from Malmö University, to develop a biotechnological prototype or a multi-modal analytics system to reveal my Heart Rate Variability in real-time whilst I'm performing Deep Flow-a somatic dance practice that I am also currently developing. For this Artistic Research Lab, I aim to reveal the PaR journey I undertook over four Pilot Studies that actively helped me construct a tentacular worlding, using an intertwinement of movement, the pre-reflective, ideokinesis and an embodiment of technology. As I am both the subject and object of this investigation the research is self-reflexive and autoethnographic. Structure of my presentation 1) Introduction: a bit about me and how I got here 2) Rationale 3) Conceptual Framework 4) Methodology-Practice as Research & Case Studies

In this article I propose that augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) have the potential to expand the notion of a Screendance archive. This takes the form of a hybrid installation, where visitors are invited to download an AR app onto their mobile phones, or tablets, to access a Screendance archive tagged to images in an installation space. This type of archive, is conceived as a piece of artistic work for hybrid installations, and is intrinsically related to collaborative artistic, philosophical and technological research. It has the ability to highlight temporal shifts between past and present and demonstrates how archived somatic states may ripple outwardly across technologies, bodies, and space, to audiences who embody these states within the wider somatic feld. For these MR interactions to work, methods in relation to flming, editing, and archiving are reexamined. Documentation and archiving methods are reviewed through a phenomenological lens and once distributed within the AR/MR archive installation, a postphenomenological perspective reveals how new relations with technology, materials and media are discovered. Furthermore, the use of AI is perceived as enhancing the rippling out of afective somatic states that becomes an embodied materiality 1 (orig. emphasis), a relational feminist posthumanist perspective, that, permanently changes ways of seeing and experiencing dance on screens and the notion of a Screendance archive.

TITLE "tentacular worlding" an assemblage of dance, technology and lived experience through embodied relational biofeedback and materials of the human and non-humankind. I am a practice as research final third year PhD Creative Technologies Candidate at London South Bank University with Full Scholarship from the Applied Science and Arts & Media Departments. Currently I'm collaborating with Dr Daniel Spikol from Malmö University, to develop a biotechnological prototype or a multi-modal analytics system to reveal my Heart Rate Variability in real-time whilst I'm performing Deep Flow-a somatic dance practice that I am also currently developing. For this Artistic Research Lab, I aim to reveal the PaR journey I undertook over four Pilot Studies that actively helped me construct a tentacular worlding, using an intertwinement of movement, the pre-reflective, ideokinesis and an embodiment of technology. As I am both the subject and object of this investigation the research is self-reflexive and autoethnographic. Structure of my presentation 1) Introduction: a bit about me and how I got here 2) Rationale 3) Conceptual Framework 4) Methodology-Practice as Research & Case Studies

P(AR)ticipate: body of experience/body of work/body as archive and AffeXity are two AR (Augmented Reality) and Screendance works that attempt to capture, amplify and share affect and memory using AR, mobile phones and audience participation. P(AR)ticipate is an immersive, autobiographical, participatory and live installation work comprising: text, analogue hieroglyphs and gestural Screendance videos, tagged to the hieroglyphs, using the AR app Aurasma, within an interaction design. The work explores the porosity between analogue and augmented gestures, personal somatic memories and mediated experiences, of living in an apartheid and democratic South Africa. AffeXity on the other hand, is an interdisciplinary choreographic project examining affect, dance on screen and cities. AffeXity, a play on both 'affect city' and 'a-fixity'. It is a collaborative project drawing together dance, visual imagery, AR and mobile phones, that audiences use for the viewing of choreographies embedded on tags in the city of Copenhagen Denmark. The project now forms part of the Living Archives Research Project at Malmö University. This paper describes the process and methodologies of capturing affective choreographies and memory on video, on analogue hieroglyphs and the processes of sharing them within interaction AR designs. It also describes the collaborative processes involved in both projects that attempt to allow audiences with mobile devices, to extrapolate hidden layers of affect and memory using networked mobile technology. These projects may shape choreographic formations that have not yet been explored and "is a specialised and evolving form-where the choreographic language is interrogated not for form or content sake, but in response to the changing stimuli and physical liberties of the technology itself." (KRIEFMAN, 2014). This consequentially liberates the choreographic content and language from more traditional vocabularies, narratives and settings, to poetic ones. Above all, the paper investigates the archiving of affect within a relational and dialogical field, of "unfolding the self into the world, whist enfolding the world within" (BRAIDOTTI, 2013). It explores how we anchor our bodies to the world (GREGG and SEIGWORTH 2010 cited in KOZEL, 2012) and how these "messy encounters become platforms for the transmission of affect (and memory) across bodies that themselves exist across layers of mediatization" (KOZEL, 2013).

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, California went into a 13-month stay-at-home isolation protocol. The extended isolation and its effects on people in general, and men in particular, is unprecedented and provides sociologists with a unique opportunity to study the long-term effects of isolation in men. As COVID-19 continues to affect and disrupt the way we live across the world, it is exacerbating issues concerning male mental health. This extended period of socioeconomic stress does not look like it will be resolved any time soon. Considering the consequences these conditions are having on men and those around them, it is now imperative that sociological studies discover the means to put in practice programs that will address male mental health. By utilizing qualitative research in the form of six case studies, this paper explores the various effects and consequences that extended social isolation had on male mental health and social support networks in the California Bay Area. This study endeavors to explore how men's mental health and their social support networks were affected. Furthermore, what support or lack thereof men found from their social support networks, the effects of loss of social support networks on male mental health, and coping strategies men turned to during those 13 months. This study uses ethnomethodology to explore the experiences of six men and via their stories looks for themes that arise from them. The findings of this paper aim to provide insight into a unique social occurrence and empower further sociological research into male mental health during the Male Mental Health During COVID-19 Isolation COVID-19 pandemic by providing a guide for exploring issues and nexuses for future quantitative and qualitative research.