Senses Places is a dance-technology collaborative project creating a playful mixed reality performance environment for audience participation. Generating whole body multimodal interfacings keen to a somatic cross-cultural approach, the project stresses an integration of simultaneous local and remote connections, where participants and environments meet towards a kinesthetic/synesthetic engagement.

Application form (participation limited to 15 people)

Senses Places wishes to contribute to enlarge the range and interconnectedness of sensory-perceptions within the already complex practice of group improvisation, proposing a constructive and transformative means of inter-subjective and collective socialization, reversing the dead end substitution, gender and movement cultural stereotypification, and instrumentalization of bodies by avatars in social networks, such as Second Life©.

The experimental, cross-disciplinary and culturally-critical improvisational dance practice pursued through the somatic-technological vision underpinning Senses Places allows us to not only stay grounded in our physical bodies, but to actually grow deeper roots and encompass more conscious integrated states while increasingly expanding virtually through embodied interfacing modes. Through this intertwined practice, we are learning new ways of working with the emerging connectivity developed through shared physicality-virtuality between the local and remote partners. Understanding the value and implications of neurological processes, this practice is anchored in conscious principles and techniques of embodiment derived from different somatic practices and forms, strongly orienting our work.

We identified rooting, openness, witnessing, and perceiving as/in action as the main principles orienting this experimental soma-tech practice, addressing them in the workshop. In this workshop, we introduce participants to a somatic embodiment and improvisation, progressively facilitating the experience of different and combined modes of interacting, including the embodied interfaces step-by-step.

The emphasis for the connections with our avatar and video simulations (through video streaming) and environment is somatic, tuned to the networked kinaesthetic empathy, source for the creation/research/play of a more deep and diverse human experience. Senses Places happens between becoming physical-virtual corporealities and private-public environments gathered at Odyssey Simulator (Second Life).

You can get to and participate in the Workshop Rooting to Virtualize: Senses Places @ Festival Vivarium 2019:

WITH AN AVATAR
1. Create account/Choose an avatar in Second Life MUVE:
https://secondlife.com/
2. Download Second Life and copy the location link into your browser to log in: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Odyssey/31/147/681

Or open SL and login with your avatar name and password

Workshop participants are welcome to bring their computers with Second Life installed and with an avatar to interact with the webcam interface.