How do we perform digital technologies and how do digital technology
perform us?
Another way to ask this question is what are the physical and behavioral
symptoms of digital technologies present within our everyday lives
to think about this? I want to talk about one thing which is your phone.
You've heard it all night, but ask yourself, can you count how many times
you've checked your phone since you've entered this building?
Right? Um During talks, do you feel the need to look at your phone even if
you don't do it? Yup. And asking these two simple questions, how has your
physical and affective state changed? Just by thinking about it? My name
again is Jessica Reiko and I'm a professor in the school of film, dance
and theater. My background is in dance and somatic practices. And given
this, you may be wondering why I'm asking you about your phone. It's real
, right? But the reason is, is because I am very interested in and
concerned with how we physically engage in our everyday world. I'm also
really interested in our conscious awareness of how we do that physically
.
I just so happen to take those practices and put them into thinking about
the usage and making of technologies.
Now this gives you kind of a picture of what I do. Um But in like true ted
fashion, I gave myself a really cheesy title just for this talk. And so
here it is, I am a compassionate kinesthetic, disruptor of digital and
digital culture.
So what does this mean? Let's break this down. Word for word. The word is
compassionate. This means that I am conscious of other people's distress,
feeling their struggles as if they were my own. In other words, I
empathize with people. The other one is kinesthetic, meaning that I engage
in physical act, cultivate physical and bodily consciousness, connecting
my conscious awareness to my physical sense of self. The last one is
disruptor. Hm I aim to interrupt or break apart infrastructures and
processes as I see needing radical change. And it just so happened that
one of those spaces that I really see needing radical change is our
relationship with our consumer digital technologies. Why is this though?
It's a really great question.
And then to answer that I brought on three people to explain
what is data. Um That's a really good question, right? Uh It's a question
I feel like I should be able to answer. Uh I mean, I think about this
stuff all the time. For example, in the short relationship I had with my
fitness tracker, I found in an attempt to meet my daily goals that I
became a sort of data prisoner. I would uh pace around the house late at
night in a sad attempt to get to those 10,000 steps. And I only ever met
that girl. Once I have a similar issues with my phone in general, I'll
pick it up at the first hint of boredom throughout the day. According to
this self tracking app I have on my phone called Moment, I check my phone
70 times a day. That means on average, I'm spending about two hours and 43
minutes just staring at my phone. Now, I know I don't need to check things
like Facebook that often but still I do. And this moment app is supposed
to help me take some conscious steps to limit my digital interactions. But
mostly it makes me feel super self conscious. So what's the point? Now, I
have another app to tell me things I already know and still my behavior
hasn't changed. What is data doing to me?
Everybody. This is Alisa Radcliffe, Juan Rodriguez and Lisa Garcia, three
of the 14 artists I worked with on an evening length performance work
titled Be My Qualified Self. And I right in this work, we explored the
physical symptoms, technologies in our everyday life. We told stories
through movement and words. Many of the stories coming from the dancers
themselves, like the one you just heard from ELISA. And you may hear some
, some things that are familiar to you in this and I don't know if
everyone got one, but you may have gotten a piece of paper that had a
phrase on it. Yeah, that had a big blank spot to put a word if you want to
join us in this next part. I thought we could do it together. Optional, of
course. But we're gonna do a demo version just so you get a sense of how
we're gonna do this. Ok. So you have a, everybody has a different phrase
and we have three of them in total spread throughout the audience. We're
gonna demo. What to do with Netflix. Hm. Yes, I watch Netflix about one
hour a day.
So, as you heard us come together, you can do the same. The next one we're
gonna do is good old Facebook. Yeah. On Facebook. I spend about 40 minutes
a day. I see some in there. Yeah. Just so, you know, the average user,
according to Facebook spends 50 minutes a day on the, on the site. Ok. The
next one, look at a screen about six hours a day.
All right. According to the 2016 Nielsen company audience report, the
average adult US citizen spends about 10 hours and 39 minutes looking at a
screen consuming media each day. Yes. And it's going up last one I said
about five hours a day. Any Sitters in there. Yeah. The average US office
worker spends about 10 hours a day sitting, just sitting, we see these
numbers and maybe we're surprised or maybe we've heard them before, but
have you ever been asked to write them down for yourself and look at your
own numbers? Hold them in your hand so you can look at them and they can
look back at you, right.
What do we want from our digital technologies?
What do we want from our quality of life with these types of technologies
?
Many of us go through life, we sit stand, walk, eat, talk, hang out with
people without actually being aware of our physical sensing body through
these processes. In somatic practices, we call this somatic amnesia. What
it means is we are so habituated in our own body that we can physically
engage in our world without being consciously aware of how that feels in
our own body.
We are literally practicing our bodies out of our way of being in the
world.
We are literally practicing our bodies out of our way of being in the
world
to make this more palpable. I want you to go ahead and close your eyes,
don't do anything but just close your eyes. And I'm just gonna say some
things to take you through consciousness of your own body,
connect first to your breathing with your eyes closed.
Where do you feel it? Is it up to the neck? Is it in the ribs or down at
the belly? How deep is it? Do you have to increase your breath just to
feel it inside yourself.
This involuntary action we have to do every day
bringing your awareness to the outside surface of your body. I want you to
pay attention to how you're sitting in your seat. Take note of where you
feel pressure, where it feels more or less, maybe where muscle is, is a
little less. Maybe where bones are like those six bones we sit on is a
little bit more.
You might even know if you're tilting side to side one side to another.
Just by the pressure you feel in the back of your legs, maybe one leg
isn't even touching because your legs are crossed,
going back internally into the body, feel where you're holding muscular
tension, don't change it, but just ask yourself recognizing your own
bodily intelligence. If you did some simple things, how could this
position feel better?
What could you do this act of sitting?
Go ahead and open your eyes.
So this is a solo that Lacy Garcia and I co created as part of me, my
quantified self. And I, and in the practice of making this work, we were
thinking about if we listen to our bodies, what would it say to us when
we're working with technologies, we wrap our bodies in these strange
positions in order to stare at a screen or our phones oftentimes twisting
ourselves in these strange places. Not really even recognizing that our
body is seeking out into the world, feeling and sensing which it is always
doing until we maybe stand up and move again, maybe with like a good
stretch or a sigh or even throwing our brow, maybe even with a little hint
of frustration by the fact that our body just can't quite conform to the
ongoing practice of sitting still.
Like I said, we are literally practicing our bodies out of our way of
being in the world. Or to go back to one of my earlier questions, we could
say yes, that digital technologies are performing us. And in this
performance, our bodies are really no longer really needed.
I want to show you an image. This image comes from Dan o'sullivan and Tom
Io's book on physical computing. And it was made to imagine how computers
would see us based on the way we use them, right? One eye, two years in a
digit. That is what we are to most of our consumer devices.
So if this is how computers see us and they don't see us as human beings
who can skip, walk, run or dance, they see us as an assemblage of three
body parts. So what are we doing to change this? But one of the things
that I'm doing is considering this idea of play, right? When we hear the
word play, we think of Children because they're so stinking good at it,
right? Really good. They are masters of like moving through their world
and, and being aware of what they're doing, right? They are very aware of
how their bodies are moving in space and how they're learning from them.
It just so happens that as we turn into adults, these sort of repertoire
that is acceptable has shrunk and it means that learning is oftentimes
denoted passive body and an active mind.
Not if you're a dancer though. I hate to tell you, we have all the fun as
dancers. We are just, this is our lifeblood movement. We are constantly in
the ongoing sophisticated practice of learning through our own physical
experience. A lot of times we call this movement improvisation. But for
the sake of today, let's call it critical play, not frivolous play. That's
just sort of open ended without any sort of intention, but free and open
play that is guided by the idea that we can learn something from that.
This is what we do. And it's something that as I went into grad school and
started to get into human computer interaction design spaces I realized
could be really, really useful in such spaces. And this was really
reaffirmed for me when I read Phoebe Singer's um chapter on the
engineering of experience. And in this chapter, she talks about Frederick
Taylor's work during the industrial revolution, right? Making movement
efficient and engineering our physical experience to cut out all the
excess stuff, cut it out so that we can do the work that we need to do in
factories. But the interesting thing is if you look at our contemporary
environment, it hasn't changed much. Even though we're no longer working
in factories, we are still using efficiency with our devices and our
engineered experience and our engineered world as a major metric that we
use to define what is good, what she argues and I would, I would agree
with is that maybe we should forego efficiency for a little while and
think about things like fun play, movement, physicality. So how I'm doing
this is I've started to look at things like this is my lab. This is a very
large arts festival, family friendly. And what you're seeing in here are
interactive sculptures that we've made, they resonate or vibrate in real
time with people's personal data output, meaning that when people lay roll
, hang out on these sculptures and they play on their phones, they can
actually feel their mobile phone device output in real time, we call it
data shed.
So what does it mean to think of this as our lab? Not just our academic
setting, this is our iterative process, this is our colleagues doing
things like this and this
and this
and this.
So asking other people to participate in fun things is not really that we
do it as designers a lot. But what if we ask designers to dance to play?
Yeah, as part of their process as a requirement, as part of their process.
So one thing I did is I made a rapid prototype wearable technology band
where you could snap in a bunch of different sensors and feedback modules.
Meaning that when I teach designers, I asked them to move first and to
play first before they ever sit down and start to design those
technologies. So they have to start through action through play.
Here's some other examples and here's with people who never dance where
they started thinking about the body different places than we typically do
,
right?
So this is some of the work that I do. Just two quick examples of my work
as a compassionate kinesthetic disruptor. I'm compassionate about the
difficulty of working with bodies. It's not easy as a designer, but I'm
also compassionate about the idea that we might want more from our
technologies
than what we get right now. I'm kinesthetic. I come at things physically
first, tactically first, I'm a tangible human being. I like tangible
things and I'm a disruptor because I think we need radical change in these
spaces because if we want our interactions with technology to look like
something more than this
and we want our bodies in relationship to tech technology to look like
more than this,
then we need designers who are willing to do this
and we need to make sure dancers are at the table when we're designing our
technology
so that we can have experiences with technology that look a little bit
more like this. Thank you.