WEBVTT 00:00:10.179 --> 00:00:12.179 How do we perform digital technologies and how do digital technology 00:00:14.569 --> 00:00:17.157 perform us? 00:00:17.190 --> 00:00:21.146 Another way to ask this question is what are the physical and behavioral 00:00:21.179 --> 00:00:26.366 symptoms of digital technologies present within our everyday lives 00:00:26.399 --> 00:00:29.076 to think about this? I want to talk about one thing which is your phone. 00:00:29.109 --> 00:00:33.796 You've heard it all night, but ask yourself, can you count how many times 00:00:33.829 --> 00:00:38.156 you've checked your phone since you've entered this building? 00:00:38.189 --> 00:00:44.536 Right? Um During talks, do you feel the need to look at your phone even if 00:00:44.569 --> 00:00:51.156 you don't do it? Yup. And asking these two simple questions, how has your 00:00:51.189 --> 00:00:57.625 physical and affective state changed? Just by thinking about it? My name 00:00:57.658 --> 00:01:00.565 again is Jessica Reiko and I'm a professor in the school of film, dance 00:01:00.598 --> 00:01:04.447 and theater. My background is in dance and somatic practices. And given 00:01:04.480 --> 00:01:07.467 this, you may be wondering why I'm asking you about your phone. It's real 00:01:07.500 --> 00:01:12.117 , right? But the reason is, is because I am very interested in and 00:01:12.150 --> 00:01:16.885 concerned with how we physically engage in our everyday world. I'm also 00:01:16.918 --> 00:01:20.105 really interested in our conscious awareness of how we do that physically 00:01:20.138 --> 00:01:22.286 . 00:01:22.319 --> 00:01:26.546 I just so happen to take those practices and put them into thinking about 00:01:26.579 --> 00:01:29.995 the usage and making of technologies. 00:01:30.028 --> 00:01:34.135 Now this gives you kind of a picture of what I do. Um But in like true ted 00:01:34.168 --> 00:01:37.706 fashion, I gave myself a really cheesy title just for this talk. And so 00:01:37.739 --> 00:01:44.186 here it is, I am a compassionate kinesthetic, disruptor of digital and 00:01:44.219 --> 00:01:48.326 digital culture. 00:01:48.359 --> 00:01:52.105 So what does this mean? Let's break this down. Word for word. The word is 00:01:52.138 --> 00:01:56.016 compassionate. This means that I am conscious of other people's distress, 00:01:56.049 --> 00:01:59.165 feeling their struggles as if they were my own. In other words, I 00:01:59.198 --> 00:02:04.337 empathize with people. The other one is kinesthetic, meaning that I engage 00:02:04.370 --> 00:02:08.927 in physical act, cultivate physical and bodily consciousness, connecting 00:02:08.960 --> 00:02:14.047 my conscious awareness to my physical sense of self. The last one is 00:02:14.080 --> 00:02:18.596 disruptor. Hm I aim to interrupt or break apart infrastructures and 00:02:18.629 --> 00:02:23.005 processes as I see needing radical change. And it just so happened that 00:02:23.038 --> 00:02:25.725 one of those spaces that I really see needing radical change is our 00:02:25.758 --> 00:02:31.616 relationship with our consumer digital technologies. Why is this though? 00:02:31.649 --> 00:02:34.846 It's a really great question. 00:02:34.879 --> 00:02:42.196 And then to answer that I brought on three people to explain 00:02:42.229 --> 00:02:48.017 what is data. Um That's a really good question, right? Uh It's a question 00:02:48.050 --> 00:02:50.677 I feel like I should be able to answer. Uh I mean, I think about this 00:02:50.710 --> 00:02:54.495 stuff all the time. For example, in the short relationship I had with my 00:02:54.528 --> 00:02:58.005 fitness tracker, I found in an attempt to meet my daily goals that I 00:02:58.038 --> 00:03:02.717 became a sort of data prisoner. I would uh pace around the house late at 00:03:02.750 --> 00:03:09.156 night in a sad attempt to get to those 10,000 steps. And I only ever met 00:03:09.189 --> 00:03:14.495 that girl. Once I have a similar issues with my phone in general, I'll 00:03:14.528 --> 00:03:17.725 pick it up at the first hint of boredom throughout the day. According to 00:03:17.758 --> 00:03:22.517 this self tracking app I have on my phone called Moment, I check my phone 00:03:22.550 --> 00:03:29.717 70 times a day. That means on average, I'm spending about two hours and 43 00:03:29.750 --> 00:03:34.547 minutes just staring at my phone. Now, I know I don't need to check things 00:03:34.580 --> 00:03:39.036 like Facebook that often but still I do. And this moment app is supposed 00:03:39.069 --> 00:03:43.245 to help me take some conscious steps to limit my digital interactions. But 00:03:43.278 --> 00:03:48.856 mostly it makes me feel super self conscious. So what's the point? Now, I 00:03:48.889 --> 00:03:53.327 have another app to tell me things I already know and still my behavior 00:03:53.360 --> 00:03:59.275 hasn't changed. What is data doing to me? 00:03:59.308 --> 00:04:05.047 Everybody. This is Alisa Radcliffe, Juan Rodriguez and Lisa Garcia, three 00:04:05.080 --> 00:04:08.427 of the 14 artists I worked with on an evening length performance work 00:04:08.460 --> 00:04:15.316 titled Be My Qualified Self. And I right in this work, we explored the 00:04:15.349 --> 00:04:21.524 physical symptoms, technologies in our everyday life. We told stories 00:04:21.557 --> 00:04:24.865 through movement and words. Many of the stories coming from the dancers 00:04:24.898 --> 00:04:28.536 themselves, like the one you just heard from ELISA. And you may hear some 00:04:28.569 --> 00:04:33.015 , some things that are familiar to you in this and I don't know if 00:04:33.048 --> 00:04:36.286 everyone got one, but you may have gotten a piece of paper that had a 00:04:36.319 --> 00:04:40.846 phrase on it. Yeah, that had a big blank spot to put a word if you want to 00:04:40.879 --> 00:04:44.387 join us in this next part. I thought we could do it together. Optional, of 00:04:44.420 --> 00:04:47.387 course. But we're gonna do a demo version just so you get a sense of how 00:04:47.420 --> 00:04:51.555 we're gonna do this. Ok. So you have a, everybody has a different phrase 00:04:51.588 --> 00:04:55.296 and we have three of them in total spread throughout the audience. We're 00:04:55.329 --> 00:05:03.329 gonna demo. What to do with Netflix. Hm. Yes, I watch Netflix about one 00:05:03.420 --> 00:05:06.116 hour a day. 00:05:06.149 --> 00:05:09.627 So, as you heard us come together, you can do the same. The next one we're 00:05:09.660 --> 00:05:17.236 gonna do is good old Facebook. Yeah. On Facebook. I spend about 40 minutes 00:05:17.269 --> 00:05:22.575 a day. I see some in there. Yeah. Just so, you know, the average user, 00:05:22.608 --> 00:05:28.145 according to Facebook spends 50 minutes a day on the, on the site. Ok. The 00:05:28.178 --> 00:05:36.178 next one, look at a screen about six hours a day. 00:05:37.290 --> 00:05:42.205 All right. According to the 2016 Nielsen company audience report, the 00:05:42.238 --> 00:05:48.356 average adult US citizen spends about 10 hours and 39 minutes looking at a 00:05:48.389 --> 00:05:56.055 screen consuming media each day. Yes. And it's going up last one I said 00:05:56.088 --> 00:06:04.088 about five hours a day. Any Sitters in there. Yeah. The average US office 00:06:04.309 --> 00:06:12.309 worker spends about 10 hours a day sitting, just sitting, we see these 00:06:12.709 --> 00:06:18.026 numbers and maybe we're surprised or maybe we've heard them before, but 00:06:18.059 --> 00:06:20.656 have you ever been asked to write them down for yourself and look at your 00:06:20.689 --> 00:06:23.676 own numbers? Hold them in your hand so you can look at them and they can 00:06:23.709 --> 00:06:28.236 look back at you, right. 00:06:28.269 --> 00:06:31.836 What do we want from our digital technologies? 00:06:31.869 --> 00:06:34.356 What do we want from our quality of life with these types of technologies 00:06:34.389 --> 00:06:36.786 ? 00:06:36.819 --> 00:06:42.145 Many of us go through life, we sit stand, walk, eat, talk, hang out with 00:06:42.178 --> 00:06:46.416 people without actually being aware of our physical sensing body through 00:06:46.449 --> 00:06:51.416 these processes. In somatic practices, we call this somatic amnesia. What 00:06:51.449 --> 00:06:54.325 it means is we are so habituated in our own body that we can physically 00:06:54.358 --> 00:06:58.197 engage in our world without being consciously aware of how that feels in 00:06:58.230 --> 00:07:01.317 our own body. 00:07:01.350 --> 00:07:04.426 We are literally practicing our bodies out of our way of being in the 00:07:04.459 --> 00:07:08.976 world. 00:07:09.009 --> 00:07:11.455 We are literally practicing our bodies out of our way of being in the 00:07:11.488 --> 00:07:19.488 world 00:07:22.488 --> 00:07:27.805 to make this more palpable. I want you to go ahead and close your eyes, 00:07:27.838 --> 00:07:30.606 don't do anything but just close your eyes. And I'm just gonna say some 00:07:30.639 --> 00:07:35.687 things to take you through consciousness of your own body, 00:07:35.720 --> 00:07:41.836 connect first to your breathing with your eyes closed. 00:07:41.869 --> 00:07:45.406 Where do you feel it? Is it up to the neck? Is it in the ribs or down at 00:07:45.439 --> 00:07:51.976 the belly? How deep is it? Do you have to increase your breath just to 00:07:52.009 --> 00:07:56.187 feel it inside yourself. 00:07:56.220 --> 00:08:01.995 This involuntary action we have to do every day 00:08:02.028 --> 00:08:05.395 bringing your awareness to the outside surface of your body. I want you to 00:08:05.428 --> 00:08:08.596 pay attention to how you're sitting in your seat. Take note of where you 00:08:08.629 --> 00:08:12.546 feel pressure, where it feels more or less, maybe where muscle is, is a 00:08:12.579 --> 00:08:15.947 little less. Maybe where bones are like those six bones we sit on is a 00:08:15.980 --> 00:08:18.986 little bit more. 00:08:19.019 --> 00:08:23.455 You might even know if you're tilting side to side one side to another. 00:08:23.488 --> 00:08:27.257 Just by the pressure you feel in the back of your legs, maybe one leg 00:08:27.290 --> 00:08:30.745 isn't even touching because your legs are crossed, 00:08:30.778 --> 00:08:35.605 going back internally into the body, feel where you're holding muscular 00:08:35.638 --> 00:08:40.515 tension, don't change it, but just ask yourself recognizing your own 00:08:40.548 --> 00:08:43.605 bodily intelligence. If you did some simple things, how could this 00:08:43.638 --> 00:08:46.297 position feel better? 00:08:46.330 --> 00:08:52.755 What could you do this act of sitting? 00:08:52.788 --> 00:09:00.788 Go ahead and open your eyes. 00:10:32.190 --> 00:10:36.015 So this is a solo that Lacy Garcia and I co created as part of me, my 00:10:36.048 --> 00:10:40.616 quantified self. And I, and in the practice of making this work, we were 00:10:40.649 --> 00:10:46.456 thinking about if we listen to our bodies, what would it say to us when 00:10:46.489 --> 00:10:49.836 we're working with technologies, we wrap our bodies in these strange 00:10:49.869 --> 00:10:54.717 positions in order to stare at a screen or our phones oftentimes twisting 00:10:54.750 --> 00:10:58.366 ourselves in these strange places. Not really even recognizing that our 00:10:58.399 --> 00:11:02.366 body is seeking out into the world, feeling and sensing which it is always 00:11:02.399 --> 00:11:06.336 doing until we maybe stand up and move again, maybe with like a good 00:11:06.369 --> 00:11:11.657 stretch or a sigh or even throwing our brow, maybe even with a little hint 00:11:11.690 --> 00:11:16.436 of frustration by the fact that our body just can't quite conform to the 00:11:16.469 --> 00:11:20.395 ongoing practice of sitting still. 00:11:20.428 --> 00:11:23.826 Like I said, we are literally practicing our bodies out of our way of 00:11:23.859 --> 00:11:27.797 being in the world. Or to go back to one of my earlier questions, we could 00:11:27.830 --> 00:11:31.505 say yes, that digital technologies are performing us. And in this 00:11:31.538 --> 00:11:36.096 performance, our bodies are really no longer really needed. 00:11:36.129 --> 00:11:40.826 I want to show you an image. This image comes from Dan o'sullivan and Tom 00:11:40.859 --> 00:11:45.265 Io's book on physical computing. And it was made to imagine how computers 00:11:45.298 --> 00:11:50.145 would see us based on the way we use them, right? One eye, two years in a 00:11:50.178 --> 00:11:56.596 digit. That is what we are to most of our consumer devices. 00:11:56.629 --> 00:12:00.066 So if this is how computers see us and they don't see us as human beings 00:12:00.099 --> 00:12:04.976 who can skip, walk, run or dance, they see us as an assemblage of three 00:12:05.009 --> 00:12:10.366 body parts. So what are we doing to change this? But one of the things 00:12:10.399 --> 00:12:14.775 that I'm doing is considering this idea of play, right? When we hear the 00:12:14.808 --> 00:12:17.797 word play, we think of Children because they're so stinking good at it, 00:12:17.830 --> 00:12:22.895 right? Really good. They are masters of like moving through their world 00:12:22.928 --> 00:12:25.996 and, and being aware of what they're doing, right? They are very aware of 00:12:26.029 --> 00:12:29.385 how their bodies are moving in space and how they're learning from them. 00:12:29.418 --> 00:12:33.956 It just so happens that as we turn into adults, these sort of repertoire 00:12:33.989 --> 00:12:38.025 that is acceptable has shrunk and it means that learning is oftentimes 00:12:38.058 --> 00:12:42.907 denoted passive body and an active mind. 00:12:42.940 --> 00:12:47.326 Not if you're a dancer though. I hate to tell you, we have all the fun as 00:12:47.359 --> 00:12:52.086 dancers. We are just, this is our lifeblood movement. We are constantly in 00:12:52.119 --> 00:12:55.726 the ongoing sophisticated practice of learning through our own physical 00:12:55.759 --> 00:13:00.135 experience. A lot of times we call this movement improvisation. But for 00:13:00.168 --> 00:13:03.946 the sake of today, let's call it critical play, not frivolous play. That's 00:13:03.979 --> 00:13:08.866 just sort of open ended without any sort of intention, but free and open 00:13:08.899 --> 00:13:14.467 play that is guided by the idea that we can learn something from that. 00:13:14.500 --> 00:13:18.846 This is what we do. And it's something that as I went into grad school and 00:13:18.879 --> 00:13:22.206 started to get into human computer interaction design spaces I realized 00:13:22.239 --> 00:13:26.025 could be really, really useful in such spaces. And this was really 00:13:26.058 --> 00:13:29.307 reaffirmed for me when I read Phoebe Singer's um chapter on the 00:13:29.340 --> 00:13:34.746 engineering of experience. And in this chapter, she talks about Frederick 00:13:34.779 --> 00:13:39.096 Taylor's work during the industrial revolution, right? Making movement 00:13:39.129 --> 00:13:43.885 efficient and engineering our physical experience to cut out all the 00:13:43.918 --> 00:13:47.586 excess stuff, cut it out so that we can do the work that we need to do in 00:13:47.619 --> 00:13:51.346 factories. But the interesting thing is if you look at our contemporary 00:13:51.379 --> 00:13:54.826 environment, it hasn't changed much. Even though we're no longer working 00:13:54.859 --> 00:13:59.366 in factories, we are still using efficiency with our devices and our 00:13:59.399 --> 00:14:04.135 engineered experience and our engineered world as a major metric that we 00:14:04.168 --> 00:14:09.057 use to define what is good, what she argues and I would, I would agree 00:14:09.090 --> 00:14:11.936 with is that maybe we should forego efficiency for a little while and 00:14:11.969 --> 00:14:18.096 think about things like fun play, movement, physicality. So how I'm doing 00:14:18.129 --> 00:14:23.417 this is I've started to look at things like this is my lab. This is a very 00:14:23.450 --> 00:14:28.015 large arts festival, family friendly. And what you're seeing in here are 00:14:28.048 --> 00:14:32.486 interactive sculptures that we've made, they resonate or vibrate in real 00:14:32.519 --> 00:14:36.677 time with people's personal data output, meaning that when people lay roll 00:14:36.710 --> 00:14:40.717 , hang out on these sculptures and they play on their phones, they can 00:14:40.750 --> 00:14:44.576 actually feel their mobile phone device output in real time, we call it 00:14:44.609 --> 00:14:47.547 data shed. 00:14:47.580 --> 00:14:51.826 So what does it mean to think of this as our lab? Not just our academic 00:14:51.859 --> 00:14:57.596 setting, this is our iterative process, this is our colleagues doing 00:14:57.629 --> 00:15:02.167 things like this and this 00:15:02.200 --> 00:15:04.476 and this 00:15:04.509 --> 00:15:07.025 and this. 00:15:07.058 --> 00:15:11.417 So asking other people to participate in fun things is not really that we 00:15:11.450 --> 00:15:17.395 do it as designers a lot. But what if we ask designers to dance to play? 00:15:17.428 --> 00:15:21.375 Yeah, as part of their process as a requirement, as part of their process. 00:15:21.408 --> 00:15:24.875 So one thing I did is I made a rapid prototype wearable technology band 00:15:24.908 --> 00:15:28.645 where you could snap in a bunch of different sensors and feedback modules. 00:15:28.678 --> 00:15:32.106 Meaning that when I teach designers, I asked them to move first and to 00:15:32.139 --> 00:15:35.157 play first before they ever sit down and start to design those 00:15:35.190 --> 00:15:40.755 technologies. So they have to start through action through play. 00:15:40.788 --> 00:15:45.566 Here's some other examples and here's with people who never dance where 00:15:45.599 --> 00:15:50.395 they started thinking about the body different places than we typically do 00:15:50.428 --> 00:15:54.746 , 00:15:54.779 --> 00:15:57.686 right? 00:15:57.719 --> 00:16:01.196 So this is some of the work that I do. Just two quick examples of my work 00:16:01.229 --> 00:16:04.446 as a compassionate kinesthetic disruptor. I'm compassionate about the 00:16:04.479 --> 00:16:08.385 difficulty of working with bodies. It's not easy as a designer, but I'm 00:16:08.418 --> 00:16:10.936 also compassionate about the idea that we might want more from our 00:16:10.969 --> 00:16:13.037 technologies 00:16:13.070 --> 00:16:18.106 than what we get right now. I'm kinesthetic. I come at things physically 00:16:18.139 --> 00:16:22.037 first, tactically first, I'm a tangible human being. I like tangible 00:16:22.070 --> 00:16:26.765 things and I'm a disruptor because I think we need radical change in these 00:16:26.798 --> 00:16:31.576 spaces because if we want our interactions with technology to look like 00:16:31.609 --> 00:16:35.177 something more than this 00:16:35.210 --> 00:16:38.696 and we want our bodies in relationship to tech technology to look like 00:16:38.729 --> 00:16:41.476 more than this, 00:16:41.509 --> 00:16:46.076 then we need designers who are willing to do this 00:16:46.109 --> 00:16:49.326 and we need to make sure dancers are at the table when we're designing our 00:16:49.359 --> 00:16:51.606 technology 00:16:51.639 --> 00:16:54.505 so that we can have experiences with technology that look a little bit 00:16:54.538 --> 00:16:58.570 more like this. Thank you.