Cognitive Orgies¶
OuterBody¶
As Bodies cluster, we started the process by writing down the experiences that we want to build or explore. My personal project is about joy, and triggering bizzare behaviors in public spaces. For this cognitive orgies, I wanted to focus on the bizarre behaviors part of my project. I worked with Ayal and Francesco, to create a bizzare outer body experience.
The focus was on the experience and to create a genuine attempt to dissolve the boundary between perception and presence. We wanted participants to be able to see the reality from a total different perspective. The end goal was designing something that could make another person really question their own embodiment, even briefly.
What surprised me most was how much the choreography ended up mattering. I came in thinking the technology as in the live video, the latency fixes, the TouchDesigner would be the hard part. And it was hard :) But the moments that actually landed with participants weren’t the technical ones. They were the quiet, strange ones where the facilitator stroking a hand, the sudden cut to a rock, the confusion of not knowing whose body you were looking at. There were things that didn’t work as cleanly as we’d hoped. The rock moment got laughs, which was fine, but nobody felt it as their body. Probably identification needs more than visual substitution, and if I were to improve on the experience, this would be the part that I wanted to improve, or cut.
Looking back, I think OuterBody succeeded as a first iteration not because it was technically polished, but because it was really bizzare in the right ways. It made people feel something they hadn’t felt before, even if they couldn’t name it. For me, that’s the bar I want to keep building towards to create experiences that leave a mark.