“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 final year practice as research or PaR or practice as research PhD candidate at London South Bank University and currently developing a prototype, in collaboration with Daniel Spikol from Malmö University, to investigate tentacular worlding. My theoretical framework is inspired mainly by the writing of phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, post phenomenologist Don Ihde, new feminist materialists Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway and new post humanist Clare Colebrook. This supports my conceptual framework of a tentacular worlding through which I explore unseen yet felt lively materials which could contribute to creativity, health and well-being or a deeper understanding of dance and meditation techniques. Inspired by Robin Nelson (2013), Alvesson and Skoldberg (2009) and Tim Ingold (2011), I have used self-reflexive and hermeneutic methodologies to collapse anthropocentric ways of seeing the dancing body, with ways of feeling whilst embodying biosensor technologies.

As “knowledge cannot be separated from the knower” (Alvesson and Skoldberg 2009), my methods require that I situate myself within this worlding as both performer and researcher, using an embodiment of biosensor technologies. Being self-reflexive, these tools reflect back at me my lived experience of Deep Flow, a fascia release and meditation dance technique that I have developed over the last three years. I have also developed a process of extrusions allowing for variational flows within a system, replacing the idea of using technologies as extensions of lived experience as they do more than mediate or capture the moving body. They extrude my embodied relations between human and non-human materials within a relational system that both feels and reveals. Above all it collapses binary relations of selfhood as I am both the subject and object of this investigation, using my own heart rate variability in relation to my lived experience of Deep Flow using a phenomenology and embodiment of technology.

For this Artistic Research Lab, I aim to reveal the journey I undertook over four Pilot Studies using my own personal, tacit and phenomenological experiences that actively constructed my worlding, through movement, pre-reflective perception and a phenomenology of technology.