Deep Flow: a tentacular worlding of dance, biosensor technology, lived experience and embodied materials of the human and non-humankind

How to find relations between lived experience and biosensor technology in dance practice? To do this, current dance practices using biosensor and interactive technologies are studied. These practices visualise invisible bodily events such as heart rate, in external media environments, illustrating certain aspects of a dancer’s experience, to which they respond. This neglects the storehouse of felt experience that technologies, used instrumentally, cannot capture. The research challenges these strategies of looking outwardly to looking inwardly (Höök, 2018), to understand dance as experience (Fraleigh, 2018) more fully. It explores phenomenological methods of dance practice and biosensor technology to; explore the felt senses (Gendlin, 2003) through whole body experiences; investigate experiential interactions in differing environments; and explore human relations with technologies and materials that are both human and non-human.

A practice as research methodology is used to explore this strategy. It uses a relational theoretical approach, an interdisciplinary study of the human body in dance practice, phenomenology, technology and feminist posthumanism. Phenomenological methods are explored in methods of dance practice using biosensor technologies. Multimodal qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection are used to interpret the experiences of these practices. Methods of analysis generate an understanding of the relations between these experiences, the body and biometric data.

The methods and research methodology have given birth to the practice of Deep Flow, that reveals relations between states of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; 2004), movement meditation, fascia release and heart rate variability. This replaces practices with biosensor technologies that quantifies and visualises human experience. By looking inwardly, within an ecology of lived experience, biometric data, tangible and intangible materials, Deep Flow collapses notions of inside and outside. It proposes a return to subjective experience, to understand our relations with our bodies, the world and technology, through states of flow and well-being.