Let's interface the music and dance
- Submitting institution
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The University of Reading
: A - Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory : A - Art
- Output identifier
- 85651
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Creative body of enquiry
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research asks if the Graphic User Interface (GUI) has become the normative framework through which we mediate our corporeal experience, and if so, what is at stake? The performative language of the GUI is examined in relation to that of performance scores, prominent in mid-20th century interdisciplinary practice. In comparing the symbolic systems of the interface with (similarly amorphic and non-linear) performance scoring systems that function to set processes in motion, the research arrives at new performance strategies.
This work privileges the body as a sophisticated tool through which all other technologies are mediated. It argues that the interface instructs us to act, and that we rapidly adopt its conceptual demands. It claims that our relationship to language and space changes with the ubiquitous GUI. It ascribes the term post-digital to this increasingly tacit relationship between people and tools. The research calls for further critique of the GUI in driving technology to become simultaneously more powerful and invisible.
Performance methods examine digital functions such as ‘Search’, ‘Scroll’, ‘Rotate’, and to reconnect such concepts with a physical consequence. New scoring systems instruct navigation of space conditioned by observations of how we ‘move’ around digital platforms. The work engages participants and audiences in the ‘stuff’ of the GUI, to reconsider these utilitarian environments, and create critical spectacle within systems that are silently influential. The project posits alternative experiences for a post-digital body.
Interdisciplinary exchange brings critical rigour to the project.
Ellison’s expertise in Performance, Sound Art and Graphic Design is complemented by collaborators from Dance, Music, Typography, Computing, and Psychology. As well as stimulating new discourse in the Arts, the work is of significance to the field of Interaction Design in its placement of the body and human experience at the centre of an innovative critique of the GUI.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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