Lian Loke

LUSCIOUS APPARATUS

Luscious Apparatus is interdisciplinary research into body-focused interactions, audience experience, wearable sensing technologies and Bodyweather performance methodology. The research questions are concerned with understanding and crafting audience experience of body-focused interactions in an interactive or live art context. In this particular project, the Bodyweather performance methodology is the prime method for understanding the body in its performative and experiential modes. We have been investigating the use of wearable sensors, such as the Arduino family of motion/tilt sensors and breath and pulse sensors for reading biodata.

At the second residency, we constructed a prototype live art installation, Speechless, around the concept of a series of experiential ’stations’, each one offering a different body experience, coloured by the use of material objects, masks/costumes, vocal instructions and digitally generated sound. The soundscape was responsive to the biodata measured from breath and pulse sensors. We “tested” the work with selected participants, in order to gain insight into the audience experience and gauge the viability of the current form of the prototype environment.

The Lung Station was further developed into a piece for the SEAM11 Symposium, called The Breath Temple. Critical Path Choreographic Research Centre, 17/18th September, 2011.

Watch a short video of the project at http://vimeo.com/35048592.

Artistic team: Lian Loke, Director, Tess de Quincey, Bodyweather practitioner/choreographer (http://www.bodyweather.net/), Dr George Khut, new media artist and researcher, Justin Shoulder, artist and costume-maker and Baki Kocaballi, research assistant.

Funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, Inter-Arts Office, 2010-2011. Supported by the UTS research centre for Human-Centred Technology Design, with residencies at Critical Path Choreographic Research Centre and Medium, Rare Gallery+Studio.

THE BAT-HUMAN PROJECT

The Bat-Human project is an interdisciplinary arts initiative that examines relationships between humans and animal species co-existing in urban environments – in this case, Sydney’s famous bats, the Grey-Headed Flying Fox. A team of new media artists, scientists, academics and urban planners gathered in Sydney (November 2010), to share their knowledge and alternative view points in speculating on possible futures for human-bat co-existence and urban biodiversity. These speculations were documented in various media and exhibited at the UTS Gallery (November 2010), as part of the Art of Participatory Design programme (co-curated with the UTS Gallery curators and Dr Lizzie Muller).

The Bat-Human project is part of the Remnant Emergency Artlab (http://remnantartlab.com) led by artist and researcher, Dr Keith Armstrong (QUT). It is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, Inter-Arts ArtLab award, 2010 – 2011. My role in the project is facilitator and collaborator for the Sydney Lab. We collaborated with visiting artist Natalie Jeremijenko, xClinic Environmental Health Clinic and Lab, NYU (http://www.environmentalhealthclinic.net/), exploring the application of her xClinic methodology to a local environmental issue.

Public event Friday, 29th April 2011, Cook and Phillip Park, Sydney CBD.

This event aimed to showcase the outcomes of the Sydney Lab and raise public awareness of the wider issues of urban biodiversity and co-existence of humans and other creatures in contested environments. See media interviews.

THINKING THROUGH THE BODY

Thinking Through The Body is an interdisciplinary research project exploring new approaches to ‘the body’ in contemporary art practice – with a special focus on the phenomenology of body-focused interactive experiences in art and somatic bodywork. http://thinkingthroughthebody.net

Funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, Inter-Arts ArtLab award, led by Dr George Khut and Dr Lizzie Muller, 2008 – 2009, with Jonathan Duckworth, Somaya Langley, Lian Loke, Garth Paine, Maggie Slattery, Catherine Truman. Residencies at Performance Space, Bundanon Trust and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

• Sensorium Gymnasium open studio, Performance Space, August 2009
• Wii Leaf exhibition, DAB Lab Research Gallery, March 2010
• Group presentation at SEAM2010, Seymour Centre http://seam2010.blogspot.com/
• Video by Mike Leggett http://youtu.be/zoX4sIUUpJQ
• The Body as Lived, Interview and article by Mike Leggett, http://www.realtimearts.net/article/93/9586

Surging Verticality: An Experience of Balance

Interactive work blending Feldenkrais guided Awareness Through Movement with Nintendo Wii balance board, digitally generated sound and suspended cloth apparatus attached to feet. It aims to sensitise and draw attention to the subtle shifts in weight and the body’s relationship to gravity. This work was collaboratively created as part of a series of creative experiments in the third residency at Performance Space.

Watch a video of the work in action at http://vimeo.com/13880038

Using the Body for Generative Design

How the body is conceived, constructed, represented and presented. A way of re-imagining the body and its morphology, with the potential to augment with wearable technologies. This method was explored at the second residency at Bundanon.

DESIGN METHODOLOGY OF MOVING AND MAKING STRANGE

The generative outcome of my doctoral research is the Design Methodology of Moving and Making Strange – an approach to the design and evaluation of movement-based interactive technologies, that privileges embodied, lived experience. The methodology offers designers a set of perspectives, principles, methods and tools, that provide resources for exploring, generating and testing design concepts and prototypes, grounded in sensory movement experiences.
The principle of making strange is fundamental to the methodology. Making strange is a tactic for disrupting habitual perceptions and ways of thinking. Or in this case, moving, sensing and feeling in order to open up new spaces for design.
The general principles of the design methodology motivate a design approach that can easily be extended into other kinds of technologies and design contexts, not just movement-based interactive technologies. The design methodology has great potential for providing a general framework for conducting technology design and research, where the multiple perspectives of the first-person experiential, the observer and the machine are equally valued.

Dancers as Partners in Technology Design
Can designers learn useful concepts and techniques from dancers for designing interactive technologies?

Through observation and participatory design approaches, understandings of how dancers work with the body inspired a range of methods and tools for generating, exploring and evaluating movement for use as input to interactive technologies. These form part of my design methodology of Moving and Making Strange. The motivation for designers is the capacity to work in a more informed way with movement as input into interaction by giving them tools and techniques for generating, evaluating and performing movement-related concepts through embodied skills and sensibilities.

A second strand of investigation is how to represent the moving body in ways that are useful for designers of interactive motion-sensing technologies. The representations were crafted with the twofold objective of a) highlighting the aspects of movement for interactive treatment and b) acting as return points to the enactment of movement.

Study of Falling

Falling is conceptualised as making strange with our everyday actions. The action of falling is a common occurrence in our movement patterns as children. As we grow older it recedes from the movement repertoire of most adults, only to return in a more vulnerable form in our old age. In this study we viewed dancers as the ethnographic exotic in order to defamiliarise everyday movements.
The act of falling was analysed from two perspectives: First-person subjective experience and external observation of movements for input into motion-sensing technologies.

BYSTANDER: Immersive Interface for Curatorial Collections

Interaction design researcher on research project exploring immersive ‘feedback’ environments for exhibiting and dramatically interacting with semiotic, aesthetic and emotional patterns in archived imagery. My contribution to the project was the production and use of design tools, including movement-oriented personas and scenarios, scripts for scenario enactment in user testing, the application of Labanotation for spatial movement schemas, and a tool for mapping interaction in terms of the resources available to both human and machine for interpretation of the action (based on Suchman’s analytic framework). These tools enabled a strong user focus throughout the development in an otherwise traditional multimedia production process.

ARC Linkage Grant project LP0349327, 2003 – 2007 http://www.lifeafterwartime.com
Chief Investigators: Professor Ross Gibson, A/Prof Toni Robertson
Project participants: Dr Tim Mansfield (DSTC), Kate Richards (project manager)

Doctoral Thesis
Loke, Lian (2009). Moving and Making Strange: A Design Methodology for Movement-based Interactive Technologies, University of Technology, Sydney.

• Full thesis pdf
• Abstract pdf
• Table of contents pdf
• Chapter 1: Introduction pdf
• Chapter 2: Interaction Design pdf
• Chapter 3: The Moving Body pdf
• Chapter 4: Research Methodology pdf
• Chapter 5: Project I. Eyetoy pdf
• Chapter 6: Project II. Bystander pdf
• Chapter 7: Project III. Falling into Dance pdf
• Chapter 8: Reflection on Tools pdf
• Chapter 9: A Design Methodology of Moving and Making Strange pdf
• Chapter 10: Conclusions and Future Work pdf