Hacking the Body 2.0 performance of Flutter/Stutter and Feel Me
Baker, Camille and Sicchio, Kate and Stewart, Rebecca and Mooney, Tara Baoth (2016) Hacking the Body 2.0 performance of Flutter/Stutter and Feel Me. [Digital art, Fashion, Performance, Textiles]
The ongoing collaborative project, with media artist/choreographer Kate Sicchio, Hacking the Body 2.0, evolving since 2011 with the first iteration Hacking the Body, is a series of choreographic works where the aim is to engage the public to experience novel ways to interact with performers, their bodies, as well as their own body data, enabled by the intimacy and sensation of embedded wearable technologies, creating unique and interactive performances.
The project has developed methods to use and hack commercial wearable devices, as well as making handmade e-textiles sensing devices for performance. As such, we aim to engage performers to access their own physiological data for personal use, but also to create unique and interactive performances.
Hacking the Body 2.0 has brought performers together in various iterations of the project to attempt to address the ethical issues around identity and data ownership when using wearable tech – in performance.
In February 2016, the project was taken to the stage, with performances in London and Sheffield. Flutter/Stutter and Feel Me were performed once at each location in front of an audience. We hacked into off-the-shelf devices to enable the dancers to interact directly with the embedded electronics in the garments on their bodies, to trigger the dancers to move in conversation with each other, with an added feature that allows the choreographer, or indeed the audience, to intervene directly with the dancers’ bodies and their movement responses. Two pieces were developed for the performances: 1) stutter/flutter – costumes with haptic garments and motor actuation ‘tickles’; 2) feel me – costumes with custom etextiles breath sensors and vibe actuation, custom vibe actuators and a custom iPad interface for choreographic and audience interventions or ‘live coding’.
Documentary by Queen Mary Digital Arts MA students April 2016: Rosella Galindo, Jinshan Liu, Siyu Yu, Shuxing Li.
The video documentary shows the HTB 2.0 new iteration of the project and performances pieces in development, led by artistic directors/ project leaders Camille Baker and Kate Sicchio. It shows the experimentation and user/ dancer testing of new prototype of custom wearable tech/e-textile costumes, developed by collaborators Tara Baoth Mooney for the costume design using sustainable materials and processes, and Becky Stewart designing and developing the hardware and software components for the wearable tech/e-textile garments.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4688-916X, Sicchio, Kate, Stewart, Rebecca and Mooney, Tara Baoth
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