Playing with gravity, exploring physics using bodies, finding the limits of attention and expanding them. Contact Improvisation may be a dance of improvising and partnering based on the physics of touch, balance, weight, momentum, flow and resistance. It tunes our senses to be ready to respond in an ever-shifting dialogue of movement. Sometimes quiet and Continue reading…
Co-authored with Natasha Myers. 2011 “Haptic Creativity and the Mid-Embodiments of Experimental Life,” in Companion to the Anthropology of Bodies/Embodiment. In this chapter, we present our collaboration working as anthropologists of experimental forms of life. We examine fieldsites where practitioners develop and use computerized visualization technologies. In the process we aim to collaborate with scientists and Continue reading…
Expressing the Caves: Art & Science in 3D Immersive Dialogue, co-designed by Dumit, sculptor Robin Hill and geologist Dawn Sumner, was originally planned as a daylong session for 18 artists and computer scientists to brainstorm new ideas, but thanks to the exigencies of scheduling, it morphed into an ongoing series of visits by individuals or Continue reading…
Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies
ANT 210-001, Tue 3-6p, Young 224 Prof. Joseph Dumit, dumit@ucdavis.edu Class is designed around learning to answer and re-answer the following questions: What can a body do? Where does a body end? How does a body feel? Does a body have a machine? How can a body be extended? How does a body end? Continue reading…
[Excerpts:] Parsing the neuronal sensorium is already to dismantle through analysis that which we imagine to be a comprehensive totality. If our sensorium is the sensing package that constitutes our participation in the world, then it follows that this assemblage of sensory inputs defines our boundaries, making the world present to us and by subtraction making Continue reading…