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…
How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (2012 Duke University Press) Kindle version is now out! Hear my radio interview about Drugs for Life on BBC 4 Thinking Allowed Every year the average number of prescriptions purchased by Americans increases, as do healthcare expenditures, which are projected to reach one-fifth of the U.S. gross domestic product Continue reading…
What are we talking about when we talk about embodiment, bodies, our bodies, other bodies? How did we learn to talk these ways that these words come so easily out of our mouths and fingers? And are we always improvising, and if so, how, and against what background of non-improvisation? Embodying Improvisation Class Winter 13 Continue reading…
Drawing on Allan Newell’s “You can’t play 20 questions with nature and win,” this article proposes that neuroscience needs to go beyond binary hypothesis testing and design experiments that follow what neurons care about. Examples from Lettvin et. al. are used to demonstrate that one can experimentally play with neurons and generate surprising results. In Continue reading…