A one day research seminar at the University of Brighton, School of Architecture and Design organised by Mette Ramsgard Thomsen. For more information, please click on Embodied Interfaces.
The question of presence is central to digital media. How we enter mediated conditions, and how a sense of presence in the computed environment would be experienced, is fundamental to the imagination of a digital culture. The body conceived through technology has relied on real-world attributes to define social and cultural boundaries. As developments in new technologies are exploding the isolation of digital space, the solidity of this constructed body as social object, is fundamentally challenged.
The interfacing of digital and physical space is the basis of a Mixed Reality, where the split between the mediated and the immediate is becoming blurred. Here, the virtual body coincides with the physical, extending and re-constructing the perception of presence in space. As we enter spaces of shifting digital, as well as physical, boundaries who do we become? How does the development of new body-centred interfaces affect our sense of self? Can new interfaces challenge the construct of our embodiment opening up the possibilities of being?
This seminar invites a cross disciplinary group of practitioners and theoreticians of digital culture to discuss the development of new intuitive and body centred interfaces, that redefine the user's role within a reality of mixed digital and physical dimensions. As embodied interfaces, the central question is how the interface can transfer an aspect of the users' presence within the physical site of the interface to the site of the computed, thereby proposing new means of assembling spatial experience across the physical/virtual divide.
