[ecrea] Call for Abstracts- Computing the Corporeal

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

*Computing the corporeal*

/Special issue of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies/

Edited by Nicolas Salazar Sutil, Sita Popat and Scott deLahunta

*Outline*

Intersections between human movement, computer science and
motion-tracking/sensing technologies have led to novel ways of
transferring body data from physical to digital contexts. From a
practical perspective, this integration requires engagement across key
disciplines, including movement studies, kinesiology, kinematics,
biomechanics, biomedical science and health studies, dance science,
sports science, and computer science. This development has also provoked
theoretical and critical discourse that has tried to preserve, based on
its grounding on bodily and kinetic practice, the differentiation of
lived-in and body-specific knowledge. Here is a mode of datarization
perhaps closer to what Deleuze (1988) called “immediate datum”: i.e.
information stemming not from an abstract and re-moved
conceptualisation, but from real-world experience of movement, and the
/immediate /perception or capture of kinetic information through
physical or sensorial means. Within the field of software studies,
advancing a sense of digital materialism has raised concerns for the
materiality of technological media, for instance by focusing on the
physical constraints of data storage, or the material dimension of
computing. But what about “immediation”, i.e. immediate computation of
bodily movement by machines for immediate expression, representation or
enactment in digital contexts? And what of the representability of such
immediation? How can we describe movement and preserve its datum of
difference within a scriptable or graphicable computer language without
falling into a universal sameness, a movement without bodies?

Whilst the idea that immediate data may demand a “bodying forth” (Thrift
2008), a traffic of bodiliness from biological to technological
contexts, it is necessary to de-homogenise the ‘body’ category. Perhaps
what is needed is an understanding of “corporeality” that assumes
multidimensional and relativistic realities of bodies instead, opening
up nuanced discourses based on specific body-related ontologies
(corpuscles, builds, anatomies, skeletons, muscle systems) all making up
a non-singular sense of the bodily real. As such, this collection poses
the problem of criteria. Our question is this: how and to what effect
does the research community adopt arbitrary criteria in order to compute
the body and bodily movement? Can we define narratives emerging from
this body-computing arbitration to provoke a critique?

There is a possible tension between “bodying forth”— the idea of a
single body operative across both biological and computational
contexts—and corporeal relations. We would like to focus this critical
edition on the relations between differentiated anatomical or bodily
systems (skeletal, muscular, nerve, etc.), and different modes of
computation, as well as different theoretical discourses stemming from
this experiential basis. If we recognize the problem of relationality we
must assume that more than one complex set of co-relations meet when the
machine computes the moving human body. How do we start the process of
computer-generated learning in terms of selecting body parts, functions,
organs, processes, on the one hand, and key languages, code, or indeed
technological tools for capture on the other? To what extent does
corporeal computing contribute to certain bodily systems (or perhaps
even body types) becoming the key agents of action, and indeed learning,
in such contexts? How do we respond critically to privileged systems
(the skeletal, the muscular), and body types (so called ‘normal
bodies’)? To what extent are computational paradigms still dominated by
spatial, extensive and quantitative determinations (i.e. the tracking of
skeleton, body geometry, kinematic shapes, etc.) that hide other, more
intensive, modes of corporeality? And finally, how do we reintegrate the
multiplicity of the corporeal in a computational synthesis? For
instance, how can we understand the quantitative and qualitative
(dynamics, effort, tone, intensity, etc.) as overlapping data priorities?

/Topics or projects might include:/

·Computable relations between bodies and digital avatars, digital dance
representations, digital sports representations, digital health
representations, digital animation— digital bodies in general.

·Computable relations between biological bodies and robotic systems.

·Computing relations between physical movement and abstract thought,
automated thought (AI) or machine learning.

·Computing mobility studies (i.e. relations between body and automobile,
body and assisted mobility machines, body and prosthetics).

·Computing sociokinetic material (i.e. computing the movement of groups
of bodies).

·Affective corporeal computing— the capacity to process psychophysical
and cognitive processes within corporeal movement (e.g. computing
effort, dynamics, tonicity, emotion).

·Integration of quantitative and qualitative body datasets.

·Metabody theory and notions of meta-anatomy, meta-strata in the
ontological literature (i.e. movement of digital ghosts, sprites,
techno-animism, etc.)

**

*750 word abstracts are due April 17th.*

Abstracts will be reviewed by the /Computational Culture/ Editorial
Board and the special issue editors. Authors of selected abstracts will
be notified by April 24^th  and invited to submit full manuscripts by
September 26th. These manuscripts are subject to outside peer review
according to Computational Culture’s policies. The issue will be
published in January 2017.

/Computational Culture/ is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal
of inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational
objects, practices, processes and structures


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