Bodily Knowledges

Application summary

The Bodily Knowledges research and residency creates a transnational working group to explore bodily augmentations as routes of human connection filled with the intra-actions of human and nonhumans. Our multidisciplinary approach is focused on understanding embodied relation in democratic society to speculate how virtual capacities of embodiment and their indeterminacy impact our future. Utilizing a range of collaborative and intensive research formats, including thematic scholarly charrettes and community engaged workshops, the residency builds capacity for the research cooperative bundled with a multilayered outreach strategy including podcast, lecture, and a pop-up exhibition series that will take place during the three month residency. It is our viewpoint that deepening our understanding of embodied knowledge is vital to the demands of equality and justice that challenge us in the 21st century and beyond. The Bodily Knowledges research proposal supports the residency of Aaron Knochel, an interdisciplinary artist, teacher, and researcher, to work with an international research cooperative exploring embodied knowledge that challenges dualist reductions through pedagogical interventions based in art and performance. Specifically, three forms of bodily knowledge are explored: touch, kinesthesia, and avatarism. Touch develops tactile understandings of the sensing body as a co-figuration of human and nonhuman in actuating touch. Kinesthesia will explore the body knowing, feeling and becoming within physical and virtual movement perceptions. Avatarism explores body forms as expressed in augmented realities. Each bodily knowledge highlights certain forms of experience and expression that continue to expand in our lives and suggest important perceptions in physical and parasocial intra-actions that impact our health, civic engagement, and relationships with the environment.