By Marc-André Cossette
Marc-André Cossette is a third-year student in the Individualized Ph.D. program at Concordia University, Montreal. His research-creation practice focuses on the emerging relations between the moving body and computational behaviour. Through motion capture, interactive sound, visual and haptic components, his research looks at how a dance performer can collaborate and improvise in real time with and autonomous machine.
Introduction
Why do we, as spectators, feel so compelled to watch bodies in motion, whether in film, dance or theatre? How is it that a dancer moving in silence can make us feel sadness or that watching swing dancers or shuffling ravers can instantly light up the mood? What makes British physical comedy sketches like Monty Pythons’ “Ministry of Silly Walks” so funny? A big part of the answer lies in a perceptual phenomenon known as kinesthetic empathy which Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason describe as “the ability to experience empathy merely by observing the movements of another human being” (Reynolds 2012). The recognition of the moving body as a form of art is not new; indeed, the first silent films in the late 19th century relied essentially on body language. Additionally, the first dance major in the US was created as early as 1926 (Bonbright 2000). However, contemporary ideas in philosophy and neuroscience give us new insight about the inner working of our perception of moving bodies and their effect on observers.
In this short essay, I describe how kinesthetic empathy represents a form of perception inherently multisensory that emerged out of a specific philosophical and scientific context. Additionally, I argue that the concept can be mobilized in multidisciplinary research and is particularly interesting for artist-researchers. To do so, I begin by giving a brief overview of three concepts essential to understanding the context of kinesthetic empathy: affect, embodied cognition, and mirror neurons. I then shift the discussion to focus on the concept of embodied knowledge and show how kinesthetic empathy can be used in multidisciplinary research contexts. Finally, I use two examples to demonstrate how kinesthetic empathy can be mobilized in research-creation. The two interactive dance pieces are Unless created by Brian Knoth in 2009 and the Altérité Numérique that I created with contemporary dancer Myriam Arseneault in 2019.
Kinesthetic Empathy in C visceral and pre-subjective context
In their introduction to the edited volume Kinesthetic Empathy in creative and cultural practices, Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason identify three contextual elements from philosophy, cognitive science and neuroscience to frame the emergence of kinesthetic empathy as a concept. These contextual elements have in common a desire to move away from the Cartesian mind-body dualism.
The first of these contextual frames is the affective turn of the 1990s and early 2000s. Affects are defined as visceral and pre-subjective intensities of the body, and represent a departure from emotions, in that the latter are (conventionally) construed as conscious, subjective and present in the mind. For philosopher Brian Massumi, affect precedes emotional state and does not represent feeling; affect is a non-conscious experience that cannot be fully realized in language (Massumi 2002). It is an “interface between the body and the world” (Reynolds 2012), a way to capture intensities in becoming conscious. Affect is interesting to frame kinesthetic empathy because to be “affected” implies a direct impact on the body through the body not yet in the conscious mind.
Furthermore, the context in which kinesthetic empathy is defined includes embodied cognition, a concept pioneered by Francisco Varela and Umberto Maturana. The concept, as we now know, was inspired by the 1943 article by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitt “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity” that describes how a mathematical model of a neuron network could perform logical calculus (McCulloch 2016). This demonstrated how the matter in the brain can process data. Authors in this movement of cognitive science are proposing to revisit the Cartesian dualism that argues a separation between the body and the mind or the object and the knowing subject. In place of separation, Varela and Maturana argue that the mind is the body, in other words, the body is what creates consciousness and our ability to think (Maturana and Varela 1992). One of the objectives of embodied cognition is to address two major issues with Cartesian dualism and focus on experience as the basis of cognition. The first is the “phenomenological mind-body problem” or, how can brains have experiences? The second is the “computational mind-body problem” or, how can a brain accomplish reasoning? (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 2016) This approach focusses our attention on bodily experience as the origin of thinking and consciousness.
Reynolds and Reason identify a third contextual element to the emergence of the concept of kinesthetic empathy derived from research in neuroscience. In the early 1990s, a very interesting phenomenon was observed while examining the brain of macaques performing certain actions. When the macaques performed certain gestures, like grabbing an object, certain sets of neurons would fire. Interestingly, the same neurons would also fire when the macaques simply watched or even heard another perform the task (Thomas 2012). Additional research in neuroimaging has demonstrated the possibility of the existence of what has been dubbed a mirror neuron system in humans as well (Kilner and Lemon 2013).
The Knowledge in Kinesthetic Empathy
With these contextual bases in place, Reynolds and Reason explain in reference to the work of neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese that what allows us to feel empathy or to relate to the other’s body state when observing movement is the creation of a “body simulation” in the observer generating a shared body state between the performer and the spectator (Reynolds 2012). This shared body state is inherently multisensory. While the observer perceives the movement through sight or hearing, the body simulation they create invokes proprioception (senses of one’s body in space) and kinesthesia (sense of one’s body movement) to generate the empathic experience and produce an affective transmission body-to-body. This effect can be strong enough to create conscious emotions in the observer, induce reflexivity or, as philosopher Alva Noë frames it, a reorganization of our thinking process (Noë 2015) and even contribute to the transmission of embodied knowledge.
Embodied or tacit knowledge, is knowledge located in the body, in movement or actions. One can see tacit knowledge in action when watching musicians play their instrument or athletes perform their sport. What makes this type of knowledge hard to address in academia is the difficulty to translate it into language, to explain with words what the body knows. A good example is the work done by David Sudnow in his book Ways of the Hand where he describes in great detail the process of learning jazz improvisation (Sudnow 1993). The vivid language used by Sudnow to describe the movements of his hands on the keyboard is one of the keys for readers to understand the new knowledge the author developed while writing the book. Of course, the only way to really know jazz improvisation is to place one’s hands on the piano, but the images created by Sudnow allow the readers to get a glimpse of this embodied knowledge acquired by the author.
Kinesthetic Empathy and research-creation
Research-creation, also referred to as artistic research outside Canada, is a practice that embraces art practice as a method for knowledge production in academia. It is not in itself a method, but a practice as the articulation of research and art can vary widely (Chapman and Sawchuk 2012; Frayling 1993). By integrating art in the research process, artist-researcher can explore new forms of knowledge and involve sensory perception and human experience in their research practice (Borgdorff, Peters, and Pinch 2020). Any art form can be mobilized in research-creation (Leavy 2018). However, I suggest that we pay close attention to the use of performing art more specifically dance to see how kinesthetic empathy plays a role in the production and transmission of knowledge in research-creation.
To do so, I propose to take a closer look at the interactive dance piece Unless created by Brian Knoth in 2009. In this performance work, the dancer uses Wiimote sensors (motion sensors initially made for the Nintendo Wii videogame console) to connect the movement with the sounds and images around her (Knoth 2009; Reynolds 2012). Methodologically this is a good example of research-creation because it involves the creation of an artwork as the centre of the research in combination with ethnomethodology (i.e., interviews, discussions and questionnaires) to allow the researcher to understand and translate the public’s experience into language. Furthermore, the concept of kinesthetic empathy was directly mobilized in the creation. One of the objectives of this research-creation was to explore the public’s experience generated by a direct connection between the moving body on stage and the surrounding media environment (sound and images). Not only was Knoth able to create a clearly perceivable connection between the performer and the media using motion sensors, the piece also generated an enhanced sense of connection between the public and the performer as illustrated by one of the responses he got from a discussion with the public: “I definitely felt the movement while viewing the performance. The sound and movement created a very visceral experience” (Reynolds 2012 p. 296). Through this example, my intention is to show how kinesthetic empathy can be mobilized in research-creation to question and explore human experience and the shared body-state between a performer and the public.
The second research-creation project I bring forward is Altérité Numérique, an interactive dance piece I presented with contemporary dancer Myriam Arseneault in 2019 at UQAM Dance Department. There is a clear technological link between the two projects presented here, both relied on motion sensors on the performer’s arms or hands and both were focused on creating a clear link between the sound and the movement. Moreover, in both projects discussions and interviews were used to collect data on the experiences. The main different is the fact that Unless was focused on the public’s experience while in Altérité Numérique my objective was to better understand the performer’s experience and the interaction was only with the music. Specifically, I wanted to understand how the performer would interpret her experience with sound that was not only reactive to the movement, but also composed and generated in real time by artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. My intention with this focus on the performer was to determine if there could be a form of empathy for an artificial agent and if a form of relation could develop between the performer and the agent during improvisation sessions. Interviews with Myriam Arseneault and a discussion with the public after the performance revealed that both the performer and the public would perceive intentions in the agent’s musical performance. These perceived intentions were used by the performer as inspiration for the improvisation and the public created numerous interpretations of the improvisation they witnessed. Additionally, the public felt connected with the music and the movement in a very similar way to what Brian Knoth observed with Unless. These two brief examples demonstrate how interactivity in performance art can alter the public’s experience of kinesthetic empathy.
Conclusion
In conclusion, kinesthetic empathy is a complex experience that can be framed through three conceptual pillars in philosophy (affect), cognitive science (embodied cognition) and neuroscience (mirror neurons). It involves the creation of a shared body-state between a person doing (performer) and another observing (observer) through which the observer can access the affective state of the performer. Additionally, kinesthetic empathy is an inherently multisensory experience that evokes proprioception and kinesthesia with visual or auditory inputs. As I have shown, this concept can productively be mobilized in multidisciplinary and artistic research to explore forms of knowledge that cannot be fully translated into language. I will end this essay by quoting Albert Einstein on quantum entanglement. In a way kinesthetic empathy is the “spooky action at a distance” (Bhaumik 2018) of human experience. It can be felt, observed but cannot be fully understood with conventional methods.
References
Bhaumik, Mani L. 2018. “How Does Nature Accomplish Spooky Action at a Distance?” Quanta 7 (1): 111. https://doi.org/10.12743/quanta.v7i1.82.
Bonbright, Jane M. 2000. “Dance: The Discipline.” Arts Education Policy Review 102 (2): 31–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/10632910009599987.
Borgdorff, Henk, Peter Peters, and Trevor Pinch, eds. 2020. Dialogues between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies. Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies. New York, NY: Routledge.
Chapman, Owen B., and Kim Sawchuk. 2012. “Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and ‘Family Resemblances.’” Canadian Journal of Communication 37 (1). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2012v37n1a2489.
Frayling, Christopher and Royal College of Art. 1993. Research in Art and Design. London: Royal College of Art.
Kilner, J.M., and R.N. Lemon. 2013. “What We Know Currently about Mirror Neurons.” Current Biology 23 (23): R1057–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.10.051.
Knoth, Brian. 2009. Unless. Dance & Technology. http://brianknoth.com/digital-multimedia/performance.
Leavy, P. 2018. Handbook of Arts-Based Research. New York: Guilford Press.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Maturana, Umberto, and Francisco Varela. 1992. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. 2nd ed. Shambala.
McCulloch, Warren S. 2016. Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Noë, Alva. 2015. Strange Tools : Art and Human Nature. First.
Reynolds, Dee, ed. 2012. Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Bristol: Intellect.
Sudnow, David. 1993. Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. 1st MIT Press ed. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Thomas, Ben. 2012. “What’s So Special about Mirror Neurons?” Scientific American, November. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/whats-so-special-about-mirror-neurons/.
Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 2016. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Revised edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London England: MIT Press.