How do interactive artworks ask us to perform rigorous philosophies of the body?

Stern argues that interactive art suspends and amplifies the ways in which we experience embodiment as per-formed, relational, and emergent. He provides many in-depth case studies of contemporary artworks that develop a practice of embodied philosophy, setting a stage to explore how we inter-act and relate with the world. He offers a valuable critical framework for analyzing interactive artworks and what’s at stake in our encounters with them, which can be applied to a wide range of complex and emerging art forms.

The book is published as a peer-reviewed printed book and eBook and is accompanied – or rather, re-per-formed – as an online participatory chapter about embodied research practices, and a multi-location interactive exhibition and virtual book tour.

In the companion chapter (offered in partnership with Networked Book at Turbulence.org), Stern offers a semi-autobiographical account of his own research trajectory, and invites comment, critique, and contributions of new work. This creates a participatory stage for rehearsing the performance of scholarship.

At the exhibitions, audiences encounter the concepts and materials addressed in the book. For example, in Stern’s ‘Body Language’ series, participants use their full bodies to interact with digitized sounds, projected animations, texts, drawings, and videos, which shift and change with their movements. They explore, play with, experience, and practice how we make bodies and meaning.

Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance, by Nathaniel Stern, will be released in May 2013 as the first in the Arts Future Book series by Gylphi Ltd. Arts Future Book is published and supported by an international editorial board. It represents a substantial practical and theoretical investigation into the future of books about the arts. As a book series it publishes unique works that establish new systems for considering art. Their aim is to explore the relations between the form and content of art books and to exploit new technologies that expand their literal and philosophical capacities. What is a book about art, and what can and should it do? The Arts Future Book project has been explained, modelled (and remodelled) in the open-access journal article/artwork: ‘Is Art History Too Bookish’ by series editor Charlotte Frost.

In its various modes, Interactive Art and Embodiment performs the philosophical environment of interactive art, and embodies Arts Future Book’s investigations into how we can and should perform art scholarship.

Further performances of art, philosophy and publishing will occur on Twitter using the hashtag: #implicitbody.

Links:
Gylphi: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/index.php
Arts Future Book: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/arts/index.php
Nathaniel Stern: http://nathanielstern.com/
Companion chapter: http://stern.networkedbook.org/
Networked Book: http://networkedbook.org/
Is Art History Too Bookish? http://www.gylphi.co.uk/artsfuturebook/

Twitter: @gylphi,  @nathanielstern,  @charlottefrost, #implicitbody