Gesture and response in field-based performance

Abstract

Ambience and immersive technological environments allow us to explore some basics of human pragmatics that lie beyond linguistics, intentionality and the subject-agency perspectives of human interaction. We focus on gesture and the body in sense-making and propose a discussion drawing on a non-dualist and agent-free account of embodied, material experience. By agent-free we mean an approach that does not presume a monolithic subject. Moreover, we deal with the problem of intersubjectivity by studying the human coordination of activity without appealing to a transmission theory of communication. We achieve this by considering how gesture spans multiple bodies and how aesthetic design works with this and facilitates it. The paper is in two parts, the first part covers movement studies, focusing on gesture and body movement, drawing on the acting and pragmatics, and the second part develops this with the example of the TGarden, a responsive play space for experimental performance augmented by gesturally nuanced computational media.