Kinaesthetics

Constructed spaces have the ability to influence the lives of people living in those spaces for good or bad. They have the potential to influence the user's experience. This can be done by choreographing each area in a building in order to give a person different perceptions when going through those areas. We experience any visual frame as we pass through a built space and view it in relation to the neighboring frame. At the same time, we do not simply see them when moving via a space, but even our senses are also engaged in the space perception process. They are driving our front ward motion unintentionally and our unintentional pauses. As we pass through a construction, we see the various components of the building unfold. One needs to decipher the various layers that articulate these spaces in order to address the kinesthetic factor. The order of spaces not only controls the direction of motion and the pattern of motion, but also indicates that an individual pauses or continues. Many experiences are felt because of the sequential emergence of various spaces when going through Indian traditional architecture. These observations are not accidental but are the result of conscious design decisions. But the concept of kinesthetics is ignored as an incidental phenomenon if we focus at contemporary architecture. Architects have some goals that they tackle any project with. Among them, the user experience is typically given the least importance, even though it is the most vital issue. The opportunity for buildings built with sound kinesthetics is to construct a human environment that is conducive to its inhabitants. This research is an attempt to find out the variables by paying close attention to the kinesthetics of a space from which the experience of the users can be improved.

Constructed spaces have the ability to influence the lives of people living in those spaces for good or bad. They have the potential to influence the user's experience. This can be done by choreographing each area in a building in order to give a person different perceptions when going through those areas. We experience any visual frame as we pass through a built space and view it in relation to the neighboring frame. At the same time, we do not simply see them when moving via a space, but even our senses are also engaged in the space perception process. They are driving our front ward motion unintentionally and our unintentional pauses. As we pass through a construction, we see the various components of the building unfold. One needs to decipher the various layers that articulate these spaces in order to address the kinesthetic factor. The order of spaces not only controls the direction of motion and the pattern of motion, but also indicates that an individual pauses or continues. Many experiences are felt because of the sequential emergence of various spaces when going through Indian traditional architecture. These observations are not accidental but are the result of conscious design decisions. But the concept of kinesthetics is ignored as an incidental phenomenon if we focus at contemporary architecture. Architects have some goals that they tackle any project with. Among them, the user experience is typically given the least importance, even though it is the most vital issue. The opportunity for buildings built with sound kinesthetics is to construct a human environment that is conducive to its inhabitants. This research is an attempt to find out the variables by paying close attention to the kinesthetics of a space from which the experience of the users can be improved.

​This book investigates the global hub airport as an exemplar of cosmopolitan culture and space. A machine made for movement, itself perched at the crossroads of the world’s incessant mobility, the airport is both a symbol of and stage for the ways in which we construct and inhabit the world today.

Taking an ethnographically-inflected approach, this study brings together knowledge of the moving body from dance and performance and the study of systems of mobility within cultural and mobilities studies, in order to call attention to the kinaesthetic experience of global space. What is the choreography of the global airport? How does it perform on us. How do we perform within it?

Extending thinking about contemporary cosmopolitanism and cultural identity, and the performativity of places and identities, this book is essential reading for those interested in cultural debates around globalisation, the innovative application of performance theory towards everyday experience, and interdisciplinary methodologies.
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“This is more than an original exploration of the choreographed spatiality of airports. It is for all those interested by the way one moves in and is moved by space in the era of transnational mobility. What’s more, the text itself is a well choreographed festival of intelligently deployed theory speaking to acutely observed ethnographic material traversed by sharp socio-political observations that make it a pleasure to read.” (Ghassan Hage, School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne, Australia)

“Choreographing the Airport is a deeply-grounded study of hubs of contemporary global circulation — of bodies, affects, and cultures. No longer imaginable as the sole province of a transnational elite class, airports now function as critical arteries for the movement of refugees, migrants, transnational families, and others. As Shih Pearson’s nuanced examination demonstrates, airports bear a complex relationship to their geographic locations as well as their cosmopolitan functions — a relationship made all the more complex when considered from the perspective of the kinesthetic/somatic experience of its temporary inhabitants. Employing a kinesthetic auto-ethnographic method and combining performance and dance/movement theory, and postcolonial critique, Shih Pearson goes beyond a purely architectural analysis and asks us to attend to how and where we occupy those spaces, either in concert with or occasionally indifferent to global capitalism’s imperatives, asking us to consider the urgently relevant question, “what is it to move in this space?’” (Karen Shimakawa, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, USA)

From saint feast day processions and pilgrimages for Black Christ statues, to Junkunoo, Crop Over, and other Caribbean festivals, religious holidays in Latin America are occasions for a celebration. This course focuses on the Caribbean Carnival Complex to reveal the ways this performance idiom forms mobile archives of history that testify to the accumulated forces of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism that continues to shape this region. In particular, we will focus upon ritual bodies and the potential contained in of choreography and kinesthesia to render bodies into instruments and devices of popular insurgency.

Relational leadership theory views leadership as a process of social construction in which participants engage through their bodily presence. The ‘in-between’ space connecting leaders and followers, however, is under-researched and has not been analysed with a focus on movement. With a phenomenological approach and dance theory, this study explores movement by considering techno DJs and their live performances to an audience in clubs. It analyses DJs’ insights into relationships between themselves and followers. DJs actively seek physical proximity and use bodily movement and kinaesthetic empathy to relate to the participants, engage in mutual challenge, and embrace the co-creation that emerges. These insights are transferable to many leadership situations that include embodied interaction. The study illustrates that leaders not only ‘have’ bodies, but ‘are’ (moving) bodies who achieve a profound appreciation of the situation. This changes how we conceive of leadership when agency in embodied interaction is conditioned and reciprocated by leaders and followers in the ‘in-between’ space and does not pertain to one or the other.

an essay review of
Origin of Perspective
by Hubert Damisch
translated by John Goodman
Cambridge MA: MIT, 1995

The New World Order & The Throne of the AntiChrist
The Armageddon Series Part III
The New World Order Observed, Volume 1
by Robert O'Driscoll et al.
Toronto: The Printing Office, 1993
and
New World Order: Corruption in Canada
The Armageddon Series Part III
The New World Order Observed, Volume 3
by Robert O'Driscoll and Elizabeth Elliott
Toronto: Saigon Press, 1994

The Staircase
Volume 1: History and Theories
Volume 2: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design
by John Templer
Cambridge MA: MIT, 1992

The article considers the visual conventions used by graphical user interfaces in light of the visual understanding of modern art and science. The key role of two-dimensional visual conventions, like “windows”, in web design, and the history and psychology of such conventions, is reviewed. The article explores whether two-dimensional imaging is an adequate representation of virtual space, and it examines the way in which haptic and kinetic behaviours associated with web browsing compensate in part for the limits of two-dimensional interfaces by stimulating imaginary third dimensions.  The article also considers whether higher-dimensional geometries of “hyper-space” provide clues about the way in which virtual space could be represented, and the practical benefits of this.

EXTENDED ABSTRACT One of the earliest play occurrences that the author has experienced-and arguably most people would relate to-was participation in make-belief games; imaginary swordfights and martial arts moves supplemented with playable props (e.g. broomsticks as weapons), all that attest to a kid's fantasy acted out in a physical and highly bodily manner. Kinaesthesia in that context, can be presumed to function as a bridge between the actual and the fictional-between a child holding a stick in his backyard and a decorated knight brandishing his sword in a mythical land. Accordingly, in a digital gaming situation the player exercises kinaesthetic effort through her body and fingers, in order to actualize the game's text, usually via controlling a playable figure's 1 movement within the game world. Thus, by appreciating the player in its physicality of controlling the figure, while also experiencing a vicarious sense of movement 2 , we can understand how play is permeated by our kinaesthetic experience as performers in a Digital game. This study will forward a theoretical analysis of such inquiries within the field of Game studies, while trying to examine cases in Digital games, in which the player's vicarious body, can possibly affect how we make sense of our physical body and how it can also function as a mediating interface where the actual and the virtual can convene. Kirkpatrick urges as that in order to understand Digital games as cultural forms, we need to classify them with reference to the demands they make on the human body (2009), while Bench observes that new media formats "make new movement strategies available" (2009, 279). In McLuhan's spirit, if the medium is the message (1964), then we can argue that media forms such as Digital games can shape new understandings about ourselves, revealing how a virtual entity-as a fantasized 'other'-can affect the way we kinaesthetically perceive and move our bodies. Kiri Miller in her analysis of Dance games-e.g. Just Dance (Ubisoft, 2009)-discusses how the player's body can be regarded as a playable interface (2017). She points out that while virtuosic players of e.g. first-person shooter games must demonstrate their shooting skills within the game's virtual space, they don't need to actually perform the

In the past years cultural institutions like the Dutch National Ballet are facing the problem of a decreasing trend in participation, a lack of diversity and the aging of the current loyal audience members. There is a need for a younger audience to visit ballet performances more loyally. Young adults with a university background were interviewed in in-depth interviews to get insights into their motivators for visiting ballet (Swanson, Davis & Zhao, 2008), their taste patterns (Van Eijck & Lievens) and the nature of the appreciation for ballet: which is informed by flow theory (Nakamura & Csikzentmihalyi, 2002), intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000) and the need for cognition (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982), in the light of their assumed accumulated cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1985; 2008), to uncover the underlying motivations of the visiting behavior of young adults with a university background attending ballet performances of the Dutch National Ballet. Young adults with a university background all have accumulated enough cultural capital to appreciate ballet (Bourdieu, 1985; 2008) and to experience flow (Nakamura & Csikzentmihalyi, 2002; Ryan & Deci, 2000), all have an omnivorous cultural taste with preferences across the highbrow and pop schemes (Van Eijck & Lievens) and are motivated by recreational, artistic and educational motivators to visit ballet performances (Swanson, Davis & Zhao, 2008). They differ however in the extent of dominance of their pop and highbrow cultural scheme (Van Eijck & Lievens) and some are motivated by an escapist and social motivator too. And two kind of subgroups emerged within the group of young adults with a university background: (1) currently active dancers and (2) young adults who have a preference for ballet versus young adults who appreciate modern ballet (at least) as much as ballet. Currently active dancers seem to be motivated by an inspirational motivator and they are also very likely to experience a special kind of additional appreciation of ballet through a bodily sensation of inner mimicry due to interaction of their movement vocabulary and mirror neurons (Cross & Tricini, 2011; Calvo-Merino et al., 2008). And the young adults with a university background who have a preference for ballet most probably didn’t have had the childhood exposure to modern ballet pieces, and are less likely to possess an explicit need for cognition. The young adults with a university background who appreciate modern ballet and ballet have had the childhood exposure to modern ballet pieces, enjoy a higher amount of complexity and value abstract ideas and novelty, are more likely to have a dominant highbrow scheme than a dominant pop scheme, and are the ones who are most likely to possess a high need for cognition. This study thus informs the National Ballet and other cultural institutions through what factors these young adults with a university background (subgroups: active dancers and preferring ballet / appreciating modern ballet and ballet) could be stimulated into visiting ballet performances more loyally.
Key words: ballet, Dutch National Ballet, cultural capital, distinction theory, motivators, motivation, visiting behavior, cultural taste, omnivorousness, cultural omnivore, attendance frequency, flow theory, intrinsic motivation, and need for cognition.