This Glossary is a transdisciplinary collection of terminologies that are incorporated within areas of research and discussion that has emerged from the research projects co-ordinated by individuals within the Transtechnology Research community. The Glossary is intended to provide insight into the variety found within discussions that form the Transtechnology Research community, whilst also exemplifying how our research and those of affiliated contributors are profoundly interrelated.
Transtech Contributors: Prof. Michael Punt [MP], Dr. Martha Blassnigg [MB], Dr. Stephen Thompson [ST], Dr. Brigitta Zics [BZ], Dr. Jonathan Zilberg [JZ], Taslima Begum [TB], Rita Cachao [RC], Hannah Drayson [HD], Natacha Roussel [NR], John Vines [JV], Martyn Woodward [MW], Flavia Amadeu [FA], Len Massey [LM]
Affiliated Contributors: Paul Green [PG] , Robert Jackson [RJ], Guto Nobrega [GN]
Editor: Dr. Brigitta Zics [BZ]
Affordance
By [MW]
Emergent relations between properties of the individual animal and of the animal’s environment (Stoffregen), determined by the action of the individual’s ‘body schema’ in the environment. They are actionable meanings of objects for a particular agent, who’s existence is relative to the agents body-schematic space of possible actions and interactions. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964) Affordances, and in turn meanings, are seen as an emergent aspect of the interaction of the Animal ‚ Environment system.
References:
Merleau-Ponty , M . 1964. The Phenomenology of Perception. New York, The Humanities Press
Stoffregen, T. 2003. Affordances as Properties of the Animal-Environment System, Ecological Psychology,15:2, 115-134.
Embodied Prenoetics
By [JV]
An ability of the human body that helps structure an individual’s consciousness but is not present and accessible within it (Gallagher 2005). A prenoetic performance provides the individual with the ability to absorb parts of the environment and objects into their body schema without ‘the requirement of a reflexive conscious monitoring directed at the body’ (Gallagher 2005, p.32), such as a carpenter’s hammer becoming an ‘operative extension of the carpenter’s hand’ (Gallagher 2005, p.32). The physiology of an individual organises itself in mutuality and relation to objects, depending upon the individual’s intended action and what the environment affords them.
References:
Gallagher, S. 2005. How the body shapes the mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Iconicity
By [MW]
A semiotic notion that refers to a natural resemblance or analogy between the form of a sign (‘the signifier’, be it a letter or sound, a word, or a structure of words) and the object or concept (‘the signified’) it refers to in our perception of the world. The similarity may be due to common features inherent in both. In these cases, the forms of words are said to somehow ‚ suggest their meanings, or the meanings are said to somehow ‚ motivate‚ the word forms. The general term used for these phenomena is iconicity.
References:
Merleau-Ponty , M . 1964. The Phenomenology of Perception. New York, The Humanities Press
Gasser, M. and Sethuraman, M. 2005, Iconicity in Expressives: An Empirical Investigation. CSLI Publications
Perception
By [JV]
Perception can be thought as an activity of the body that is shaped by an individual’s whole sensorimotor structure and the range of skills such a physiology provides (Noë 2004). Perceptual meaning is acquired through the implicit mastery of such sensorimotor skills and the actions these enable in relation to particular environments. With a view such as this it is impossible to consider perception as input from the world to the mind and action as output from the mind, as the two are entwined with one another ‘as a skilful activity of the part of the animal as a whole’ (Noë 2004, p.2).
References:
Noë, A. 2004. Action in perception. The MIT Press, Cambridge.
Spatial Fantasy (digital gaming mise-en-scè(r)ne)
By [RJ]
Term used to accurately depict the Lacanian notion of Fantasy (1979 [1973]) in the framing of digital video games space. This follows on from the work of Elizabeth Cowie (1990), elaborating on Lacanian Fantasy as the ‘mise-en-scè(r)ne of desire’ (mise-en-scè(r)ne refers to staging of diegetic properties within film narrative, characters, lighting, etc), thus showing how cinema provides a ’setting for the desire of the spectator’ (Cowie, 1990). Thus a spectator of film plays out their desire through narrative. Spatial Fantasy is a term used to describe a similar process in digital gaming, where the spectator transforms into an operator and literally plays out their desire in spatial narrative under the control of the algorithm. The coded space replaces the cinematic frame or screen.
References:
Miller , J.-A. ed. 1979. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: the Four Fundamental concepts of Psychoanalysis 1964-1965, trans. A. Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Cowie, E. 1990.Fantasia, in P. Adams and E. Cowie.eds. The Woman in Question, London: Verso, pp. 149 – 96
Structural Coupling
By [JV]
The engagement of two or more systems – such as a human being, an object, a specific environment – that provides certain levels of mutual cohesion and development between them (Maturana and Varela 1987). From both a biological perspective, the processes of the one system both determine and get altered the interaction with other systems. The history of structural coupling of any individual is formed by both biological and cultural dimensions, which then shape their momentary experiences and perceptions (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991). These produce a dynamic fluctuation as new couplings are formed and the current couplings are altered through the individuals embodied and situated activity (Maturana and Varela 1987).
References:
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. 1991. The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Maturana, H. R. and Varela, F. J. 1987. The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Shambhala Publications, Boston.
Passive Interaction – The Cognitive-feedback loop
By [BZ]
Keywords: cognitive-based interaction, affection, body awareness
This new modality of interaction termed passive interaction (Zics 2008) focuses on bodily reactions that most explicitly express cognitive, emotional or behavioural characteristics of the spectator. Body awareness is produced by introverted actions through technological triggers since the functional bodily actions are reduced. Although this modality might seem similar to cinematic spectatorship, the difference is that the user is intentional decision expressed through a spectrum of cognitive-based, reduced bodily responses) is captured by the system and contributes to the co-creation of the art work. With other words, face expression, head movement or mimic of the person are used to evaluate the cognitive characteristics of the spectator. The artistic system serves to produce an interactive system of affection that focuses on the participant’s cognitive action which considered as aesthetic meaning.
The Body Schema
By [MW]
The Body Schema is the way one has and one knows one’s body in action, through the demands and possibilities of the situation and the task one is undertaking in it. (Bonderup-Dohn 2006) It is our Bodily experience and movement which provides us with a way to access the world and the object with a ‘Praktagnosia’ (practical knowledge) which has to be recognised as original and perhaps as primary. The body has its world, or understands its world without having to make use of any of the bodies symbolic or objectifying function.(Merleau-Ponty 1962) The Body Schema is the bodies non-concious, sub-intentional appropriation of postures and movements, and its incorporation of various significant parts of the environment into its own organisation.(Gallagher 2005) The Body Schema recognises the very act of being-in-the-world as a fundamental resource of meaningful structuring of our basic human knowledge and understanding
References:
Bunderup-Dohn , L. 2006. Affordance – A Merleau-Pontian account. University of Southern Denmark
Gallagher, S. 2005. How the body shapes the mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Ljungberg ,C. 2006. Iconicity in language use, language learning, and language change. University of Amsterdam
The Cognitive feedback loop
By [BZ]
Keywords: feedback loop, cognition, affective computing
In the passive interaction the potential of technological feedback loops (when both, the state of the system and the participant’s cognition changes) result in a cognitive feedback loop when the ’simple’ repeated actions between human and machine produce a so-called fractal structure (visual forms of the mathematical formulations of feedback) in the spectator’s cognition. The cognitive feedback loop produces closed up circulations that cause a complexity in the cognitive engagement similarly as it can be observed in repeated pattern of fractals. This is the condition that might be evaluated as a new state of consciousness. From this perspective interactive media art works can be considered as generators of new qualities in the user’s consciousness. The core intervention of this argument moves away from approaches that comprehend interaction only as an action/reaction capacity for artistic content creation, rather, it proposes an interpretation of the cognitive development of the participant in the aesthetic chain of responses. One of the applications of the passive interaction is the affective environment of Mind Cupola (2008), where instant affection technologies (affecting the user) and solutions of affective computing (monitoring the user) are interconnected in order to guide the person toward an optimal state of experience.
Transdisciplinarity
By [MP]
‘…transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world , of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.’ (Nicolescu 1997, np.)
Reference:
Nicolescu, B. 1997. The Transdisciplinary Evolution of the University Condition for Sustainable Development. Universities’ Responsabilities to Society. International Congress. International Association of Universities, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, November 12-14, 1997. [Online] http://nicol.club.fr/ciret/bulletin/b12/b12c8.htm
z5 Discourse
By [PG]
z5 Discourse refers to the narrative possibilities that become available within certain scene transitions extracted from linear time-based media. This phenomenon surfaces when: (1) the content from adjacent scenes is blended in a single frame and the resulting image meets a certain threshold of narrativity; (2) when the resulting image encourages a reading of narrative possibilities that are altogether independent of the plot described, or story inferred, in the original narrative source. While the image frame remains oriented to the expression plane of the original source material, the story inferred is not carried in the direction of the plot intended by the author(s).Since the narrative is available only at a single point in the source media, and is not related to any other events described in the original source; the narrative possibilities can be conceptualised as extending in a perpendicular ‘z’ direction from the conventional (xy)*time expression plane (e.g. screen/projection plane) of the source imagery. Similar to the pregnant moment in narrative painting, z5Discourse is distinct in that interpretations are not available from a conventional viewing of the sequence; only when the original sequence of images is frozen or played below a threshold frame-rate can z5Discourse be presented as a possibility to a viewing audience.a.
References:
Ryan, M. 2006 ‘Avatars of Story’, University of Minnesota Press.
Prince, G. 2003. Dictionary of Narratoloy. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln&London.
Steiner, W. 2004. Pictorial Narrative. In Narrative Across Media. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln&London.
Green, Paul J. 2008.’Tween’. http://www.notthatreal.com/Practice/Tween.
Last editorial update: 09.2009