hello my name is sarah Fdili alaoui
i present a paper about RCO radical
choreographic
object a dance piece that i co-created
with Jean-Marc Matos
we followed a performance-led research
approach that was introduced to hci by
benford at all
we present our dance piece that uses a
mobile phone system to prompt the
audience members to participate
RCO served as an experimental ground in
which we observed how humans relate to
each other and to mobile technologies
we ask the participant to connect to
a server online
through their mobile phone and send them
a set of text instructions such as
carry one of the dancers or lay on the
floor
we also prompted them to perform a set
of gesture interactions such as the
shaker where they have to shake the
phone as much as possible to stop a
noise
additionally the participants are
invited by the performers
to interact with them for example a
performer can mimic the participants
make them dance carry them or touch them
we designed these instructions and
gesture-based interactions to give the
participants actions to do
and to coerce them into the role of
active creators of the piece
We followed an iterative step-by-step research
through practice method
that we describe in detail in the paper
using the notion of practitioners
trajectories
So during three showings of RCO who
toured
a lot during a year and a half we
conducted a series of observation and
led conversations with the participants
our goal
was to articulate the personal and
collective embodied and social behaviors
that were provoked by the interactions
with the mobile phones
and with performers note that the
ethics were tricky here so i provide
full details on participants consent in
the paper.
The results of our observation and
conversations showed that the
participants
felt that they were being held hostage
and socially constrained in the RCO
situation
and in the use of the mobile phone. They
felt subjected to physical and embodied
constraints that are imposed on them
by implicit social rules such as
inactivity and invisibility.
Some were able to ignore the phone
however
and they then passively observed the
dance and took a a posture of voyeurs
that seemed to take pleasure in
observing something private and
forbidden.
Most participants reported that they
were always
accommodating the instructions they
reflected on their obedience to it with
a mixed feeling
i felt between fusion and resistance
with technology said one of the
participants
however we observed that participants at
time broke free and reinterpreted
sometimes creatively the instructions
and appropriated specific roles
in the piece such as the one of the
mediator or the desk partner
finally participation was either viewed
as worrisome
or as creative indeed a participant
reflected on the moments during which
they were invited by the dancers to do
an action as
anxiety inducing another participant
said
i realized that with the same phone i
give my data to google for free services
how can it not bother me. However
participants also
thought they were beautiful moments of
sharing where they let go of their
anxiety
and entered a state of freedom and
euphoria
Our results allowed us to reflect on felt
technological
social constraints. RCO seems to have
reinforced
a situation of uncanny social
interactions for example when
participants were asked to kiss each
other or to carry a dancer. These
behaviors
challenge the everyday social
interactions that the sociologist Erwin
Goffman calls
interaction rituals in parallel
participants reflected
on the frames that restrain them within
these predetermined rituals
and that prevented them from imagining
other possibilities of being
this echoes Michel Foucault's
description of the social limits that
define the areas
of exclusion and inclusion. The political
problem consists for Foucault in the
resulting micro powers
that invest the body and in the case of
RCO prevented our participants from
behaving outside of the frame of social
norms
and values although this was encouraged
on the other hand the feeling of being
subjected to the technology in RCO
echoes what smartphones have
been seen
as devices that frame and alienate
individuals echoing
Georgio Agamben this also reminds us of
Nicolas Nova's metaphor
of the leash to describe mobile phone
predominant presence
however there is a happy ending to this
story RCO
progression offered alternative in the
last text messages sent such as dance as
much as you can
or kiss whoever you want as we could see
at that point
all the audience took control of the
peace and interaction with their phones
and entered a state of collective
enjoyment
in summary RCO generates a situation
mediated by dance and technology
that allows both the participants and
the artists to reflect on forms of
social and technological domination
it also allows to resist and break free
from it sketching
alternatives with humor and irreverence
Thank you!