George Khut
George Khut’s work with body-focussed interactive art is unique in it’s focus on the experiences of embodiment that bio-medical and digital interaction technologies and biofeedback training methods can support. His biofeedback artworks use analogue and digital technologies to measure changes in our nervous system, as revealed through such processes as heart rate, and brainwave activity. These measurements are then used to modulate digital sounds and images, providing a realtime display of these charges as they are unfolding in realtime. More than simply a novel application of medical technolgies - these interactive and participatory works highlight - through hands-on ‘learning-by-doing’ - the proundly embodied aspects of our being, and the deep entanglement of body and mind. This is the essense of biofeedback training in clinical, theraputic practice - and George Khut’s interactive artworks apply these principals in an art exhibition context - to facilitate a creative re-imagining of selfhood, agency and physiological-embodiment. His 2006 Doctoral Exegesis “Development
less
Interests
Uploads
Papers by George Khut
The central theme addressed through these works concerns the representation and experience of subjectivity as a physiologically embodied phenomenon. Although contemporary theories of psychophysiology and phenomenology have overturned the idea of mind-body separation, many forms of cultural practice continue to represent subjectivity as a fundamentally disembodied phenomenon. In addition, bodily experience in contemporary culture is framed almost entirely in terms of narrowly defined and commodity driven notions of sexuality and desirability, or even pathology. Such representations and experiences perpetuate feelings of mistrust and hostility towards the body, in ways that inhibit our ability to fully engage with the world as fully humans. This problematic use and representation of the body in contemporary culture has attracted the attention of many artists and theorists over the past fifty years, generating a diverse body of works celebrating and sometimes questioning the embodied subject as a medium for enquiry and aesthetic enrichment.
The artworks documented in this exegesis extend this process of re- examination through the use of interactive bio-sensing technologies and audience participation. Interactive practices reframe subjectivity as a fundamentally active process, shifting our sense of involvement in the issues at hand from one of detached onlookers to active participants. Each of the works creates a space where participants and observers alike can become present to aspects of body-mind process. Audience responses to these works have been studied as a way of evaluating the extent to which these interests have been realised through interaction and this exegesis contributes to an emerging but growing body of research into the use of audience experience as a tool for designing and evaluating interactive artworks.