ASU Scholarship Showcase

This chapter is not a guide to embodied thinking, but rather a critical call to action. It highlights the deep history of embodied practice within the fields of dance and somatics, and outlines the value of embodied thinking within human-computer interaction (HCI) design and, more specifically, wearable technology (WT) design. What this chapter does not do is provide a guide or framework for embodied practice. As a practitioner and scholar grounded in the fields of dance and somatics, I argue that a guide to embodiment cannot be written in a book. To fully understand embodied thinking, one must act, move, and do. Terms such as embodiment and embodied thinking are often discussed and analyzed in writing; but if the purpose is to learn how to engage in embodied thinking, then the answers will not come from a text. The answers come from movement-based exploration, active trial-and-error, and improvisation practices crafted to cultivate physical attunement to one's own body. To this end, my "call to action" is for the reader to move beyond a text-based understanding of embodiment to active engagement in embodied methodologies. Only then, I argue, can one understand how to apply embodied thinking to a design process.

As speculative aesthetics, what might feminist ontologies and artist imaginings do for rethinking the "real" assemblages and infrastructures of our quotidian experience, particularly with respect to those that standardize aggressive capital agendas, maximum industrial output and extreme waste? This paper draws connections between female artists' image and event-making, speculative design and tacit knowledge, as sensing tools for technological possibilities at a time when energy dependency, in the form of electricity, is the greatest generator of fossil fuel waste and pollution. I use Remedios Varo's paintings from the mid 1930-1960s as a springboard to think about sustainability and ecological design from an embodied, fem-magic and deep-time perspective, and I draw from other female artists whose work explores technologies and energy, such as Alice Aycock, Tania Candiani, Cassie Meador and Hito Steyerl. An analysis of these artists' works allows me to explore the ways that feminist imaginings function as an ontological orientation that shifts power away from contemporary infrastructures, to decolonize and re-feminize electrical possibilities as alternative ways of engaging with and sensing assemblages.