Improvisation in dance with technological mediation: An investigation through studies of situation cognition
Cogent Arts & Humanities November 26, 2018 Ivani Lucia Oliveira de Santana
Situated cognition, which understands the subject and its cognition as mutually involved with the environment, is a key pillar of embodied cognition. Dance, particularly improvisation, exemplifies situated cognition by constructing conceptual systems where movement emerges from real-time actions and reactions to stimuli. Unlike choreographed dance, improvisation training sharpens dancers' perception and sensorimotor knowledge. In improvisational dances mediated by digital technologies, new semantic layers, spatiotemporal relations, and interaction possibilities emerge between dancers and their computational devices. Using concepts of embodiment, enaction, actionism, and empathy, the article addresses the notion of presence in these systems, considering technologically mediated dance as a cognitive artifact and empathy as a condition for interaction between physical and virtual bodies.