main conference abstracts & biographies - University of New South ...

of theory / praxis dualism, but I am interested in ideas of thinking through the
body via a physical engagement with the world. How might ideas of embodied
cognition and extended mind be relevant to thinking about practice-based
research?
I will present my recent project Closer: experiments in proximity (Tonkin 2010,
2011). This work is a video installation that responds to the user’s distance from
the screen to form a series of different sensori-motor feedback loops. These
create a dynamic structural coupling between the movement of the user’s body
through space and the real-time manipulation of the video and sound they are
experiencing. In these experiments I am trying to think through some issues in
relation to embodied cognition and the nature of visual perception. My hope is
that the audience might also think about some of these things through their
physical engagement with the work.
BIOGRAPHY
John Tonkin is a Sydney based media artist who has been working with new
media since 1985. In 1999-2000 he received a fellowship from the Australia
Council's New Media Arts Board. His work explores interactivity as a site for
physical and mental play. Recent projects have used real-time 3d animation,
visualisation and data-mapping technologies and custom built and
programmed electronics. His works have often involved building frameworks /
tools / toys within which the artwork is formed through the accumulated
interactions of its users. John currently lectures within the Digital Cultures Program,
at the University of Sydney and is undertaking a practice based PhD at COFA,
UNSW. His current research is around cybernetics, embodied cognition and
situated perception. He is building a number of nervous robots that embody
computational models of mind and responsive video environments that explore
situated models of perception.
JONDI KEANE
The Science of Our Own Fiction: Affective experiments enacted through creative
research
The impulse driving my arts practice has been to develop art as a mode of selfinvention
or self-modification by way of an ongoing experiment to inflect the
plasticity of the body-environment relationship. This creative inquiry focuses on
the relationship of the biology of self-organization to the affective system and the
lived-experience. For example, the gap and overlaps between body image
which “consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to
one’s own body” and body schema which is a “system of sensory-motor
capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual
monitoring” (Gallagher 2005: 24) highlights the artificial separation between
sensing and perceiving which artists are eager to rigorously explore as ‘the
science of our own fiction.’ Art, in this context, offers processes that reconfigure
the way we perceive, feel and think. This has far-reaching implications for the
way in which our daily activities shapes our physiology and allow us to ‘enacts’
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