In our contemporary networked society, interaction increasingly takes place through wireless, social networked media. At the same time, public spaces turn into ‘smart environments’ that increasingly interact with electronically and digitally enhanced bodies. In contemporary network society encounters increasingly take place in systems that encompass people, communication devices, networks, and REs. Currently, mediated affective relationships are largely designed by corporately owned social networked media (Facebook, Google, e-mail, Twitter) and Res largely extract personal information from their users for commercial purposes.
These developments cause profound changes in the role of the body and physical presence since mediated presence leaves little or no room for touch, face to face encounters, and body language that are core components for the building of trust and reciprocity, which are in turn the foundations of social structures.
Research into how in a mediated and tele-present society bodily based experiences of presence, reciprocity, and trust can be generated, mediated and maintained is urgently needed.
TELE_TRUST is a critical and sensitive exploration in how we can intensify networked affective experiences in relation to the mediated body. It looks for new parameters for new forms of interaction, participatory systems and interfaces, in which the conditions for ‘trust’ can be recognized and acknowledged – or at least be differently perceived.
The TELE_TRUST project addresses the following questions:
_ What role does our body play in our perception of presence and reciprocity, and there for trust?
_ How can we create the experience of embodied face to face and touch contact, mediated by interfaces?
_ Which new parameters can be developed for ‘trust’ in mediated multi actor systems?
Theoretically TELE_TRUST reflects on the meaning and experience of mediated trust, focusing on the notions of presence and reciprocity. No longer a future mythical envisioned cyborg, [1], we have now internalized the use of mediated social communication. Mulder [2] describes how through the use of digital media communication a ‘body-less existence’ emerges, which creates a digital body awareness with a changing identity, connected with others through systems and networks. While touching is one of the most important means to create trust, electronic and digital media extend the presence of the body in space and time, but also prohibit touch. The networking gaze [3] isolates bodies from the physical public space and turns the online agora into a panoptical system – with a virtual guard [4]. How do human beings experience presence here as a basis for trust?
The second phase of this research explores three ways of establishing presence: natural presence, mediated presence and witnessed presence [5]. The role of the hybrid and tangible body will be looked at as part of a multi-actor system in which human beings and participatory systems interact. The theoretical context are media-theories on embodied perception and digital mediation, which explore the tendency of digital imaging to detach the viewer from an embodied, haptic sense of physical location and ‘being-there.’[6],[7].
In the artistic field, Lygia Clark [8] experimented with reciprocity on the basis of what she called ‘lived experience’ and ‘body knowledge’ with her audience - working with sensory perception and psychological interaction. In the same period artists like Dan Graham [9], Sophie Calle [10], Vito Acconci [11] artistically researched the ‘gaze’ and the ‘mediated body’.
In TELE_TRUST new insights, innovative technologies, and the human body meet to initiate and inspire (yet) unimaginable types of intersubjective engagement – defining new parameters for a hybrid, networking bodies’ trust.
[1] Donna Haraway: A Cyborg Manifesto, Socialist Review, 1985. [2] Arjen Mulder: Over mediatheorie. Taal, beeld, geluid, gedrag, 2004. [3] Paul Virilio: Art as Far as the Eye Can See, 2007. [4] Michel Fouceault: Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, 1975 [5] Caroline Nevejan: Presence and the design of trust, PHD dissertation University of Amsterdam, 2007. [6] William J. Mitchell: ME++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, 2003. [7] Mark B.N. Hansen: Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, 2006. [8] Lygia Clark, artist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lygia_Clark
