articulations@tate:results

Articulations @ Tate Modern

22-23 June 2019

Part of the “Moving Humans” event

1. A general presentation of the event:

2. Analysis of experiential questionnaires:

After the movement experience/experiment, each participant completed a short questionnaire. After being asked to provide basic demographic data, they were presented with 17 assertions regarding the experience (ex. : “I found this visual and silent space very alluring”) and were asked to indicate on a scale of 0-6 their adherence or agreement with the assertion (0=not at all, 6 =perfect match). The assertions were formulated based on written (open) questionnaires that we collected in April in Paris and based on the research hypotheses of the group.

We used an exploratory factor analysis to identify patterns in the responses across subjects . The weighting of the two factors can be found in the table below:

Factor one seems to index engagement or adherence to the experience. Factor two might be related to the person’s degree of connection with their partner. We are now investigating relations between these factors and other dimensions of the experience/experiment (movement parameters, intra-dyad correlations…).

3. In depth dyadic interviews:

After stepping out of «the world of balls », as one participant named it, participants were invited to spend a few minutes in a still VR environment voicing their experiences. This phenomenological momentum was taken into in-depth interviews where both participants in dialogue would engage in sense-making. Preliminary familiarization with these data opened analytic windows into how narrating the virtual movement impacts both movement experience and connection with the other; how collective creativity can be a mode of non-hierarchical learning, complex listening, and paying attention; how the boundaries of human-nonhuman/mine-theirs/big-small/light-heavy have a potential for rearrangement.

4. Quantitative analysis of motion data:

In one of the protocols dyads experimented three ‘scenes’:

Moving with a partner facing a large mirror (spheres of the two partners have the same color)
Moving with a partner facing a large mirror (spheres of the two partners have different colors)
Moving with a partner without a mirror

Mirror condition:

no mirror condition:

Our hypothesis was that the presence of a mirror will increase coordination between the two movers. Furthermore we hypothesized that when both dancers are represented in the same color, they will exhibit (and experience) more jointness (togetherness), as if they were making one body.

In the preliminary analysis of the motion data we looked at overall quantity of motion for all subjects, comparing the three conditions and the relative velocity of the two movers (how similar is their velocity) for each dyad for each condition.

results:

When participants could see each other in a mirror, they were moving laterally (as operationalized by horizontal head movements) to a larger extent when the same color was used to represent the spheres of their respective bodies than when different colors were used for each of the participants (p<.01). The privileged hypothesis is that they had to use more ample movements in order not only to differentiate themselves from each other, but also to create interpersonal pattern they could have a grasp on.

2) When partners were represented by spheres of different colors, they matched each other’s velocity of lateral displacements more closely than when their spheres were of the same color (p<.01). This might be due to the fact that, again, that they had to move more differently to differentiate themselves from each other.

These two results suggest that rather than enhancing ‘togetherness’ the identical coloring of the spheres brought about strategies to enhance the distinguishability between the respective spheres of the partners (I-agency over we-agency).

We also correlated the movement patterns in the different conditions with the subjective experience of participants as reported in the questionnaires.

Results:

3. The more participants were in agreement with the proposition « When we could see our spheres in the mirror I felt as if we were moving as one », the closer their respective velocity of lateral (head) displacements were, but that was true only in the conditions where they was an actual mirror (r=-.73, p<.01 ; r=-.74, p<.01), and not in the baseline condition where they wasn’t any (r=-.22 , p=.51).

4. The more participants agreed on that they were « not paying attention to the reflection of our movements in the mirror », the more the velocity of their lateral (head) displacements were different from their partner, although this was not statistically significant when their spheres were of the same color (r=.44, p=.17), and a only a tendency when the spheres were of different colors (r=.53,p=.09). When there was no mirror, their relative velocity had no relation with their agreement to that statement (r=.05,p=.88).