Eidolon: a relational, embodied approach to practice-based research in art and technology

Abstract

The materials that form this PhD by Research Publications were published as a multimodal practice-based research project titled Eidolon. The PhD materials include a portfolio detailing a live immersive performance, an artist film installation, a virtual reality film, a fully illustrated monograph, a peer-reviewed journal article, and this critical review summarising the research methodology and contributions.

Developed over five years, the research employed an interdisciplinary, distributed dissemination strategy, with publications spanning from 2016 to 2018. The research has reached large and varied audiences through presentations at international exhibitions, conferences, and events.

Eidolon developed from an ongoing interest in the relational impact of technology on the body, relationships, and lived experiences, explored as a creative critique through digital media, performance art, and writing. The research reimagines our embodied and relational encounters with technology by engaging with art as an interdisciplinary research practice, undertaken in collaboration with NHS medics, technologists, professional performers, and the cultural sector. It uses creative practice as a means of critical inquiry into real-world concerns about current and near-future existence, reflecting upon the implications of our digital and technologically entangled lives.

The research addresses how creative practice can be used to examine how science and technology affect our relationship to and experiences of the body, each other, and the world. Here, by teasing out the emotional, physical, and psychological presence of humanlike patient manikins used in medical training.

The research examines performance art practice as a relational approach to investigate technological concerns in new ways, i.e., as an artist and creative practitioner, not as a roboticist, programmer, or engineer. Eidolon explores what new insights this can bring, not on the technicalities of science and technology, but its affective sociotechnical potential and implications. This is achieved by assembling a novel grouping of an artist-researcher, professional performers, medics, and technologists to provide new insights and experiences, sitting at a crossroads between the arts, public engagement, and academic research.

The research contributes to the fields of interdisciplinary and collaborative creative research practice, placing the artist at the intersection between art, science, and technology. Eidolon was undertaken through a mixed, emergent methodology that combines practice-based research with theory, grounded in philosophy and science and technology studies (STS), drawing from feminism, posthumanism, new materialism, and phenomenology. It extends previous work undertaken by artist-researchers within the context of science and medicine, adding a relational, embodied approach, drawn from participatory performance, collaborative, and digital art practice.