Embodied Intelligence
Embodied Intelligence celebrates the body as a container of solution, an archive of story, and a center of power to radically transform culture. Movement is the key to turning isolation and fear into communal joy and collective effervescence. It re-awakens our senses, re-attunes our connection to nature, and mitigates reliance on technologies that reject the body or perpetuate trauma. This shared future is tended by Heidi Boisvert, Sydney Skybetter, and Melissa Painter, who mobilize three independent, yet interdependent, movement research labs to experiment, share resources, nurture hubs of knowledge, and co-create speculative tools for social change. We believe that bodies are the last frontier of colonization in this time of surveillant emerging technologies, and consequently that there is deep need for a shared future to advocate against disembodiment and the offloading of our sensing and moving capabilities to machines. We view our relationship to our senses, and our body, as the most complex, and vital technology we’ll each ever own. Body knowledge, and collective shared movement rituals, have been important across history to architect a sense of well-being, health, communal connections, and interconnection of ecosystems inclusive of nature. Many of those inherent, intrinsic and intuitive connections have been cut-off by the very contemporary technologies purported to be in the service of such modes. Disembodiment, therefore, is a source of individual pain, suffering, numbing and communal disconnection. There is critical value in re-attuning ourselves to our bodies, and to one another. How do people learn their bodies over time? How do we preserve the instinctual body knowledge we come into the world with?
We seek to build a global movement to re-attune people with the body as a place of healing, strength and creative potential, to acquaint people with trust in their body, to counter commercial and technological forces that seek to colonize and control the body. How can the body be utilized to help people heal from collective grief, anxiety and trauma? We believe this requires exorcising the deeply embedded scripts we all carry in the nervous system. We seek to reach the broadest audience possible, professional (as research subjects), and non-professional movers. In the immediate future, post-COVID, however, this Shared Future has an immediate role to play. The social choreography of reentry will be challenging, and our movement patterns are going to be controlled. Contact tracing may be internalized into our bodies. These interventions will be fast, deep and toxic. In the face of this, there will be a need for new, positive, body-based healing and rituals.
Collaborators
Heidi Boisvert is an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist and academic researcher who interrogates the socio-cultural and neurobiological effects of media and technology.
Simply put, she studies the role of the body, the senses and emotion in human perception and social change. Boisvert is currently mapping the world’s first media genome, while taking great care with its ethical implications.
She founded futurePerfect lab, a creative agency and think-tank that works with social justice organizations to design playful emerging media campaigns to transform the public imagination. She also co-founded XTH, a company creating novel modes of expression through biotechnology and the human body.
Boisvert, who holds a Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from RPI, is the Director of Emerging Media Technology at CUNY, where she teaches. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Norman Lear Center, a research affiliate at MIT and a member of NEW INC.
Melissa Painter heads MAP Lab, a product invention and incubation studio for emergent technologies, and is the founder of Breakthru, a platform of immersive wellbeing experiences for the workplace powered by AI, spatial computing, and our bodies in motion. The work of both orgs focuses on body centric, movement driven wellbeing and learning experiences, seeking to use next gen tech as a moment where we can reframe our relationships to technology in a way that is healthier for individuals and society. She has twenty five years of experience in narrative design, content strategy, interaction design, movement, storytelling, both cinematic and live, and in leading large and small teams around creative collaboration. She is a pioneer in the mixed reality space, and an award-winning filmmaker and author. She holds a BA in Ancient Greek from Columbia University, and an MFA in film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Hailed by Dance Magazine as “One of the most influential people in dance today,” Sydney Skybetter’s choreography has been performed at such venues as The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Jacob’s Pillow, and The Joyce Theater. A sought-after speaker, he has lectured on the relationship of dance history to emerging surveillance technologies at Harvard , South by Southwest Interactive, Yale, Mozilla, and Stanford. He is a Public Humanities Fellow and Lecturer at Brown University where he researches the problematics of human computer interfaces and mixed reality systems. He has served as a Grant Panelist for the National Endowment of the Arts, is a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects, and is the winner of a RISCA Fellowship in Choreography from the State of Rhode Island. He received his MFA in Choreography from New York University.
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