The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

researCh and the seLf

to characterize these moments as, for example, spectacle, participation or human story.
in relation to empathy, we try to find out which of the characters and planets the chil-
dren remembered and what they remembered about them. We ask the teachers about
their perceptions of all of these and also about learning styles. The techniques we use
include: staff observation during the show; staff questionnaires; children using video
diaries, video booths and the chatter- sphere; group discussions; and both before and
after the show the use of an interactive set of concentric circles mapping space from
home to planet with the children.

The impact of digital technology on our sense of our selves^2

Sara Giddens and Simon Jones

since 1997, through a series of intermedial collaborations with musicians, video and
sonic artists, Bodies in Flight have progressively interrogated the impact of digital
technologies on our sense of our selves and our inter- relationships with others, and
how those technologies can be used in performance to expose this intimate process of
incorporation into the human psyche – what Bodies in Flight call ‘second- naturing’.
This series of works has produced a sustained contemplation on contemporary
human experience as interstices in- between various discursive fields and their related
technologies. The following dialogue reflects on the series to date.

saRa giddens: i remember being somewhat fearful of working with technology.
understanding technology as that industrial, then analogue now digital, beast
resulting ultimately in all that heavy metal cluttering up the rehearsal rooms
exacerbated by the need to hump it about and then wait for it to start up, break
down and then start up again! Reassuringly, i could perceive that the body was
indeed a technology in amongst all those others, in fact i could see the body itself
as an assemblage of very practical, and multifarious and wondrous technologies. i
could hear the production of language itself as a technology, as an example of the
cleft cleaving as we called it. The natural and the learnt technology, of the tongue
and the co- ordination of its sixteen muscles all having to work consensually and
very hard, particularly in any Bodies in Flight show! over time the rehearsal
studio became a place to explore the different capacities of each technology, each
element, and each separate line of flight and of course inevitably the gaps in
between them.
simon Jones: in order to begin to unpack the density of the basic event- ness of
performance, so that audience- spectators could disentangle themselves from its
enveloping, white- hot interstices, we turned to Brecht. he had proposed in the
1920s a set of estrangements whereby the audience- spectators would be able to
put themselves as if at a distance from the events unfolding on stage. By opening
up the actual gaps both between and within media inherent in the theatrical
experience itself, Brecht intended to open up the possibilities of engagement. This
separation of the elements of performance was the basic aesthetic strategy we used
in Do the Wild Thing! We later discovered that it had opened up the pandora’s
Box of media in general, and the technologies that facilitated them, as a means of