I think a lot of what I was experiencing or maybe even paying attention to was… I was noticing moments when I felt power or lack thereof and how that was being affected by the interface. I kept noticing that there was a conflict for me between how learned a specific way of interfacing through my body and…

I’m very much trained in dance. I anchor myself and orient myself through what I’m sensing. Then that sensing generally becomes an impulse that I can guide and direct. Having something limit that, which is not what I think this device was intended to do, but it sort of, it did.. it did. You know, it opened up some sorts of exploration and closed off others. I kept feeling that tension between wanting to do what I wanted to do and somehow being inhibited or in some ways how the inhibition would enable other things.

I was experiencing a lot of dealing with that conflict and deciding which impulses to override and how that would… hmmm it’s difficult to articulate.

Yeah.

…and how overriding some impulses would then affect the next choice that was made. There was a series of feedback that was happening that, depending on my level of discomfort in a moment, with whatever consequences that I was dealing with as a result of my choice. I would then feel moved in another direction. So it was interesting just balancing. Yeah.

Tell me about how you think it dealt with your experience in movement and how you battled between using your body in a traditional way, that you’re comfortable with and then dealing with the sight.

I felt responsible for the visual environment and sometimes I needed the visual environment, but more often than not, I ended leaning toward one or the other. I would either be moving and ignoring the images, just having them be a backdrop so that I could see what it was like to move in this way with a suit on. Or I would not really be paying attention to myself, my projected image of myself visually.

I wouldn’t be paying attention to how I’m choreographing my body because I would be choreographing images. I kept trying to bridge those two things. How I was seeing and how I was seeing myself… using my body to see. It was really difficult for me to find a way to bridge that and that’s the area where I feel compelled to work. To find a way that makes both of those things interesting or attended to in a way.

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