On 2010-08-03, at 9:58 AM, Helgi Schweizer wrote: Diessen 3.8.2010
Dear Xin Wei.Reading on Posterous about your plans and suggestions for the coming years, I would like to bring up an old idea, which we never managed to tackle on an experimental basis. It might be, that your students and collaborators find interest in this somewhat spooky phenomenon. I am telling you this, because the idea relates to gestures and movements, especially writing movements. We have done some preparatory, pioneering work and gathered some experience, but all of this is very preliminary and vague.The topic I am talking about is joint drawing and writing. The central question is, does it happen, and when under what circumstances and preconditions? It all started many years ago when I watched two artists doing joint drawing as some kind of greeting ceremony.
Instead of handshaking they were drawing, both of them holding the pencil. I encountered this startling phenomenon again years later in the context of facilitated communication which is widely used in connection with the treatment of autism.The experiments can be conducted with relatively little technical effort.
For pilot studies it is sufficient just to have two participants a pencil and a piece of paper. The tricky part, I confess, is the psychological one. It is the same darn problem as with facilitated communication: which are the (psychological) prerequisits? It may work with some individuals and teams, but with other not. So far explanations are seemingly leading nowhere, although to some extent the degree of familiarity or sympathy may be an issue.The experimental setup should vary the physical and especially the sensory contact of the hands. Morover, it is of major interest to control the sensory connection of the two participants altogether. This can be done with little technical efforts, so for instance by having the two participants separated by a screen. (The party-game–version is to have more than two people grasping their hands in a box finding out whose hand they are holding – with and without face to face visual contact. An other funny variant form of this experiment is to jointly produce pieces of abstract art).The more philosophical - psychological basis refers to the question, to what extent our gestures and bodily movements are immediate, instantaneous (joint, mutual, shared...) common actions and to what extent or in what respect we should regard them as (coordinated) individual processes.
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We are going to document the performances and if you are interested I would be happy to send you some of our video recordings. I have already collected a plethora of ideas regarding dance, synchronicity and the perception of dance-movements. Unfortunately, most of these ideas require technical prerequisites that exceed our means. In addition, as usually, I have written a book –actually it is a collection of essays – on dance. This time with exercises.With best regards.Helgi