Faculty of Art

Integrated Media

Elliott Larson-Gillmore

Notes Towards Solicitation and Gui(dance) in Movement

To what degree is the kinaesthetic body both a free and constrained field of movement-potential? I approach the kinaesthetic body as at once responsible and responsive, guiding and guided, in movement. Having not only sensations of movement in the act (I feel my arm moving as it moves) but also a basic faculty of movement with known and unknown potentials the kinaesthetic body does not assume an objectified, cognitive, and synthetic system of systems “body”, but rather assumes a Merleau-Pontian “flesh”, which is at once intelligent and naive and is the absolute indifference between body and world, subject and object, sensation and the sensible. This non-dualism is where life as a thick-tissued thing may appear, and where certain artists and phenomenologists have already begun to work. This text is an exercise in phenomenological philosophy more so than phenomenology as a lived and embodied, investigative methodological attitude. I draw from texts by Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, as well as Karen Barad, Hubert Dreyfus, artists Casilda Sanche and STELARC, cognitive neuroscience, and the rubber hand illusion.