Culture in multisensory computing: dividing the body for a digital future

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ways in which computer science and a selection of multisensory digital devices modulate the term culture. Three self-identified, ‘cultural computing’ devices are examined: ZENetic, Alice’s Adventures and GRIOT’S Japanese Renku. The devices variously configure relationships between bodies and culture so that the body is thought to provide a window into particular cultures, as well as a universal tool of their transmission. These delineations of the term culture occur in continuity with surrounding political histories and projects, including racial and ethnic ones. Dividing the body between the extra cultural and the culturally specific works to secure the communicability as well as the exclusivity of cultural practices. It is an instance of what Merleau-Ponty terms a divergence, a gap within the body between two imbricated parts. In this way, these devices present culture as a source of innovation that combats global and abstracted computing practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• multisensory computing
• body
• cultural computing
• Nakyota Tosa
• D F Harrell

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The devices examined here can be considered to be cultural heritage digital projects in that they involve communication and story-telling, digital capture and annotation of intangible culture, and the creation of new cultural experiences or artefacts (Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage, 2018).

2. Taxonomic methods model cultural group membership according to traits and averages, a practice that is problematic for numerous reasons, including its vulnerability to stereotype, inability to account for cultural hybridity and people’s different positioning within culture. For further development and criticism of the idea of postcolonial computing see Ali (2014).

3. Goun is a system of interaction between Buddhist teachers and pupils that characterises pupils in terms of the five aggregates: matter (body), sensation or feeling, perception and conception (object recognition), and ideas and volition (triggered by object), and consciousness of mind.

4. Research on the marketing of Japanese anime, video games and toys (for example, Iwabuchi, 2002; Allison, 2006) suggest that globally influential Japanese technological practices erase the difference between culture and technology.

5. Prior to World War two Japanese was not only depicted by the state as ethnically homogeneous and pure, but also as multi-ethnic mixed origins depending on political circumstances. During the interwar period, theories of diverse, mingling Asian origins dominated, since they could justify the goals of imperial expansion (Tai, 2003, p. 10).

6. Confucius Computer develops this relationship between race and culture in a related but differing fashion. It aims to teach Confucianism to young Singaporeans racially identified as Chinese to ensure their ‘Chineseness’ in the face of modernity (Cheok, Edirisinghe, & Karunanayaka, 2017).

7. The design follows the boredom promoting principles of sensory deprivation, monotony, prevention of drowsiness, lack of novelty and indeterminate waiting. A small rabbit hole is located behind the tree trunk, allowing participants to follow a large, talkative carbon-fibre white rabbit down its warren (via monorail).

8. Even when not explicitly addressed, race and ethnicity pervade Enlightenment thought and culture. It is now widely recognised that the concept of race and its hierarchies were developed by Enlightenment thinkers in the context of European colonial expansions (Eze, 1997). Immanuel Kant, the author of ‘What is Enlightenment,’ which is cited by the developers of ALICE’S Adventures, has been characterised as the ‘inventor of race’ (Bernasconi, 2001).

9. Dreyfus’s response to the work of Agre makes clear that he considered the argument that AI is Cartesian extends beyond representational approaches to all AI, including interactionist approaches (Dreyfus, 2007).

10. Harrell considers computing limited in its ability to capture important dimensions of human experience, writing ‘Computation must exhibit humility about its limitations for capturing the elusive world of human imagination with its blurry boundaries between the conscious and unconscious aspects of meaning, between clearly expressible discourse and affect, between sensory perception and mental imagery’ (2009).

11. In contrast to my point that conceptual metaphor theory cannot avoid attributing some universal processes to the body and so entails some overlooking of embodied diversity, Hayles suggests that asserting that bodies are physically various and differently marked bodies provides further support for the view that embodiment is encoded into language through metaphoric networks (2008, p. 206).

12. Dourish suggests that flexibility and relationality could be captured in ‘subjected oriented programming’ and ‘the use of predicate classes so that an object is dependent on context’ (2010, pp. 97–99).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erika Kerruish

Erika Kerruish lectures in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University. Her research includes the cultural dimensions of multisensory computing and robotics, sensory studies and aesthetics.