CogNovo research fellow Klara Łucznik presents her work at the annual conference organised by the society for Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB2016). The conference will be held at the University of Sheffield from 4th to 6th of April 2016. Klara will give the talk "Between minds and bodies: Some insights about creativity from dance improvisation" on 5/4 at 2pm as part of the symposium Embodied Cognition, Acting and Performance.
In our research, the four branches of radical cognitive science—embodied, embedded, enactive and ecological—dialogue with performance, with particular focus on post-cognitivist approaches to understanding the embodied mind-in-society; de-emphasising the computational and representational metaphors; and embracing new conceptualisations grounded on the dynamic interactions of “brain, body and world”. Radical cognitive science reaches out to areas of scholarship also explored in the fields of performance practice and training as we aim to facilitate a new inter- and transdisciplinary discourse in which to jointly share and explore common reactions of embodied approaches to the lived mind.
(from https://www.sheffieldrobotics.ac.uk/conferences/aisb-2016/)
In Klara Łucznik's research, she adapts improvisational scores as a laboratory into group creativity. She uses a video-stimulated recall method, which asks dancers to reflect upon their own processes just after completing the score, to explore the interdependency between meta-cognitive strategies such as imagery and sense awareness, group processes, the role of others in one's own creative processes, and interactions between bodies and with the environment. As a result, she describes how dancers build together a common improvisational space, which allows them to co-create and share their ideas mostly in non-verbal, non-propositional ways. Using excerptions for dancers' reports, she argues that, a group creative process is not a sum of individual creative ideas that are transformed by a group, but rather it is highly interactive practice that mostly focuses on supporting the actions of others. Therefore, the agency of such processes is shared and it is rather the process of creative collaboration, and co-creation of the work, that emerges in a shared creative space. She also discusses the medium of the body and the embodied response as central of dance improvisation practice.