Merleau-Ponty and Embodied Cognitive Science

What would the Merleau-Ponty of Phenomenology of Perception have thought of the use of his phenomenology in the cognitive sciences? This question raises the issue of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the relationship between the sciences and philosophy, and of what he took the philosophical significance of his phenomenology to be. In this article I suggest an answer to this question through a discussion of certain claims made in connection to the “post-cognitivist” approach to cognitive science by Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun Gallagher and Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. I suggest that these claims are indicative of an appropriation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought that he would have welcomed as innovative science. Despite this, I argue that he would have viewed this use of his work as potentially occluding the full philosophical significance that he believed his phenomenological investigations to contain.

Duet: Improvising spatial dialogues with an artificially intelligent agent

This paper presents an experimental framework for a virtual reality artwork, Duet, that employs a combination of live, full body motion capture and Oculus Rift HMD to construct an experience through which a human User can spatially interact with an artificially intelligent Agent. The project explores conceptual notions of embodied knowledge transfer, shared poetics of movement and distortions of the body schema. Within this context, both the User and the Agent become performers, constructing an intimate and spontaneously generated proximal space. The project generates a visualization of the relationship between the User and the Agent without the context of a fixed VR landscape or architecture. The Agent's ability to retain and accumulate movement knowledge in a way that mimics human learning transforms an interactive experience into a collaborative one. The virtual representation of both performers is distorted and amplified in a dynamic manner, enhancing the potential for creative dialogue between the Agent and the User.

Uomo universale : the imaginary relation between body and mathematic(s) in architecture

What is the role of the human figure in the drawing of the uomo universale? Interlocked with the “master architect” as a constituent component of the canonical bodies of architecture, is the idea of the uomo universale, the universal man, an idea that was especially compelling to Renaissance masters. In contemporary social theory the uomo universale is read for its generic sense as the “universal subject”. Critical to this is a dialectical sense in which “man” confronts its non-neutral association with a gender specificity, either man or woman. This paper looks at the drawing and image of the uomo universale and explores the distinction between presence and representation, between the visibility of the image, its content and detail and the symbolic role of the image as constitutive of a canon of architecture. Though we are not meant to “see” the human figure as corporeal presence and rather focus our attention on the image as a geometric schema, my argument is that only through the figure is the uomo universale engendered as an image of the highest form of nature.