DANIEL LANDAU – TIME-BODY STUDY / PERFORMATIVE EXPERIMENT
UCLA GAME LAB LECTURER
February 28, 2017, 6:00 pm
“Time-Body Study” is a performative experiment created by media artist and researcher Daniel Landau exploring the boundaries of body, identity and self using virtual reality technology. This live event includes a lecture and demonstration of an experiment where a participant, wearing a virtual reality head-mounted display (HMD), is re-embodied in the body of a 7, 40 and 80 year old person.
Inspired by the classic Rubber Hand Illusion (Botvinick & Cohen 1998) and the work of Prof. Mel Slater (Barcelona University), The Time-Body Study creates the re-embodiment illusion by having a participant see his virtual hands being touched in the virtual space while, simultaneously and in perfect sync, his real hands are being touched, by a live performer. Both Botvinick and Slater’s experiments used this mechanism to demonstrate how easy it is to manipulate our body representation so that a subject can experience a rubber or virtual hand as his own.
In “Time-Body Study,” Daniel Landau adds narrative layers to the re-embodiment experience in an attempt to explore this cognitive mechanism on an emotional level. The audience get to see both the participant’s view of the virtual body (projected onto a large screen) and the live performer’s interactions. This gives the audience a unique view of the experiment demonstrating how the human body is effectively an evolving medium subjected to it’s technological environment.
Daniel Landau – a media artist and researcher. He completed his second degree in music composition and new-media at the Royal Conservatory in The Netherlands where he lived and worked for close to a decade. Daniel’s work resides in the intersection of Art, Technology and Science – exploring the complex relationship between body and technology. Core to his work is the attempt to trace techno-political processes and their impact on social and private spaces.
Daniel Landau’s residency is made possible by the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, the Phillip and Muriel Berman Foundation, and the Israel Institute’s Schusterman Visiting Israeli Artist Program.
