Ozgun Kilic Afsar
MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
We present a novel intercorporeal experience – an intersubjective haptic voice. Through an autobiographical design inquiry, based on singing techniques from the classical opera tradition, we created Corsetto, a kinesthetic garment for transferring somatic reminiscents of vocal experience from an expert singer to a listener. We then composed haptic gestures enacted in the Corsetto, emulating upper-body movements of the live singer performing a piece by Morton Feldman named Three Voices. The gestures in the Corsetto added a haptics-based ‘fourth voice’ to the immersive opera performance. Finally, we invited audiences who were asked to wear Corsetto during live performances. Afterwards they engaged in micro-phenomenological interviews. The analysis revealed how the Corsetto managed to bridge inner and outer bodily sensations, creating a feeling of a shared intercorporeal experience, dissolving boundaries between listener, singer and performance. We propose that ‘intersubjective haptics’ can be a generative medium not only for singing performances, but other possible intersubjective experiences.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581294
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2023.acm.org/)