The issue of practice as a means of recognizing and grasping the significance of embodied habitation of human environments, natural or artificial, social and cultural, is a seminal concern for a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The proposal is for a cross-disciplinary engagement with this and related issues in the light of frontier technological explorations.

The big picture

The dynamism of form is something to which millennia of cultural production testifies, and something which the interaction of technology and culture in the past century has massively accelerated. The challenge is to devise technological platforms both to map and to stimulate the dynamism of forms as features of contemporary social and cultural practice, in contexts where the already highly flexible category of the everyday is very significantly extended through the universalization of access to cutting edge media and social channels. 

The work needed

To devise technological environments and tools through which to map and understand transformations in embodied practice.

The opportunity

Form is an aesthetic, sociological and anthropological category; as such, it facilitates cutting-edge transdisciplinary work. A project along these lines also has the potential to stimulate collaborative work connecting cultural analysis to developments in cognitive science, and also can shape engagement in the issue of the sustainability of cultural practices, including immaterial practice.