Photo courtesy of Daniel Landau
Israeli media artist and researcher Daniel Landau will deliver a lecture on the brain's representation of the body and lead the demonstration of an experiment that explores the boundaries of body, identity and self using virtual reality technology.
Tuesday, February 28, 20176:00 PM - 7:30 PMBroad Art Center, Room 1250
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts
For more information, call the Department of Design Media Arts at 310-825-9007. Parking information can be found here.
About the Event
"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. Filmed actress: Ruti Tamir | Light: Nadav Barnea Art: Shai Govhari | Producer: Shahar Marcus
About the Speaker
Daniel Landau is a media artist and researcher whose work resides in the intersection of art, technology and science. In his work, Landau explores the complex relationship between body and technology, tracing techno-political processes and their impact on social and private spaces.
Landau completed his second degree in music composition and new-media at the Royal Conservatory in the Netherlands where he lived and worked for nearly a decade. Between 2012-16 Daniel led the Media Studies department at the Midrasha Faculty of the Arts, Beit Berl Academic College in Israel. Currently, he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre, Herzliya. Landau is also the Co-founder and Director of oh-man, oh-machine - an art, science and technology platform that includes an international conference, workshops and a research lab. A native of Israel, he lives with his family in Tel Aviv.
Landau will be an artist in residence in the Department of Design Media Arts during Winter 2017. His residency at UCLA is sponsored by the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies with generous support from the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation and the Israel Institute's Schusterman Visiting Israeli Artist Program.
For additional information about the event, please download the flyer below:
Download file: Daniel-Landau-UCLA-Lecture-Flyer---2-28-17-nu-3g3.pdf
Sponsor(s): Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, Design | Media Arts