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Arts & Communication Digital somatic arts: Choreographing autonomy

We can see that this evolution of the physical body— develop with their environment, I get them to distinguish
corporality—under the effect of various destabilizations between the first sensation when they are in pain or losing
caused by technology, will give rise to specific corporealities, mobility, comparing it with the new sensation when they
that is, to different states of body experience. This will create are exploring another movement or posture option in
other forms of embodiment, as an act of integration of the learning, for example. In this process, I therefore see the
technological environment. From this multimodal dynamic, absolute necessity of rebuilding trust in the information
we can see the new status of the contemporary body. Here, their sensations give them.
technology must be subordinated to the aesthetic level, in The need for trust in the information that sensations
the etymological sense that aesthetics is our ability to renew give us is partly explained by the fact that one of the
our way of feeling and perceiving, of understanding through major problems widely identified in Western thought is
sensation. Given that sensation is one of the first pieces the devaluation of the body. The dualism, the mind–body
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of information we receive from the world, this sensation divide, which is one of the main sources of this devaluation,
that enters the body’s interiority will be interpreted—in its has resulted in the exclusion of bodily intelligence
reorganization—and create new perception. If we take up from the structure of knowledge. This means that the
the main elements of somatic intelligence, i.e., it increases academic research communities, which tend to value
the skills associated with the senses, with perception, and only objectivity, have largely recognized only one type of
with the relationship between the body’s interiority and
its exteriority (including the technological environment), intelligence, namely the logical-mathematical capacity,
we can observe the consequences at the cognitive level. linked, in particular, to language. Bodily intelligences,
By modifying the body’s sensory cues, we modify the way rooted in becoming and action, stemming from the Greek
concept of Metis (flair, sagacity, and resourcefulness),
we think and organize. By introducing a different way of
feeling and perceiving the world—of understanding and intuition, and empathy, for example, have been dismissed
creating in the broadest sense—knowledge is reorganized as non-knowledge and excluded from Greek philosophical
as it becomes multimodal. thought since the fifth century. This radical dichotomy
between the intelligible and the sensible is thus part of the
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As we open ourselves up to experimentation with this logic of fixity in classical ontology that underpins Western
somatic awareness and knowledge, we observe the creation thought. 34
of new perceptual modes, specific to this century, as well
as multimodal and synesthetic modes of composition Two of the three main lines of research in this article
and understanding. Aesthetics is once again an event that are the notion of revalorizing bodily intelligences and
concerns the body and perception, etymologically speaking, an embodied approach to aesthetics, as sensation is
a form of knowledge, activated and renewed by the senses treated here as knowledge. Note that the choice to retain
and the development of our ability to perceive. Aesthetics certain terminologies in English is deliberate, as these do
is a form of knowledge that comes through perception and not carry the mind–body divide found in their French
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sensory experience. The positive results of the experiments translations (e.g., incarnation). Bodily intelligence
in this trial are one of the outcomes of this openness and our was identified by Gardner in his book Frames of Mind:
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ability to adapt. In this approach, practitioner Germain, also The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. One of its forms of
an artist, became a researcher, and it includes the research expression is somatic intelligence, constituting a modality
she carried out on her own body (as a choreographer, dancer, of bodily experience, a form of embodied knowledge that
and Feldenkrais practitioner). Indeed, the knowledge she can be described, and acts as an enhanced ability to feel,
acquired partly explains how she can pass this on to her perceive, and connect. The syntagm “somatic intelligence”
students. The body here is the laboratory of experience, a highlights the relationship between the Greek root of the
laboratory that becomes a context of research and creation, word sõma—body as a whole, leading to the key concept
of innovation, where we have adopted an experiential of the integrative body–mind relationship that promotes
approach to technology, and where this technology must the abolition of dualism—with that of the aesthetic word:
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be lived to be understood; it must be embodied. aisthesthai (to feel, sense, and discern), aesthesis, aisthêtikos
(the faculty of perceiving or understanding), and aisthêsis
7. Conclusion: Sensory authority and the (sensation). 60,61 Thomas Hanna, an American philosopher-
revaluation of bodily intelligence teacher and founder of the field of somatics, offers a
modern interpretation of sõma: “Sõma, does not mean
Germain explains: ‘body’: it means ‘Me, the bodily being.’” 62(pp35-36) Hanna
So, in the dialog I initiate and create with my students, presents sõma as being a body, the body in all its sensitive,
which they initiate with themselves and which also vital, and expansive qualities and thus in its potentiality:

Volume 3 Issue 3 (2025) 10 doi: 10.36922/ac.4477