For over 18 months, an interdisciplinary team formed by dancers, composers, engineers, researchers, theorists, performing and visual artists, among others, worked in an interdisciplinary project in order to create an interactive piece combining dance, sound and visuals based on the capture of physiological signals associated with emotions.

From the perspective of the project’s directors, this presentation will address the methodologies used in the different phases of Emovere; how the first questions and lines of work were set out in order to bring together the various disciplines involved; the development of an exploration phase in a laboratory setting in order to heuristically test various ideas, followed by the creation and composition phases where different decision-making forms were tested within a complex context. The project Emovere will be used as a case study in order to conduct a critical analysis of the creation process with an internal and post-facto vision. In addition, a reflection will be provided regarding the particular aspects of this project, along with methodologies that we consider transferable to other interdisciplinary works of similar nature.

Some of the aspects we are interested in discussing are the metaphors that emerge as ways of relating the material aspects of each discipline. In this context, the appearance of a specific vocabulary enabled communication with the work team while building the reality and direction of the creative process at the same time. On the other hand, we are interested in addressing iteration as a work methodology in research-creation processes. Finally, we will discuss the aesthetics emerging from an interactive process with physiological signals, where the control and lack of control of the artistic material comes into play.