Watch this! Recent developments and future challenges

On three different screens, three faces are shown, seemingly still, yet moving. Seeing the minimal facial twitches and eye movements is intriguing: What goes on in their minds? What are they looking at? Why do they respond in certain ways? Through earphones, breathing, footsteps, swooshing and cracking noises are audible. For short moments, the gallery audience is also shown snippets of a dance performance: Double Points by the choreographer/dancer Rosie Kay, slowly resolving the mystery: these are the faces of a dance audience. The video-sound installation allows gallery audience to immerse into the bodies and minds of dance spectators - in some ways taking on the role of the researcher. The artwork was inspired by the research on the AHRC funded project "Watching Dance: Kinaesthetic Empathy" (2008-2011). The dance performance by Kay was employed to study spectators’ neurophysiological and emotional responses to watching dance (Jola, Pollick, & Calvo-Merino, 2014; Reason, Jola, Kay et al., in print). As the post-doc on the project with a background in cognitive neuroscience and dance, it was important for me to emphasise the missing link between what is accessible from the outside and the spectators’ invisible neuronal processes, two parts that were situated at the core of the interdisciplinary research project combining neuroscience and audience research. The installation was selected for exhibition at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool in 2010, as part of the Moves Festival and it is still targeting prevailing questions on the intriguing links between embodied aesthetic experiences and experimental research.