Who’s zoomin’ who
Take another look, and tell me, babe.
aretha franklin
In 1985, Aretha Franklin recorded the hit song “Who’s Zoomin’ Who.” Thirty-five years later, social gatherings, work, fitness classes, and even the arts groped, sometimes blindly, for connection on Zoom, which claims to be a “frictionless communications platform … that started with video as its foundation.”1 Given the glitchiness and instability of real-time internet connections, starts, stops, random freezing, and sped-up sections create a temporal disjunction that marks the experience as different from communication in real life (irl), in shared physical space. Further, the glowing bit-timed body parts displayed on screen with face touch-ups and filters circulate the simulacra of self-ness, such that an onscreen human is in fact a hyperreal avatar through which and with which people communicate. The real-time mimetic digital transposition feeds back into my performance of self, reifying the “phantom ego” explored by Nidesh Lawtoo.2 This chapter leans into the affective spacio-temporalities of online embodiment practice, the embodied posthumanisms proposed by Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti, and the mimetic turn.3 It contributes to research into “hypermimesis” by considering the feedback loops of real-time
In early 2020, I began experimenting with how to open possibilities for a felt sense of group belonging online in the face of isolation and distancing protocols that arose around the globe with the rise and spread of covid-19. I was not alone. As somatic practices and classes moved out of studios, classrooms, and therapeutic settings to Zoom rooms online, embodiment teachers and practitioners were challenged to move differently toward and away from established sensate experiences of relationship in space and time. This mindful somatic investigation of intimacy and affect cascades in the digital divide brings a new dimension to conceptions of “the mimetic unconscious” and the subject in the Anthropocene.5 How does a somatic lens of mindful movement inflect the mimetic hypothesis? Embodied philosophy attends to different weights and densities even as it affirms and corresponds to both embodied posthumanism and developments in theoretical and experimental neuroscience. It takes seriously the fact of kinetic bodily knowledge, and that this knowledge is not translatable into language. Writer, researcher, subject, participants, and reader alike participate in a hybrid unfolding and inquiry—an uncontained sharing.
A brief description of embodiment and Open Floor movement practice (ofmp) situates my research question and methodology. The first half of the analysis is given to research informed by somatic and narrative arts. In the second half, I incorporate some socio-psychological and neuroscientific frames that offer insight into the experiment, including trauma theory, the social
Embodiment is a disruptive political act and mobilization of both mimetic and posthuman theory. It is not just a question of having or being a body, but the action of being moving with awareness of pattern, change, sensation, and impulse. Dance philosopher Kimerer MaMothe writes, “At some level humans are always already participating in this rhythm of bodily becoming. To dance—is to do so in ways that cultivate a sensory awareness of our participation in it.”6 Dance is the medium of inquiry for this research. The sensory awareness of our participation in habituation and choice is, I argue, the condition of posthuman becoming. To this aware participation, LaMothe ascribes our “ecokinetic” emergence,7 which is a supplement to both Katherine Hayles’ reminder of the posthuman body of information,8 as well as to Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman “zoe-geo-techno assemblage,”9 which makes non-human life, locality, and techno-entities matter in a non-hierarchical manner. The somatic experience of dance is ephemeral and temporally contingent. Attending to dance in LaMothe’s sense asks that we practice awareness of, and participate with awareness in, the flow of time as movement. The physical temporal phenomenon of being movement augments Lawtoo’s mimetic hypothesis pathos/logos, or “patho(-)logies,”10 understood as both pathologies and critical discourses (or logoi) on mimetic and embodied affects (pathos). Using a somatic lens, we recognize a (somewhat less elegant) mimetic threesome: pathos/logos/kineticos.
Belonging in the digital divide emerged as a simple requirement—a backdrop for doing ofmp online. ofmp develops embodied resources that support participation in the world by enabling response over reaction. The Open Floor International think tank identified simple in vivo patterns that, when practiced, cue practitioners to multimodal activity occurring both within and between bodies. A practice of becoming sensitive—sensible in French, sense-able—to interoception, proprioception, neuroception, and affect cascades, embodiment orients through feedback loops. We take seriously the sensing,
In contrast to my past various experiences of group work with others who were all in the same room, the Zoom experience fell short in many ways. For example, when I chose to mimic a particular person in this exercise, they would likely be unaware that I had just centered on them alone; I sensed that the interpersonal connections at such a Zoom gathering were comparatively weak.13
The felt sense of in-person connection enables a sense of community and belonging, which is to say, the difference and similarity that allow us to feel, at varying distances, intimacy with the group body.
From the question of “what might embodiment practice online be,” there arose an inquiry about people’s experience of a felt sense of “we” online. At times, participants reported or commented on an immediacy and intimacy to certain experiences that was unprecedented. To what were they belonging in those moments of connection? And how might I understand their experience? To find out more, I chose a simple hand mirroring dance that has several variations and repeated it with a variety of different groups. Over a period of several months, I had done it with about seventy people. I collected feedback about the experience in situ verbally during classes, invited people to write about it and share their writings with me, recorded group discussions, and, knowing that other teachers were similarly negotiating how to achieve embodiment practice online, reached out to my teaching community to talk to others who were using similar exercise variations. Participants in the exercise were usually at their home or someone else’s; always on Zoom; sometimes in the same cities and at other times in different continents, time zones, seasons, and climates; and sometimes spoke different languages. They were friends and strangers, members of the population at large that self-enroll in online therapeutic and
There are several variations of the exercise, all of which are done either with partners or with the whole group. With small groups, the “gallery view” can be on, such that partnerships are ensconced in a varying field of mirrored movements. With larger groups, participants “pin” partners so that each dominates the screen for the other, even while several other windows showing other participants as well as themselves remain on screen. One paired version of the exercise has one partner leading the other in a mirrored hand dance and, after a minute, they are invited to switch leadership. Over a period of ten minutes, the leading and following roles switch several times until the dance becomes a mutually engaged event of fluid co-creation. In this co-creative piece, each partner has become highly attuned to the other as well as to the self, attentively listening/following/offering in minute detail, and consistently engaged in a nonverbal negotiation of suggestion and reception. A simpler version has one partner leading a whole dance, and then the other partner doing the same. The group variation I use most invites each individual to find a simple hand movement repetition that holds some substance for them and to share it by turning toward the group through the screen. The instructions are then to notice the repetitions of others and, in your own time, to join another’s repetition. For a duration of 10 minutes, people follow, leave, create, and join repetitions at will. A simpler version invites people to pause their repetition as soon as they see that someone else has paused and to continue it as soon as they see someone has begun moving again. I have played with these exercises by both priming emotion and entering the repetition practice without any kind of emotive suggestion. Priming can take the form of substantiating awareness of sensations in the hands through a mindfulness practice, or by calling up sensate memories of, for instance, what hands have touched over a lifetime or what they long to touch when in lockdown.
The goal of these exercises is to open up the possibility of neurological coregulation through a felt sense of connection and community in the digital divide. Although this research was carried out in the context of a global pandemic, its implications are important for the mental and physical health consequences of loneliness assailing growing populations, particularly the aging and those who grew up in the hand-held digital age. These goals are experientially rooted in both the individual and the group. They also rely on the digital platform that connects and separates us in space and time. At this technological juncture, Zoom is filled with temporal glitches that freeze and speed. This glitchiness shifts us further out of the human time of shared physical space, because as
When doing connection work in person, we are working with three spaces: the first person, the second person, and the third space that opens between them. Connection work is a means of sensing and noticing patterns in the social-brain-body-environment assemblage. If we accept that the mirror neuron system neither distinguishes a more real or original instance, nor does it partake of simulacra, then the social and more-than-human resonance of movement is the subject prior to individuation. We are always in it, but can also turn toward it. Two people face one another and do a mirroring hand dance. In this mimetic exploration, I’m facing you in a shared physical space: I see the back of my hand, your palm/hand, and you following. In a Zoom room, however, I have my self view on because I don’t have sufficient proprioception to know when I am in or out of the Zoom window. So I might see the back of my hand, but I am looking at the palm of my hand in the mirror image of myself in my zoom window. I am also looking at you mirroring my movement. Then there is an additional disconnect of missed contact since the camera is not the screen. Neither of us is looking at or meeting the eyes of the other. Visually, the gaze of the other is always askew and diverted downward, which in western Anglo culture insinuates social information about a lack of confidence, sincerity, and comfort. The real-time onscreen environment multiplies mimetic loops beyond the third space and creates a lot of feedback noise. This is the realm that Nidesh Lawtoo calls “hypermimesis,”15 and it sets internalized feedback loops into overdrive: from habits of thought and emotive state to patterns of connecting with an other, to my performance of self as both same and other, to the complex negotiation of both leading and following well, to the affective contagion of play and vulnerability that are risked in this kind of exchange.
This hand movement exercise was my first experience of this type. It was brand new and there were surprises at each turn. I dwelt at times in total self-absorption, since I was amusing myself with the new tricks I was finding. Regularly I would remind myself that I was part of a group exercise and at those times I would scan the screen to pick a person and a movement that I could mimic. While my arms and fingers were being activated with a physical workout, I was simultaneously titrating the degree I would allow an other’s dance to influence me. It was a joyous exercise because I could go wherever I wanted to, it was not complex, it offered surprises and it was easy.16
But then, if you have the clear response of the emotional [sic] that comes on, like, the laughter or just the, I don’t know sometimes the confusion, or whatever that is, it is clearly shared, but on top of that we are sharing something very clear together, then it’s like, oh we are together, like, it is
reciprocal. Which sometimes online I have a hard time with, cuz it’s like, are you laughing at me, or are you laughing with this person? and yea, it’s really difficult. But that was really clear—or it felt clear.19
For D, the multiple layers of hypermimesis, mirroring, and affect seem to create an alternate pathway to connection that can contend with the discontinuities of uncertain emotional congruence and missed sight lines. There is a resonance for D that even makes confusion a sign of mutual connection. D was born into the digital world and worked creatively online during the pandemic. She noticed the different condition of the assemblage when the platform was intentionally charged and included as a mediating space. A successful felt sense of online connection requires multiple and layered feedback loops. In the conclusion to her chapter on subjectivity, Braidotti writes that “Posthuman subjectivity is a practical project. It is a praxis.”20 That praxis is both intentional and strategic. It is an aware mobilization of theory in vivo. We need to learn how to put the conditions into play, as well as how to navigate them. To be theory in action, the practical project that is posthuman subjectivity requires a radically visible enactment, rather than an assumption that abandons it to transparency.
The play of mirroring simply by hand movements was unexpectedly deeply profound. At first, it felt hand puppet-like. Joyous smiles and miming as we found our own rhythm together. After playing with shapes and hand gestures, I think I made the first move; to touch my own face—allowing an invitation to her to follow, in touching hers. And then time and distance dissolved. I was not only hugging, holding, and caressing my dear friend—but she [was doing the same] to me as well. It was so beautiful and it brought tears of joy and sorrow, reverence and gratitude. It’s an exercise, a moment, that will be with me forever.21
This is how I understand Braidotti’s naming of the “non-linearity of posthuman time [that] echoes [with] the non-unitary, multiple and heterogeneous sense of space.”22 It partakes of a “pathos of
To address risk and its degree in this dance, I want to remember Hayles’s insights on incorporating and inscription processes in How We Became Posthuman in order to supplement my analysis with a somatic intervention into linguistic linearity. Echoing Connerton, Hayles writes that “the meaning of a bodily practice ‘cannot be reduced to a sign which exists on a separate “level” outside the immediate sphere of the body’s acts.’”25 I therefore invite you, Reader, to risk a little by bringing your awareness to physical sensations in your own body just as it is now. How might you shift your weight to invite more ease where you are? What movements can you make right now that will soften or release tension? Together, these words, the sensations you are aware of, and some movement, enact emergent knowledge that is uncertain, dependent, and vulnerable.
Invite awareness to your breath. Sometimes it helps to close your eyes when turning within. So if it feels comfortable, read the next two paragraphs first, and then pause to do some somatic practice in the echo of written language. You don’t need to change anything; just notice. How does your body move passively as you breathe? Are you aware of a rise and fall of the chest or shoulders? An expansion and release of the sides and back? The out and in of the belly as the diaphragm works to inhale and release? Do you feel air on your upper lip? In your nasal passageways or your lungs? Is there rigidity here in the invitation to turn toward breath? There is no right or wrong sensation. A somatic
How generous can you be with your intention and attention to this somatic investigation? Do you rush past this section toward less formless information: toward consumption and utility? Why do this somatic material all, beyond reading and imagining it, or half-heartedly doing half of it along the way? If you’ve been reading, now is the time to pause, breathe, and give a few minutes to this simple movement practice.
Embodiment practice contributes to this somatically informed research because inscription and incorporation processes differ, and the latter “cannot be reduced to a sign … outside the immediate sphere of the body’s acts.”26 If you gave the exploration enough time and curiosity to pass beyond the initial awkwardness, judgment, hurrying, and self-consciousness, did you notice any activation or settling that occurred? Perhaps a momentary “de-acceleration”?27 It doesn’t have to make sense. This is not the “level” of logos.28 Notice if you felt safe enough to be vulnerable in the unspoken. How did you take this dance of the breath’s feedback loop in? This is how you are right now. As you complete the process, shake your hands out or let them connect to one another or to your body where you can feel the rise and fall of breath. Maybe there is gratitude for having been met where and how you are.
Written words and the embodied exploration of breath with hand movements, sight, and pause offer supplementary knowledges. To transcribe the felt sense of somatic experience is to miss what opens there, particularly when it is uncertain and doesn’t have a name that contains/tames it. I speak about risk and “safe enough” because as soon as we are in the practice of embodiment, we become susceptible to the affect cascades of emotion, memory, and trauma that inhabit body parts and patterns. In the free play of movement, it is possible to apprehend and/or be surprised by what gets released to consciousness in the process of a breath, of moving an elbow, or of noticing echoes shaped in a squat. Braidotti’s ethical posthuman transversal subject is a “work-in-process” that “prioritize[s] issues linked to social justice, ethical
In his keynote address at the Posthuman Mimesis conference “Cyborg Experiments,”31 Kevin Warwick shows how brain neurons that fire together wire together when he talks about how his little human brain cell cyborg learns to navigate enclosure. Theorists of decolonization and social justice, feminists, and others understand that “The body is enculturated … the body produces culture at the same time that culture produces the body.”32 Culture, and any repeated experience, is literally hardwired into the brain and nervous system. We don’t need neuroscience to know that by “by their nature, habits do not occupy conscious thought.”33 Hayles reflects on the fact that “this property of the habitual has political implications.”34 The recent emergence of anti-oppression and trauma-based somatic interventions, however, mobilizes mindful movement to interrupt and disrupt both habit and culture. Pierre Bourdieu does indeed overstate, as Hayles claims, that “principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness and hence cannot
This awareness is, again, sensory. It is not conceptual. It is not that as we dance we are increasingly able to think about our bodily selves as movement makers … rather, this awareness hums within us as an ability to receive and follow through with impulses to move. It opens within us as a vulnerability to being moved by the movements we perceive.38
LaMothe foregrounds the pathos/kineticos connection here with the risk of being moved, which is a risk of surrender as we experience patterns with awareness. The way out is in and through. Mindful free movement exposes habituations and enables insights that may or may not make meaning. Every dancer has their habitual dance—a series of rhythmic and patterned moves they default to—as well as their stuck patterns. Some have a limited movement vocabulary; others have a large one. Given time, we might meet these patterns and build the capacity to move with them differently. Our patterns are both what hem us in and what make us experience if not safety, then at least a sense of protection. Embodiment is a potent site of political action and social/cultural change because it exists as a field of intentional play with and through somatic
- –That was really moving. I wasn’t expecting that.
- –I didn’t think it [would] move me so deeply.
- –I’m always amazed by how intimate this type of connection is, even through a screen.
- –That was so mellow and very intimate.
- –I hadn’t realised how much I was craving touch after a year without seeing my godchildren.
- –That was the first time I’ve ever done anything like this. I was surprised at how not awkward it was!
- –I felt so emotional and filled in my heart.
- –Yes connection.
- –I am longing to touch other people … my friends.
- –Such connection and very emotional and moving.40
The participants experienced a cathartic release of emotion, both longing and connection, and a slowing or “mellowness.” I understand these in relation to a softening of normalized patterns of holding in and back. In the softening, we allow ourselves to feel (dis/connection from our group bodies). Stephen Porges’ polyvagal Theory41 and Daniel Siegel’s window of
One time I was doing a move that I got from someone else, and I was the only one left doing it, and then more people joined on to that move and you sense how you are part of the group in those moments that you carried on someone else’s movement and now new people are doing them.47
I read a tension in the moment of being “the only one left” doing it: alone, different, not even my own movement. But then more people join and instead of being the only one and out of place, E recognizes herself as the flow between people and time. She belongs when in service to the group: What a beautiful and simple experience. It exemplifies the stress of isolation and the joy of being held in, and holding, a larger body. We need these experiences desperately in order not only to re-cognize but to in-corporate the experience of our place in a bio-techno-kinetic posthuman assemblage. I am both apart and a part. Given the opportunity to practice, this assemblage lets me remember my selves’ home, and sensitizes me to subtle sensate knowledges of safety and belonging.
Lasting cultural change is inculcated through embodied patterns and play. It is by meeting and moving through the Body and bodies that we re-member ourselves not just as emergent properties of the social organism, but
I want to give the last words of this research to the group wisdom of the Zoom platform and folks who wrote about the hand dance. The Zoom poem is a Dadaesque form that emerges when each person selects a line from their own writing or experience and enters it simultaneously into the chat, which then produces the poem:
Zoom, “Video Conferencing, Cloud Phone, Webinars, Chat, Virtual Events: Zoom,” accessed May 20, 2021,
Nidesh Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 1–3.
These figures are contributing to the mimetic turn in posthuman studies, see Nidesh Lawtoo, ed., “Posthuman Mimesis,” Special Issue, Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022).
Nidesh Lawtoo, “Black Mirrors: Reflecting (on) Hypermimesis,” Philosophy Today 65, no. 3 (2021): 523–47, 524,
Nidesh Lawtoo, “The Mimetic Unconscious: A Mirror for Genealogical Reflections,” in Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society, ed. Christian Borch (New York: Routledge, 2019), 37–53, 38.
Kimerer LaMothe, Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 5.
LaMothe, Why We Dance, 178.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Information, 74th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 192–221. See also N. Katherine Hayles and Nidesh Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis ii—Connections: A Dialogue Between Nidesh Lawtoo and Katherine Hayles,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 181–91.
Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 47.
Lawtoo, Phantom, 6.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 41.
The mirror neuron system is a set of neurons first identified in macaque monkeys in the early 1990s. It refers to a class of neurons that activate equally whether an interaction is engaged in or observed. See Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119, no. 2 (April 1996): 593–609, esp. 595.
Personal interviews, feedback, and workshops, ReMix 1 and 2 (2020–21), 2020.
While neuroception is the internal and sensate perception of whether one is safe or not, neuro-regulation is the modulation of the nervous system achieved by the individual alone or with support (co-regulation). We have and can practice technes that support down- or up-regulation from overly high or low zones of arousal that risk shifting the psyche-soma into sympathetic fight/flight/fawn reactivity and dorsal vagal flop/freeze reactivity respectively.
Lawtoo, “Black Mirrors,” 524.
Personal interviews, feedback, and workshops, ReMix 1 and 2 (2020–21), 2020.
Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. T. Sebeok (Cambridge Mass.: mit Press, 1960), 353.
Toronto Dance Community Love-In, Artist in Residence Workshop, January 12, 2021.
Toronto Dance Community Love-In, Artist in Residence Workshop, January 12, 2021.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 74.
Personal interviews, feedback, and workshops, ReMix 1 and 2 (2020–21), 2020.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 69.
Lawtoo, Phantom, 3.
See Nidesh Lawtoo, “‘This is No Simulation!’: Hypermimesis from Being John Malkovich to Her,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 37, no. 2 (2019): 116–44.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 199.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 199.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 54.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 199.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 41.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 53.
Kevin Warwick, “Cyborg Experiments,” keynote presentation at the international conference Posthuman Mimesis: Embodiment, Affect, Contagion, at KU Leuven, July 6, 2021,
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 200.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 204.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 204. See also Hayles and Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis ii.”
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 204. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 94.
See Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (Boston: Mariner Books, 2022). See also Shu Imaizumi, Ubuka Tagami, and Yi Yang, “Fluid Movements Enhance Creative Fluency: A Replication of Slepian and Ambady 2012,” PLoS one 15, no. 7 (2020),
LaMothe, Why We Dance, 6.
LaMothe, Why We Dance, 5.
Lawtoo “The Mimetic Unconscious,” 37–53.
Quotes from participants at Majero Bouman’s workshop as part of the “My Self” course by Beyond Chocolate, May 19, 2021.
Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
Daniel Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).
Beth Dennison, “Windows of Presence,” 2011,
Elizabeth B. Gross and Sara E. Medina-DeVilliers, “Cognitive Processes Unfold in a Social Context: A Review and Extension of Social Baseline Theory,” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020): 2,
Gross and Medina-DeVilliers, “Cognitive Processes,” 5.
Hayles and Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis ii,” 181–83.
Toronto Dance Community Love-In, Artist in Residence Workshop, January 12, 2021.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 44.
Julian Kiverstein and Mark Miller “The Embodied Brain: Towards a Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9 (2015): 2,
Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2009), 24.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 44.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 51.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 44.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 53.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 44.
Personal interviews, feedback, and workshops, ReMix 1 and 2 (2020–21), 2020.