20-22 May 2025

Last month we welcomed 23 attendees from around the world to the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham to explore the role of digital technologies in revealing ‘glitches’ within the human mind-body. The workshop investigated how these insights could serve as sources of personal enlightenment, aesthetic experience and well-being.

While we aspire to see ourselves as well-integrated, holistic mind-bodes – an ideal particularly valued by those practicing somaesthetics – achieving and maintaining a sense of ‘wholeness’ can be challenging. Human beings are complex, driven by intertwining multiple physical systems, which connect to emotions, feeling and thoughts in ways that remain difficult to understand, despite advances in neuroscience.  The seams between these systems may present as ‘glitches’ regarded as problems, for instance issues in self-regulations, control, pain or disease, or as opportunities, for the development of new, exciting aesthetic experiences, for example in immersive games, rides and music. This blend of perspectives renders the concept of ‘glitching the soma’ both intriguing and complex, making it an exciting and challenging research area.

Photo credit : Alan Chamberlain  “During the workshop I started to unpack the notion of Soma Design & Pain – as normal, inflicted and shared and how to deal with this. The drawing started off as a trajectory with consideration to who can/can’t engage in activities and opting out as part of that too.”

The workshop adopted a soma-design approach and involved practical exercises with technological explorations. Attendees considered and engaged with the concept of ‘glitches’ through a series of body-focussed activities encompassing a range of diverse and complementary applications. To support a more focussed approach, Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) was used as a gentle provocative tool to induce glitches, allowing attendees to encounter and explore them within somatic experiences in a safe and controlled manner.

Somabotics Lead, Steve Benford opened the workshop, with a presentation ‘Why Glitching the Soma?, welcoming attendees and setting the stage for exploration. Rachel Garrett spoke on ‘In the Moment of Glitch: Engaging with Misalignments in Ethical Practice’, followed by Andrew McPherson who addressed ambiguity, indeterminacy and glitching in music.  Kia Hook from KTH provided background and context on soma-design, while Dila Demir discussed designing for the somaesthetics aspects of pain. Vasiliki Tasknaki concluded the first day by offering insights into the requirements for developing attentiveness to bodies, drawing inspiration from artistic and design practices.

Day two began with facilitated warm-up exercises followed by group work using off-the-shelf commercial EMS devices, led by Rakesh Patibanda – a visiting Research Fellow with expertise in computational systems influencing direct bodily movement using technologies like EMS. The groups used this session to identify and work on experiences for deeper exploration, and to prepare for day three. After additional warm up exercises, attendees engaged in a session to finalise their chosen experiences.  Attendees then introduced their developed experiences during a Show and Tell exercise, followed by time to try out each other’s creations. This resulted in some fantastic discussions and generated ideas to inform future research.

The workshop was structured to include regular check-ins and reflection with attendees. These breaks provided valuable opportunities to explore frictions, difficulties, underlying norms, values and habits, and were especially useful for fostering group discussions on ethics – beyond seeing it merely as a mechanism of delimiting potential research approaches, but to identify new ethical understandings across different experiences, disciplines and practices. This aimed to consider and envision a different ethical future that influences how technologies are designed and integrated into society.

The Somabotics Team will now spend some time reflecting on the event which proved to be a value and enriching couple of days, helping to consolidate insights, identify opportunities for new research and strengthen future collaborations”.