Creative Europe
Desk UK
for Culture

METABODY will be a laboratory and observatory of cultural diversity that will highlight the importance of non-verbal communication and embodied expressions as a primary substrate of cultural heritage. The project will generate an understanding of the threats posed by the homogenising processes of globalisation and Information Society. Furthermore the project will produce new cultural, communicational and technological paradigms through interdisciplinary developments in new media and the arts, which foreground embodied expressions and interactions.

This will be accomplished through interdiciplinary research and creation by continuous collaboration between the partners; involvement of local communities of artists, researchers, social groups and wider audiences through workshops and public presentations; and the final construction and touring of a mobile laboratory, an experimental architectural structure that will contain interactive multisensory environments.

The project will embrace a highly transdisciplinary field, from dance and music to experimental architecture, from visual and media-arts to cognitive sciences, from philosophy to alternative mathematics, from communication technologies to history of emotions, from disabled to gender and cultural minorities, that will develop over five years a novel concept of interactive, performative, multisensory space and design based on movement. The final architectural structure will constantly transform and modulate in relation to the bodies that interact with it, and to its specific environments and histories, hosting performances and installations, residencies with local artists, workshops and educational projects, developing new networks and communities of bodies, places and institutions in interaction with the Metabody, that will continue evolving after the project.