HOW CAN EMBODIED SIMULATION ENRICH EMOTIONAL CONNECTION AND SHARED UNDERSTANDING?

This journal documents the beginning of a practice-led enquiry into a questions that has gradually become central to both my creative practice and my wider research: how can embodied simulation enrich emotional connection and shared understanding? The project began from from a genuine sense of fragmentation in my own work. Whilst much of my practice has always aimed to communicate, I realised through reflection that communication and connection are not the same thing. I had become increasingly aware that in the digital age, where so mych of visual experience is mediated through screens, something about the affective and embodied quality of connection can feel altered, intercepted, increased or at times lost all together.

Working through autoethnographic and phenomenological methods, this journal follows my own lived experience of thinking through making. Rather than separating theory from practice, the research develops iterative experimentations, reflective journalling and material enquiry across both analogue and digital processes. Throughout the project I worked with a varied range of analogue and digital image making skills, including the use of AI image ideation, using each process not simply to produce outcomes but to better understand how emotion, perception and meaning are shaped through interaction with image, material and atmosphere.

As the work progressed, the enquiry became less about trying to create one exact emotional response and more about understanding what creates the conditions for embodied response in the first place. Across the journal, I found myself repeatedly drawn towards visible mark making, material texture, compositional texture and the sensory qualities of light. These often carried more emotional weight than representational content alone. In many instances, response seemed to begin through sensation before conscious interpretation, suggesting that what we feel first may shape what we understand afterwards.

The research also highlighted an important tension in digital mediation. Whilst digital interfaces can flatten tactile qualities, they can also intensify contrast, luminescence, depth and perceptual focus in wats that shfit, rather than erase, embodied engagement. This has opened a more focused direction for the next stage of the project: 'How does relational decision-making shape embodied participation in creative practice?'

Moving forward, I want to look more closely at how light, texture and compositional framing shape what the viewer encounters first, what they feel, and whether an image can prompt not only emotional resonance, but a physical impulse to move, touch, recoil or lean in. At this stage this journal is not a conclusion, but the grounding of a more precise and embodied line of enquiry.

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