Susan Kozel

Susan Kozel is a performance artist, phenomenologist, and artistic researcher who has made embodied dance practice and philosophy practical tools for investigating responsive digital systems, archives, and human-computer interaction. Rather than treating performance as an illustration of theory, she has used movement, sensation, and improvisation as ways of producing knowledge, joining training and practice in dance with philosophical research.

Her 2007 monograph *Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology* gave this approach a durable methodological form. Drawing on performance practice and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, Kozel examined telematics, motion capture, responsive architecture, and wearable computing while keeping lived bodily experience at the center.

At Malmö University, where she became a professor in the School of Arts and Communication, Kozel developed research spanning artistic research, interaction design, and design. Her projects combine philosophical writing with collaborative performance practice, often asking how digital systems mediate touch, memory, affect, and agency. She led the Swedish Research Council-funded Living Archives project, which treated digitized archives as active social resources rather than inert repositories. Within that program, the Performing Memory strand used dance, choreography, mobile media, and improvisatory methods to explore how bodies and data move through public space.

Somatic Archiving, which grew from Living Archives between 2012 and 2017, uses augmented and mixed-reality systems to transform and transmit embodied memory rather than simply recording bodies. Kozel's continuing collaborations with artists including Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, Gibson/Martelli, and Jeannette Ginslov have extended this work into re-enactment, affect, and bodily transmission.

Her current research spans phenomenology, affect, somatics, mixed reality, and Somatic Archiving, with service in Sweden's artistic-research infrastructure. This work keeps dance central as a method for understanding how bodies can retain agency inside increasingly complex technological environments.