hear/here, gathering the commonplace: towards a new understanding of affect and embodied encounter through constructing non-narrative sound installation
(2025)
author(s): Ana Gabrielle Rutter
published in: Birmingham City University
This practice research PhD employs concerns of affect theory, sound/fine art, aural ecologies and emergent praxis, while utilising an embodied crip/neurodivergent approach. Investigating sound and affect through the lens of Masumi’s description of ‘microperceptions’ (from Leibnitz) and linking this to the multifacetedness of aural ecologies. Working with/through gathered materials, exploring initially ‘microperceptions’ as triggers of non-conscious affective response, and through the praxis adding other elements that inform the making of original artworks as sites of affective encounter.
This is a constantly developing, heuristic following, through tests and experimentation for the unfolding of a unique approach to research and creation of fine art works that explore and explicate my/our non-conscious affective response to our quotidian sonic environment. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s Smooth and Striated symbiotic spaces, to create a scaffolding for working with; affecting slippery stuff, this ‘bodymind’, and to maintain the affecting qualities of the materials.
The praxis centres on gathered sounds and images from spaces/situations, where these are less important than the small things that might be occurring within them. The sites/titles of gathering: Early Tests & Experiments, The Cairngorms, Dyffryn, About, Coventry, The Dyffryn Book and Gathering Closer. From these audio-visual works have been constructed and exhibited investigating affect and embodied encounter.
This submission, recognising and exploring the porosity/permeability of sounds/spaces/time/bodies/affects, is a drawing together of materials gathered across the research and considering new knowledge/approaches in an exhibition and Research Catalogue expositions as sites for the thesis, which sets the practice in its research context.
Hyper - Diffractive Photographic Diptychs in the Queer Borderlands of Drag and Wrestling
(2025)
author(s): Carl-Mikael Björk
published in: Research Catalogue
An RC adaptation of the project as presented at the Hugarflug conference, Reykjavik 2025.
The presentation takes its point of departure in a photographic artistic research project that moves within the queer borderlands between drag and wrestling – two performative expressions that, through eccentric personas, embodied gestures, and DIY culture, destabilise notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. I approach these practices as arenas of performativity, where the hypermasculine and the hyperfeminine are not positioned in opposition, but meet in mutual tension and unstable, embodied renegotiation.
Through photography, in reciprocal movement with essayistic writing, I explore images of identity in motion. The presentation is part of a diffractive methodology, where photographs neither illustrate nor represent, but emerge as entangled with fiction, memory, theory, and philosophy as components of a broader research apparatus. An unstable interplay emerges, where photography and language generate tacit knowledge – a possible, partial and situated enactment of how identity and the body are (re)presented and displaced.
The project is diffractively grounded in the thinking of Barad, Butler, and Haraway on research apparatuses, performativity, and situated knowledge – with particular attention to the camera’s and photographer’s access to spaces where identity is performatively negotiated.
