Situated Knowledge, Transmissions of Practice and Parasitic Endeavors
(2018)
author(s): Helen Palmer, Victoria Hunter, Jessica Foley, Karolina Kucia
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This paper presents an exchange between four practitioners from distinct disciplines of site dance, philosophy, experimental writing and pedagogy. It presents responses to provocations that position these practices as containers of Situated Knowledge, it interrogates the transmission and reception of practical knowledge, and employs the notion of ‘parasitic endeavor’ as a lens through which to facilitate discussion of of how disciplinary specific practices and emerging knowledges might traverse from one discipline to another and how this knowledge might be articulated and communicated to wider audiences. Informed by Bennett’s notions of ‘vibrant matter’ (2010), Barad’s conception of agency and intra-action (2003), transversality (Guattari, 1964 and Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012) and J.J. Gibson’s theory of affordances (1986) the paper explores how embodied knowledges become activated and mobilised through human-material-world intra-actions and how interdisciplinary engagements facilitate the articulation of such knowledges. The notion of parasitic endeavor employed here alludes to a temporal process in which theoretical paradigms from one discipline are employed within or applied in another for a required period of time to facilitate the articulation of complex intra-active and diffractive human-nonhuman entanglements.
This paper seeks to show how distinct practices transmit knowledges beyond disciplinary boundaries. Each respondent will offer a ‘score’ to provoke and support intra-active practice. The score frames a set of instructions, rules or constraints for fellow authors to explore and reflect on their experiences in relation to their own, customary modes of ‘doing’ practice and research. For publication, each contributor will present a response to one or more of these scores, drawing on their own disciplinary methods and working practices to consider how the specificities of their discipline engage creatively with these alternate actions and actors.
In this scenario the notion of ‘parasitic endeavor’ is positioned as prodigious and facilitatory; we move through and beyond disciplinary silos, borrow and compare, creating new theoretical and disciplinary entanglements, through which new/augmented modes of thinking/doing might emerge.
Painting as Discourse
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Andrew Bracey
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Painting-As-Discourse' is a methodology to complement painting practice with a reflection of “on action and in action” (Gray & Malins, 2004, p21) that is central to the research and its findings. Selected individuals (from a range of expertise and levels of knowledge of the author's research) have partaken ‘Painting-As-Discourse’ conversations with Bracey in regard to one body of practice (ReconFigure Paintings), through the course of his PhD. In this way the artistic researcher has been encouraged and challenged about what he is saying verbally about the practice and being encouraged to respond to new readings and possibilities for the research. Each conversations is then used to form an ongoing series of revised statements about the work, following the approach of Elizabeth Price’s ‘Sidekick’ (Price, 2006). Each revised statement is given to the most recent 'Painting-As-Discourse' participant prior to the conversation to act as a spur for the conversation.
Gray, C. and Malins, J. (2004), Visualising Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design. Ashgate.
Price, E. “Sidekick.” In Thinking Through Art, edited by Macleod, K. & Holdridge, L. (2006), Oxford and New York: Routledge, p122-132.