hear/here, gathering the commonplace: towards a new understanding of affect and embodied encounter through constructing non-narrative sound installation
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Ana Gabrielle Rutter
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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, 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, 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.
