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.
