Betwixt and Between

Max Spielmann

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we, in our role as lecturers, conducted hybrid workshops with design and art students from ten partner institutions on five continents. Our goal was to explore soundscapes from different viewpoints, and we were deeply impressed by the outcome. The recordings and their accompanying images and conversations dissolved geographical borders along with social, cultural, and structural differences. Following Hartmut Rosa, we understand this atmosphere of connection produced between the participants and the soundscapes themselves to be a resonance space, which only became explicit to us after some time had passed. In this article, we re-interpret this space through personal recollections and theoretical positions, and claim that such a collaboration holds pedagogical and artistic implications for future teaching and creative practice. These include not only the impact upon technology in the classroom, temporal perception, inter-relationality, and care practices, but also the artistic benefits of opening up spaces of resonance as a means of engaging with the challenge of intercultural communication and witnessing in our global world.

III The Process – Re-Placing

As a degree program in processual design, we have been engaged with the emancipatory potentials of the internet age since our founding in 1999. We seek to advance the worldwide exchange of our concerns and ideas in social, cultural, economic, and intellectual life for a more diverse, just and sustainable world. However, in everyday pedagogical life, we experience digitalisation primarily as an increase in efficiency, and emancipatory effects fall by the wayside.

The immediate resonance of the workshops was obscure to us because it was not redeemed, could not be redeemed, with the attempt to repeat it and make it useful. But as Hartmut Rosa points out on resonance, the central part of this worldly relationship to resonance is one’s own transformation: experiences of resonance change us and confer upon us the very experience of aliveness, while we recognize simultaneously that resonance itself is constitutively unavailable and cannot be forced (Rosa 2021).

Rosa proposes that there are three different axes of resonance. The horizontal axis concerns resonance between people, the diagonal axis lies between us and things and the vertical axis represents the resonance with and through values as well as “collective singulars” such as nature, aesthetics or religion. Our starting point was the diagonal axis employing the soundscapes as things or mediums that enabled negotiation. They connected the participants from very different physical contexts and created a vertical resonance with aesthetics and nature as well. Although Rosa defines this conceptual achievement of a diagonal link between horizontal and vertical as problematic, he nevertheless justifies it as a typical relational connection between things and values.

Our practice of listening to and sharing with one another should be understood within the open and transformative paradigm of interrelationality. Once the world of “things” is understood as the interrelation of human and non-human actors the entire field of relation is reconfigured (Bennett, 2009; Haraway, 2016; Ingold, 2018; Ingold, 2021; Mol, 2002; Tsing Lowenhaupt, 2015).

This changed relationality, this being-in-connection, leads to a different relationship between bodies and space, as well as in our relationships to one another. Our teaching-experiences in face-to-face after COVID-19 appear in a different light.

"Re-Placing embraces both physical and mental aspects of being. [...] Today belonging is also much connected to inclusive, participatory processes that emphasize the connection of people and space."

Call Art of Research Conference 2023

Next Chapter

IV Discussion and Conclusion - Re-Visioning

Tip

Tip