READER


-Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm? 

Barbara Bolt


-A Manifesto for Performative Research

Haseman, Brad (2006). Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, theme issue "Practice-led Research" (no.118):pp. 98-106.


-Embodied Research: A Methodology

Ben Spatz, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol. 13, No2 (2017)


-Touch as an Aesthetic Experience

Jenni Lauwrens (2019): Touch as an aesthetic experience, Journal of Visual Art Practice, DOI: 10.1080/14702029.2019.1680510


-Seeing Touch and Touching Sight: a Reflection on the Tactility of VIsion

Jenni Lauwrens (2019) Seeing touch and touching sight: a reflection on the tactility of vision, The Senses and Society, 14:3, 297-312, DOI: 10.1080/17458927.2019.1663660


-Touching Technologies, Touching Visions. The Reclaiming of Sensorial Experience and the Politics of Speculative Thinking

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, The University of Warwick, Article in Subjectivity, September 2009, DOI: 10.1057/sub.2009.17

Initial Thoughts - Reflections on last year.

 

"Space makes us realise taht things can hardly be experienced in isolation, but only exist in arrangements". - Fuller & Löw


Relationality

Marching forward "WITH"


Planting constants as a way to identify the methodology.


Spectators listening MORE to the space, what they have to say, how they perform

Bringing attention to something that's already there

FOUND SPACES

The space as a CO-PERFORMER


Using senses beyond the vision, touching (not just hands but skin in general as entry point)


Spatial Sharing


DRAMATURGY (from start to finish)

Embodied Experiment

-Handshakes

 

What?

Within room 4.37 we were asked to form pairs.

Then we were asked to take our partner's hand and treat it as an object, as if it's not attached to a body, as if we're discovering it for the very first time. We did that in turns.

Then we were asked to shake hands 3 ways: 

-Give a strong (firm) handshake

-Give a comforting handshake

-Give an equal handshake. In the last one we were asked to stay for a long time

Then we were asked to follow our physical reaction to everything that had just happened.

 

Embodied Experiment

-Blindfolded

 

What?

We were given a blindfold. We were asked to explore around, our bodies indicating which space was interesting to us, what draws us somewhere. Then we stayed there and explored without the blindfold.

In the end we had time to document our experience and findings in whatever way we felt was needed. 

 

 

I remember Katya's reaction of laying on the floor and me thinking "why didn't I have such a strong reaction? Was I supposed to?"

What I wrote down straight after:

The trapped air between 2 hands.

Feeling something that is literally all around us, being so close, so condensed.

Responding to touching. Who is shaking, who is moving? Who is initiating?

Exploring with curiosity, the hand as an object. The softness, an object that is responding.

I was drawn to a triangular spot, in front of the windows, behind a board. My first impression of that place was that it sounded different, like a vacuum. Although I could hear the voices of others through the thin wooden panel, it still made me feel more secluded, hidden from the rest of the world.

It felt like a little nest where I could, by touching different surfaces find different qualities of sounds. I started hearing the sounds that my hands made when touching surfaces, exploring all different sorts of rhythms.

 

What I wrote down straight after:

--> Space that was more protected

 

The water underneath

Bare feet

The weather

Movement

 

Sound bath + soothing for my hands

 

A Symphony of Incidental Sounds

 

The sound changed, that's what drew me in

I felt very much in my element with these exercises. I am used to working from the body, from MY body. 

Treating my physical body as an instrument, listening to indications (which I often refer to as gut feeling) is already part of my methodology. Also part of my methods is staying in a place to feel it speak to me, to live it temporarily and understand why and how I connect to them.

What I struggle with sometimes is how to document and archive the experiences I'm feeling, the "things" that inspire me or touch me. I often choose to take a video and/or write about my experience, either in the style of a journal or just by putting a few phrases down on physical paper.

I catch myself trying to rationalize (like I read on Jenni Lauwrens' text) through theories and science of how the brain and the body works, my experiences. Within this, I also try not to lose my body experience, by documenting my thoughts in a vocabulary I can actually grasp, that I use as a first response, that is simple and tangible. Sometimes, the simplest thought has a lot of value when re-read and reflected upon later on, after contextualizing and digesting.

 

After reading Ben Spatz's text on Embodied Research I found myself being more aware of the importance of framing my research. Although I'm still working on understanding better how to use this advice, I'm definitely more aware of observing and trying to define it. Also, I'm working on understanding better how to move from the solo embodied practice to externalising it and involving spectatorship, a step which I have been working on already from the previous semester. 

Haptic Visuality Experiment

-My Scars

 

 The performer (I) stood in front of a group of people in the same room (a classroom) where they were already gathered in, wearing skin tone clothing.

The performer-researcher talked about the connection of this experiment with their previous work, mentioning that it was a reworking of their looking into a room's surfaces using a microscope and how that was now translated into using the same technique with their own body,

The performer asked the group to think of a scar or mark they have on their body and place their hand on it. They were asked to keep their hands over that mark for as long as the performance lasted.

The performer then held their phone over their finger, while a soundscape was playing from a small bluetooth speaker placed in front of the group, a couple of meters away from the performer. The soundscape was narrating a moment how the performer's scar formed, in this case a cut from a snapped exacto knife. On the phone, a video of a microscopic view of that finger (using a digital microscope) was playing. 2 more marks (a mole and a knee injury) followed.

Standing in front of my classmates and tutor and literally putting my body under a microscope. Using my phone (as I had used a projector last year) as a tool to frame, expose and enhance certain details, in this case my real scars and marks and working on how the spectators relate to something so common as "the story of a scar", through my own body. 

 

The microscope for me works as a framing device but most importantly as a tool to provide a view that is already there but we cannot really concentrate on to see, or are undable to because we would need to be really close to the subject. In a way, it distorts reality by exposing it. It comes from my own embodied knowledge, since I many times see the world as a compilation of details (my background in designing and building architectural maquettes has definitely helped me develop this) and I'm always finding it difficult to explain with words how that feels or even how it IS. 

 

The soundscape was a way to be immersed in the story of how that inch of skin was forever changed. I wanted to experiment with the sound coming from a different source than the video, to further explore the relationship between the two. I was hoping that through the detachment a more immersive experience would come.

 

Asking the group to touch their own scar/mark was a way for me to evoke empathy, maybe some of these scars have similar stories to mine and therefore can relate. Touching them serves as a way to bring attention to that which is many times forgotten and taken for granted. Through touch, warmth is also generated. This is my way of saying "show your marks the attention and love they deserve".

Questions from peers' feedback:

 

-What is our relation to the soundscape?

-Is it events, ot other type of storytelling?

-What are your expectations?

-How did itt feel to me to perform, especially what was the difference between the phone on bare skin and the phone over the textile of my clothes?

-How did you preapre your audience?

-Why did you choose to place the camera there? (opposite the audience)

-What was ther reason for seperating the sound and the image?

-Are there different ways of mainting the audience's connection with their own body?

-Why is important for me that they touch their scars?

-How important is to introduce the previous work? 

-What is the relation between the past and the present?

-Is the phone used as a tool?

-Is the skin seen as a "world"?

 

 

connection with my fascination of what surfaces and materials have to say, what are they holding, what's their memory

I have to think of Casilda Sánchez's work here, how the closeups of eyes change our percpetions of the sense of vision

Questions forming:

 

-Can haptic visuality not concern the human body?

-How does our engagement and our empathy evolve in time while participating in such an artwork as Sanscez's?

-Can we feel empathy for something non-human?