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I begin this chapter introducing my ‘assembling’ of a methodology, which I then outline through sections on art praxis approaches and my affect heuristic linked to new materialist and situated knowledge thinking and described in my autoethnographic voice.
I go on to outline: my crip/neurodivergent position, including my ‘bodymind’ as an imbricated site for/of research, that I am utilising structures and scaffolds to support this ‘tricky’ place of working with language/text within this terrain, and that this is all a gathering together. I then ask the reader to join me on this onwards journey.
Key to this investigation is affect theory, and how we affectively respond to our sonic environments. Exploring affect, not as a ‘thing, but an aspect of every event’ (Massumi, 2002), and ‘microshocks’ as the triggers of moments of affective response, necessitates the using of multimodal, multifaceted approaches to facilitate the gathering and drawing of elements together to make ‘spaces’ of new understanding and experiencing. I am not considering this as a critique of others’ activities; it is an ‘entanglement of matter and meaning’ and am looking for the ‘diffraction patterns that make the entanglement visible’ (Barad in Dolphijn, van der Tuin, 2012). This enquiry is situated (in this bodyminds’) feminist New Materialism, in which the hypersensitivities of neurodivergence have ‘use’ (Ahmed) as does approaching things from a different angle. My research process situated in my investigational art making and is positioned where ‘the creative artefact is considered the embodiment of the new knowledge (Skains, 2018, p85). If ‘a measure of the value of research is seen to be the capacity to create new knowledge and understanding that is individually and culturally transformative, then criteria need to move beyond probability and plausibility to possibility’ (Sullivan, 2010, p95/96), so this must be a speculative space.
The multimodal, multifaceted methods used include:
- Scaffolds to support all the working and to hold spaces open for ‘affect’.
- Art praxis and the creation of new art works, reflection on the processes and the works and informal discussion.
- Qualitative and dialectical approaches, exploring philosophical and theoretical texts, art works and discussion linking with practice in part through a ‘holding in mind’ of thoughts/ideas’ as I ‘work’.
- Using autobiographical/autoethnological textual writing, which come together through free writing and journalling notes, to communicate/explicate thinking.
Through my iterative reflective processes of working, thinking, making, reading and doing, approaches are modified and new understanding and knowledges that inform what comes next develop. ‘Elements’ come to light that become parts of constructing new approaches to making, in ways which hold potentials for an embodied encounter with affecting atmospheres.
Crip/Neurodivergent ‘me’:
My self-identifying/describing as crip/neurodivergent has developed across this research - in part possibly because a heuristic methodology necessitates the looking at and understanding more about oneself; a growing embracing of who/how I am, which draws on a neuro-positive understanding of my usefulness and social model approaches to disability. As it became clearer how ‘situated’ in this ‘bodymind’ and its experiencing all ‘this’ research would be, it became clear that I needed to directly speak to this.
My ‘embracing’, includes recognising the neurodiversity paradigm, that there is no validity in the notion of a ‘normal’ brain or person; “once we’ve thrown away the concept of “normal,” neurotypicals are just members of a majority – not healthier or more “right” than the rest of us, just more common”(Walker 2013/2021). Knowing that the pathologizing of neurodivergence and physical impairment through a medicalised/deficit model ‘disables’ us, holds power and ‘the masters tools’ (Walker 2013/2021), I aim to be part of a ‘joining with others and of 'troubling’ the 'premises of the logic of deficit’ (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, et al 2023).
The medical model’s describing of ‘our’ situation to ‘us’, can inform, if the context is shifted from describing the neurodivergent as ‘higher distractibility by irrelevant stimuli’, that their ‘sensory input(s) may not be properly regulated’ (e.g. being flooded by sensory events), and ‘the inability to suppress irrelevant noises’ (e.g. footsteps in the background while doing another task) (Schulze, et al 2020, p. 9, 27,29), and looked at through a different lens. Yes, I am flooded by sensory inputs, I cannot not notice.
I live in a constantly ‘aware’ state: dancing light, shifting sounds, how the environment around me is changing, the ‘atmosphere’, how other ‘bodies’ seem to be. Movement and breath, shifting leaves in a breeze, the sounds of dust on a street in the summer. Changes in colour, temperature, light. Sounds of my pencil, the keyboard, my feet on the floor, my eyes moving, my blood flowing…. all with the fluctuating hum of the city, the stuff that is just sort of there all the time. I get a ‘frisson’ from this stuff; this links me, makes me very attuned to the world around me, cognisant of small things, and moments. And I have a desire and a need to explore it, to share that being ‘in it’. I am embracing my VAST experience(ing), that my experiential knowings from the world around me are of ‘use’, and intrinsic to this research.
Art, Praxis:
At its core, this is enquiry undertaking through my ‘doing’. Methods have developed from those of my longstanding practice, including the gathering of materials and a reflective embodied process of working with those in the creation of artworks. These are additionally utilised in my wider research and my drawing together of texts to explicate thinking and developing/ed knowledges. As "Methodologies in artistic research are necessarily emergent and subject to repeated adjustment, rather than remaining fixed throughout the process of enquiry" (Barrett / Bolt, 2007, p6), these have been constantly developing; this has been/is an organic, responsive iterative process of thinking/making/reading/discussion. The resulting exhibited art works and talks and papers, generating informal discussions, more considered reflection, and an emerging ‘multi-method strategy’ of ‘practice raising questions that can then be investigated through research, which in turn impact on practice’ (Gray/Malins, 2004, p1).
This research is a ‘journey’ exploring the sonic environments I ‘live’ within, affecting sensing of/through those, and entangled and embodied ways to communicate/share an/my experiencing of these places/spaces within the installations/art works I form. My own “immersive interaction carrying over into reflection and speculation towards new understandings – reinforces the intimate relationship between doing and knowing, action and reflection, practice and theory” (Gray and Delday 2011 p4), expanding my knowledge, while aiding in answering my questions and establishes what I can contribute to this field.
Structures and scaffolds:
From the start of this research, I have been considering approaches for working with the ‘tricky’ things that are affect and sound, as well as working with the textual requirements for explicating research ideas (as ‘this bodymind’). Thinking about the sorts of ‘supports’ I might utilise, ‘structures’, invisible but there in my mind’s eye; scaffolding to hold open a space.
Scaffolded pedagogical approaches can be described as ‘supportive elements added to a program’, ‘to provide a temporary framework in the form of support for learners’ and as dependant on “identifying the area that is just beyond but not too far beyond students” (Garfield and Holland 2012). My scaffolding is more an approach to working with the ‘tricky’ theory, materials and aims that I am, particularly in the context of ‘this bodymind’. I am thinking of Scaffolding as a term relating to temporary supporting structures. I explore scaffolds in detail, relating these with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Smooth and Striated’ (2004), and considering ‘structures’ that can hold spaces for my activities as well as for shifts in how something can be.
There are visual/drawn diagrams as ‘structures’ for spaces, for times, and for works sonic, visual and textual; some of which appear as backgrounds to the research catalogue chapter pages.
This scaffolding has included: setting parameters for gathering, planning work as ‘experiments’, and mapping elements from a gathering space to a showing space - to give an initial outline form, and to shift the spatialities in sound. Transliterating processes I have long used for gathering and editing video/sound into approaches for theoretical research and writing, and using ‘commonplace’ structures for writing, as I am using ‘right now’. The scaffoldingsupports ways of working in line with the ‘care’ needed for the nature of the theoretical areas and materials, it is a holding open of a space for things to ‘occur’, not constricting the ‘affect’ out of stuff, which supports the ‘affect heuristic’/embodied processes. It is an exploring of structures and affect to find a symbiosis that ‘allows’ the praxis to take place, without compressing the affecting qualities out of the resulting ‘work’.
Affect heuristic:
A heuristic approach is apposite when ‘looking for’ affect. It could be said that the ‘nose’ I am following is the one attached to affective responses, an ‘affect heuristic’ perhaps? When using the phrase ‘affect heuristic’, I must acknowledge the term’s recognised use in areas such as behavioural science and psychology, within which, ‘the affect heuristic’ (Slovic et al. 2007) is generally regarded negatively. Here, I am positing a different use of the term, only shifted slightly but in keyways which I suggest moves ‘affect heuristic’ into a space of being a useful element within my methodology.
Behavioural Science literature describes a shift in understanding through the early 2000’s, from a belief that human decision making was based in rational cognitive processing, to one that includes acknowledgement of the role played by affective and experiential systems, and that ‘The affect heuristic refers to the fact that people make judgments based on representations of objects or events that are marked with valenced affect.’, (Skagerlund et al 2020). In the Behavioural Science context, ‘the affect heuristic’ is outlined as using prior experience to frame something as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, which then informs “system 1” fast (as opposed to “system 2” slow) processing (The Decision Lab, 2025) and deciding future action in response to this. While this is recognised as potentially useful within flight or fight response where ‘speed’ is needed, it is generally seen as a quick gut response which does not consider additional information that may be available or the context of the situation, therefore is viewed as ‘limited’ and a ‘flawed process’ within which our emotions can be manipulated by others in an attempt to control behaviour. (Nikolopoulou, K. 2023). In relation to affect, Slovic et al. (2007) go as far as to state that (as used in their paper), ‘‘affect’’ means the specific quality of ‘‘goodness’’ or ‘‘badness’’ (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus.”,
Within these frameworks, affect is connected to both the emotional charge associated with an experience or thing, and specific positive or negative ‘qualities’ of that experiencing. I consider affect as less directly linked to emotion, within this research, I use affect to describe felt sensed experiencing, a ‘stimulus’ or activator of response, which may become understood as an emotion or could inform us about a space/place/situation in a range of other ways. I use heurism to describe enquiry that is direct, personal, empirical and from experiencing. Additionally, I am not using an ‘affect heuristic’ approach to my decision making, instead it is an element within my methodology which pertains to being open to my experiencing of the stuff of the world around us in a way to support the gathering of affecting microelements within those spaces/places/situations that I can possibly use in the constructing of works which hold some potentials of an affecting embodied response in others.
Recognising that ‘Heuristic research differs considerably from other methodologies in that it views the researcher as a participant’ (Djuraskovic / Arthur, 2010, p1572), supports the use of a subjective approach, and accepting that ‘subjective action is necessary to make use of eventual creativity and produce change, this action is only secondary to the pre-conscious event of bodily-emotive affect in which creative force resides’. (Richter 2023, p134) further reinforces my use of ‘affect heuristic’, as one which can usefully describe a positive working with my own experiencing. Additionally, as we do not have the ‘language’ to ask or answer some questions around affect/experience (picked up at many points through this thesis, including Language/text: later in this chapter), it is difficult to quantify the “affectiveness” of works for ‘viewers’, adding to the rational for this as an ‘affect heuristic’ enquiry, in which I am involved as subject, participant and researcher, following my nose attached to affective response.
Language/text:
Both affect and sound have a difficult relationship with language/text, often described through what makes the sound or how the affect makes you ‘feel’ (see writing affect in The Field Survey and in Coventry). Other practice researchers describe similar experiences, as Batey (2023. p10) says ‘The terminology of trying to describe in words elements of the creative process has also necessitated an expansion in describing creativity. Experience has shown us how radically different the creative process can be for everyone, generating frustration in communicating’. I often find ‘academic’ texts do not correlate with my experiencing of the researching, I was gathering lots and lots of ‘elements’, but was struggling to work out ways to bring them together, as Cascella describes: ‘over many years I had collected a number of thoughts and materials, but the large knot that I couldn’t untangle was “how” to write’ (interview between Cascella and Biserna, 2013).
When thinking how to ‘write’ about sound and affect I have considered the structures and strategies used in Ordinary Affects (Stewart, 2007) and The Hundreds, (Stewart, Berlant 2019). In the of writing of Ordinary Affects, I feel a freedom that I link with my experience of freewriting. This is a process which has ‘opened up’ how I approach writing; using sound/ imagery from my practice, a word or phrase I keep coming back to, as a starting point, giving myself a duration to write in, then returning to the text produced to edit and work with it (in iterative cycles). The structure from ‘The Hundreds’, written in word groupings of hundreds, informing my approach to breaking texts down into ‘chunks’ with wordcounts, that are then movable, (intrinsically linked to all the other) self-contained ‘elements’ I can work with to construct the ‘picture/mosaic’
Exploring these ‘complications’ opens possibilities regarding how one can work with what at first can seem irreducible materials and processes; through this emerges methods of working with and sharing, but there is no straightforward route or answer. I am using multiple approaches: looking at practice thesis examples including Haley Newman’s asking questions of ‘herself’ and the narratives of Elizabeth Price’s described through the rolling of masking tape, gave me some ways in. I am looking to share my own sensed felt experiencing, tying the reader as closely as possible to my experience, enabling them to ‘sit with me’ in the process; interspersing first person narrative with gathered stuff of theory, using simple diagramming and time (wordcount) based approaches, from my approach to editing sound/imagery. I began to assemble some things, the Research Catalogue helps brings together the different ‘registers’ of the elements, supporting my communicating of the research undertaken, my understanding of it, and my new knowings. From these I will make a mosaic that holds things enough for it to make ‘sense’ to another.
New materialism:
As well as looking inward to sensed experiencing and knowings, I must also look outward and explore my relationships to spaces, situations and all (bodies) active within them. I am the ‘maker’ of the works; recognising that the ‘materials’ are ones I gather, I am not ‘abstracting’ them, and am ‘using’ them to represent what they are. Additionally, the spaces I construct the works within and what/who moves through them, all ‘add’ to the things I make – bring something of ‘themselves’ into my works.
New materialism shifts how we consider the stuff of the world around us, ‘Deleuze first turned to Spinoza and Leibniz because’ they ‘thought that all of nature was defined primarily by an immanent vital power or force’ (Gamble /Hanan /Nail 2019, p119). I include in an idea of ‘nature’ everything around us; it all brings change to everything else it meets. None of us, and nothing at all, exists in isolation; we are always being affected and affecting everything else we meet and interact with in whatever small way. This can be seen as particularly pertinent to the ‘making’ of affecting/embodied art works, Braidotti’s ‘creative event is not produced by the reason or will of a human subject but rather originates in the affective creativity of post-human relations’ (Richter 2023, p135). I think that art works only begin to ‘live’ when they are experienced by/with other bodies; an aim is to make ‘things’/art works that ‘hold’ a potential for another body to experience an affecting embodied response, to which they will bring previous experiencing and bodily knowings, in spaces ‘whose’ activity and form will also inform what occurs.
To explore my objectives, I need to utilise methods and approaches that support and inform my gathering and working of/with affecting atmospheres/microelements. New Materialism recognises the unguarded, porous approach that I as an embodied researcher must try and hold ‘open’, as ‘the capacity to detect the presence of impersonal affect requires that one is caught up in it. One needs, at least for a while, to suspend suspicion and adopt a more open-ended comportment. If we think we already know what is out there, we will almost surely miss much of it.’ (Bennett 2010 preface xv)
Bodymind:
I use the term ‘bodymind’, described by Margaret Price as ‘the imbrication (not just the combination) of the entities usually called “body” and “mind”’ (Price, 2015 p3). Price cites Garland-Thomson (Misfits: a feminist materialist disability concept, 2011) who explores ‘bodymind’ as a materialist feminist concept that directs attention to “the co-constituting relationship between the flesh and environment” and as ‘a materialist feminist DS concept‘.
The holism of ‘bodymind’ informs my ‘considering’ of my dif/disabled self and my engagement and responses to the world around me. I do not know if my ‘frisson’ begins with the thought, or the experiencing of, a breeze; but I know it ripples through, touching every part of me. Considering this with my ‘affect heuristic’ approach, and the move away from the duality of mind and body of The Affective Turn, I build a ‘picture’ of ‘my bodymind’ as an imbricated site of felt/sensed/affective responses that I inhabit as this embodied researcher.
This research is not about ‘being disabled’; it is a following of fleeting/tangential things, a nebulous gathering of stuff. The work I make has filaments and elements which all slip and shift and change in every moment; in its ‘methods’ there is a reliance on the ‘use’ of my feminist (queer) crip (Kafer 2013) experiencing of the stuff of the world around me, and this sensing ‘bodymind’ as an environment of/for ‘situated knowledge’.
Situated knowledge:
My methods are subjective, embodied and in part situated in my knowing learned through my experience and long-term artistic practice. These inform all my undertakings, and are affected and developed by everything I do and experience. My ‘situated difference’ (Haraway 1988, p593) is particular to me, and a given point in time. This is the basis on which we interact, understand and experience everyday; ‘The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and originality is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another’ (Haraway 1988, p586). So, even though my approach is subjective, situated and embodied, it is not isolated or unconnected; it is porous, leaky and entangled. Sutherland/Acord (2007, p126) suggest that ‘knowledge production happens as a combined effort of creators, technology, mediators, artistic works, contexts and recipients – permeable and material art worlds’, and ‘Knowledge is, therefore, best understood as an embodied, tacit and contextual phenomenon, varied and subjective: a verb rather than a noun.’ If this is the case, then these methods, working with/through my embodied response, following my ‘affect heuristic’, and speculatively seeing where things take me, are approaches that correlate with exploring and seeking affecting dimensions of everyday sonic environments. The aim is then to construct artworks with the potential for an embodied experience in another body – and to be able to reflect and draw out moments of new knowings from the praxis and works made.
Gathering together:
Contemplating why gathering seemed so much better a description than ‘taking’, I found my way to The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Ursula K Le Guinn, 2019) and have been thinking of ways to work that are not reductive or oppositional. The materials gathered I use as ‘themselves’; I am not abstracting them but using them to represent what they are and where they are from (still woven in with what made them ‘appear’) - a wrangling of ideas and stuff. I am choosing’ what to use, and constructing with them through my own sensed experiencing (and in relation to the ‘space’ they will go into), so they can still be (quietly) dynamic and shifting; it is a process of addition, bringing things together, making new moments of encounter and experience.
What has developed is a multimodal multifaceted methodology, a gathering together of a spectrum of approaches and elements, correlating in my practice to microelements of the gathered sound. These can be built into something that includes many ‘angles of view’ concurrently, giving me a way to better construct something more of the nature of sound and affect, shifting and overlapping, things moving to the fore and back, ‘far more than by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects’ (Deleuze, and Guattari, 2004 p479). All the research, including ‘theory’ writing, requires the same potentials to be active and shifting. I will not be ‘using the masters tools’ (Walker 2013/2021) but ‘cutting my own keys’. (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, et al. 2023) and building a ‘tool kit’ for the research (and this ‘bodymind’ )
Rethinking and reworking is a process of ‘affirmation of other practices, activities and works.’ (O’Sullivan, Deleuze, 163). I want my outcomes to be additive and positive inputs; as Barad says, ‘In my opinion, critique is over-rated, over-emphasized, and over-utilized, to the detriment of feminism. I believe this research requires a generative, supportive approach, one open to the ‘sensing’ and ’seeing’ of what might be possibly, supported by the New Materialist approach, which shifts us away from ‘dualist structures by allowing for the conceptualization of the travelling of the fluxes of nature and culture, matter and mind, and opening up active theory formation’. (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012)
Autoethnography:
As research methods I am utilising include ‘listening’ to my own experiencing, through gathering of materials, making of artworks and reflecting on these and the doing/thinking processes, I have/am written/ing this in my voice. I have made notes through the processes; these have been used in the development of the texts, initially around the practice work that has developed into the central practice chapters, but increasingly, using prompts and free writing approaches to get together texts around ‘what I was thinking’, these have been worked with and developed (see later section in this chapter on ‘text’). My writing is principally autoethnographic/autobiographical, it is describing my experiencing, and through this my linking of theories with what is understood through my practices.
Both embodied approaches and autoethnography can be seen as primary research. My ‘writing’ has several functions in the research process: a way of recording actions, thoughts, of developing approaches to sharing the research (in other ways than ‘exhibitions’), the writing has become ‘as a method, (autoethnography is) both process and product’ (Ellis, et al. p27). In this I am an ‘insider’ - exploring what I ‘make’, developing thinking about the links with theoretical concerns, engaging in informal discussion and feedback, and reflexively considering all these elements. As with all of this/my research, my ‘thinking’ is not fixed, but shifting and changing, ‘reality is neither fixed nor entirely external but is created by, and moves with, the changing perceptions and beliefs of the viewer’ (Duncan, 2004. p30). These methods all feed into the developing ‘picture’, and a bringing into focus of possible points of new knowing.