Links text:

This body of research centres around the process of gathering, [alongside theatre company Stans Cafe devising a new work], and the constant reflecting and testing through which a new work was developed for exhibition. Consideration is given to the gathering as an embodied activity and how this is particularly informed by ‘this bodymind’, working with the spaces and a developing a ‘feel’ for what is done. 

The known spaces and short timeframe both allows and necessitates testing out elements in the showing space while the gathering is still underway, and giving parameters and a scaffolding to the activity from the outset. There is reflection on the exhibition, an on difficulties in knowing of other’s experiencing, active event and not knowing. My working/researching approaches were extended through the process, particularly in relation to making active spaces and utilising and extending my own bodily situated knowledge.

I produced a paper/article/film output which was published and a version specifically made for the research catalogue

as the text is combined with the film. [which I suggest a reader might be interested to ‘watch’ as an outline of my thinking at the time]  Additionally, I made two single screen iterations of this work: one shown at Warwick Arts Centre, and a binaural/360 audio iteration for an exhibition  in 2021

Link to title and contents page:

Not knowing: 

I cannot accurately textually describe these, possibly how ‘it was’ felt, but not ‘what’ it was, or what ‘made it’ occur. Fisher observes that, “Within education (at all levels) the prevailing culture requires one to be able to articulate, at the point of experience, what one ‘knows’’ (2013 p77). I think at the time I made the piece, I was ‘pleased’ with how it was in the space, I felt it had shown me things I could carry forward in my enquiry, informed how I made the Dyffryn STRIX shows and my Coventry work. But I do not feel like I can articulate all of what I learned; some of it only sits within me, I carry it. This part of my continually developing situated knowledge is known ‘bodily’ through and feeds back into my embodied research process. Some of this research needs to be in spaces of ‘not knowing’, some I will be able to articulate, draw together with other elements of the thinking/doing/research, and ‘construct’ points where things make ‘sense’ and be shared. Because of the nature of affect/sound/this ‘bodymind’ others I will not.

Gathering: following my affect heuristic, looking for atmospheres + moments of something occurring.

I spoke with James Yarker, artistic director of Stan’s Cafe theatre company (Stan’s) in February 2018, arranging to gather audio and imagery while they were devising a new piece ‘The Capital’. I was slowly working at Dyffryn; however, I wanted to investigate other things that might happen in different spaces/places. In this instance, what occurs as ‘artworks’ are made and developed - not the work made, but active encounters that ‘happen’ and inform how the work develops. In my experience, these are often outside textual description; they are a bodily sensing of something ‘having legs’, the frisson, the affective encounter experienced. Stan’s devising process and the making of ‘artworks’, could be seen as outside the everyday or commonplace, but for ‘artists’, these are habitually part of ‘our’ practice, so this a ‘particular’ activity, but an everyday one in the spaces I inhabit. 

It was agreed that I would gather as Stan’s worked through late August and September, their new show opening at the Birmingham Rep in mid-October, aligning with when I had been invited to show in the foyer/museum at Birmingham School of Art. I would gather in their space on Mondays and Fridays and review materials at the weekends; neither I nor Stan’s could know definitively what might be happening on any given day, the new pieces emerging concurrently. 

I utilised scaffolding, a collection of supporting elements, bits of systems, some of more use on one day than another, mutable, flexible and porous. These include: the mapping of one space to another, discussions, pre-planning equipment or a time frame for recording. Essential in this was a holding ‘in mind’ previous learning and theoretical considerations as I worked, and a being open to a sensed awareness of the space/place and the atmospheres and elements within it. The aim, to make manageable the work with this shifting, slippery stuff, while holding it gently, to not ‘squash’ and reduce. My scaffolds are not set; there is no pattern via which everything is done, and each situation is particular. I use scaffolds across all the work, including the assembling of this chapter.

I felt excited, sure there would be something occurring and there were some very clear structures and parameters for gathering and constructing. There was a short time frame and a known space at a known point; my decisions had to be made quickly, and work put together with available equipment. This allowed for the rest of my approach to be very open and based in my affect heuristic, confident that other bits of structure would develop, and I could open a space to construct the work in an active and affective way.

Before Stan’s started the devising process, when the ‘travelators’ had just arrived, James and I met and talked. I made some photographs of the space, one of those - with James just a yellow blur of high vis jacket, excitedly exploring the workings and structure of the travelators - became part of my exhibition. The space, that image, full of active potential, an excitement for both of us around how elements might come together. I was beginning to understand the necessity of ‘activity’, movement and shift in the works I was making, as ‘parts’ of affect, the image holds a moment of what Massumi describes as a microshock. 

Event:

I am working in a space of affect and event, both not plannable, and where you cannot ‘know’ for sure, when, or how they might occur, or even if they have. As Lomax writes, “And once again she found herself asking if an event is going to happen. – ‘Or, has it happened already? Rather than the too-early is it now the too-late?’” (2005 p8). I have held the notion of the requirement for interaction, shift, movements and activity in what I put together, and they need to shift and move with/through the spaces they are put into, and with the ‘bodies’ that come into play with them, that “each occasion of experience comes into itself amid activities that are not its own, already going on. The coming event takes a dose of the worlds surrounding “general activity” and selectively channels it into its own “special activity” (Whitehead in Massumi 2013 p2). Working with my gathered materials, constructing and putting them together into and with the space, I was thinking with affect and the manyneses and moments; and how these manifest in occurrent art/event in the work I was making.

Chapter Seven

About, facing away from the direction of travel:

Gathering in a space where I thought something might be occuring.

The gathering process (as this ‘bodymind’):

In this chapter I am considering the utilising of ‘having things in mind’ and being open to sensations. This is textually tricky terrain of non-conscious, sensed knowings, that when ‘looked at too closely’ are gone. But I will try to describe some of the edges, the influences, and thinking that come into play here, winding a pathway through the experiencing and trying to share. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Le Guin 2019) informs my approach to gathering from around me into a bag full of bits of the world, things found even if I did not ‘know’ I was looking for them, and then brought together in ways so they begin to make a ‘sense’ for/to me, of where they were from and my experiencing there. 

I write further in The Dyffryn chapter on my ‘role’ in the process and at many points how I am in the materials gathered, but here I want to return to my being ‘this bodymind’. I am a mix of hyper and hypo sensitivities to sensory signals. My hypersensitivities include light, sound, proprioceptive (movement), and vestibular (balance) sensations. I hear my eyes move, I feel if my skin is dry from ‘the inside’, I hear and am aware of my blood circulating, my joints moving and muscles expanding and contacting. This is not unusual in a ‘bodymind’ such as mine. What it does mean is that when I say I feel a ‘frisson’ in my gathering/making processes, I physically sense my skin shrinking, the hairs moving, I have a rush of chemicals and ensuing reaction swirling around in my body. It changes my heart rate, my vision and what I can hear. I am sure that this ‘stimulation’ I feel from the world around me is a causer of my interest in the field of affect; I am trying to ‘utilise’ the way I ‘experience’ in my gathering/making processes (all of them, including the textual), so I am making with theories of affect in mind, trying to hold a space in the environment to feel the ‘micro-shocks, the kind that populate every moment of our lives; for example, a change in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision.’ (Massumi, 2009, p4), things of use in this endeavour, and with the aim to see what it is posable to make with/apparent and share, and in some moments what others might ‘make’ of being in my ‘experiencing’.

Reflecting on the work: 

Arts practice is so often speculative. We know parts of what we are doing, what we hope might develop, a ‘feel’ for something; ‘Artists enjoy the challenge of potential, and the pleasures of surprising themselves and so create spaces for not knowing, both physical and intellectual’ (Fisher 2013 p77). These spaces are often where something happens, materials come together, we surprise ourselves with what occurs; but what can we know of another’s experience of what we make. Considering the notion that, “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does” (Foucault, quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982 p187),  I am not thinking of our responsibility for, or understanding of, the consequence of actions, I am thinking of this as a description of artistic practice. It articulates the feeling of ‘not/knowing’, the excitement and interest in the stuff and ‘doing’ things with it, but the never quite knowing how what is made will be received/understood by another. A hope it will have meaning, invoke thought and response, but there being trepidation, and an awareness that others’ ‘otherness’, means they may not see/feel anything in the things you do. 

Not knowing is a condition of/for an artist in making, and when working with/for affect and event, everything is more slippery and the environment is less describable, but this is the territory I need to be in to ‘do’ this work, and it is in the space of not knowing that things often occur. My description of scaffolds for ‘holding’ a space open, in this context, is a space of not knowing and of ‘holding things in mind’, so that I am ‘primed’ for sensing; “with genuine encounter…. our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted. We are forced to thought” (O’Sullivan 2006 p1). The scaffolding supports my activity, and traction can be gained, but much of this activity is ‘non-describable’ and of sensed encountering. I am trying to work in this terrain, of fleeting ‘thought’, of only-just-perceivable disruptions, while holding things in mind, so I can ‘encounter’ the slight but present sensing of them and utilise this in my undertakings. 

The work revealed possibilities in the construction with and remediation of gathered materials, and how they could ‘inhabit’ another space. Because of the shape of the space, the sound circled up and, it felt, came back down from many directions, the elements of sounds meeting at different places. Therefore, my thinking of these as ‘elements’, with gaps and spaces, was an impossibility in the space. But in this there was a serendipitous working with the space; things came together and shifted, merged and grew into each other. This was another thing I was exploring, and through this could see that the elements of areas when experienced actively together, made a ‘new’ space. 

In a discussion in the exhibition with artist and academic Mona Casey we talked of the similarities of the activity and sounds across the two spaces - in the context of the art school the materials ‘everyday’ and ‘commonplace’- and how the sound activated the space. Not only did sounds from the building come into the work, it seeped around and through into other spaces and out onto the steps. The movement in the visuals, sometimes still and at other times quiet flurries of activity, changed the feel of the space, and the buzzing and footsteps on and off and of the travelator felt at once both here and there. It was an encounter; you were ‘meeting’ the materials, and where they were from, within the changed space of the exhibition; small events happening in different ways all the time. It felt occurrent, active and affecting. Through discussion, I could have an insight to another’s experiencing of what I had made, and that in this work there was an ‘eventscape’ - “Sound transports the event into the listener’s consciousness. The soundscape is therefor and eventscape. Because hearing is always active without ‘earlids’, listeners are involuntarily connected to those events”, (Blesser/Salter in Carlyle and Lane 2013 p87) - that was active and shifting. 

In the space:

The travelators spanned the space, the motors running them to the right with some props and costumes. To the left the main area where the performers spent time with seating and more props and costumes. James at the ‘front’ facing the stage and travelators (where the audience would be). Initially there was a lot of discussion in the devising space; I tried to keep out of the way, not impact the process, and as I didn’t want discussions or things that were explicit or verbally descriptive, I was sensing/looking for the microelements of the space, the stuff that made it like it was.

The area to the left was the busiest part of the devising space, the activity in it feeling like a mix of the mundane and the expectant, cast members waiting, moving props and costumes so they could be used or were out of the way. A sort of ‘queue’ would develop at times at the getting on point to a travelator, and spaces opened when people might need to step off. Through the being in the space and the reviewing of materials from this area recognising elements as,  ‘momentary cuts in the mode of onward deployment of life’ (Massumi 2009 p4), these ‘interruptions’, shifts of attentions, were part of the stuff of the space, material with a ‘potential’, that when brought together with other elements might interact to make something; something I did not know yet know, but “doing it to find out what the result will be” (Paula Rego in Fortnum 2007 p55). Working with a scaffold allowed an openness, not knowing what might be there or of use, while being alert to the small things that were occurring, allowed for the gathering, this material becoming part of the left side of my exhibition. 

Following on from The Cairngorms tests, I was considering the mapping of specific points of gathering in the devising space and what parallels they may have in the showing space as a strategy for transposition. In the showing space, there is a main entrance from the street; you can turn immediately left or right, or travel through the space towards the back of the building. I decided I would site my ‘elements’ in the central area of the showing space so that when the audience first entered the building and the space, they would be positioned where James had been. This additional scaffold gave me a clear way to combine the spaces, with my work laid out roughly mapped to the points it was from, creating a ‘new’ space comprised of elements of both.

The space that it will be in and is from, an active grouping of groupings, embodied process: 

The space of the exhibition was very different from the rehearsal/stage space. The showing space at Birmingham School of Art, a Victorian Venetian gothic building, is the foyer/museum entrance space to the building. There are pillars to each side, a high ceiling that meets at an apex, and windows in the roof. It is a little like a small church, flooded with light on a bright day. Part of my scaffolding was to roughly transpose the layout of the rehearsal space to this; the point you came fully into ‘my space’ would be where James had been positioned, looking towards the main stage activity, and other elements were positioned in relation to this. 

On the left there were two screens and sets of speakers, the imagery and audio from the getting on and off point, with additional audio from contact mics on the floor and travelator. Further left, a pair of speakers with the sounds from ‘outside’, giving its semi-industrial context. To the right, on the wall, the early travelator image, and near later travelator sounds of motors and electrics across two sets of speakers. Looking straight ahead, ‘James’s view’ was a split moving image across the brick wall and the white block, with a pair of speakers behind you and to the left. The moving image, from multiple points of one day, put together with a mix of long slow merging joins, imagery layered up, clear and then subsumed, and short hard cuts; the audio diegetic sound, some out of time and additional elements from other days.

As I worked in the space and on edits, I had in mind affective atmospheres, bodily response and the occurrence of event, so that by following my own affect heuristic, I could notice when things ‘occurred’, and how the space shifted with different positionings and combinations of elements. I understood from previous works that I needed to make the stuff active - multifaceted groupings of gathered microelements from the other place/space, put together in relation with others, but with gaps, shifts and space to invite promiscuity with the space I was constructing into, its shape and audio ecology. 

Masumi’s aesthetic event, which can be a particular sequence of images on a television screen or an artwork, emerges under [the same determined] conditions of individuation. However, Massumi employs Deleuze’s materialist reading of bodily potentiality in Spinoza to argue that the relationally emergent event can generate a spontaneous response within the neuronal relations of the affected subject’s body. (Richter 2023 p32/133) · 

I was constructing an environment to allow for aesthetic event, or, more accurately, shifting changing constantly different moments of aesthetic event, which when experienced are bodily. And that when bodies move through the environment I constructed, they would shift and change it, opening ‘space’ for more and different events, as they are in turn shifted and changed, a spontaneous neural/body response that exists just in that moment. I had to ‘trust’ that the approach of working in a very present and embodied way would give the greatest potential for the making of a space for embodied response from another.

Testing in the process:

I was carrying into this process understanding from The Cairngorms and other previous works; Knowing through the bringing together of my embodied experiencing, my thinking and the theory I was exploring, that the work I was making should consist of moments/points. I was developing this further as clusters of materials, linking with other points and spaces between, to build a ‘bigger’ picture than one grouping could alone. I was also bringing in filmed elements, all locked off views, giving a partial image of activity and space; following on from the gaps between the ‘clusters’ I experimented with gaps in the film and audio, points where the sounds alone might make the environment and where gaze can be dropped and moved to another point. 

As this working process had a tight time frame and known spaces, gathering, reviewing, drawing elements together and testing them in the space, all happen ‘together’. I positioned sounds mapped between the spaces, the travelator sounds were to the right, near the travelator image, constructing a ‘new space’ ‘from’ the same place but not concurrent. Building these into a wider space of time than the ‘duration’ of the piece, linking the wider environment it was from, and in the showing space to ‘that’ wider ‘environment’, as when people move through the exhibition, opening doors, you catch sounds of the workshops below and the street outside. I was constructing the work/space, so microelementscame together in a new ‘unique’ form, that was different in any given moment.

I was beginning to ‘see’ and articulate how these approaches spoke to my questions, giving me parts of the answers and new understanding of how to make embodied spaces of/for affect and embodied encounter. This was happing amid the process and so could feed into continuing gathering and inform how the work ultimately came together. 

I was seeing interplay in the meeting of elements within my clusters of microelements; gathered in an active space of (many types of) occurrence across time, in which new things ‘happened’. When these clusters were brought together with others, there were points of interactions, moments of microevent, and a space began to develop, an environment that a ‘body’ could be/experience within. There was additionally the interplay between my constructed elements/space, the active audio and visual ecology of the space they were put into, and the bodies that move through that space, alive with what they bring with them. All of these came together in a shifting, active, moving and meeting, a space of occurrence in which moments of affective encounter would occur and be present. 

Through experimenting and testing in the showing space, I developed a very clear approach to the final gathering, what additional materials I wanted and where they might go in the space. I was looking for ‘more’ of James’s view, which would be the view that someone arriving in my show/space would see directly in front of them. The audience entering ‘in the position of James’, linking with my positioning of the audience in my seat, in the middle of it all, in the early Cairngorms tests. The imagery that would be projected on the back wall, the meeting of performers on the stage, an image made up of multiple parts, a assembly within the ‘frame’ that additionally held details and softer focus atmospheres. Framing that was tighter and then wider, so the scale and the surface shifted though its duration. The ‘surface’ it landed on would be broken up, part brick wall, part a white panted ‘block’ that was 3m high and stood just in front, so again a movement and points of gaps and change. I set up a fixed camera shot, with binaural microphones, in a central position to the ‘stage’, and binaural microphones on a performer. I shifted the framing through the filming, to gather wider and closer elements of what happened on the stage. As I worked reviewing all the materials and beginning to put elements together, I had other roughed-out elements ‘playing’ in my studio, listening through them as I reviewed other material and catching glimpses of the visuals as I worked. I had been thinking about a title, wondering if it was something about seeing, colliding, slipping out of view. As I noted down ideas, ‘about’ kept appearing; as I was reviewing audio from James’s position in front of the ‘stage’, I caught him saying ‘face away from the direction of travel’, as a direction to a cast member. This spoke to me of what you might see looking the other way/ in different ways, and this felt like it was About that.

Developing a ‘feel’: 

As my ‘feel’ for the spaces of gathering and showing extended, I had more understanding of where things might be occurring that would be of interest to gather, and where I might situate these materials when constructed into the new piece. On subsequent visits, I gathered in multiple ways and concurrently, from James’s position, further exploring the area to the left with travelator on/off points, and from just outside the space, sounds that in quiet moments might be heard in it.

Connecting my experiencing of the multifactedness of sound and spaces with affect theory resulted in an understanding that for an affective response, for a microshock (Massumi), to occur, stuff needs to active, shifting and changing and that my ‘microelements’ are bits of stuff that I can then actively bring together to make an affecting ‘space’. I am speculatively gathering, but with a ‘plan’; and in that and the reviewing following my ‘affect heuristic’ to see what I would ‘find’, what might become ‘visible’. I recognised that I could utilise the meeting of the ‘characters’ on the stage as a form of a non-dramatic active coming together, and that the materials from the left I could work with, and combine them into a second grouping of image and sound, with constant small change and movement, similar but slightly different to the first. 

Additional materials/microelements: 

I had gathered materials around the activity of devising, and additionally sounds that ‘made up the space’; microelementsthat are ‘not [a] smaller perception; [but] a perception of a qualitatively different kind… something that is felt without registering consciously [which] registers only in its effects.’ (Massumi 2009 p.2). These sound elements of the everyday and commonplace of the space, ‘made’ by something occurring, maybe not seen, heard or noticed, until given a ‘space’ to be part of. Using contact microphones on the travelators allowed gathering of ‘internal’ sounds, a hum and judder, footsteps on and off, ‘bodies’ shifting on them. With a coil microphone, sounds that we just about hear from the motors and lights, but in a form I could separate from the hubbub of the space. I gathered sounds that came into the space, which give an extended ‘view’ into a wider ‘commonplace audio ecology’ sounds of being in a still semi-industrial area of the city: a grinder cutting, background traffic, seagulls.