hear/here - gathering the commonplace, towards an understanding of affect + embodied encounter through constructing non-narrative sound sculpture by Ana Gabrielle Rutter

This practice research PhD centres around gathered sound (and imagery) from spaces/situations and working with and through those as an embodied maker/researcher; following my affect sensing nose (an affect heuristic?) to explore microperceptions as triggers of non-conscious affective response to elements in the world + how this informs and extends my approach to constructing ‘sound sculptures’ as new spaces for bodily encounter. This is a subjective exploration from my crip/neurodivergent position. working with things gathered and building with/upon other's thinking and doing using approaches developed from my art-making practices. It utilises mutable, flexible scaffolds to support ‘construction’ and working with all the materials (+me) retaining potentials/possibilities for affective response + atmospheres.

This will be the About - 3 page.

This page will be about Doing / Thinking the conferance paper and then published paer

This is the link back to the first About page

About + paper

This presentation is, in parts, made from re deployed, altered and re connected elements from a paper I originally resented at Demontford university – there is also a version in the works that is an even more intertextual layered version – for publication hopefully – which is a film with text overlay and voice as well as image and audio from the original artwork it has an accompanying text with spaces and gaps – so the slipping and sliding between modalities of doing, receiving and understanding are shifting always – well that is the hope…… that it is an always different active and activating thing…..

The paper that I proposed and then presented was called

doing/thinking:

My thinking started with the Foucault quote;

The paper was read with a film with audio behind me, I was on a stage spot lit – more performative than I am maybe comfortable with; It was an attempt to explicate my emerging/ent methodology/ical approach to recording praxis and thinking. My hope was that the ‘doing’ would help me develop / clarify my process and methodology in a way that would become the basis for a ‘chapter’ in my thesis. And Its on its way –

And the doing of this, is in and of its self, helping me clarify and map where I was / am – and at times helped me become more entangled.

And I hope your still with me…….

So to try and sum up where I am now –

I am thinking about event, bodily response, affective atmospheres and the way these are related to how something might occur. I am concerned with these in relation to my practice of brining elements and parts from gathered materials together to make ‘new’ moments and occurrences. I am thinking about what Massumi describes as micro shocks and Deluze and Guatarie as micro perceptions and the relationship of micropercetions to embodied response, the part they play in making memory and triggering bodily remembrance. Key to this is thinking about affect as not an emotion or a feeling but an experiencing of something occurring as Massumi says –

‘Affect for me is inseparable from the concept of shock. It doesn’t have to be a drama. It’s really more about 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.’^⁠¹

These shifts of attentions, interruptions, what Massumi describes as ‘a momentary cut in the mode of onward deployment of life’,^⁠² they are not consciously noticed in themselves, but we are aware of the affect, of its effect on our bodies;

Massumi describes microperception as; ‘not (a)smaller perception; it’s a perception of a qualitatively different kind. It’s something that is felt without registering consciously. It registers only in its effects.’^⁠³

I have been thinking about this in relation to the materials I ‘gather’, considering a notion of ‘microelements’; details, stuff, little bits of moment, shifts in light, something passing. How I can combine these, bring them together, in ways that trigger response and make new events. I have been experimenting with taking things from one place and moving them to another. Massumi states there is ‘no such thing as starting from scratch’^⁠⁴ things are always related to what’s happened before. What is felt is the quality of the experience and that this ‘transition’ leaves a trace, a memory, therefore it’s not restricted to that one occurrence. Our experiences and how we carry them forward are part of an ongoing dynamic event that is ever-shifting and altering and that when we meet something our experience of it is particular to that moment. We can never meet it in quite the same way again. as Massumi says ‘a reactivation of the past in passage toward a changed future.’^⁠⁵ Other ‘bodies’ in a space will also inform our response, ‘our experience emerges from a field of conditions’, and the subject of that is only made in that moment with those elements / body in play in that particular way; so that ‘subject’ what it is in that moment can only be ‘then’.

Tip

Tip