Media, Practice and Theory: Tracking Emergent Thresholds of Experience 1648895042, 9781648895043

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Media, Practice and Theory Tracking emergent thresholds of experience

Edited by

Nicole De Brabandere McGill University

Series in Art

Copyright © 2023 by the Authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Vernon Art and Science Inc. www.vernonpress.com In the Americas: Vernon Press 1000 N West Street, Suite 1200 Wilmington, Delaware, 19801 United States

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Series in Art Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945897 ISBN: 978-1-64889-643-9 Also available: 978-1-64889-504-3 [Hardback] Product and company names mentioned in this work are the trademarks of their respective owners. While every care has been taken in preparing this work, neither the authors nor Vernon Art and Science Inc. may be held responsible for any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in it. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For Rakesh and Avni

27BC11

Table of contents Acknowledgements Introduction

vii ix

Nicole De Brabandere McGill University

Chapter 1

Part One: Theory and Practice

1

Seeing and Touching the Shadow: Texturing the Installation

3

Amélie Brisson-Darveau UQAM Université du Québec à Montréal

Chapter 2

Virtual ISLANDS: Proposing VR Tidalectics

19

Olivia McGilchrist Concordia University

Chapter 3

Con-Tactilisation: Touch as a form of multisensory, reciprocal, and co-constitutive perception

47

Elke Mark University Flensburg Lindsey French University of Regina

Chapter 4

Part Two: Transversal Articulations

73

A Matter with(out) Delay: (Dis)appearances of a gift

75

Petra Köhle and Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin Institute of Visual Arts, EDHEA – The Valais School of Art, HES-SO Valais-Wallis

Chapter 5

A History of Violence: Photography and Writing as an Experience, Experiment and Insight

115

Kai Ziegner University of Applied Sciences Potsdam

Chapter 6

There are no negative forms Or: How I lost my interest in copies

131

Sarah Burger ZHdK Zürich

Chapter 7

Part three: Speculative Discourse

151

Sidelining Photorealism: Speed Racer and the Articulation of Digital Visual Effects Labour

153

Jonah Jeng University of Pittsburgh

Chapter 8

Powers of Abjection and Factories of Strong Emotions: On Nadja Kurz’ / Flaccid Knob’s Video Installations

177

Friederike Sigler Ruhr-University Bochum

Chapter 9

Latento for Curation as Research-Creation

191

Treva Michelle Legassie and Matthew-Robin Nye Concordia University Karen Wong Independent curator and designer

Index

211

Acknowledgements I have had the privilege to meet and share research with the authors of this volume at various academic and artistic research (or research-creation) events and programs over the past several years. I am thrilled to have been able to reconnect with the authors through the inspiring lens of their research in the making of this volume. I am deeply grateful to my PhD advisors, Erin Manning and Giaco Schiesser, as well as my post-doctoral supervisor Alanna Thain for their mentorship and for their radical investment in building and maintaining artistic research and research-creation communities. It is through the support of these communities that new modes of inhabiting and worlding the institution become possible. I am also humbled to have been able to witness the highly generous and thoughtful feedback of the peer-reviewers, as well as the contributors’ deep and sincere engagement with the reviewer feed-back. Organizing the peer review process revealed the extent to which it is embedded within institutional and personal disparities. This became visible as reviewers with a comparably precarious professional situation were more frequently available to commit the time needed to write the review than those with established employment (and unforgivingly busy schedules). It is also notable that care duties and a structural critique of the unpaid labour involved in the peerreview process were among reasons that some prospective reviewers declined my reviewer requests. But alongside these very real problems and concerns, I am extremely grateful to the reviewers who did contribute for their generosity, as well as for their thoughtful and provocative insight.

Introduction Nicole De Brabandere McGill University

This volume gathers contributions from artist and media researchers investigating the co-compositional dynamics of media and bodies. Some of the media in discussion include animation, VR, installation practices, interview, curation, archiving, photography and multi-media assemblages. Amidst this diverse set of media—and the techniques, durations and practices that accompany them—the fact of having a body is an important starting point.1 Having a body is the means by which a media practice conjures meaning that is thinkable, feelable and livable. Here, the body is conceived, not as a given threshold separating the self from another, but as something that acquires relevance by the way it is co-constituted within a media ecology. This co-constitutive dynamism is punctuated by events of emergent thought, sensation and perceptibility and can occur either within an artistic/multimedia practice or within contexts of media spectatorship and criticism. As bodies and media are posed in their mutual co-constitution, they gesture towards a holding together that complicates dominant registers of intelligibility premised on the discreteness or separability of objects. What is foregrounded are situations of paradox or contradiction characterized by the coming together of differences such as media and representation, movement and stasis, the material and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, analysis and intuition, the abstract and the concrete. The paradoxical becomes propositional (and relevant for a media research practice) as it holds open the potential for its own variation.2 As a result, the irreconcilability of its terms becomes intensely heterogeneous. Paradox within media assemblages thus forwards a means of thinking and experimenting with how interest and importance emerge multiply

1 Drawing from Spinoza, Isabelle Stengers (2010) reiterates the problematic of “what a body can do” to implicate minor aspects of experience within a concept of corporeality. 2 For José Gil the paradoxical body creates space through movement, even as it is imbricated in objective space. Such movement coincides with affects that render space “dense or rarified, invigorating or suffocating” (2006, p.22).

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within situated media practices in ways that are livable, and both critical of and in excess of, given terms. As this volume gathers contributions that center the body from a number of different media-based, disciplinary and processual vantages, it forwards a kind of toolkit for enlarging both critical and pragmatic media research. In some contributions, media research techniques make time and space for, non-linear and transversal modes of inquiry, where articulation is both discursive and non-discursive, conceptual and materially situated. Other contributions deploy primarily discursive strategies to relate how spectatorship can become a means of intervening into and repositioning dominant theoretical frameworks, while imbuing critique with intense sentience and affect. Many of the contributions feature a combination of these two approaches, sometimes playing one off the other, giving rise to a dramaturgy where discursive and non-discursive critical gestures are staged in a mutually generative unfolding. In all cases, the co-presence of media and bodies makes an opening to tend to the role of affect, or the intense quality of experience as it shapes sentience and inhabited tendencies of perception in non-deterministic ways.3 Since affect is not extractible but occurs with and alongside the felt thought of this emergent perceptibility, chapters grapple with concepts, phrasing, as well as modes of organizing discursive and media-based forms at the threshold of what can be squarely accounted for or stated with given terminologies or conventions. This process constitutes a means of doing media research by drawing new lines of separation (or continuity) across concepts, bodies, objects, practices, materials and technologies that may or may not manifest in discursive form. Interest and affinity within diverse media assemblages, drive the possibility for knowledges that cannot be accounted for by empirical means alone and in fact, become the driving force for developing techniques

3 Brian Massumi distinguishes affect and emotion, where emotion is designated by terms such as “happy” and “sad”, contrary to affect, which is an intensity that is felt but that does not have a pre-determined emotive status or obvious causality. Massumi suggests that “the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect” (1995, p. 84). This means that affect (and the bodies that are affected by an affective event) are not determined by that event but are “attuned to, certain regions of tendency, futurity and potential”. This preserves their differential relation to events that may be experienced collectively (2015, p.108). Marie-Louise Angerer (2019, p. 40) similarly situates affect within non-linear durations or within interstices that conjure “a dimension of abstracted physicality”.

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that further condition or prime new practices and modes of intelligibility.4 At the same time, this process often calls for grappling with terms that propose instances of cohesion that are marked with abstract and generative intensity. Some of the terms that the authors and artists of this volume use to describe such instances include in-betweenness, togetherness, co-composition, contactilization, seamfulness, partialness, difference, the unspoken, and texture. This set of terms offers distinctly transversal affordances that enable specifying how pragmatic constraints co-compose, and how practice enters into theory, and vice-versa, within situated media research. Here, practice and theory act as constraints, as problematics and as propositions that are co-composed in a dynamic negotiation, where one informs and transforms the scope and relevance of the other. Research becomes think-able as a contemporary worlding of discourse, media and bodies that gives contour to emergent and speculative futures.5 While themes of the body and process figure in all the chapters, additional terms of continuity (and distinctness) between the chapters hinge on the how of doing research as a situated and analytical assemblage. 6 When the how of research is not given but problematized, discursive and experiential knowledges are unmoored from given modalities in favor of pragmatic engagements that operationalize critique as a means of sustaining affectively driven, interestbased inquiry. Whether coming from a disciplinary, inter-disciplinary or practice-based research orientation, tending to the how of research makes

4 The

transversality that I describe here jibes with what Rosi Braidotti calls “Transposition” (2016), a notion taken up by Michael Schwab (2018) to gather contributions in a volume of the same name from artist-researchers who describe the incipient and heterogeneous correspondences between different media and modes of practice that exceed representation. 5 This speculative futurity is in contrast to normative articulations that reproduce heteronormative and progress-oriented becoming and allows for affective, nonchronological and indeterminate forces. See (Springgay and Truman, “Counterfuturisms and speculative temporalities: Walking research-creation in school,” 2019, pp. 548-549). 6 In the last decade, several theorists have underscored the importance of unpacking the how of practices as a means of both critical and world-making engagement. Indigenous scholar Leanne Simpson (2017) proposes the how as a means of understanding indigenous political resurgence as a decolonial practice “rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking”. Science and technology studies scholar Michelle Murphy (2017) develops the how as a means of privileging experimentation in “technoscience dreaming”, or a means of bringing speculative futures into the present. Deborah Levitt (2018) considers the how as a means of accounting for the dynamic cocomposition of human and non-human animacies in the context of animation, virtual avatars and A.I.

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think-able the way affect, perception and articulation are co-emergent with the researcher and the research outcomes. The contributions of this volume can be roughly divided into three groups, each emphasizing different registers of engagement with the how of research, and its implications for tracking and articulating corporeal generativities within media assemblages. The first part, Theory and Practice, (Ch. 1, Ch. 2, Ch. 3) comprises contributions that explicitly position the specific media practices in which they are engaged alongside critical hermeneutics and discourse. In these contributions theory is not reducible to practice, and viceversa. Each is developed with recourse to the other, in a way that privileges the conditions for specifying both. In this generative back-and-forth, spacetimes of critical inquiry emerge with and alongside a diversity of practices, which themselves can become a means of either substantiating or refuting theoretical claims. Within these examples, experiential accounts are also operationalized as a means of holding different modes of inquiry together based on the importance of their lived effects and affects, rather than given assumptions. This means that different modes of research inform one another, but in ways that exceed causality or that cannot be fully anticipated, preserving criticality as a livable activation of interest and relational potential. In the second part, Transversal Articulations (Ch. 4, Ch. 5, Ch. 6) the research milieu is forwarded as both multi-media assemblage and investigative framework. Contributions in this group co-compose non-discursive and discursive media, where intelligibility is informed by a strong sense of how the co-presence of different media within a presentational format enlists diverse temporalities, opacities and registers of articulation. In bearing witnesses to these convergent differences, we are invited to apprehend media iterations in ways that insist on their own indeterminacy but that nonetheless iterate specific terms of novelty or generativity. Here, novelty is forwarded, not in counter-distinction to the always out-of-date, but as a non-linear potential that can draw from and lend new relevance to past iterations at any instant, suspending the difference between artist and spectator. Here newness is intime with inhabitable co-presences that move both within specific iterations and across them, alongside established media forms and concepts, as well as those that are in-the-making. The third part, Speculative Discourse (Ch. 7, Ch. 8, Ch. 9) consists of contributions where practices are primarily situated within theoretical discourse but engage the situated generativity of how media objects and spectatorship co-compose. This is a process that makes room for the emergent thought and sentience that occurs between witnessing a media object and articulating its specific generativities. In these contributions, discourse and critique become implicated in the making of a sensorium,

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where critique is explicitly informed by felt absences and intensities. While the mode of articulation within these contributions remains primarily textual, its analytic formulations and affective evocations congeal important continuities with non-discursive modes of media research, positioning media criticism as a media practice in its own right. In this volume, the term tracking is forwarded as a means of holding together these heterogeneous research approaches since it entails detailing the specific and situated dynamism of inhabiting media ecologies. To elaborate, as thought is figured in its co-emergence with situated media, what arises is a strong sense of transversality that does not undermine critical differences, but points to their embeddedness in the simultaneously irreducible. Such irreducibility lends a consistency to the research practice that foregrounds the processual in a way that is at once tentative and informing. Put otherwise, the long-term engagement with the specificity of a research process gathers and accumulates registers of interest, desire, sentience and intelligibility, preserving radical openness while deepening the research in a way that is coincident with the making of inhabited tendencies. While articulating this co-emergence as an analytic strategy relies on abstraction to map relevant differences, such differences are never separable from how they mark intensive openings for further iteration. This enlarges the field upon which media practice develops as a means of worldmaking and livable futurity. Archival Generativity Another important framing for this volume is the way media research manifests as an archival practice. Each contribution proposes an archive that is markedly unique. This is in part due to the fact that contributors come from research communities spanning European and North American contexts, as well as from fine arts and humanities-based disciplinary backgrounds. At the same time, the archives presented are very much in adherence to the specific constraints, particularities and affordances of the research practice in question. The most radical examples feature a marked horizontality between pragmatic and hermeneutic referentiality, where references operate variously as substantiation and proposition, as theoretical premise and as the substance of material and media-based experimentation. As a corollary, the archive operates within the research ecology in heterogeneous ways, cuing formal, gestural or affective urgencies. Below, I briefly describe how each contribution develops and deploys the archive to highlight the way it diversely co-evolves with specific research processes, questions and results. In the work of Petra Köhle and Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin, the archive is explicitly engaged as a proposition to develop a research practice that is

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premised on how the archive both manifests particular histories and proposes relational and speculative possibility. The duo conducted extensive research into historical correspondences around the transfer of gifts from league of nations member states to the Palais des Nations around the time of its formation in order to analyze political philosophies of the gift, and its embeddedness within international hierarchies. Through this archival research, the gift is problematized to enable a speculative worlding of nations as a concept and as a situated assemblage that operates through pragmatic constraints and protocols. Köhle and Vermot-Petit-Outhenin expand this pragmatic generativity towards developing performative modes of scripting that engage the otherwise undocumented and unspoken histories associated with the archive, and which constitutes a major part of their artistic and creative practice. The archive is operative in Kai Ziegner’s chapter as a means of making time and space for seemingly mundane events and exchanges, but that when put together, provide a complex picture of how state violence enters in various and unexpected ways into everyday life. The dissolution of former East Germany corresponds with Ziegner’s own personal timeline from childhood into adulthood, allowing him to pose his own personal history, tendencies and concerns as an uncertain archive of violent events, where causality is neither conclusive nor complete. In turn, the violence that the author sets out to document is unmoored from any particular object and without a singular or causal explanation, surfacing instead as a gradual assemblage or texture of encounters, memories, situations, comprising documentary as well as fictional narrative techniques. Sarah Burger both mobilizes and problematizes the archive through her mediation on the bicycle helmet. Burger employs an associative discursive strategy as well as practices of mould-making and digital image manipulation to render a non-hierarchical archival assemblage comprising neo-lithic, romantic, technological, material and industrialized animacies. With the aim of seeking a returning “gaze”, or a transformative and magical “third space” that exceeds the original and the copy, Burger undermines Western paradigms of thought in favor of a rationality that has always been paradoxical and inseparable from the magical. The intense and generative non-linearity that results from this convergence between the rational and the magical, leads Burger to problematize the how of referentiality such that references are posed in loose correspondence (and generative proximity) with her text, rather than a linear or causal index, as convention would dictate. For Amélie Brisson-Darveau, theories of corporeality and movement practice offer a means of approaching the material and affective textures of an installation setting, which in turn, propose a diversity of ways of practicing

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and thinking with the archive. One important example from her text is the way corporeal movement can comprise the movement of shadow, which when staged in a particular way can exert a non-linear and multi-directional intensity. This pertains to conceptualizing the installation setting as well as a reading of early American horror films as an aesthetic and formal proposition that exceeds cinematic narrative. In her words, this kind of convergence makes “the relationship between the theoretical and practical dimensions of the project permeable.” Olivia McGilchrist likewise proposes a hybrid research archive, where the causality between referentiality and research outcomes remains undetermined, though rich with generative correspondences. McGilchrist’s work bridges Caribbean studies, post-colonial theory and critical race studies and the situated media practice of developing experiences in Virtual Reality (VR). For McGilchrist, the transposition of a physical body into a virtual wording becomes an opening to trouble racialized identity categories and modes of recognition and to examine how they are implicated in notions such as empathy, opacity and embodiment. With and alongside this critical lens, VR is proposed as a means of problematizing identity in an experiential way, whether by being virtually submerged by a tidal wave or the intensive layering of coastal imagery, to name a few. Hybridity as an explicitly generative gathering with both theoretical and pragmatic implications is foundational for Lindsey French and Elke Mark, as well as for Treva Legassie, Matthew-Robin Nye, and Karen Wong. In these contributions, hybridity manifests as a dynamic archival practice that is elaborated through hyphenated terminologies that are both conceptuallydriven and materially concrete or situated. French and Mark forward the cocompositional gathering of “contact” and “tactility” through the term “Contactilisation”. The central positioning of these two terms is the means by which the authors develop research practices that combine performancebased and empirical research approaches, wresting empirical knowledge from its embeddedness in paradigms of binarization that separate research subjects and objects, while proposing emergent performative and worldmaking potentials. Legassie, Robin-Nye and wong similarly begin with the hyphenated term “Research-Creation” to unpack the generative holding together of research and creation as they inform ecologically-situated curatorial practices. This gives rise to several other terms that emphasize the relevance of the undetermined or yetto-come, including “pollination” and “haecceities”. Here, terminological correspondences operate to simultaneously cohere and expand the research archive in a way that gives consistency to a research process that is both within and without the institution. What is fascinating here is that this

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terminological gathering is not premised on referential meaning alone but comprises their compositional effects and affects as they are operative within discursive and more-than-discursive ecologies. This includes curatorial practice, which is reproduced (and transformed) by the way it in-folds new relational potentials or speculative futures that are both described by and in excess of its terms. While Jonah Jeng and Friederike Sigler’s contributions belong more squarely within the domains of cinema studies and art history respectively, the archives they engage coincide with a critical discussion of the media they present in its material specificity and affective generativity. Jeng develops the notion of "seamfulness" through Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s film Speed Racer (2008) to make conceptual time and space for how the specific affordances and visibilities of CGI animation can make think-able the labour that produces it. This is in contrast to photorealist examples where the aim is to make such labor invisible, feeding into an attention economy that bypasses labour’s corporeal temporality and situated materialism. Jeng's close attention to the felt visibility of the film’s productive labour makes it thinkable as a kind of archive in its own right, where heterogenous modes of appearance, are gathered to expand on and multiply an uncertain object. Friederike Sigler’s engagement with the multi-media installations of Flaccid Knob constitutes authorial voice as an archival practice that holds meaning and affect in intimate and generative tension. Sigler enacts a bio-political repositioning of the abject, from a reaction of disgust towards a discreet object, towards an opening to specify the critical generativity of care and copresence. Sigler achieves this by employing methods of critical discourse alongside highly specific descriptions of witnessing the multi-media installations. These installations include video screenings of Flaccid Knob’s performances and built structures that visitors can enter into. In Sigler’s description, we discover that these structures seem to be part of the sets used in the videos, albeit partial and inexact variations of them. For Sigler, this inexact transfer of objects across media imparts a sense of spatial destabilization (something reinforced by the material uncertainty figured by a prevalence of substances like slime and goo in Flaccid Knob’s work) which she expands on and elaborates through her at once evocative critical discussion. Though diverse in practice, discipline and media, what we witness in all of the contributions is how the archive does more than forward or substantiate particular research claims. Instead, it conjures relevance that stirs at the thresholds of given practices, techniques, media and modes of intelligibility. The archive operates multi-modally, informing situated constraints and outcomes in the midst of taking shape. Amidst such a research milieu the archive becomes increasingly heterogeneous (in that it can be approached

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and mobilized in various and unexpected ways) informed by factors such as inhabited memories, materiality, techniques and technologies. As archives are figured in their co-compositional generativity, they are revealed as a situated potential where both discipline and the binary separation of subjects and objects, can be actively and critically wrestled with, sidestepped, or upended. This offers a reading of the archive as technology, and as media, with explicit influence on the scope and dynamism of research practice, as it evokes emergent spacetimes of meaning, interest and importance. Technology, Practice and Transversal Historiographies To help contextualize the specific generativity of the contributions, here I propose a brief historiography of concepts that both describe and operationalize the transversal effects and affects of interdisciplinary media research. Though Western media research paradigms have tended to pit media objects as discrete entities, binarily opposed to the media analyst or researcher, non-binaristic media research practices were introduced by artists and philosophers in the last century, including Paul Valéry (1998) Paul Klee (1953), Suzanne Langer (1951) and Gilbert Simondon (1969). What distinguished the contributions of these thinkers was their focus on tending to the virtual dynamism of specific media forms, techniques and technologies, as both a critical and analytic strategy. The theorization they present thus centers the body as it becomes intelligible in instances of co-composition that exceed parameters set by empirical registers of physicality. Examples include the static form of the undulating line that seems to move (Langer, 1951); the flat plane whose overlapping shapes appear to recede and project forward (Klee 1953); how rendering different kinds of surfaces within a single scene in the context of sight drawing can merge different registers of recognition (Valéry 1998); the rhythmic and durational generativities that occur alongside and in excess of machinic function (Simondon, 1969). Marcel Duchamp’s (1983) concept of the “infrathin” also articulates instances when material forms become intense as they embody the felt inseparability of objects (or the passage between them in time) as in the case between bodies and chairs as figured in example “the warmth of a seat which has just been left”.7 Such generativities cannot be experienced second-hand but are inextractible from how they open up or give germ to new areas of interest and speculation. The above-mentioned examples—the virtual movement in the

See Marcel Duchamp (1983, p. 45). Erin Manning (2013, p. 339) develops the similar concept, the “infra-dimensional” to account for the architectural bodying that takes shape in dance where tendencies shift away from displacement and “toward an infradimensionalising of the very idea of ground itself”. 7

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familiar form of the drawn line, the affective dynamism conjured by simple geometric forms on a picture plane, the ineffable sense of temperature on the familiar surface of a chair—thus achieve rhetorical importance as they exceed the discursive registers with which their generativity is explained. In other words, the inseparability of form and affect within these examples insists on the threshold where novelty is not reducible to a given format or mode of articulation. Whatever the explanation of virtual effects and affects provided, it cannot stand alone but requires experimentation that renders and makes felt its corporeal and irreducible situatedness. As discourse gives way to corporeal generativities that exceed the textual, and vice-versa, it marks and preserves an “interstice”. Both Jean-Luc Godard and Gilles Deleuze discuss the interstice by way of the cinematic image, which is constituted by a holding together of movements both within and between shots and gives rise to a temporal sense that exceeds real-time capture.8 For Godard, the interstice is a “a method of constitution of series, by finding 'theorems' at the edges of 'problems'” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 180). Deleuze elaborates that such theorems always require new modes of reconciliation, according to the transformation of the whole, since “the whole becomes the constitutive part between-two images (Deleuze, 1989, 180). But this notion of the interstice can be extended to understand research in terms of how situated differences matter for how one might inhabit a media ecology, or further, how one might generate new worlding possibilities (or concepts and practices that characterize the negotiation of an incipient whole or totality) as a research process in its own right. This altogether sidesteps reductionist models that equate objects with their copy as, for example, in standard paradigms of lens-based and data capture. The potency of the interstice in destabilizing such paradigms is evidenced by the diversity of ways that contemporary media researchers have interrogated (and pragmatically rerouted) the premise of their ontological, technological, material and durational status through performative engagement.9 When

8 See

Alana Thain’s Bodies in Suspense (2019) and Toni Pape’s Figures of Time: Affect and the Television of Preemtion (2019) for in-depth readings of durational affects that occur through the interstice within cinema and T.V. based examples. 9 Media researchers who engage lens-based media as ecological worlding include Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Mobeus-Greil (2019) in Choreo-graphic Figures: Scoring Aesthetic Encounters; Natasha Myers in Becoming Sensor in an Oak Savannah, with Ayelen Liberona (2015-present), and Allison Cameron (2017); Johanna Zylinska in works such as WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN DIGITAL (2009) and iEarth(2014). Also see video’s by Hito Steyerl that engage the image as part of a surveillance ecology in How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) and within histories of image philosophy in Adorno’s Grey (2013). See Drawing Light: at the

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embedded within a performative practice, lens-based capture is forwarded as an interstice, as it destabilizes and complicates the temporality of the instant by rallying diverse and situated practices. The interstice as world-making possibility jibes with Édouard Gliassant’s description of opacity, which occurs through “échos-monde”, or worldechoes, and engenders an iterative seriality. Through the creation and apprehension of “échos-monde” opacity proposes a generative and ethical imperative that “protects diversity” within a broad range of relational ecologies.10 Glissant states: in the opacity of relation “all the threatened and delicious things [join] one another (without conjoining, that is, without merging)” (1997, p. 62). Échos-monde are thus a means of accounting for emergent differences over series that mark and reconstitute media and bodies in their mutual generativity, but only partially describe their basis in causality. This maintains an eye to the heterogeneous generativities that accompany media iterations while eschewing their reductive characterization. Here, the terms of intelligibility move away from centering given or contained objects, to tracking tendencies of emergent coherence within a creative practice and the speculative possibility of their transformation. To further explain the generativity of the interstice it is useful to return the form of trajectory as it manifests differences in the way it is drawn as compared to how it is walked. One can “take a line for a walk” as Klee famously claims, since the two forms of trajectory can both be experienced as an inhabited form of passage and displacement.11 But the difference between the two modes is interstitial in that it proposes new openings to think, feel and inhabit trajectory as it is negotiated between drawing and walking, since each presents very different spatial and temporal conditions. Slight changes in material quality, or the dynamism of line weight while drawing, can open to new experimental possibility for walking. Meanwhile, the auditory and

thresholds of perception (2018) an installation/workshop that I developed with Alanna Thain for a discussion about how lens-based practices can coincide with formal, material and conceptual figurations of the weave. See De Brabandere (2022) “Co-composing the Perceptible Across Affective, Painterly and Computational Generativities” (2022) for an account of how the computer vision algorithm of the website www.ThisPersonDoes NotExist.com proposes radical re-compositions of lens-based visual and technological paradigms. 10 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 62. I also refer to échos-monde in “Co-composing the Perceptible Across Affective, Painterly and Computational Generativities”, Kunstlicht: Algo-rhythms, 2022. 11 Klee’s proposition is implicit in his description of a drawn line that is “an active line on a walk, moving freely without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake” (1953, p. 16).

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topographic dynamics of walking can suggest ways to expand a drawing practice to specify new drawing textures, including material qualities or viscosities, as well as durations and rhythms.12 The interstice thus sustains the possibility of inhabiting, and enlarging emergent points of convergence across different domains of experience. The aim here is not the resolution of difference, but a persistent interrogation of the terms of differentiation (and continuity), which emerge and become explicit over a series of iterations. While contributions in this volume do describe discrete examples of interstitial generativity, they are not always made explicit. Some contributions employ an implicit rendering of the interstice, which may occur through the juxtaposition of image and text or the pairing of different kinds of textual or discursive modalities. But more important than the explicit identification of the interstice, is the way readers are invited to apprehend the interstice in a speculative manner and before its generative effects have been fully accounted for. This means to develop affinities with the research as an assemblage, as it guides one to apprehend artifacts, effects and affects in their co-constitutive transversality.13 This is an invitation to conjure research as a means of creating the possibility for its own variation and to tend to the generativity of an increasingly broad range of practices and techniques. A final concept that I would like to introduce here is the notion of “technicity”. Simondon suggests that the motor of technicity is the discovery of form: “it is not the destruction of potentials; the system continues to live and evolve; it is not degraded by the appearance of structure; it remains 12 Also

see works by Sedje Hémon, including Fête, Oil on Canvas, 93 x 77cm, 1957, which foreground abstraction as a means of articulating intense or “spiritual” convergences between painting and music (featured in the exhibition “Abstracting Parables” 1 Jul – 16 Oct, 2022, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam). Thomas Lamarre (2002) describes a similar transversality in Heian “paperscapes”, which provide an incipient texturing that preceeds and co-composes with the poetics, materiality, movement and dimensionality of calligraphic mark-making. In “Experimenting with Affect across Drawing and Choreography” (2016) I engage the weighted line, as a means of experimenting with movement scoring techniques and the intense processual affects of mark-making as they co-emerge within situated material ecologies, which give rise to variations over series. This work also refers to the weighted, calligraphic scores for dance improvisation by Dana Reitz. Other expanded drawing ecologies that I have developed include Cuing and Aligning with the Audible (2015) with Graham Flett; A Collaboration of Intercessors (2016) with Amélie Brisson Darveau and Christoph Brunner (for an account of this ecology see De Brabandere, N. (2021) Textures of Collaboration) and Drawing Light: Gesture and Suspense in the Weave, with Alanna Thain (2018). 13 Giaco Schiesser (2015) makes the case for the inclusion of these these components within artistic research methodologies and outputs in “What is at Stake – Qu’est ce que l’enjeu? Paradoxes – Problematics – Perspectives in Artistic Research Today”.

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tenuous and is capable of self-modification' (Simondon, 1969, p. 163, my translation). Erin Manning draws this definition forward into what it means for an experimental research practice, describing technicity as a phase of emergent form that “sets the conditions for successive operations, each of which incorporates the implicit, creating an opening toward an ecology of experimentation” (2013, p. 35). Within research ecologies that privilege technicity, outcomes are not always complete or translatable, even as they occur with and alongside discreet media-based instances or insights. This non-translatability sustains the way an image or installation that is part of a research practice makes thinkable speculative relationalities that extend beyond what is immediately given or recognizable. What is at play is the strategic gathering of partial and discontinuous elements that present potential tactics for preserving interest, intensity and criticality. Technicity thus enables the possibility of centering research aims around what it means to inhabit research in a way that tends to and radically intervenes into specific corporeal tendencies, as well as existing terms of experimentation. Technicity thus also figures the corporeality of the artist, author or practitioner, as something that is co-emergent with and transformed by the research process. This mutual dynamism requires the welcome inclusion of excess and opacity, such that it enacts an ethical positioning.14 This begs the question, what kinds of responsibility and scope do such corporealities bear within and outside the institutional settings where research takes place? Institutional Worldings This volume unfolds with and alongside the institution, whether in the context of museums and galleries or academia (along with the disciplinary frameworks that are reproduced by the academic institution). By bringing together researchers at the intersection of practice-based research in the arts and fields in the interdisciplinary humanities such as media studies, curatorial studies and art history, this volume seeks to provide entries for understanding the scope of research as a world-making-ambition that is both situated within and in excess of institutional and disciplinary frameworks. This excess is characterized by the way research practices engender obligations and affinities, modes of belonging and marginality, that propose new occasions for thought that are unmoored from given registers of value and recognition. Investigating the potential of such research has been at the forefront of feminist theory, as it offers opportunities to rethink and reroute binary separations along the lines of gender and sexuality, Félix Guattari (2000) outlines an “ethico-aesthetics” based on the dynamic cocomposition of the physical and the affective in The Three Ecologies.

14

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and by extension, those pitting the human against the non-human, the animate and the inanimate. Instead, what is privileged is how research practices actively co-constitute ecological assemblages where knowledge is inseparable from situated meanings, affects and desires. Feminist scholars in the humanities who have led the call for the inclusion of “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 2016) and experimental media practices within a critical context include influential figures such as Isabelle Stengers (2011, 2014), Natalie Loveless (2019), Donna Haraway (2016) and Michelle Murphy (2017). From another angle, practice-based research has gained in popularity as it has coincided with the adoption of 3rd cycle or PhD programs (which have been variously labeled artistic research, practice-based or practice-led research, research-creation and research-as-creation)15 and has been implemented in dozens of academic institutions across the U.K., Europe and North America over the past few decades. The aim of many of these programs is to make space for and situate individual or collective arts practices as research. Several handbooks have been published to help understand how such PhD programs should be organized (including evaluation recommendations and best practices) and position their specificity in relation to other academic disciplines. Many of these publications have expanded the contexts with which to articulate value within experimental aesthetic practices beyond the gallery and the art historical cannon.16

15 Institutions in continental Europe and Scandinavia tend to refer to Artistic Research, while institutions in the U.K. tend to refer to practice-based or practice-led research. Research-Creation is widely used in the Canadian context. Olivia Chapman and Kim Sawchuk (2015) refer to “research-as-practice” to forward a research context that need not reproduce discursive conventions present in the broader humanities. 16 There are an increasing number of handbooks and articles in recent years, which describe and intervene into the institutional settings and constraints where practicebased research in the arts takes place. Due to the interdisciplinary negotiations that ensue from the problematics and opportunities raised by artistic research within emergent and more conventional research contexts, these handbooks forward very different concerns and approaches. The audiences for these volumes can include researchers in the field of media studies and aesthetic philosophy, as well as arts-based practitioners, looking to understand and contextualize generativities within arts-based research practices. Such examples often include case studies from individual practitioners, whose results are aesthetically and theoretically rich but not necessarily (or only partially) reproducible outside of the situated research context. Alternatively, they can present a guide for evaluators and administrators within academic and funding institutions to help grapple with research processes that may not easily be described by conventional research terms and methods. This is complicated by the fact that depending on the national and institutional context, conventions vary. Below is a list that I have compiled that is suggestive of the scope, diversity and complexity of the

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While the formal inclusion or practice-based research in the arts has made research funding accessible to a wider range of researchers, a side-effect is the imperative to position aesthetic research practices with and for institutional frameworks and registers of valuation, which implicates audiences, techniques and media in ways that give particular contour and dimension to the research process. While we may (and should) adopt a critical stance regarding how paradigms of recognizability operate within an institutional framework to reproduce hierarchy and exclusion, there is an opportunity here to rethink what recognition can do as part of an inclusive practice. What if given terms of recognition can be confronted by “bursting the seams” or by gathering cause for interest and concern through the specificity of practices that stir or reconfigure given thresholds of recognition?17 If the privileged mode of research is one that occupies its own thresholds of intelligibility, or envisions itself as operative within the interstice, does this mean that it is always and already oriented towards creating new modes, measures and desires for inclusivity? Amidst the generative tensions posed by the somewhat uneasy inclusion of practice-based research within institutional accreditation and funding paradigms is the opportunity to take seriously the experiential and media-based dynamics of situated research processes and how they might transform institutional paradigms.18 What if practice is not posed as an

topic: Borgdorff, H. (2013) Artistic Practices and Epistemic Things in Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research; Borgdorff, H., Peters, P. and Trevor Pinch (eds.) (2017) Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies; Bruneau, J., Scholts, N., Georgelou, K., Doruff, S, Rosie, H. and Marijke Hoogenboom (eds.) (2021) Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education In the Performing Arts; Cotter, L. (ed.) (2019) Reclaiming Artistic Research; Dombois, F., Ute Meta Bauer, Claudia Mareis and Michael Schwab (eds.): Intellectual Birdhouse. Artistic Practice as Research; Leavy, P. (ed.) (2019) Handbook of Arts-Based Research; Lilja, E. (2015) Art, Research, Empowerment: The Artist as Researcher; Chapman, O and Kim Sawchuk (2015) “Creation-as-Research: Critical Making in Complex Environments”; Loveless, N. (2019) How to make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation; McNiff (ed.) (2013) Art as Research: Opportunities and Challenges; Schwab, M. (ed.) (2008) Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research. 17 This is how Chapman and Sawcheck (2012) describe their hope for how research-ascreation can inform and transform the institution, based on a private correspondence with Nathalie Loveless. 18 Giaco Schiesser, who developed a first-of-its-kind PhD group at the Zurich University of the Arts (four of the contributors of this volume were members, myself included) was designed to amplify the situated emergence of research processes. This occurred through periodic group discussions that would collectively establish the research scope and methods of group activities, based on the research interests of individual members. Evaluations were not only centered on the artifacts of the research process but the manifestation and articulation of its effects and affects. This allowed for a processual

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intervention or counter-point to scientific, theoretical, philosophical or scholarly research but is rather figured as something that proposes new entries for approaching research that can be adopted across disciplines? Isabelle Stengers (2010) elaborates such a potential through an understanding of how aesthetic practices are fundamentally ethico-aesthetic, which means that they unfold by tending to diverging and minoritarian (or emergent and as yet undetermined) obligations. Such practices must in turn accommodate the non-translatability between media and discursive practices while preserving interest in articulating the necessarily incomplete and propositional quality of how practices are shaped affectively, and thus co-emergent with an irreducible sense of situated corporeality. To make situated practices recognizable as research, as an ethico-aesthetic positioning, then demands modes of articulation that figure non-translatability as an ethical spacetime of negotiation, hesitation and reinvention. Put otherwise, as practice-based aesthetic research processes involve corporeal affects, they engender a certain ethical responsibility or obligation to the minor and emergent qualities of a research process, as well as to findings and desires that may contradict preestablished research goals (troubling the terms of institutional accountability). Sarah Ahmed (2017) situates the potential for feminist practices, which are at once intersectional (thus comprising a confrontation against injustice in many forms and support for diverse groups including gender and racial minorities) and in-the-making, within the institutional context of doing diversity work. By engaging this institutional context, Ahmed pinpoints practices that reproduce power and exclusivity for some while excluding others, along lines of race, disability and gender. But rather than accept critique of injustice as an endpoint, Ahmed understands feminism as a gathering that is always in movement and transformation, amidst parts that must be “kept still, given a place” (2017, p.3). The generative dynamism between movement and stasis takes on various forms in Ahmed’s work and is mobilized towards both establishing feminist communities and dismantling exclusionary systems and structures. In the chapter “Brick Walls” from her book Living a Feminist Life Ahmed demonstrates how a writing practice centered on its own processual generativity can stage an encounter between feminist transformation and institutional injustice, which actively conceals its own reproduction. By articulating institutional reproducibility through metaphors that describe material and immaterial effects and affects, the institution is figured (and horizontality between different modes of research, including textual, material or media based and more readily transversal media research approach. See Schiesser (2015) for further insight about designing 3rd cycle arts-based research programs.

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destabilized) as a processual potentiality that can be effectively and practically reworked and redirected towards becoming a more inclusive environment.19 While the research presented in this volume runs with and alongside institutional frameworks, it maintains the potential to radically intervene into normative registers of inclusion and exclusion within them.20 Contributions heighten this potential by engaging minor registers of intelligibility, including silenced or unspoken histories of violence and state power, human-nonhuman co-compositions, the interstitial generativities of media processes that are figured in their transversality. By engaging the minor quality of movements within media objects or between and across them, contributions conjure and stage emergent bodies, making time and space for that which is typically excluded or silenced by normative paradigms. Furthermore, as contributions engage the problem of generativity within situated media practices in different ways, they invoke shared resonances while signaling important differences. This constitutes a worlding that allows for rethinking the basis for and validity of existing paradigms while creating openings to establish heterogeneous and collaborative new versions of the body and the institution. As each contribution is figured within and across specific media settings, this worlding is both immediately graspable and rich in unspoken potentials that are felt affectively if not yet formulated as concrete directions for further research (or that remain insistent and generative in their quality of being not-yet). This is an invitation to reconsider research as a gesture, as an opening to thought that is both specific and poetic, iterative and speculative. Such research practices can locate meanings that are simultaneously at the center and at the margins of particular objects, within the givenness of forms and their gesturing towards an uncertain unfolding of time, intensity and potential. Through the figure of the interstice, we see that the urgency and importance of discreet media articulations are often characterized by an indistinction between given and marginal modes of intelligibility. Here authors and spectators conjoin in non-linear co-compositions, in rhythmic iterations that ready the potential for new and heterogeneous versions of research. It follows that such research holds open the possibility to engender new modes of accompaniment, obligations

19 In 2019 I adapted Ahmed’s metaphorical writing technique to a classroom setting for the course “Ecology and Existence” with Alanna Thain at McGill University, where students could begin to articulate and share systemic institutional hierarchies along the lines of gender, race and disability from multiple affective, experiential and descriptive vantages. 20 In the introduction to the publication Fieldings (2021) Sher Doruff also describes the potentially radically transformative coupling of practice-based research strategies, collaborations and communities and established institutional frameworks.

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and modes of relationality that are in excess of the institution that supports it, and the given subjects and modes of representation it reproduces. While such media research does not guarantee a critical stance towards injustice, it is the means by which such an imperative can forge alliances that ally the specificity of media and material-based agencies towards relational urgencies that are felt in their situated intensity. Contributions I now turn to individual contributions, to elaborate how this volume positions research as a site of generativity with and across different media and disciplinary modes of practice. While the chapters present specific contexts, practices, concepts and terminologies, meaning emerges differentially between and across them through their assembly within a single volume. As the contributions field different research modes and conventions—or different approaches to positing, explaining, articulating, testing, apprehending, theorizing, substantiating and disseminating—they betray how research operates in accordance with particular techniques, disciplines and institutions, as well as the thresholds where they can be troubled and redirected. The relevance of each chapter is thus compounded as a generative proposition, where as an assemblage, it maps divergent and convergent insights, terminologies, media, technologies and practices that jostle in speculative and pragmatic possibility. Identifying such similarities (and points of contrast) enlarges the space for double-takes, for re-readings, and for experimental openings. In summarizing each chapter, I aim to highlight aspects of its formal and conceptual specificity, while tacitly signaling potentially generative points of continuity and contrast between them. “Seeing and Touching the Shadow: Texturing the Installation” (Ch.1) Amélie Brisson-Darveau describes the generativity of an installation that she staged as a series of five “essays”. Each essay comprises material assemblages composed of textile elements particular to the stage (costumes, puppets, props), and structures inspired by those used in film production, including a lighting system. While these assemblages stand alone as discreet and specific objects, they are also propositional in that they gesture towards and insist on their own partiality. As spectators are invited to participate in generative play with the various elements of the installation, the participation and experience of spectators become part of the speculative and pragmatic content of the work. As spectators are invited to consider the terms of their co-composition within the installation context a field of indistinction is sustained between maker and spectator, objects and shadows, gravity and weightlessness, movement and stasis. This relational dynamism, as felt in time and space,

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makes palpable the potential for variation within the scene as a kind of “texture,” which comprises the corporeal. For Brisson-Darveau, the concept of texture is critical as it affords meanings that are simultaneously material and conceptual and foregrounds the apprehension of materials alongside “their immaterialities”. Brisson-Darveau proposes a richness of material and immaterial textures through contexts of material making that include weaving, knitting, 3D modelling, laser cutting, molding, cinematography and puppetry but without prescribing terms of production, assembly or technique typically associated with them. The implication is that as the artifacts of these material and technical engagements are presented within the spacetime of the installation setting, the product of technological making becomes fragmented and newly available to inform practices, as well as tendencies of apprehension that exceed a contained corporeal. Instead, the installation’s textures impart a corporeality in flux that is spaced and timed in the present, as well as across the temporalities of multiple, otherwise discontinuous technological practices. This engenders and invites the possibility of a futurity that is at once aesthetic and speculative and that maintains a transversal ethics by proposing a making process that is in excess of its own object. “Virtual ISLANDS: Proposing VR Tidalectics” (Ch. 2) Olivia Mc Gilchrist forwards the VR work Virtual ISLANDS, of which she is the core creator, as “allied with the portrayal of hybrid identities through careful consideration of which stories and experiences are made available for VR viewers”. As such, she considers how VR can propose an alternative to technofuturism and a postcolonial stance within VR-making practice that aims to “decenter the technology’s whiteness” as well as “colonial legacies of whiteness and anti-black racism present across cultural spaces, which includes VR design and creation”. Mc Gilchrist begins with a specifically Caribbean context, framing the VR project with notions forwarded by Caribbean thinkers such as Kamau Brathwaite’s (1999) “Tidalectics” and Édouard Glissant’s (1997) “Poetics of Relation”, the affordances of her own white privilege as a white EuroCaribbean, and a VR production process that began in the Caribbean cultural context. For Mc Gilchrist, tidalectics operationalizes the metaphoric fluidity of water as a consistency that can hold together contradiction, as well as suspend what Lisa Nakamura calls “toxic embodiment”, a corporeal relationality conditioned by white privilege that structurally reproduces racial inequality along class lines. Virtual ISLANDS adopts “island tidalectics” (Llenin-Figueroa, 2012) in VR as a research-creation method, where 3D visualizations of insularity and the fluidity of water propose a cyclical, non-

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linear engagement with 3D technologies. Mc Gilchrist asks: “Can I evoke a Caribbean tidalectics—where water is a site of history and memory —through a virtual watery space—where a virtual body comes in and out of sight in VR?” In Virtual ISLANDS, an insular, watery spacetime is featured in three distinct VR iterations. The first manifests as the constant and progressive layering of digital images appears to produce a substantive thickening that churns with fleshy, breathy consistency. The second follows the figure of a guide within an abstracted Caribbean island space that questions the location, duration and object of intelligibility as the guide variably appears and disappears by becoming particulate through digital effects. The third enacts a virtual submersion of the user’s avatar in a tidal wave, in a sudden rush of material transition into the watery. Each distinct instance of figural submersion (and emergence) proposes a corporeal in co-composition with a specific environment and history that at once adheres to and suspends the context of place, whether Caribbean or VR, by orchestrating an affectively-driven, speculative corporeality in time. This series of partial and inconsistent figurations thus make time and space to consider the generativity of submersion as it is specifically afforded in VR, and how this creates the felt potential for an ethical worlding.” “Con-Tactilisation: Touch as a form of multisensory, reciprocal, and co-constitutive perception” (Ch. 3) Elke Mark and Lindsey French engage micro-phenomenological openings in the study of sensory perception, which are further developed within the context of arts-based experimentation and performance. Through what they term “Con-Tactilisation” the authors develop a discourse and set of tactics for understanding perceptibility as a co-constitutive process. Drawing from Richard Kearney´s concept of “con-tact” the authors consider touch, not as a passive experience but embedded in a tactfulness that is unbounded from a single sensory register. Con-tactilisation is aimed at differentiating “prereflexive” qualities of sensing through multi-modal forms of accompaniment (how, for example, prompts that compel close attention to non-conscious hand-gestures afford greater sensitivity in describing the experience of smell). What is particularly generative about their contribution is that it reframes sensory experimentation from something that obscures the unequal power relationship between expert observers and text subjects, in the service of empirical objectivity, to a situated and critical practice of collaboration and emergent sociability. On the one hand, this makes sensible the generativity of the experimental context beyond the scope of its planned for results. On the other, it allows for expanding the techniques and tactics of sensory experiment into registers of explicitly performative and speculative world-making, and

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more specifically, the phenomenon of human and non-human “mutual sensitization”. Rather than aim to circumvent inherent hierarchies in the process of distinguishing sensory intelligibility, Mark and French forward a series of situations of relational emergence (which exceed normative means of prescribing and extracting value), while maintaining an eye on the systemic inequalities and uneven distributions of power that inform them. In the mutuality of con-tact, the authors affirm: “[e]xchange and reciprocity is not necessarily (or even usually) equitable. Every encounter requires a negotiation of consent, power dynamics, and risk, and we do not come to these encounters on equal footing.” The authors turn to environmental studies to engage sites of human and non-human contact to negotiate such inherent inequalities, whether in the form of touch, pollination or a mosquito bite, and the way they are constitutive of overlapping political, imperial, affective and historical dimensions. Within their sensory practice, con-tact is thus developed as “a guide for empathic and shared futuring” and “an impulse to carry the experience forward into community with others”. In this sense, con-tactilisation builds “coalitions in support of our shared and reverberating future”. “A matter with(out) delay: Interferences of a gift” (Ch. 4) Petra Köhle and Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin suggest how archival history can become a speculative and performative proposition. The duo follows the eight-year-long history of the plans to transfer a gift from five Latin American states to the Palais des Nations, which housed the League of Nations. The League was founded after the First World War, and eventually became the European headquarters of the successor organization, the UN. The gift, which would have been a bronze inscription with quotations from Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan politician who contributed significantly to the independence of Latin America from Spanish colonial power and conceived the first precursor to the League of Nations. Although the gift was initially accepted by the League, the plate was never installed. Through the careful examination of archival materials and conversations with historians Köhle and Vermot-Petit-Outhenin develop a script that interrogates the meaning and potential of this gift that was not given but that conjures a complex negotiation of “interferences”. These interferences address the problem of the situated relationalities of archives and their intersection with political history and gift giving as an aesthetic potential, or one with the possibility to suspend intelligible modes of transfer in favour of conjuring new modes of speaking and thinking in and through the gift that “withdraws from the principle of reciprocity”.

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The script that they develop conjures historical presence, through almost ritualistic fidelity to the material evidence, the anatomy of the archival form, its organization as a part within a totality, to its enumerated, hand-inscribed and missing information. But perhaps even more generative than this staging of archival information is the attention to the situated quality of information—the contours of penned marks, the colour of aged paper that presents information as a topography, one that patches to the glow of scanned copies on the computer screen. This material performativity of the archive renders the script a score that can be inhabited and performed. The archive thus becomes a situated proposition— a speculative dramaturgy of logistical socialities that can trouble and remake relational possibility. “A History of Violence” (Ch. 5) Kai Ziegner presents excerpts of an experimental, multi-faceted book that he developed, which co-composes photographic and text-based entries. The book operates as an assemblage, documenting histories of violence stemming from the dissolution of the former East Germany, as they permeate personal and everyday encounters. For Ziegner, the book is an “object of deployment”, as well as a “means of communication and labour, that enables a deeper understanding of severe social change, and which helps to establish a dialogue across different generations of those affected”. The author’s personal investment in research as a means of dialogue and accompaniment is carried out literally in the fact that he travelled to all 21 places associated with violent events (both obscure to the state authorities and orchestrated by them) to photograph each site in color and b/w medium format film. But these concept-based photographs, which are both documentary and staged, do not stand alone as documents of violent events, since on their own they appear to be snapshots of mundane buildings and places. Only the highly staged images of weapons placed amidst them offer recognizably violent associations. But the modest portrayals of places and events are strategic in that they track and provide vantages for Ziegner’s multivalent engagements with current and remembered histories within the scope of the project. This includes the unfolding of the research process, as well as personal memories and affects with violent implications that maintain an indetermined correspondence with the social history in question. The result is a polyphonic composition that provides a multitude of moments, voices, observations and vantage points, which wrests the timeline of violent events from state versions of them. In the process, memory is troubled as a stable mooring of history and identity, emerging instead as something to be reckoned with, and that finds itself as it occurs in the midst of transformation and remaking. What is fascinating about the artist´s approach

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is how the research process and format (as experimental media assemblage) insists on the indeterminacy between images and events, documents and histories. Such a research artifact suspends and reorganizes the difference between “victims and perpetrators”, just as Kai Ziegner variously identifies with both in multiple ways within the framework of an intriguing narrative. “There are no negative forms, Or: How I lost my interest in copies” (Ch. 6) Sarah Burger begins with the statement: “All that follows here is caused by the observation of bicycle helmets, their resemblance to crafted masks from various historic cultures and heads of insects. From there on the fixed idea to make a mold and cast it.” In Burger’s engagement with the bicycle helmet, it is revealed as a form that holds together myriad contradictions. Such contradictions include the stylistic evocation of the technological amidst the profanity of cheap plastic and foam parts, which are themselves “treasure chambers” in that they conceal the capital gained through the economic disparity between “Wewest” consumers and “Nonwest” producers; the “visually fast” uniformity of packs of cyclists, alongside the specificity with which bicycle helmets (and other athletic gear) adhere to specific bodies, entrapping hair and sweat; the coincidence of high-performance imaginaries given by merely “ornamental plastic geometries”; and finally the way the helmet operates as a protective shell that conjures a metamorphosis, binding the skeletal and the exoskeletal, inside and outside. Through this series of contradictions (and others) Burger demonstrates how functionality persistently incorporates the magical. The text itself makes think-able it own situatedness as an assemblage, aligning associative, anecdotal and experiential registers of intelligibility, where differences function to make think-able the degree to which the the magical is already integrated into paradigms of Western reason, as figured within art historical images, concepts of animacy and dissection, to name a few. What emerges is not a singular line of argumentation so much as an elaborated gesture that follows material traces, traces of movement, and traces of tenderness, in the pursuit of learning/remembering “how to dream together”. For Burger, this is the making of a “third” that exceeds the hierarchy of looking at a passive object, in that it entails “compassion” and “transformation”. Burger develops a means of articulating the how of this material transformation by engaging in a material practice with a bicycle helmet, first by casting the helmet in alginate, then silicone, and finally through the affective/associative materiality of digital manipulation. While the author relates that attempts at casting helmets using different materials failed (in that the casting material failed to set) this failure was generative in enlarging the difference between object and copy, or the space-time of the in-between. Here, the difference

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between original and copy was populated with durations, affects and movements that later informed a practice of digitally manipulating the helmet image, in a kind of “algorithmic kneading” that exceeded recognition. Across these three examples, we come to realize the generativity of Burger’s practice in rerouting Western rationality and its insistence on the singular, the symmetrical and the matter-of-fact. Magic occurs as divergent practices gather non-linear insistence, multiply and transversally across practices, memories, histories and technologies. “Sidelining Photorealism: Speed Racer and the Articulation of Digital Visual Effects Labor” (Ch. 7) Jonah Jeng offers a detailed and insightful problematization of photorealism through his engagement with Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s blockbuster film Speed Racer (2008). Jeng forwards the notion of seamfulness in contrast with the visual seamlessness of a photorealist aesthetic, which “effaces the means and temporality of its own construction”. Meanwhile, seamfulness foregrounds the work of digital VFX artists through “a collision of “animation” with “liveaction” which results in the appearance of a kind of “constructedness” that is only achievable through “the specific affordances of digital VFX technology” something that “paradoxically reinjects a sense of temporality and digital VFX labour”. Jeng’s notion of seamfulness is thus suggestive of something that points to more than a media aesthetic—as it holds together paradoxical elements it incites tensions that allow for “thematizing the temporal, affective and generative dynamism of labour.” Throughout the chapter, Jeng identifies an “insistent aesthetic of ‘bothness’ in which live-action and animation, photorealism and the fine-grained manipulation of the image are held in tension.” This bothness occurs through (and gives rise to) ostentatious layering within the image, removing cuts between takes that upend a live-action correspondence with cause and effect, layering different and exaggerated movement registers including that of the camera, the movement of race cars and the movement of one animated image layer against another. In this disjunctive aesthetics alongside a narrative about “appearances-versus-reality,” the material reality of labour “is gestured toward in the space between disjunctive image components.” Jeng suggests that what is generated by this togetherness is more than selfreflexive and signals an affective opening to the material reality of labour, even as the inclusion of specific tasks in VFX labour are absent in the film. Instead, a sense of labour emerges as the author describes concrete examples in the film where the specificity of working with VFX informs new senses of continuity (and non-continuity) in time. For instance, as logics of editing that correspond with a seamless, the linear flow of events are upended and

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replaced with durations that exceed lens-based recognition (when, for example, the camera seems to pass through a solid object and, despite what appears to be continuous forward camera movement, completes a 180-degree rotation in the world of the film, now facing "behind" but without the classical use of hard cuts). This unlikely re-figuring of seamlessness between bodies, materials and perspectives presents the image as a technical assemblage that involves tendencies of cinematic apprehension as much as the specific affordances of a given technology such as CGI. As seamfulness and seamlessness are posed differentially in heterogeneous iterations throughout the film, they underscore its situated generativity both in the making of the film itself and in the context of spectatorship. “Powers of Abjection and Factories of Strong Emotions: On Flaccid Knob’s Videos” (Ch. 8) Friederike Sigler considers the video installations by the Berlin artist duo Flaccid Knob, a collaboration between Nadja Kurz and Per Warberg. The videos feature performances of the duo within quotidian environments that are at once familiar and excessive, featuring a staged and artificial production quality, slimy materials, colours that “stand out from all directions” and absurd scenarios that converge with and undermine neo-liberal expectations of individual autonomy and productivity. For Sigler, Flaccid Knob reveals “the mechanisms of biopolitics in 21st century neoliberalism by working with the corporeality of bodies that do not subordinate but refuse the neoliberal dictate. Because what happens almost consistently in all the videos is that the bodies break out of these structures, even overflow, and in doing so make visible precisely what the biopolitical authority is supposed to make impossible for them: their materiality.” Sigler contends that as these works operationalize material excess and artifice, alongside video-based performances that destabilize the status of video as documentary evidence, they propose a live-able afterlife for the abject. This occurs as the abject is repositioned from objectifying alignment with specific, determined bodies, to a mode of care and co-presence where bodies are co-extensive with human and non-human materials and practices. Sigler arrives at this critical insight (and proposition) through close description of three works by the duo, each of which situates videos of their performances within different installation contexts, alongside readings of Michel Foucault’s “techniques of the self” and Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “abject”. Sigler relates that Foucault’s “techniques of the self” refers to the selfoptimization of individuals on the level of everyday practices towards greater workforce performativity, something that simultaneously constitutes the individual and conceals the power structures inherent to this process. When

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read through Kristeva’s notion of the abject, which is characterized by “immanent resistance” (because it cannot be located in discreet objects of disgust such as excrement, blood or the feminine, as it has historically been theorized) Sigler identifies an alternate technicity with which to understand the self and productivity. A key contribution of Sigler’s chapter is how her repositioning of the abject offers a critical notion of the self that exceeds the binaristic formulations of “self” and “other” while operationalizing situated generativities of the "inbetween". Here the abject is not used to distinguish and stigmatize certain bodies but becomes a means of overcoming normative impulses in favour of more-than-human techniques (or technicities) of love and care. We witness this carry over into the writing of Sigler’s chapter, where discourse is foregrounded as a generative practice in its own right as it carefully interweaves and inflects theoretical and close descriptions of experiential meanings. The performativity of her discourse doubles the critical positioning offered by her text as it makes apprehensible a situated thinking practice that exceeds categorical or disciplinary registers of meaning creation. “A Latento for Curation as Research-Creation” (Ch. 9) The Curatorial Research-Creation Collective (Treva Legassie, Matthew-Robin Nye, Karen Wong) propose the term latento to engage the specifically Canadian context of “Research-Creation”. The latento, which is “the antonym of a manifesto, an assertion of that which is clearly evident” (Raqs Media Collective, Fragments from a Communist Latento, 2010), aims to elaborate that which is “latent” or “hidden”. As a discursive modality, the latento gives consistency to the authors' elaboration of the latent potential within institutional knowledge structures, including research and curatorial practice, by way of the hyphen. The collective suggests that curation as research-creation be approached as a conceptual and pragmatic holding together, that foregrounds the generative potential in the spacetime between words, as well as the latent values within a creative or exhibitionary/presentational context. The authors describe how the hyphenated term “research-creation” has characterized research processes that are situated in media creation within academic institutions, and which, until the past few decades (or more recently), have been excluded from the institution. The collective elaborates the relevance of research-creation as a conceptual and pragmatic holding together, that articulates the generative potential in the relation between words, as well as the sometimes-latent values within an artistic or curatorial context.

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Throughout their text, the collective engages in a rhythmic performativity that negotiates the latent within diverse curatorial ecologies while repeatedly circling back to concepts posed by the influential research-creation thinker and practitioner Erin Manning, the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) and curator of Imaginary Homelands Emilie Chhangur. Some of these concepts include the “minor gesture” and “haecceities” or qualities that are “yet-to-come into their full presence but that, even without form, carry an affective tonality” (Manning 2020, p. 48). Further terms include “in-reach”, which “sits in contradistinction to outreach and describes projects that “change institutional practices from within by introducing different social economies, cultural protocols, and perspectives” (Chhangur, 2021, p. 31). As the text progressively in-folds such terminologically (and institutionally redistributive notions), it proposes a discursive consistency that opens to speculative possibility, more than it does a singular line of argumentation. This interweaving enlarges and assigns value to practices that are in excess of the institution, aligning them with processes and ecologies of gardening, germination and “wilding”. The authors foreground that what researchcreation shares with these processes is their generativity in opacity—how the earthworm, though largely unseen, is a critical part of the sociability of a garden ecology. The relevance of the unseen similarly pertains to gestures within a curatorial context that are in excess of received modes of value recognition but that are nonetheless critical to its generative dynamism. The mediation of the latent that the chapter performs similarly becomes an affective, durational and speculative germ from which to infold values that traverse divergent registers of experience, that are at once opaque and emergent, articulable and in excess of given terms. Reference List Ahmed, S. (2017), Living a Feminist Life, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Angerer, M. (2019), Ecology of Affect: Intensive Milieus and Contingent Encounters, translated by G. Jackson, Leuphana: Meson Press. Bauer, U.M, Mareis C., & Schwab, M. (eds.) (2012), Intellectual Birdhouse. Artistic Practice as Research, London: Koenig. Bernstein, R.M. (2009), ‘Dances with Things Material Culture and the Performance of Race’, Social Text, 27, pp. 67-94. Borgdorff, H. (2013), ‘Artistic Practices and Epistemic Things’ in Schwab, M. (ed.) Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 199-220. Borgdorff, H., Peters, P., & Pinch, Trevor (eds.) (2017), Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies, New York: Routledge.

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Braidotti, R. (2006), Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Cambridge: Polity. Bruneau, J., Scholts, N., Georgelou, K., Doruff, S., Rosie, H., & Hoogenboom, M. (eds.) (2021), Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts, Amsterdam: DAS Publishing, Amsterdam University of the Arts. Brunner, C. (2021), ‘Research-Creation and the Pedagogy of Diagrammatic Textures’ in Brisson-Darveau, A., & Brunner, C. (eds.), Texturing Space: Towards an Exponential Cartography, Hamburg: Adocs Publishing. Buckwalter, M. (2010), Composing while dancing: An improviser’s companion. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Chapman, O., & Sawchuk, K. (2012), ‘Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and “Family Resemblances”’. Canadian Journal of Communication: Media Arts Revisited, vol. 37, no. 1 pp. 5-26. Chapman, O., & Sawchuk, K. (2015), ‘Creation-as-Research: Critical Making in Complex Environments’, RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 49-52. Chen, M. Y. (2011), ‘Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections’, GLQ, vol. 17, no. 23, pp. 265-286. Cocker, E., Gansterer N., & Greil-Moebius, M. (2019), ‘Choreo-graphic Figures: Scoring Aesthetic Encounters’, Journal for Artistic Research, no. 18, https://www.jar-online.net/en/exposition/abstract/choreo-graphic-figuresscoring-aesthetic-encounters. Cotter, L. (ed.) (2019), Reclaiming Artistic Research, Ostifildem: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Crary, J. (2007), ‘Spectral’, in Jones, C.A. (ed.), Sensorium: Embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art, Cambridge: MIT Press. De Brabandere N. (2016), ‘Experimenting with Affect across Drawing and Choreography’, Body & Society, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 103-124. De Brabandere, N. (2021), ‘Textures of Collaboration’ in Brisson-Darveau, A., & Brunner, C. (eds.), Texturing Space: Towards an Exponential Cartography. Hamburg: Adocs Publishing. De Brabandere, N. (2022). ‘Co-composing the Perceptible Across Affective, Painterly and Computational Generativities’, Kunstlicht Journal for Visual Culture, Algorhythms: Living In And Out Of Sync With Technology, vol. 2/3, no. 43. De Brabandere, N., & Flett, G. (2015), ‘Hearing on the Verge: Cuing and aligning with the movement of the audible’, Fluid Sounds: Seismograph, https://seismograf.org/fokus/fluid-sounds/hearing-on-the-verge. De Brabandere, N., & Thain, Alanna. (2019), ‘Drawing Light: Gesture and Suspense in the Weave’, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, https://necsus-ejms.org/drawing-light-gesture-and-suspense-in-the-weave/. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta. Dombois, F., Bauer, U.M., Mareis, C., & Schwab, M. (eds.) (2012), Intellectual Birdhouse. Artistic Practice as Research, London: Koenig. Doruff, S. (2021), ‘Introduction: On the Potential of Fielding the Propositon’ in J. Bruneau, N. Scholts, K. Georgelou, S. Doruff, H. Rosie, & M. Hoogenboom

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(eds.), Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts, Amsterdam: DAS Publishing, Amsterdam University of the Arts. Duchamp, M. (1983), Notes, arranged and translated by Paul Matisse, Boston: G.K. Hall. Gil, J. (2006), ‘Paradoxical Body’, TDR/The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 2135. Glissant, É. (1997), Poetics of Relation, translated by B. Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Guattari, F. (2000), The Three Ecologies, translated by I. Pindar & P. Sutton, London and New Brunswick, N.J.: The Athlone Press. Haraway, D. (1988), ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 575-599. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hémon, S. (1957) ‘Fête’, Oil on Canvas, 93 x 77cm. Sedje Hémon Foundation. Klee, P. (1953), Pedagogical Sketchbook, translated by S. Maholy-Nagy, New York: Frederik A. Praeger Publishers. Lamarre, T. (2002), ‘Diagram, inscription, sensation’ in Massumi, B. (ed.), A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, London: Routledge, pp. 149–170. Langer, S. K. (1953), Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art, New York: Scribner. Leavy, P. (ed.) (2019), Handbook of Arts-Based Research, New York and London: The Guilford Press. Levitt, D. (2018), The Animatic Apparatus: Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image, Portland: Zero Books. Lilja, E. (2015), Art, Research, Empowerment: The Artist as Researcher, Stockholm: Swedish Ministry of Education and Research. Loveless, N. (2019), How to make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, Durham, London: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2013), ‘The Dance of Attention’, Inflexions 6: Arakawa and Gins, pp. 337-364, http://www.inflexions.org/n6_manning.pdf. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014), Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham and London: Duke University Press. McNiff, S. (ed.) (2013), Art as Research: Opportunities and Challenges, Bristol: Intellect. Minneapolis: The Athlone Press, University of Minnesota Press. Murphy, M. (2017), ‘Experimental Otherwise’ in The Economization of Life, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Myers, N. (2015–present), ‘Becoming Sensor in an Oak Savannah’, with Liberona, A. (2015-present), & Cameron, A. (2017) (Research-Creation Project). Myers, N. (2017), ‘Ungrid-able Ecologies: Decolonizing the Ecological Sensorium in a 10,000-year-old NaturalCultural Happening’, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory Technoscience, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 1-24.

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Myers, N. (2020), ‘Anthropologist as Transducer in a Field of Affects’, in N. Loveless (ed.) Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies of Researchcreation, Alberta: University of Alberta Press. pp. 97-125. Pape, T. (2019), Figures of Time: Affect and the Television of Preemption, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Pape, T., Solomon, N., & Thain, A. (2014), ‘Welcome to This Situation: Tino Sehgal’s Impersonal Ethics’, DRJ, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 89-100. Schiesser, G. (2015), ‘What is at Stake – Qu’est ce que l’enjeu? Paradoxes – Problematics – Perspectives in Artistic Research Today’ in G. Bast, E.G. Carayannis, & D.F.J. Campbell (eds.), Arts, Research, Innovation and Society, ARIS (1), New York: Springer. Schwab, M. (2008), ‘Introduction’ in M. Schwab (ed.) Transpositions: AestheticoEpistemic Operators in Artistic Research, Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 7-22. Simondon, G. (1969), Du mode d'existence des objets techniques, Paris: Aubier. Simpson, L.B. (2017), As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. (2019), ‘Counterfuturisms and speculative temporalities: walking research-creation in school’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 547-559. Stengers, I. (2005), ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 183-196. Stengers, I. (2010), ‘Including Non-Humans in Political Theory: Opening Pandora’s Box’ in B. Braun, J. Whatmore, I. Stengers, J. Bennett (eds.) Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stengers, I., & Despret, V. (2014), Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf, Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, University of Minnesota Press. Steyerl, H. (2012), Adorno’s Grey, single channel HD video projection, 14:20 min., four angled screens. Steyerl, H. (2013), How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File, 15:52 min. Thain, A. (2017), Bodies in Suspense, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Valéry, P. (1998), Danse, Degas, Dessin, Paris: Gallimard, Folio Essays. Zylinska, J. (2014), ‘iEarth’, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no. 5. Zylinska, J. (2018), Nonhuman Vision, HD-video, 07:06 min. Zylinska, J. (2020), AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams, London: Open Humanities Press.

Part One: Theory and Practice

Chapter 1

Seeing and Touching the Shadow: Texturing the Installation Amélie Brisson-Darveau UQAM Université du Québec à Montréal

Abstract: Through my material research-creation practice, I examine the contrasts between the gravity of materials in an installation practice – mainly at the level of the shadow –, textile, and the visitor's body. This text explores texture through my artistic practice that I analyze with a specific method: ObservationAnalysis of Movement (OMA). This method allows me to foreground the relationships and movements constitutive of what I term texture. Through this method, I generate the material for reflecting on how texture can help conceive the exhibition space as a set of movements in co-emergence. Keywords: Texture, research-creation, intersensoriality, shadow, haptic, OMA (Observation-Analysis of Movement), installation *** The idea for this text came to me as I was working in the studio with a shimmering branch, covered in navy blue velvet powder and lit by direct light. After realizing that it looked more frightening spread out on the floor than upright, I positioned it on the ground while projecting its shadow on the wall. At that moment, I realized that the shadow I was working with was not (or at least not directly) subject to gravity, while the other materials, including the branch, were. This gravity of the shadow, contra the gravity of the materials, is one of the contrasts through which I explore textures in my installation projects. Following this experiment in the studio, I asked myself the question: how can this relation—between the weight of the shadow and the materials with which I work—transform the visitor’s experience of my installations in the space, as well as the visitor’s impact on the space?

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I will here explore texture through my artistic practice, analyzed via a specific approach: Movement Observation-Analysis (MOA)1 developed by Geneviève Dussault and Nicole Harbonnier. This approach allows me to foreground the relationships and movements constitutive of what I term “texture,” a central concept in my artistic and research practice. Through these observations, I will generate the material for a reflection on how texture can help conceive of the exhibition space as a set of movements in co-emergence. MOA remains first and foremost as a tool of exploratory and subjective reflection, providing input for the creation of my own art installations. As a first step, I will unfold my material practice. Taking as an example my recent installation project, Où allait mourir le bruit de la chanson, there came a dark and undefined shadow,2 and in particular its work with the shadow, I will address how the concept of texture allows me to think the relation between body and media. This process is important, in that it becomes a proposition for the public as they visit the exhibition space. Finally, these inquiries lead me to look at how the visual and sensory experience of the shadow’s inhabitation by the public generates new relationships and movements between the materials and the bodies in space, as the visitors participate in the creation of a new texture and the recomposition of the installation space. Texture as concept and as practice Où allait mourir le bruit de la chanson, there came a dark and undefined shadow3 explores the texture of shadows through early American horror films of the 1940s and 1950s. The choice of this period and genre comes from their approach to forms of monstrosity (relating to a social context crossing the Great Depression and the Second World War) without presenting the monster through a concrete and embodied figure. The monster is rather cast through shadows which transform its form through illumination and obscuration, hiding or revealing it. In comparison with the black and white German expressionist or Italian neorealist film noir, the first horror films are characterized by their vibrant, organic, febrile shadows and lights. The project consists of a series of five “essays” composed of textile elements particular to the stage (costumes, puppets, props), structures inspired by filming tools, and a lighting system. Each of the essays contains a very short film

1 I use the abbreviation MOA (Movement Observation-Analysis), which is a translation of the French Observation-Analyse du Mouvement (OMA). 2 Où allait mourrir le bruit de la chanson, there came a dark and undefined shadow, presented at the Skol, Montreal, Canada, May 2021. 3 Ibid.

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sequence that I transform by exploring and magnifying the potential of their structures and textures. I gradually interweave additional elements, such as new materials (and the techniques attached to them), film images, and references. This essay format is crucial, since in French, the essay is both an open literary form offering an exercise in reflection and, in the common sense, designates a space for experimentation. In my case, the essay functions as a way to make the relationship between the theoretical and practical dimensions of the project permeable. Without beginning or end, this format leads to an open proposal: the visitor is invited to circulate and move through the different "essays" in order to experience the (and her/his/their) shadow projected in the space among them. Through its work with lighting, and notably through the transformation of the shadow’s projection and its involvement of other senses than vision (in particular touch), the installation invites the public’s engagement with the space. This process will be discussed in more detail in the observations conducted with MOA. My sense is that the space of co-emergence in this installation derives from a double movement. On the one hand, the exhibition display encourages the exploration of the different textures created by the play of light and shadow with the environmental actors. On the other hand, the gestures made by the people in the space contribute to generate, complexify, and activate new textures. The emergence of texture in space is linked to movements and gestures: those of the public and those of the materials in space. Clarifications concerning the notion and practice of texture allow us to understand more precisely how this co-emergence develops. In this installation, just as throughout my entire artistic and research practice, texture takes on two meanings. Firstly, texture becomes a surface that I explore through materials: the grain seen on a cross-section of wood, the patterns printed by the pressure of a textile on ceramic, the wavy grooves of matte leather. For instance, the distinct qualities of the matière4 or its finishing can transform or enhance its composition.5

4 The textile artist and art theorist Anni Albers makes a distinction between matière and structure in the process of fabrication. If the first one concerns more aesthetic qualities, the second one relates more to functionality. However, the first, as much as the second, requires an intellectual effort, since it requires a tactile sensitivity in order to make sense with the matière. See Albers, A., Weber, N.F., Cirauqui, M. and T'ai Lin Smith (2017) On Weaving: New Expanded Edition. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 5 Texture as a concept and practice was initially developed through two researchcreation projects that explore the public space: Fil conducteur: Theater for disappearance (Stromereien festival, Zurich, 2014), and Texturing Space (two seminars

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Secondly, texture becomes a way to unfold the multiple dimensions of an installation artwork. From an architectural perspective, texture only exists when the structure of a material is brought into relation with light. This emphasis on the aspect of the "being in relation” of texture leads me to conceive of it through the relational qualities—material, historical, architectural, social—of the work, transforming them into extensions and densities in space and time. Texture thus becomes a method for making and thinking, experimenting and analyzing. The process of texturing, which consists of bringing out the qualities of materials and their immaterialities, allows me to assemble them procedurally in my installations, and, by doing so, to transform the installation space. After modeling three-dimensional geometric shapes in the software, I prepare them to be laser cut to make models. Each cut piece is glued to another to obtain interlocking hardened pieces, creating the skeleton of a sphere. Light is then projected through. From the contrasts, a transformation takes place. The projection can give the appearance of multiple crystals or pixels that vibrate with touch, projecting an almost three-dimensional shadow on the wall with liquid aspects depending on the lens. This transformation of the shadow's qualities (with organic appearances) links the historic time of the material to the time of the installation. Texture becomes something I explore on two levels: visual and tactile. It is an ephemeral installation device, interdependent with light and shadow. The process of texturing: from contrasts to nuances In order for the aforementioned materials and immaterials to intertwine and assemble, I conduct a series of experiments and tests that allow me to explore and magnify their relationship to texture and light. In this sense, the compositions, functions, uses, techniques, and modes of fabrication (e.g. weaving, knitting, 3D modelling, laser cutting, molding) inherent to the materials are at the center of my explorations. I conduct my experiments by projecting light onto the materials, focusing on the newly generated or highlighted qualities such as opacity, transparency, reflection, density, blur, and the hardness of the shadow. These experiments lead me to develop a process in which I accumulate several layers of textures from the assemblage between the shadow and the materials in the installation. This way of working as part of the MA Transdisciplinary Studies at ZHdK, Zurich, and Connecting-Space Hong-Kong between 2015 and 2016, in collaboration with Christoph Brunner). Texture is defined as a field of relations in movement, which constantly (re)composes and cannot be reduced only to a quality. See Brisson-Darveau, A. and Brunner, C. (2021) Texturing Space: Towards an Exponential Cartography. Hamburg: Adocs publishing.

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allows me to explore the many nuances between their contrasts, and to create modulations. In addition to participating in the search for new qualities of shadow that go beyond its traditional binaries (notably based on good and evil, positive and negative, full and empty, memory and forgetting), this activity is part of a process of exploring their tangibility and tactile character. The process of experimentation described earlier, in which I play with the shadow and the light, generates contrasts between the qualities of the materials and immaterials. These contrasts emerge, for example, through the gravity of the materials and the absence of gravity of the shadow, in the time of the installation and the time transformed by the play of shadows (which amplify its passing), in the densities of the various textures of the surfaces of the materials and those of the projected shadow, and in the filmic or theatrical space and the real space. These processes of experimenting with materials are essential, as they embody both the research process in the studio and the proposal to the public mentioned above: the visitor is invited to move around the space-time of the gallery and to experiment with different textures. In this context, I define experimentation as an action without any preempted result. It involves a notion of the unknown, of immediacy, and of feeling. The importance of experimentation lies in the fact that this process participates in the coemergence of new textures in the exhibition space. The visual and sensory experience Following previous observations using the MOA (most noticeably in the “Pars mais prends bien soin de revenir” project, and in the studio with the velvetcovered branch mentioned above), I became interested in gravity as an element causing variations in the experience of shadows. I wanted to pursue this investigation with a different installation device. I have conducted a series of observations from a video documentation of the exhibition Où allait mourir le bruit de la chanson, there came a dark and undefined shadow, in which an audience visited and explored the exhibition. There, I looked for the contrasts between the gravity of the body and materials and that of the shadow cast, in relation to the public. To conduct these observations, I used Movement Observation-Analysis (MOA). This approach to the observation of movement involves the analysis

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of all expressive and functional dimensions.6 It is used most notably in the field of dance, but can also be transposed to other practices which include movement, such as installation art. My focus was on how visitors develop a visual and sensory dynamic with the materials, light, and shadow, and how this influences the installation space. I have used the haptic and dynamic functions as entry points. The haptic function is the space where the shadow, the materials, and the body of the visitors cohabit. The dynamic function refers to an expression of the movement characterized by a transformation at the level of speed, the intensity of a movement, or a pulsion of action, to give an example. Although it is an approach, I use MOA as a thinking tool. In my researchcreation practice, MOA has been useful to describe, analyze, and prioritize the movements between materials, between bodies, and between bodies and materials in the production and spatialization of the installation. MOA has also become a tool to investigate the "material" qualities of the shadow, such as its fluidity, density, or three-dimensionality, in order to examine their impact on the space as well as the way they are perceived visually and sensorially by the audience. In the context of this article, investigating the relationship between vision and touch allows me to challenge the notion of shadow as an element specific to vision (optics) and to extend it to an affective and sensory experience (through sensing its textures); it thus proposes new points of entry into the environment of the installation and the exhibition.

6 The development of L'OAM (MOA) took shape in a research project between 2013 and 2016. OAM is a combination of LMA (Laban Movement Analysis) and AFCMD (Functional Analysis of the Body in Danced Movement). This approach was developed between 2013 and 2016 and intended to articulate language, analysis, and expression in a research-creative practice. The conceptual organization of MOA includes choosing a vocabulary and organizing observables through conceptual schemes. The MOA thus offers a focus on observation and analysis where the observables are distributed around three elements of a diagram associated with a function of its own (the Backgroundphoric function, the Space-haptic function, and the Dynamics-expressive function). The process of observation and analysis can be described through three spaces that are organized in concentric circles: in the center, the space of transformation of perceptions (which is an intersubjective space, the space of perceptions), the space of transformation of representations (the space of insertion into language and conceptual analysis), and the space of transformation of meaning (where the activity of inference and abduction based on the conceptual analysis develops). The activities related to MOA move in these spaces and allow for a relation between the analytical, sensitive, and cognitive dimensions. Harbonnier, N., Dussault, G., & Ferri, C. (accepté). Un nouveau regard sur le lien fonction/expression en analyse qualitative du mouvement: L’Observation-Analyse du Mouvement (OAM). Recherches en danse 10. 2021.

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MOA presents a subjective dimension of my gaze and thought, as illustrated in the following essays. Observation-analysis, essay I

Figure 1.1 Essay I. Où allait mourir le bruit de la chanson, there came a dark and undefined shadow. Photo credit: Guy L’Heureux.

After passing the gallery entrance, the public is presented with the opportunity to move to the left and approach a scrim target,7 a hoop-like cinematic tool whose use is to diffuse light during filming. In the context of the exhibition, I created my own tool by stretching a recycled black knit pullover into a laminated wood hoop to experiment with different densities of light and shadow textures. This scrim target fixed by a C-stand and a lighting system projecting its shadow on the wall, is extending almost to its entire surface. The first image introduces the cinematographic tool, the first “essai” where I conducted an observation among others in the space. Through it, the audience is subtly called upon to move or manipulate a puppet between the light source and the screen. The person observed manipulates a leather puppet suspended between the scrim target (cinematographic tool) and the light source. Here are the MOA observables:

See Alton, J. and McCarthy, T. (1995) Painting with Light. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 50.

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Its right leg, positioned towards the back, takes in the weight at the top of its kinesphere. The stability of the legs allows it a higher mobility of the top of the body. It enables a bouncing movement of rising amplitude, starting with the left elbow and growing through the arm. This stability enables for experimentation with the top half of its kinesphere.8 The coordination of its movements is articulated from gesture to posture. I can observe slight adjustments of the body depending on the variation of amplitude of its right arm’s movement. The movement is initiated by the elbow. Its kinesphere is medium. It is small but the extension of its arm by the marionette, as well as its projected shadow, gives me the impression that it is much bigger. Its tracking line sculpts the outdoor space, the weight of the marionette.9 Its gestalt is slightly in the shape of a screw, and its relation to space is also multidirectional. It moves mainly on a sagittal plane. There is almost no fluctuation in time. However, very small variations in speed, increasing or decreasing, are observable in the projected shadow of the marionette on the wall.10 In this first observation, the contrasts between the weight of the shadow, the body and the materials are manifested in the bouncing performed by the left hand holding a string puppet. At the beginning of the phrase, the arm guides the marionette. As the marionette’s elliptical travel accelerates and grows, the tracking of the arm of the person in the space accompanies it and joins that of the leather marionette, which is surprisingly heavy. The movement of the arm and that of the puppet come together: they unite in a phenomenon of contamination. In Paradoxical Body, the Portuguese philosopher José Gil describes how a duo can generate multiple dancing human bodies: Instead, both enter into the same rhythm, while marking within their own differences. This rhythm surpasses both partners, given that the difference perceived in one of the partners bounces back and resonates on the movement of the others reciprocally.11

Personal notes. Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 See Gil, J. (2006) ‘Paradoxical Body’, TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 4), pp. 21-35. 8 9

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My interest in movement is not anthropocentric, but rather extends to a field of relations between body, materials, shadow and space. Although this quote from Gil is about two human bodies, his reflection opens up the potential to generate multiple "textures" (or create new fields of relationships) through the contamination of the two experiences described. In this essay, the space of co-emergence was developed from the angle of projection, amplifying the size of the shadow cast by the arm, the scrim and the puppet to a larger-than-human scale, sometimes extending beyond the edges of the floor and ceiling. Moreover, care was taken with the materials used for the scrim, so that a variety of densities and contrasts could emerge, giving the impression of a tridimensionality to the shadow. As for its structure, it had to allow the light to pass through and project a three-dimensional shadow. The co-emergence was also developed through experiments between the focus of the light source and the illuminated surface of the scrim (its pattern and translucency), which will cast a shadow on the wall. Now, the relationship between the puppet and the body amplifies the diameter of the ellipse created by their exchange and generates a new variety of shadows projected on the wall, where the eye is involved. In the space of the gallery, the feel of the shadow’s weight and lightness is amplified by the arms’ bouncing phrase. This movement of the arm towards the rear (towards the light on the ground shining in an ascendant direction) constricts the shadow, and the movement of the arm towards the front (towards the scrim) dilates it in density as well as shape. This shadow projected on the wall is perceived by the vision and has an impact on its gravity. It transforms the space and the movement of the person by dilating the shape of the ellipse and its intensity. Even as the isolated movement of the arm of the woman varies very little in terms of speed, by combining it with the shadow of the space an accent becomes discernible where the arm is at the bottom of the ellipse (speed and intensity), which is the middle of the movement. This creates an impression of the weight of the marionette, amplified by its projected shadow on the wall of the gallery. This weight is also moderated by the passage of the light through the membrane of the scrim made of yarn. In the fashion of an optical illusion, the knitting also jerks the movement of the shadow. This experience adds a feeling of constant passage between the lightness and heaviness of the shadow and the nervousness of the space. It creates a nervosity, a febrility in the exhibition space. It acts as a relay between my material research related to horror films and the context of the installation. Here the texture becomes a space-time continuum for a meeting which emerges, amongst others, out of the body and the marionette, then out of the shadow and the scrim. The human body emerges no longer as the center of the

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gesture or of the amplifying movement, but as a part of the assemblage of these elements, where contaminations, dilations, and contractions are experienced. Observation-analysis, essay II

Figure 1.2 Essay II. Où allait mourir le bruit de la chanson, there came a dark and undefined shadow. Photo credit: Guy L’Heureux.

At the end of the gallery is a wooden scaffolding table with a transparent plexiglas top, on which are placed objects of textiles and porcelain. The shadow projected on the wall slides between the floor and the ceiling. The second image shows the trial where I conducted a second observation. In the context of this one, the person being observed is standing between the shadow of a tablescaffolding and the wall they face. She raises her left arm. A lighting system projects the shadows on the wall. Here are the MOA observables: This tension of the gestures starts in the forearms, follows into the hands, and extends to the extremity of the fingers as the body of the person stretches. When it has reached the limit of its upper kinesphere, the tension appears gradually in the calves to the tips of the toes, allowing the lower kinesphere to stretch completely as well. In a constant and slow speed, the size of the kinesphere grows, going from small to big. I feel the elasticity of the space. The gestalt of the woman has the shape of a pin, and the dynamic of her movements is vertical. The type of gestures made by her left arm in front of the wall corresponds to a slide, a

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unidirectional movement combined with an internal weak force and an external controlled force. She resists gravity.12 In this part of the observation, the contrasts between the weight of the shadow, the body and the materials seem to operate between the ascending movement of the shadow and the body and the movement descending from the installation. The movement of the shadow towards the top is amplified by the vertical and diagonal lines drawn by the marionette onto the wall—its stature as well as its weak density. At this moment, the shadow of the structure projected on the wall seems light to me, as if in contemplation. The ascending movement of the woman is created by the engagement of her body in the vertical dynamic space. This dynamic is justified by a vertical plane and a unidirectional engagement. In a similar way to the first observation, there seems to be a contamination experience, this time between the shadow and the stretch of the person's body. This engagement suggests that the person has an intention—to explore the limits of the shadow of the installation (which she follows and exceeds at the same time) projected onto the wall, from ground to ceiling. The experience of its movements gives me the impression that the person is unfolding or stretching the space. On the other hand, in the middle of the room lies the installation—a wooden tablescaffolding making its gravity felt through the materials, a massive black walnut densely textured through which a descending movement is felt. The woman moves. If in the previous description, she was located between the essay and the wall, and she is now between the light source and the installation. Since it is closer to the light source, the dimensions of its shadow are amplified. The MOA observables are: Her muscular tone is superior in her legs: it stops the body from swaying to the front because of the change in distribution of the weight in the body. The position of the woman adjusts now more in tandem with the table-scaffolding. Comparatively to the previous position, where the person was stretched out or unfolding, this time they fold themselves.13 Her body explores the space in multidirectional ways: its internal force is weak, and its external force slightly without hindrance. The gestures made by the visitor seem to resemble dusting. The shape and the dimension of her hand projected onto the wall is similar to the

12 13

Ibid. Ibid.

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porcelain leaves of the trees projected on the wall. She touches them with the projection of her shadow. Her touch gives the impression of crushing these objects slowly, since her arms are swaying slightly from top to bottom. Her arms themselves create projected diagonals on the wall, which add to the shadows from the table-scaffolding.14 In this second part of the same observation, the contrasts between the weight of the shadow, the body, and the materials seem now to unfold in the descending movement of the shadow and the body in relation to the ascending movement of the installation. The descending movement of her body is explained by its engagement in the space—indeed, by a spatial movement of the body towards the bottom. Her hand drags the whole of the body towards the ground, at the edge of losing its balance now. The woman explores the inferior limits of the shadow projected on the wall and seems to crush or fold the space of the installation. The hand that grazes the floor is doubled on the ceiling and crosses the transparent board of the table. The presence of this hand seems to weigh down on the shadow and create relays between the shadow and the body (the hands and the gaze). The movements of the shadow and of the body towards the bottom brings out the verticality of the structure of the table-scaffolding, but also the weightlessness of its see-through board. This stretching and contracting of the space also engages the materials. The play of contrasts, of light and shadow in co-emergence with the objects and the body, seems to offer an experience of binding the space, albeit in different directions, rather than cutting it up. The play of contrasts of shadow and light in co-emergence with the objects and the body seem, by these relays, more to offer an experience of binding, although in different directions, rather than cutting it. In this essay, co-emergence is developed from the different angles of projection that deform the scale of the projected shadow in relation to the elements constituting the space; stretching and contracting it. By creating for example vertical, horizontal or oblique lines projected in the installation and the gallery from the structures (or bodies), these transformations act on the perception of the gravity of the shadow. The texture in this observation shows that the space co-emerges through the relationship between the body, the materials, and the shadows. The vision and the touch of the shadow bring forth changes between the vertical dynamics and the descending spatial projection. The space is not taken for granted.

14

Ibid.

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Observation-analysis, essay III

Figure 1.3 Essay III. Où allait mourir le bruit de la chanson, there came a dark and undefined shadow. Photo credit: Guy L’Heureux.

On the left side, as you enter the room, there is a third essay. A lighting system casts the shadow on a branch covered with velvet powder and two ash structures with integrated ceramic, textile, and wooden objects. The third image shows the essay in which I observed the last person. She is standing between the installation and the wall: they are perpendicular to the wall. The MOA observables are: Their gaze is foveal: it follows the shadow projected on the wall but does not guide it. It seems rather to evaluate. The hand is dense, clearly outlined on the wall, very obscure with organic shapes. Its finesse almost allows one to feel a tridimensionality in the contours. The different deformed geometrical shapes and textures projected on the wall by the installation are fuzzy, and the shadows lighter. It is as if she was trying to feel or touch the variations of density and motifs contrasting on the surface of the wall.15

15

Personal notes.

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The gestures of her hands are now throwing her body in the space, in a slow fashion. The fingers on her hands are the only part of her body which have a certain tension: a weak internal force, and an external force even weaker and more controlled. The coordination of these movements is articulated from the gesture to the posture. In this sense, the initiation of these movements is distal: it starts by the extremity of the fingers, as if it were dragging her in the space or stretching her out as much as possible on the wall through the pulsation given to the slide.16 In this observation, the contrasts between the weight and the shadow, the body and the materials, are present in the variation of density between the shadow projected by the installation, letting the light through, and the shadow explored by the hand of the person. An emphasis on the stretching of time is made felt through the slow movements of the hand. This emphasis makes visible the contrast of density between the shadow of the structure projected on the wall and the hand sliding in front of it. If the first is of medium density, the second is very clearly outlined. The person seems to directly experience the feeling or touching of these variations of densities and patterns that contrast on the surface of the wall and move from geometric shapes to abstract forms with fluid appearances. The French writer and dance historian Laurence Louppe mentions that the relationship between slowness and weight is characterized by an intensification of the perceptible tone—for example through the resistance of the body to gravity: “a receptive space where the tactile properties can be diversified: the movement in this configuration, able to create elastic or rigid spaces, powdery or liquid, depending on the qualities working in the specific distribution of the tonus and the work on the resistances to which the intensification is led.” The relationship between the weight, the slowness of the arm, and the shadow can also generate many textures that open onto many qualities and new relations. In this essay, the choice of lighting sources is a manner of modelling the space and the objects composing of the installation, favoring a space of coemergence. The point light17 source allows for a multitude of densities and creates a sharpness of shadow contours (that is, the hardness of its contrasts). The spaces (the distance) between the object or the body, the source of light, and the surface of projection are also elements that contribute to the emergence of a co-emergence, by transforming their scales (as in the preceding example) but also through a change at the level of the density of the shade.

16

Ibid. narrow point of light that radiates in several directions.

17 A

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In this observation, texture creates a crack and allows for a questioning of the object in front of us in relation to the light: is it the maquette of an architectural structure, a wooden board cut by laser, a membrane blocking or letting through the light, an attractor which attracts the tactile exploration of the motifs, an impression of fluidity when the hand slides on the shadow? The texture offers the body a multitude of sensations through the projected shadows on the wall. It becomes a sort of activation, inviting one on a trip of gestures or toward an open movement in the space. In this sense, the texture also puts in evidence the place of touch in the articulation of thought and gesture in relation to shadow. Conclusion Composed of five essays, the installation Où allait mourir le bruit de la chanson, there came a dark and undefined shadow explores the texture of the shadow in early horror films. In the exhibition, an ephemeral co-creative space is developed to incite movements of the body, materials, and shadows, primarily through its lighting display as well as the shapes and surfaces onto which the light is projected. The visitors invited to experiment with the textures and the shadow projection through their gestures become part of the installation. These gestures are a subtle way of initiating a relation between the time of the installation and the time of my research material by exploring the qualities engendered by the shadow (such as vibrancy, organic-fluidity, febrility, nervousness). They participate in a co-emerging space, which allows them to initiate transformations of movements and qualities of the space when thresholds are crossed. A new display thus emerges. The observations I have conducted with the MOA approach in the context of this exhibition are for me a thinking-tool to take account and reflect on how seeing and feeling the weight of the shadow participates in bringing out new textures through the installation and its space. New movements were participating in the exhibition space: contaminations, stretching-contractions, densifications, and shape-shiftings. The experience of texture provided by the senses moves beyond representation: a thought from the texture is registered between the categories. Reference List Albers, A., Weber, N. F., Cirauqui, M., & Smith, T.L. (2017), On Weaving: New Expanded Edition, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Alton, J., & McCarthy, T. (1995), Painting with Light, Berkeley: University of California Press. Brisson-Darveau, A. (2021), Où allait mourir le bruit de la chanson, there came a dark and undefined shadow, presented at Skol, Montreal, Canada.

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Brisson-Darveau, A., & Brunner, C. (2021) Texturing Space: Towards an Exponential Cartography, Hamburg: Adocs Publishing. Louppe, L. (2007) Poétique de la danse contemporaine: La suite, Bruxelles: Contredanse. Gil, J. (2006) ‘Paradoxical Body’, TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 2135. Harbonnier, N., Dussault, G., & Ferri, C. (2021), “Un nouveau regard sur le lien fonction/expression en analyse qualitative du mouvement: L’ObservationAnalyse du Mouvement (OAM).” Recherches en danse, no. 10.

Chapter 2

Virtual ISLANDS: Proposing VR Tidalectics Olivia McGilchrist Concordia University

Abstract: An interdisciplinary analysis of Virtual Reality technology, embodiment, and empathy through the lens of Caribbean futures informs my experiential artistic VR project “Virtual Islands” where virtual immersion is related to the experience of being in water. Research-creation in VR requires tackling its tendency to centre whiteness as a default form of embodiment. Drawing from my earlier artworks featuring my alter-ego named ‘whitey’ (created as I returned to live in Jamaica), I address my own privilege as a white female artist of mixed heritage who gains from new findings in VR, a medium operating within phenomenologies of whiteness (Ahmed, 2007). Reading from Ruha Benjamin’s critique of VR empathy and her notion of the “New Jim Code,” and Lisa Nakamura’s concerns with “the pleasures of toxic embodiment” in what she describes as “virtuous VR”, I also engage with VR experiences by North American and European creators which propose intersectional and inclusive futures. Keywords: Virtual Reality (VR), technology, embodiment, empathy, gender, race, feminism, research-creation, white privilege, Afrofuturism, Caribbean futures *** As a white French-Jamaican multimedia artist engaged in questions about identity, I have exhibited in the Caribbean, Europe, South and North America. I completed a Photography MA (London College of Communication, 2010). I am pursuing an Individualized Program PhD at Concordia University, with Professors MJ Thompson, Lynn Hughes, and Alice Ming Wai Jim. Building on my experience as a white Euro-Caribbean, my arts and research practice explores how colonial legacies extend their reach to Virtual Reality (VR) technology. My current research-creation project entitled: Virtual ISLANDS ties the relationship between Caribbean futures - as an alternative to Western techno-

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futurism (Lewis, 2014) and the possibility of submersion as a postcolonial stance within VR-making practice. Inspired by the geography of Caribbean insularity and the influence of this geography on Caribbean identities, my project is informed by the violent histories of transatlantic slavery, which I read through the framework of British scholar Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic (1993) in dialogue with the notion of tidalectics developed by Barbadian scholar Kamau Brathwaite (1999). To counter the Western influence of the Hegelian dialectic of thesis / antithesis / synthesis, Brathwaite proposes a tidal poetics, or tidalectics, where the constant ebb and flow of the tides around Caribbean islands are constitutive to the philosophical framework around Caribbean identities. Virtual ISLANDS proposes a VR tidalectics in dialogue with Brathwaite’s vision, inspired by other postcolonial Caribbean perspectives such as the notion of relation developed by Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant. “For Glissant, all identity is produced and extended in relation to the Other. It is through the meeting (and clashing) of cultures that they evolve, creating the circumstances for Relation.” (Skerritt 2012). Virtual ISLANDS explores the representation of the self and / as the other in VR. Within my arts practice, this stems from the challenge of placing my alter ego whitey in a VR artwork without repeating some of the negative tropes that I am troubling as a researcher. My approach conjoins two core processes: the critical study of written and audio-visual texts- here I will study selected artworks engaging Blackness, feminist performance and immersion, which foreground hybridity and fluidity both formally and conceptually - combined with creation-asresearch (Chapman and Sawchuk 2015) which integrates an experimental, aesthetic creative process. Notes on the social / cultural / technological context in which I employ VR I am mindful of the cultural context in which empirical studies around the recent and ongoing developments in VR and XR technologies are presented. Even with the steady increase in consumer adoption, around two percent of the global population is considered an active VR user.1 As a white CaribbeanEuropean artist, the creation and conceptual framework around Virtual ISLANDS aims to address the presence of whiteness and white privilege in virtual space whilst signaling the historical exclusion of Black voices from this space. Questioning how this can be done productively by a white person, Virtual ISLANDS explores how my alter-ego whitey bears relevance in virtual space when she removes her white mask. In Virtual ISLANDS, I explore the Petrov, C. (October 2022), ‘45 Virtual Reality Statistics That Will Shock the Market in 2022’, techjury, https://techjury.net/blog/virtual-reality-statistics/#gref

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affordance of my white privilege through the lens of hybridity by visualizing my body dissolving into the visual plane of the artwork. This remains an experimental artistic articulation of my whiteness, the continuation of an exploration that began within the Caribbean cultural space.2 My artwork created within this project so far comprises of physical multimedia installations with a VR component. The artistic content across both types of displays is connected. For example, I will show a video projection formatted to work for a flat screen alongside a VR experience featuring the same visual content either as a 360 video or transformed via 3D effects. Each time, the viewer wearing the VR headset is considered as a participant within the installation. Within the VR component of Virtual ISLANDS, I propose an aquatic scene in which the viewer can see / observe / interact with the ebb and flow of water around her. Creating audio-visual content using digital video and 3D mediums suitable for VR’s Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) is different to creating within the context of the gallery space and the white cube, where my visual arts training has been primarily situated. Combining VR within a gallery-based art installation began with defining the space / place in which my artwork is experienced. Having worked with multi-screen video installation oriented my choice of tools to achieve this, such as placing one or more video projections or screens within the space for the viewer to feel as if they were surrounded by moving water. Ideally, the gallery space allows for large displays, to reference the scale of cinematic projections both within enclosed venues, outdoor billboard type screens, or punctual, large-scale projections during public events. Centered around the various components encompassed within Virtual ISLANDS, this chapter explores aspects of the artwork’s creation through

To situate whitey within a Caribbean art historical context, I am reading Canadian scholar Charmaine Nelson’s (2019) analysis of the lack of representation of white women during slavery. “Whiteness was one of the foundational concepts on which slavery and plantation monoculture was based. White identity was reinforced by artworks, literature and any cultural text created during that period.” Representations of whiteness and white women remains complex within Jamaican and Caribbean culture, since the deliberate erasure of the role played by white women during slavery has rendered them other to a space in which they existed. Myself a white woman born but not raised in Jamaica, Nelson’s research allows me to better situate the implication of representing a white woman in a Jamaican or Caribbean setting and to acknowledge the historical, social, political, and aesthetic charge of choosing to depict a white female protagonist in that space. As I explored the affordance of placing my alter-ego in the Jamaican and Caribbean landscape, there was an increasing tension in how I could grapple with the different forms of privilege afforded to me as a white woman with a hybrid cultural background. 2

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several of its iterations created since 2017. In the following pages, I will explore the theoretical questions which prompted the work or which I propose as conceptual counterpoints through three main research questions and how the experience of Virtual ISLANDS works in tandem with these. 1.

Can an encounter with a virtual body that comes in and out of sight in VR address how the self and the other are represented in virtual space?

2.

Can VR as an experiential, artistic project versus narrativeled VR, suggest a different approach to the technosolutionist assumptions at work, and what happens when VR is evoked as an empathy machine to address issues of identity, embodiment, gender, and race?

3.

Can I evoke Caribbean futures through tidalectics, where water is a site of history, memory, and a virtual body which comes in and out of sight in a virtual watery VR space?

Throughout these questions I engage with the following themes: VR’s mediation of the hybridity of the self and alterity, submersion in VR and its relation to water and identity in postcolonial history, and a Caribbean tidalectic approach as decolonial approach informed by perspectives from the Caribbean towards decolonizing technology.

Figure 2.1 ISLAND was created between 2017 and 2019 as the first iteration of Virtual ISLANDS. Ayana Evans and Henri Tauliaut with Olivia McGilchrist, ISLAND: vitrine (2018) VR experience for HTC Vive and two screen video installation, solo show at TOPO Montréal, Canada, 2018.

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1. Can an encounter with a virtual body that comes in and out of sight in VR address how the self and the other are represented in virtual space? VR’s mediation of the hybridity of self and alterity Studying VR as a tool affording us an opportunity to reimagine the self, prompts the question: which self are we considering? For this, I turn to feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed’s notion of “the stranger,” “strange encounters” and “stranger fetishism and postcoloniality” as a starting point. Virtual ISLANDS reimagines these notions in virtual space. An analysis of strange encounters allows us to address how the encounters that produce ‘the stranger’ as a figure that has linguistic and bodily integrity are determined. In other words, it is such encounters between embodied others, impossible to grasp in the present, which are concealed by stranger fetishism. It is here that we can begin to pose the relationship between stranger fetishism and post-coloniality. (Ahmed, 2000, pp. 13-14) Ahmed articulates the correlation between the legacy of colonialism and its impact on both a socio-cultural construct of otherness, and an embodied experience of otherness. This colonial legacy is something which I think through the virtual space of VR. In the early stages of the creation, my project was called ISLAND. I collaborated with several other artists using the mediums of 360 video, 3D graphics and generative sound, brought together in a VR experience presented as a multimedia installation. For the viewer, the VR experience begins in a dark 3D watery space where three large geometrical shapes move around you, and then towards you as you look at them. Each shape dissolves into a completely new space, two of which are 360 video performances and a third combines bright colors with nodes of text and 3D graphics. Each island had a distinctive sound and leads back to the initial watery space, and you can experience them in any order. Informed by aspects of cyberfeminism and Afrofuturism, these three virtual islands engage with the notion of a speculative, virtual Caribbean hybridity and the work has been presented with some formal variations in several exhibition contexts.

Figures 2.2 and 2.3 ISLAND (2018). ISLAND (2017) Virtual Reality experience for HTC Vive, game engine still 01 (left) and video still 02 (right).

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This approach is informed by Ahmed’s “strange encounters,” “strange bodies” and post-coloniality, in relation with American feminist Peggy Phelan’s proposal that “performance’s only life is in the present.”3 One of the three islands was the result of a collaboration with American multidisciplinary artist Ayana Evans, in which our respective alter egos were interacting without speaking in an empty, white domestic space. Based on several prompts from our individual practices engaging how the female body is read within different spaces and cultural contexts, we explored the affordance of reacting to each other’s presence within a 360 field of view, something new for both of us at the time. This performance was then adapted for both the screen (it was shown as a video projection) and for ISLAND’s VR experience.

Figures 2.4 and 2.5 ISLAND (2017). Ayana Evans with Olivia McGilchrist, 360-video performance video still 01 and 02.

When creating ISLAND, I also invited British multidisciplinary artist David Corbett to engage with the work through his generative audio-visual practice. This resulted in Corbett’s artistic response to ISLAND’s 3D space, two 360 videos and images from my notebook. His audio-visual contribution was designed as an ongoing, always evolving piece. My aim was to bring the generative nature of Corbett’s composition to be experienced as such in VR, but it became more feasible to capture a screen recording of his work, which functioned in the existing VR interface. My aim remains to propose aspects of live audio-visual content within a VR experience once I have found a suitable technical solution. I make a connection between both these islands and Phelan’s notion of the “present” tense of performance which remains unique and non-reproducible;

3 Phelan, P. (2001) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London; New York: Routledge, p.146.

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and how performance can become a useful signifier of truth on the threshold “between the real and the representational4.” Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. (…) The document of a performance then is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present. (Phelan, 2001, p. 146)

Figures 2.6 and 2.7 ISLAND (2018). (Left) David K. Corbett, Generative collage for VR and video installation, screen capture. (Right) David K. Corbett, Ayana Evans and Henri Tauliaut with Olivia McGilchrist, ISLAND (2018) VR experience for HTC Vive and video installation, Taking Care, AE Campus exhibition, Ars Electronica, Austria 2018.

ISLAND questions how Phelan’s “present” moment of a performance functions in immersive spaces where viewers experience the proximity to the performers in combination with the sense of presence - of feeling as if you were really therewhich is specific to VR. Alongside this, I engage with what Canadian scholar Heather Davis considers a notable strength within contemporary feminist communities: an increased acknowledgement of how diverse and “not-one” feminism can continue to foster positive change in the present, future and in reading the past, whilst reaffirming the central role of embodiment. The point is that we are not one. We are not one body, nor one gender, sex, nor one race or ability or age. Feminism itself is the realization of the not-one. There is no position that can be outside of embodiment.

4 “Like the relation which adheres between the real and the representational, something which can neither be confirmed nor denied, can nonetheless be convincing and “true.” The uncertainty created by this logic is immensely powerful. It suggests another way of thinking about the relation between representation and the real.” Phelan, P. Unmarked, pp. 179-180.

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(…) That body is a body that desires and its desire creates new worlds and new possibilities for feminism and art. (Davis, 2017, p. 56) Davis offers “Propositions for Twenty-First-Century Feminism,” where she highlights the importance of considering a multiplicity of bodies within a feminist practice, and how this “not one” body is conducive to richer feminisms and art practices. Davis also establishes both the importance of adopting a nonlinear approach, such as a “feminist historiography” including Peggy Phelan’s notion of a “future that remembers.” In a third island, I present the work of Martinican multimedia artist and scholar Henri Tauliaut whom I invited to participate in ISLAND. He generously shared a 360-video performance co-created during a recurring performance laboratory entitled “LaboPerf land arts” which invites diverse performers to collaborate within the evocative location of Martinique’s Savane des Pétrifications. Tauliaut allowed me to incorporate the 360-video within ISLAND and manipulate it for both the screen and for VR. In parallel to the performance created by Ayana Evans and me, this work engages with the frame of 360 video, as the performers move around the camera, aware of the affordance offered by this field of view. Alongside Tauliaut’s praxis, my project overall questions how we think about the relationships between the body and technology from a Caribbean perspective.

Figure 2.8 ISLAND (2018). Henri Tauliaut and Laboperf Landarts collaborators, 360video still remixed for ISLAND (2018).

The current iteration of Virtual ISLANDS builds on two solo 360 video performances where I filmed myself on the coast of Tadoussac, Québec and in Bude, Cornwall. These videos have appeared throughout the project, with

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various layers of digital manipulation. They form the first part of my exploration in re-situating my alter-ego whitey in the work, without her white mask. Since 2020, I have shifted from 360-video to volumetric video (a 3D capture technique), currently fine-tuning this visual approach. My alter ego currently appears on her own in a sparse underwater landscape. Here viewers can follow my virtual avatar as she moves around the virtual watery space and comes in and out of visibility through digital effects where her body transforms into a set of small particles. This aims to reflect how easily a body can go from being familiar to being other or absent altogether from our field of vision. This also aims to prompt a reflection on how we situate the self in relation to a virtual body constantly shifting as it moves around the visual frame. Wearing a VR headset implies that we can look in every direction5 since our visual and sonic perspective is situated directly within the experience as opposed to the traditional frontal perspective of visual arts or film.

Figure 2.9 Virtual ISLANDs (2020). Virtual ISLANDs (2021) Unity 3D screenshot with volumetric self-portraits 03.

2. Can VR as an experiential, artistic project versus narrative-led VR, suggest a different approach to the techno-solutionist assumptions at work, and what happens when VR is evoked as an empathy machine to address issues of identity, embodiment, gender, and race?

5 Technically,

this is described as giving the viewer / user either three degrees of freedom or six degrees of freedom, based on the different types of VR headsets and how they allow your body to engage within the virtual environments.

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The difference between narrative-led VR vs artistic project with VR to suggest a different approach to the technology: submersion over immersion in a postcolonial context My work is informed by the ongoing, iterative VR project by international research collective BeAnotherLab entitled The Machine to Be Another; Gender Swap Investigation on Gender Identity, Queer Theory and Mutual Respect (2013-ongoing) or TMBA. In this joint two-person experience, each user can explore the embodied visual perspective of the other user with whom they are sharing the experience, whilst both users follow each other’s movements, and can touch each other’s hands. When you are in the experience, you are seeing yourself and can touch what seems to be another set of your own hands, from the other user’s perspective. Both users follow each other’s movements. I am inspired by this project’s emphasis on the tension created between embodiment and interaction, whilst relying on the live presence of two participants / viewers.

Figures 2.10 and 2.11 ISLAND, MYRa: a gift for Rym, ISLAND project (2019). (Left) live performance with Mathieu Lacroix, Embodied Interventions, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada 2019. (Right) MYRa: a gift for Rym, ISLAND project (2020) cinematic 360 VR experience (4min), video still 05.

The guiding principle for Virtual ISLANDS is to suggest a different approach to using this technology within a fine arts practice, whilst making use of the technology’s affordances. I conceive immersion in Virtual ISLANDS as an experiential artistic project with VR, rather than a narrative-led VR experience. As an iterative project, it comprises a series of audio-visual pieces which are designed to complete each other but can also be experienced individually. Each component offers viewers different forms of engagement entangled with my research questions. In ISLAND (2017-2019) viewers navigate between three virtual islands in a VR experience and video installation. In MYRa—one of the VR iterations within Virtual ISLANDS— viewers remain still amidst a virtual tidal wave, represented through 360 videos and 3D animations. In the current iteration of Virtual ISLANDS, a

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representation of my body as a virtual avatar moves through the virtual watery space, acting as a guide for the viewer.6 Reading cognitive scientist Kimberly Voll’s (2014) definitions of immersion and submersion in VR sparked my interest in exploring these notions physically and metaphorically. Voll’s blog post allowed me to formulate an approach where VR is understood as submersive through the headset’s physicality. Her definitions of immersion and submersion in VR prompted me to explore the notion of submersion over immersion. Voll distinguishes between the immersive, “streamlined perception in which the non-core elements of an experience fade away from consciousness,” versus a submersive experience understood as “any situation where we are perceptually surrounded. (…) Understanding VR as something submersive is the easiest way to wrap your head around it.” (Voll 2014). Voll’s submersion, combined with Phelan’s present tense of performance, frame my reading of Canadian new media pioneer Char Davies’ Osmose (1995), a VR experience requiring the “immersant”7 to use her breath as a navigation tool within an aquatic virtual environment. The immersant becomes a part of the installation: on one screen viewers who are not in VR can see the ‘immersant,’ and on the other screen, we can see what the VR immersant is seeing, in real time. Davis’s aim with Osmose is for the immersant to sense unity with nature as a sacred space and achieve an ‘osmosis’: a dissolution of dualist categories, an osmotic interpenetration of subject / object, figure / ground, interior self / exterior world by subverting the mainstream media applications of 3D imagery, and she is also concerned with the medium’s socio-cultural context. (Davies in Gigliotti 2002, p. 66). Although Osmose functions in a linear way, the embodied experience of each “immersant” is led by their unique physical and virtual engagement with it, which is something I am drawing from whilst creating Virtual ISLANDS. For me, immersion is understood as the exploration of a digital environment where viewers navigate virtually and can choose to learn new modes of engagement with the audio-visual content, based on guidelines established by the artist. Virtual ISLANDS adopts “island tidaletics” in VR as a research-creation method, where nonlinear 3D visualizations of insularity and the fluidity of

6 The intention as I complete this version is to strike a balance between having this visual guide and her absence as she comes in and out of visibility, prompting viewers to explore the space. 7 “immersant” is Char Davies’ preferred term for someone experiencing her VR experience.

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water propose a cyclical, non-linear engagement with 3D technologies. Water connects my own experience of navigating between Caribbean and European cultures, whilst creating this work in Canada where VR production and distribution are thriving. My situated experience of cultural hybridity - being a white woman of mixed European and Caribbean heritage - is brought in relation (Glissant 2009) through a virtual encounter with water and selfportraiture (in the most recent iteration), in VR. VR as an empathy machine Aforementioned BeAnotherLab aims to “use technoscientific knowledge critically to promote human integration instead of alienation.” According to the creators, “By combining virtual reality, cognitive sciences and performance, TMBA is a system that offers users the possibility to see themselves in a different body while moving and interacting with the space with realistic tactile feedback.” The project is ongoing, build by an open community of creators, scientists and participants who aim to promote an “empathetic society” and to promote “human integration instead of alienation.” (BeAnotherLab n.d.). For American VR researcher Linda Joy Gerry, a research partner of BeAnotherLab, seeing VR “as a tool for empathy” is conducive to “empathic activation.” She values the fact that “perspective taking VR” can “present another person’s point of view concretely rather than conceptually.” (Gerry 2017, p. 59). While from a psychological perspective (Schoeller et al. 2019), empathy is mostly read as either cognitive or emotional, American VR film director Chris Milk coined the expression “[VR is] The Ultimate empathy machine” (Milk 2015) when advocating for the benefits of VR to solve world crises. American psychologist and neuroscientist Jamil Zaki (2014) studies how empathy can appear simultaneously automatic and context-dependent and examines the relationship between levels of empathy and the amount of agency those studied have on this. He suggests that empathy is akin to an emotional goal and that it is a motivated phenomenon. For Zaki, “Although empathy can be automatic, by no means is it always automatic. Instead, this phenomenon is deeply context dependent and varies along with numerous situational features.” Additionally, “empathy is often a motivated phenomenon in which observers are driven either to experience empathy or to avoid it. Just as they do in response to other emotional goals, observers translate their empathic motives into changes in experience...” (Zaki 2014, p. 1608). This point troubles the notion of VR as an empathy machine since this removes a subjective emotional variable from the correlation between experiencing VR and feeling empathy for the people or the situation represented. If those who design Virtual Reality experiences are white or benefit from white privilege, how does the colonial construct of whiteness operate in virtual space whilst claiming to

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produce empathy towards those we are seeing or embodying virtually? And should we assume the type and the levels of empathy suggested for each VR experience is suitable to all viewers? Empathy and colonial legacies, and how these operate within technology How is VR oriented toward the white body? American scholar Saidiya Hartman’s critique of empathy in the context of slavery draws out a theoretical contention with the claim that VR is oriented toward the white body and embodiment. Hartman’s discussion of empathy comes up when she analyzes the implications of abolitionist John Rankin’s staging of a scene of subjection of an enslaved subject in a letter to his cousin, in her book “Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America” (1997). In the imagined scene, Rankin placed himself and his family in the position of the enslaved being tortured to garner the empathy of his cousin for the abolitionist cause. By making the suffering of others his own, has Rankin ameliorated indifference or only confirmed the difficulty of understanding the suffering of the enslaved'? Can the white witness of the spectacle of suffering affirm the materiality of black sentience only by feeling for himself? Does this not only exacerbate the idea that black sentience is inconceivable and unimaginable but in the very ease of possessing the abased and enslaved body, ultimately elide an understanding and acknowledgment of the slave's pain? … Does it not reproduce the hyperembodiness of the powerless? The purpose of these inquiries is not to cast doubt on Rankin's motives for recounting these events but to consider the precariousness of empathy and the thin line between witness and spectator.” (Hartman 1999, pp. 18-20). VR as empathy machine could be perceived as a streamlined version of the performance and identification that Hartman critiques. Whilst I explore the matter of VR technologies made by those who are white and the universalizing tendency of VR to propose a singular, solipsistic conception of the self - yet as a technology that can afford the possibility of empathy - Hartman’s discussion problematizes the precariousness of empathy itself. Through this perspective, the precarity of empathy seems maximized in VR – and the precarity of the encounter of performance and whiteness, in combination with empathy. American scholars Ruha Benjamin and Lisa Nakamura study how VR technologies are presented in the media alongside the proposed effect of specific VR experiences on viewers, through intersectional perspectives. For both authors, systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism

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are present in certain VR experiences yet some of these same projects are presented as tackling and or denouncing these issues. Both authors highlight the dangers of associating empathy in VR with a generally positive outcome for viewers seeking alternate realities within an immersive experience. Since the medium has become more accessible since 2014, more experiences are created and distributed through increasingly diverse channels, and both VR experiences and the technology itself are celebrated as vectors for change. For Benjamin and Nakamura, this can become a justification for the creation of problematic VR projects which cause harm, mis-represent situations or perpetuate the tropes they had set out to denounce. Race after technology – the New Jim Code and empathy Throughout her book “Race after technology,” (2019) sociologist Ruha Benjamin highlights both the negative aspects and positive affordances of emerging technologies, and the everyday production, deployment, and interpretation of data. She coins the expression “the New Jim Code” to highlight the enduring racist legacy of America’s “Jim Crow” laws across digital mediums and platforms that are presented either as neutral or objective. With emerging technologies, we might assume that racial bias will be more scientifically rooted out. Yet, rather than challenging or overcoming the cycles of inequity, technical fixes too often reinforce and even deepen the status quo. Such findings demonstrate what I call “the New Jim Code”: the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era… (Benjamin 2019, p. 10) “The New Jim Code” also refers to American writer Michelle Alexander’s book entitled “The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration in the age of color-blindness” (2010) which addresses America’s racist mass incarceration system and a prison industrial complex which has become a lucrative industry. For Benjamin, “design is a colonizing project” and the proliferation of more accessible tools to design media and apps with a potentially high impact must always be considered in relation to the systems or industries they relate to. She gives the example of an app called Appolition, launched by Kortney Ziegler and Tiffany Mikell in 20178 which allowed users to contribute money towards unfairly imprisoned people’s bail fees whilst reminding us of the 8 Appolition

ceased its activities during the Covid-19 pandemic https://app.moonclerk. com/c/h27chmplg

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increasing presence of the American “technocorrections” industry which uses similar tools with a different agenda. “in the current technological environment, (…) the politics and purposes of design matter.” Benjamin pays attention to popular design methods and strategies since empathy is a part of that “empathy is the first of five steps in an approach called ‘design thinking’: empathize; define; ideate; prototype; test.” She also challenges the notion of VR-as-empathy machine by highlighting the relation between the physicality of the hardware, the UX (user experience) and the content of the VR experience. “Tech designers have created actual headsets that we can don, our physical body in one world as our mind travels through another. (…) do we really leave behind all our assumptions and prior experiences as we journey into virtual reality?” She suggests that the physicality of seeing someone else’s perspective in VR will not be enough to relate the complexity of their lived experience, particularly when it comes to marginalized or systemically disadvantaged communities: “Perhaps we overestimate how much our literal sight dictates our understanding of race and inequity more broadly?” The author also addresses the correlation between some VR creators’ intention to show suffering, and how “pain is repurposed as a site of economic production” through the financial gain of VR producers and manufacturers. (Benjamin 2019, pp. 102-106) NSAF: VR as an “optimizing machine” International collective Hyphen-Lab’s NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (2017), also referred to here as NSAF, is a project at the intersection of product design, VR and neuroscience perspective aspects of oral storytelling from an Afro-futurist and Cyberfeminist perspective. Inspired by “the lack of multidimensional representations of black women in technology,” NSAF. The project explores aspects of oral storytelling from an Afro-futurist and intersectional feminist perspective. The all-female collective designed a series of speculative self-care and selfpreservation products for women of color, which inspired the creation of a narrative sequence for VR, conceived within a physical installation. According to Hyphen-Labs “The VR experience is set in a Neurocosmetology lab where black women are pioneering techniques of brain optimization, cognitive enhancement, and exploring the neurological and physiological effects of content made for and by women of color.” (Hyphen-Labs, n.d.). This echoes with British writer and artist Kodwo Eshun’s “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” in which he emphasizes the creation of Afro-futurist tools to create effective change.

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Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention with the current political dispensation may be undertaken. (Eshun 2003, p. 301) NSAF capitalizes on the “undiluted attention” which viewers are in for a set time, using VR as an “optimizing machine” instead of an empathy machine. “It can get you through creative roadblocks. It can inspire you and empower you.” Here, VR allows users to “embody a new character” instead of being body-less, like in some other VR experiences. (Aguilar y Wedge in Lange 2017). For Ruha Benjamin, NSAF “recasts what counts as technoscience and whom we think of as innovators.” She also highlights the potential for technology to become a tool for liberation once designers such as Hyphen-Labs commit to combining an “emancipatory approach to technology” with a critical approach which “entails an appreciation for the aesthetic dimensions of resisting the New Jim Code.” Although she is critical of VR “empathy machines (are) enrolled in the New Jim Code,” she also sees the liberatory potential of the medium, asking “what do abolitionist tools look like? What does an emancipatory approach to tech entail?” Benjamin makes connections between the existing bias at the heart of some media technologies and the effect they can have once this is understood and subverted. For her, it’s important to understand, expose and repurpose these tools for the emergence of “creative alternatives that bring to life liberating and joyful ways of living in and organizing our world.” (Benjamin 2019, pp. 112-114) “Toxic embodiment,” “virtuous VR” Since 1990’s, digital media scholar Nakamura has been writing about the emergence and uses of digital and networked media (digital bodies, the internet, video games, social media, film, TV, advertising and more) through the lens of gender, race, class, and ability as well as access to technology. In her essay “Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy,” (2020) she contextualizes VR’s technological framework, from “VR 1.0 of the 1990s to the VR 2.0 of the 2010s” with the notion shared by many, that VR is a quantifiable tool for positive societal change, whilst addressing the unequal access to it, and how this contributes towards the promotion of “toxic embodiment.” (Nakamura 2020, pp. 53-61) Nakamura’s essay on the dangers of “virtuous virtual reality” challenges the notion that empathy created through VR experiences can create positive change through emotional and sensorial triggers such as “pleasurable tears of empathy.” For her, VR has the power to provide “pleasures of toxic

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embodiment” to viewers who are “witnessing racial suffering in VR.” She considers this form of embodiment to be false and to further perpetuate the unequal living conditions of the disadvantaged subjects of these VR works. Addressing VR designed for empathy, she sees the need to decolonize VR and the “automation of racial empathy” that is “addictive by design,” since it was initially created and developed by the American military to “both prepare humans to wage war, and to rehabilitate them from its traumas.” (Suchman 2016 in Nakamura 2020, p. 53) The author also outlines the pitfalls of using empathy as a primary motivation for VR content creation and the dangers of repeating or reinforcing racism, misogyny, homophobia, class bias and ableism whilst intending to do the opposite. “VR’s vast claims to produce this compassion, to function as ‘empathy machines’, frame racism and toxicity as a problem with a head-mounted solution, rather than as a set of structural relations that require structural solutions” (Nakamura 2020, pp. 53-61). Like Benjamin, she refers to the physicality of the headset to highlight the dangers of limiting the effect of VR experiences to something users put on and take off without any consequences or accountability. Lisa Nakamura sees the socio-economic context of what Gerry outlines as VR’s cognitive affordance, since for her, “VR 2.0” appears to offer “an imagined reset button” to what she describes as the “newly-chastened digital media industry” which includes Facebook, Google, and other smaller VR start-ups and companies. “It is a disturbing and enticing promise that we remember from the early internet but that we cannot have any more.” Nakamura makes suggestions for decolonial strategies in VR. She is concerned with the assumption that VR can “automate compassion” and empathy for those who suffer from systemic racism and other forms of discrimination. For her, the focus should be on a critique of such methods since they use empathy and compassion to justify “untenable material conditions of labor for racialized and gendered people long before VR claimed them.” (Nakamura 2020, 52-61) In this sense, VR functions in a continuum of media practices that are changing only superficially yet claiming to offer new and positive rewards to users by default. For Lisa Nakamura and Ruha Benjamin, it’s important to understand, expose and repurpose these tools for the emergence of “creative alternatives that bring to life liberating and joyful ways of living in and organizing our world.” (Benjamin 2019, p. 114). According to both scholars, projects such as NSAF and Ziegler’s Appolition do just that. 3. Can I evoke Caribbean futures through tidalectics, where water is a site of history, memory, and a virtual body which comes in and out of sight in a virtual watery VR space?

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In my original 360 videos and the subsequent edited video artworks, my intention was for the viewer to feel central to the virtual scene, being able to look around a 360-degree field of view whilst experiencing a less familiar viewing angle which the 360-video frame emphasizes with the camera placed slightly lower or higher than a habitual perspective. When working with the video game engine Unity 3D for VR creation, I have experimented with different techniques to create an ambiguous scene through the combination of 360 video, 3D models and more recently working with shaders (small computer programs within the game engine), through which I distort sequences of still images, themselves extracted from video sequences. In the current version of my project, I am working with volumetric capture (a technique of filming the body in movement with 3D sensors) and further 3D visual effects, allowing me to create a virtual avatar which can transform into dots, small particles and more.

Figure 2.12 Virtual ISLANDs (2020). Virtual ISLANDs (2020) Unity 3D screenshot with volumetric self-portraits 02.

I’m reading Kamau Braithwaite’s “tidalectics” through the literary analysis of Puerto-Rican scholar Carmen-Beatriz Llenin-Figueroa as an “alter/native historiography to linear models of colonial progress,”9 which sees water as a site of memory, bringing both life & death, bridging the void(s) between land and culture within elliptic, non-linear histories. The symbolic power of water

9 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, cited by

Carmen-Beatriz Llenin-Figueroa, “Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2012), 6.

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in combination with the Caribbean colonial context allows me to rethink the possibilities of VR as a constructive mode of representation and experience through the notion of submersion. Caribbean tidalectic approach as decolonial approach Tidalectics are concerned with the fluidity of water as a shifting site of history, invoke the rupture of modernity created by transoceanic migration and transplantation and imagine a regional relationship beyond the bifurcations of colonial, linguistic, and national boundaries. (DeLoughery 2017, p. 94) For Australian poet Simon Eales, (Brathwaite’s) “tidalectic(s) allows non-linear theories of time to influence one’s reading of a text and opens history to the revisionist processes so important to post - and de-colonial poetic practice” (Eales 2017). Drawing from Eales’s proposal, tidalectics play a central role in my vision for Caribbean futures through VR. Here, users can metaphorically adapt to the underwater world and navigate the potentially hostile environment virtually, without needing a breathing apparatus.

Figures 2.13 and 2.14 MYRa, ISLAND project (2019), Virtual ISLAND (2020). ISLAND project (2019) 82in x 56in digital print on photographic paper Virtual ISLANDs (2020) Unity 3D screenshot with volumetric self-portraits 01.

ISLAND’s creation method was inspired by Glissant’s understanding of a Caribbean identity “that is both multiple and singular”10 in combination with Llenin-Figueroa’s “island tidalectics.” The concept (…) of tidalectics (a horizontal, back and forth movement without definitive point of origin or conclusion and whose rhythm is dictated by an extremely slow time) provides the cue for the following discussion, which makes the coast a problem for thought in the context

10

Glissant in Diawara, 2010.

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of a project on insularity. We will approach the coast tidalectically as a chronotope in the hope that it will help us to imagine and affirm a baroque engagement with time, history, and space that resists the dictates of capitalist coloniality. (Llenin-Figueroa 2012, p. 122) In the creation of my solo 360-video performances on the coasts of Tadoussac (Québec) and Cornwall (England), which I have incorporated in each iteration of Virtual ISLANDs until the most recent one, I also draw from LleninFigueroa’s literary method inspired by the action of walking and adopting a rhythm of “extremely slow time” (Llenin-Figueroa 2012, p. 122). My praxis draws from Llenin-Figueroa’s approach to writing and reading that is akin to walking, an activity that forces us to consider a slower rhythm and an expansion of our sense perception. I also appreciate her thematic approach to thought categories significant to Caribbean literature, such as the ocean, the sea, the coast, and tropical light. Through various modes of technological experimentation, I engage visually with the notion of a Caribbean tropical picturesque so heavily altered it is barely recognizable.

Figure 2.15 ISLAND (2017). Virtual Reality experience for HTC Vive, game engine screen capture 438.

Engaging with tidalectics and submersion prompted me to produce abstract visuals in 3D, created for an experiential VR experience. In the second version of ISLAND and in MYRa, viewers are presented with a non-specific underwater virtual space, where the representations of my body are nonfigurative, enmeshed within the watery space. This aesthetic choice was

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motivated by the intention to evoke a complex situation without portraying it literally. MYRa features my body in dialogue with several bodies of water. These sequences are a meta-reflection on water and the wake, to evoke the Caribbean’s complex relationships with water: from geographical dependency to environmental precarity, “island futuring and defuturing” (Sheller 2018, 974). In MYRa viewers cannot interact with the images or the sounds, but akin to the non-linear VR components of my overall project - MYRa capitalises on the potential for directing your gaze in any direction as opposed to the fixed viewing perspective offered by a video screen. Throughout Virtual ISLANDS, I’m creating a link between water and audiovisual, physical & metaphorical waves through an embodied VR practice. Engaging with submersion in new media technology; artworks operating in Black Atlantic cultures and the notions of hybridity and creolization informed by Brathwaite’s tidalectics11 and by Édouard Glissant’s relation, Virtual ISLANDS investigates VR as a decolonial tool (Tuck and Yang 2012) through the lens of Caribbean futures. Perspectives from the Caribbean towards decolonizing technology American scholar Elizabeth DeLoughery’s engagement with Caribbean writers situates their engagement with water through the lens of coloniality, and her reading of these writers has informed my creative approach. In this Anthropocene era of extreme weather events and dramatic sealevel rise, Caribbean writers provide a prescient perspective on the relationship between human history and the ocean. Brathwaite and many of his fellow Caribbean authors have envisioned what I have elsewhere called a “transoceanic imaginary” as a trope for Caribbean history, migration, and regionalism. This can be characterized as a cultural oceanography that maps a broader regional identity, establishing that, in Brathwaite’s words, the “unity is submarine. (…) Édouard Glissant has declared that “the dialectic between inside and outside is reflected in the relationship of land and sea.” This “openness” suggests a tidalectic between the routes of the sea and the transplanted roots of Caribbean diasporas, providing a critical method for reading island literatures. (DeLoughery 2017, p. 94)

I was initially drawn to Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of “tidalectics” as a bridge between the embodied masking practices of Caribbean carnival and the tangible immersion offered by consumer VR from 2012 to the present. This inspired the creation of Jonkonnu / Gens Inconnus (2017), a VR experience presented in a custom-built wooden structure.

11

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Reading VR’s immersive technologies as submersive, this artwork explores Caribbean futures through video installation and experiential VR, within a tidalectic approach. Glissant’s understanding of a Caribbean identity “that is both multiple and singular”12 and the connection he draws between the water and Caribbean diasporic identity, offers useful tools to explore the viewer’s dual / hybrid experience in VR, where she can experience the perspective of another. The VR user is therefore herself whilst being another, which goes back to Glissant’s notion of an identity that is multiple and singular. However, each viewer’s own perspective conditions their understanding of the other’s point of view. In my VR artwork, islands are metaphors for a condensed physical space in which we are aware of the edges of our living environment. Throughout the different iterations, viewers are offered two forms of engagement where virtual immersion is related to the experience of being in water. Viewers can either navigate between virtual islands or remain still amidst a virtual tidal wave, represented through 360 videos and 3D animations. The project invites a reading of VR practices as aesthetic / artistic creation foregrounding submersion over immersion for VR creation to highlight the relation between water and identity in a Caribbean postcolonial context. Whilst Caribbean thinkers have a unique and innovative understanding of modernity and exploitation through modern capitalist systems, how does sometimes limited access to the latest technologies affect a Caribbean analysis of local and global technocultures? Here, non-linear visual sequences evoke a rhizomatic model of future human interaction through immersive technologies, grounded in a Caribbean space / place / speculative future.

Figures 2.16 and 2.17 Virtual ISLANDs (2020). (Left) Unity 3D screenshot with volumetric self-portraits, work-in-progress. (Right) proposal for a video installation with VR headset, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada 2020.

12

Glissant in Diawara, 2010.

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Situating my hybrid identity within the project of Virtual ISLANDS: working with an alter-ego informed by Caribbean futures, exploring VR as a decolonial tool My alter-ego “whitey,” created in 2011, appeared in several series of my photographs, videos, and live performances, appearing mostly within evocative landscapes and seascapes in Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba, and a brief appearance in Canada before I moved to Montreal. This alter-ego was created to engage the flowing questions: how is the white female body read as both a source of oppression and one that is oppressed? In which contexts does this operate on both registers and what is my position as a white female artist when addressing these themes through my work? whitey was standing in to visualize my sensation of proximity to late Jamaican relatives (my own ghosts) and the ghosts of late white women on the island. The use of a white mask allowed me to distance myself from direct associations with women who participated in and profited from slavery – yet also enabled viewers to project their myriad perspectives on these white women and suggest other nuanced and complex contemporary images of whiteness and white womanhood in the Caribbean today. Drawing from the creation of an alter ego which explores my experience of whiteness and white privilege in a predominantly Black country (Jamaica), my aim in Virtual ISLANDS is to articulate the ways in which notions of hybridity and “creolization” (Glissant in Diawara 2011, 7-19) transposed to VR creation remain rich and generative within the current cultural, social, political, and theoretical contexts of anti-Black racism in the Caribbean, in North America and globally.

Figures 2.18 and 2.19 whitey (2014) ISLAND work in progress (2019). (Left) whitey, discovery bay (2014) 84in x 59in, archival inkjet photographic print on banner. (Right) multimedia installation studio experiments, Montreal, Canada 2019.

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Trinadadian scholar Marsha Pearce asked me the following question in an interview for her “Quarantine & Art” series:13 “As the world confronts asymmetries of power and the residue of colonialism, do you see colonial legacies extending their reach to technology?” (Pearce 2020) My answer: I approach VR technologies within a continuum of lens-based media emerging within modern European colonial projects, which has led me to research colonial biases in art history as well as in the mediums of film and video games, mediums redeployed within the VR production I engage with. My project aims to study Virtual Reality from intersectional perspectives, whilst addressing my privilege as a white VR artist who gains from new findings in a medium operating within what Canadian scholar Nichole Lowe describes as “registers of whiteness” (Lowe 2012). Alongside this, I am reading from Sara Ahmed’s suggestion to begin an enquiry into whiteness by reading Black feminist perspectives14 on both antiblackness and on the race-relations within feminist movements. Ahmed’s notion of a “phenomenology of whiteness” which “helps us to notice institutional habits” and “allows us to keep open the force of critique” informs my praxis. In Virtual ISLANDS, my personal exploration of a white, hybrid Caribbean identity and its representation in the immersive space of VR is informed by what Ahmed describes as “keeping open the possibility of habit changes, without using that possibility to displace our attention to the present, and without simply wishing for new tricks” (Ahmed 2007, p. 165). Trinidadian-Jamaican writer Amanda Choo-Quan describes Trinidad as a “majority-minority country” where “we still have a problem with AntiBlackness” (Choo-Quan 2021), which is something I relate to as a white Caribbean person. Grounded in the framework of a Caribbean future, Virtual ISLANDS aims to decenter the technology’s whiteness, concerned with the colonial legacies of whiteness and anti-black racism present across cultural spaces, which includes VR design and creation. My vision of VR is one that can be allied with the portrayal of hybrid identities through careful consideration of which stories and experiences are made available for VR viewers.

13 Between

May and August 2020, Marsha Pearce published “Q&A” twenty-five interviews of contemporary artists from the Caribbean and the diaspora. “Quarantine and art is a conversation series initiated in the context of the global covid-19 lockdown.” 14 I pay particular attention to the critiques of white feminism by American scholars bell hooks and Angela Davis, both important voices in Black studies and feminist scholarship from the early 1980’s to the present. And I refer to American critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion of “intersectionality.”

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Figure 2.20 ISLAND (2019). Virtual Reality experience for HTC Vive, game engine screen capture 03.

In Virtual ISLANDS, I am concerned with how VR tends to operate on a universalizing basis that is implicitly Eurocentric / North America-centric and white, whereas the Caribbean thinkers I engage with conceptualize the self as neither singular nor universal - creolized, hybrid, relational, but still specific. As a counterargument to VR as an “empathy machine” (Milk, 2015), Édouard Glissant offers new possibilities for thinking through the self as interdependent, not entirely separable from those around us, without promising to ever completely inhabit the other and, in fact, resisting that impulse as colonial. This notion works well to counterbalance techno-utopist ideals of empathy, suggesting that yes, interpersonal and intercultural exchange is possible and even fundamental, but a notion of difference is still worth preserving. I argue that Kamau Brathwaite makes us rethink empathy by proposing alternate, fractured models of the self, as grounded in a creolized Caribbean experience. His notion of tidalectics is a rich theoretical framework for my approach to VR creation in Virtual ISLANDS. How can we think about the relationships between the body and technology from a Caribbean perspective? For Édouard Glissant, the island space is a metaphor for Caribbean identity: “The island is thus the site of a double identity—closed and open.” (DeLoughrey 2018). Glissant describes Caribbean identity through creolization where “you can change, you can be with the other, you can change with the other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself.” (Glissant in Diawara 2011, p. 7) Drawing from Glissant, I’m reading this double or multiple identity as a

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pertinent place from which to think about empathy and embodiment in VR. I’m also drawing from past research in the portrayal of hybrid identities within contemporary Caribbean culture; exploring the connection between this and VR’s promise of a hybrid experience of self and alterity. Endnote I would like to thank both my anonymous referees in the peer review process who contributed essential and very helpful points which I have incorporated in this chapter. Many thanks as well to the editor, Nicole De Brabandere for her interest in my research and ongoing support for my work. Reference List Ahmed, S. (2000), Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London: Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2006), ‘The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’, Borderlands, vol. 5, no. 5, pp. 1-39. Ahmed, S. (2007), ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 149–68. Bailenson, J. (2018), Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do, New York: W. Norton & Company. BeAnotherLab (2013-present), The Machine to Be Another; Gender Swap – investigation on Gender Identity, Queer Theory and Mutual Respect [Virtual reality experiment], http://beanotherlab.org/home/work/tmtba/. Benjamin, R. (2019), Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code, Medford, Massachusetts: Polity. Brathwaite, K. (1999), ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey. Staten Island: We P. Chapman O., & Sawchuk, K. (2015), ‘Creation-as-Research: Critical Making in Complex Environments’, RACAR: Revue d'art canadien / Canadian Art Review, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 49-52. Choo-Quan, A. (2021), ‘I Grew Up in a Majority-Minority Country. We Still Have a Problem with Anti-Blackness’, Harper’s Bazaar [online], https:// www.harpersbazaar.com/author/227878/Amanda-Choo-Quan/. Corbett, D., https://www.davidkcorbett.com/ [artist website]. Crenshaw, K. (1988) ‘Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law’, Harvard Law Review, vol. 101, no. 7, pp. 1331-1387. Davies, C., & Softimage 3D (1995), Osmose. Immersive interactive virtualreality environment installation with 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a head-mounted display and real-time motion tracking based on breathing and balance, http://www.immersence.com/osmose/. Davis, A. (1981), Women, race & class, New York: Random House. Davis, H. (ed.) (2017), Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. DeLoughrey, E.M. (2010), ‘Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity’, PMLA, vol. 125, no. 3, pp. 703-712.

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DeLoughrey, E.M. (2011), ‘Island Writing, Creole Cultures’, A. Quayson (ed.), Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, Cambridge University Press, pp. 802-832. DeLoughrey, E.M. (2018), ‘Revisiting Tidalectics: Irma/José/Maria’ in S. Hessler (ed.), Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, Boston: MIT Press, pp. 93-100. Eales, S. (2017), ‘The Ocean’s Tide: Parentheses in Kamau Brathwaite’s and Nathaniel Mackey’s Decolonial Poetics’, Cordite Poetry Review, no. 1, http://cordite.org.au/essays/the-oceans-tide/. Eshun, K. (2003), ‘Further Considerations of Afrofuturism’, CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 287-302. Evans, A., https://www.ayanaevans.com/ [artist website]. Gerry, L.J. (2007), ‘Virtual Reality as a Tool to Facilitate Empathy: Embodied Simulations and Perspective Taking in the Body of Another’ [Cognition and Communication Thesis], University of Copenhagen, MA. Gilroy, P. (1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Gigliotti, C. (2019), ‘Reverie, Osmose and Ephemere; Carol Gigliotti interviews Char Davies’, Paradoxa 9: (Eco)Logical, vol.9, pp. 64-73. Glissant, É. (1997), Poetics of Relation, translated by B. Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Glissant, É. (2009), Philosophie de la Relation, Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Glissant, É., Diawara, M., & Winks, C. (2011), ‘Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara’, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, vol. 28, pp. 4-19. Hartman, S.V. (1997), Scenes of subjection: terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America, New York: Oxford University Press. hooks, b. (1981), Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. Boston MA: South End Press. Hyphen-Labs (2016-present), NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, Virtual reality experience [online], http://www.hyphen-labs.com/nsaf.html. Lange, M. (2017), ‘The female inventors exploring brain stimulation through braiding’, i-D VICE magazine [online], https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/z mnv98/the-female-inventors-exploring-brain-stimulation-through-braiding. Lewis, J. (2014), ‘A Better Dance and Better Prayers: Systems, Structures, and the Future Imaginary in Aboriginal New Media’, in S. Loft & K. Swanson (eds.), Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, pp. 48-77. Llenin-Figueroa, C. B. (2012), ‘Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics’, PhD in Literature Dissertation, Duke University. McGilchrist, O. (2015-2017), Jonkonnu /Gens Inconnus. VR experience including a three-channel video with spatial sound, presented in a wooden structure, created in collaboration with the Carlton Walters Jonkonnu Band, 10:00 minutes, Jamaica / Canada [online], https://vimeo.com/128493444. McGilchrist, O. (2017-2019), ISLAND. Site specific multimedia installation: two videos, one VR room-sale experience with sound, created with artists

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David Corbett, Ayana Evans, and Henri Tauliaut, 16:00 minutes, Canada / Martinique / UK [online], https://vimeo.com/385908078. McGilchrist, O. (2019), MYRa: a gift for Rym. Virtual Reality artwork with spatialized sound, 4:00 minutes, Canada, [online], https://vimeo.com/3753 01356. McGilchrist, O. (2020-present), Virtual ISLANDs (work in progress) in collaboration with sound composers Kasey Pocius and Jack Hyde, [online], https://vimeo.com/559159453. Michelle, A. (2012), The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York: New Press. Milk. C. (2020), ‘How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine’, TED 2015, Filmed March 2015, [online], https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_ milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine. Nakamura, L. (2020), ‘Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy.’ Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 47-64. Nelson, C. (2019), Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica, London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Pearce, M. (2015), ‘The Caribbean Futures Project’, An open call for artists, published through various online channels, Dr. Marsha Pearce, Department of Creative and Festival Arts, University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago. Pearce, M. (2020), ‘Caribbean Futures and Virtual Realities: A conversation between Marsha Pearce and Olivia McGilchrist’, [online], http://marsha pearce.com/qanda/caribbean-futures-and-virtual-realities/. Phelan, P. (2001), Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge. Schoeller, F., Bertrand, P., Gerry, L.J., Jain, A., Horowitz, A.H., & Zenasni, F. (2019), ‘Combining Virtual Reality and Biofeedback to Foster Empathic Abilities in Humans’, Front. Psychol, vol. 9, pp. 27-41. Sheller, M. (2018), ‘Caribbean Futures in the Offshore Anthropocene: Debt, Disaster, and Duration’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 971-86. Skerritt, H. F. (2020), ‘Book Review: Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation’ [online], https://henryfskerritt.com/2012/08/16/book-review-edouard-glissant-poeticsof-relation/#_ftnref. Tauliaut, H. artist website: http://henritauliaut.com/ [artist website], and Laboperf Landarts, https://www.facebook.com/laboperf.landarts.1 [group page]. Tuck, E., & Yang, K.W. (2012), ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-40. Voll, K. (2014) ‘Virtual confusion: Immersion, submersion and presence’, Who’s a Nerdy Girl [blog], June 12, 2014, https://zanytomato.tumblr.com/post/8863 8888460/virtual-confusion-immersion-submersion-and. Zaki, J. (2014) ‘Empathy: A motivated account’, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 140, no. 6, pp. 1608-47.

Chapter 3

Con-Tactilisation: Touch as a form of multisensory, reciprocal, and coconstitutive perception Elke Mark University Flensburg

Lindsey French University of Regina

Abstract: Building on Richard Kearney´s framework of touch as a multisensory and social conceptualisation of con-tact, we use examples of our own artwork to consider processes of collaborative, creative co-creation that leave all participants changed. Referring to Martin Buber's (1958) dialogical conception of the self as never isolated but always understood as part of a unity in relation, we also draw on Heinrich von Kleist's approach of the shared, co-constitutive bodily-based linguistic development of a thought, which highlights the transformative power of a bodily counterpart during this process. We look to performance practices and micro-phenomenological tools to emphasise how these encounters both reflect and alter broader social, ecological, and political contexts of participants before and after the encounter. Including Aurora Levins Morales’ investigation of the body’s inscription of memories of lived and intergenerational experience, which intimately connects us to our environments and one another, we emphasise the reciprocal nature of perception. Keywords: reciprocal perception, touch, artistic research, co-constitutive creation, collaboration, multisensory artwork, micro-phenomenology, ecology, insects, pollination ***

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“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you.” Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993 Introduction to an Expansive Definition of Touch Nearly 30 years ago, preceding the felt experiences of climate change and its unequal social impact, Octavia Butler wrote the above words through a fictional character who, in the throes of political and climate crisis, develops guiding principles for a new society. While we do not take up Butler’s work in the scope of this essay, the possibility of touch as a site for mutual, reciprocal change guides the focus of our essay.1 We work with an expansive definition of touch to consider not only one’s individual, perceptual experience, but also its social context. We take contact and touch as a broad starting point in order to subsequently differentiate the individual aspects involved in a multisensory experience. (Comparable to a flower, whose individual petals we comprehend one after the other as part of the whole.) Referring to Richard Kearney’s concept of con-tact with a focus on tact (which includes social implications), we understand touch as a “double sensitivity”: as a reciprocal experience that exists not only in the tactilekinesthetic field as touching and being touched, but in all other senses. He says: “Tactful taste we call savvy; tactful smell we call flair; tactful sight we call insight; and tactful sound we call resonance” (Kearney 2021, p. 10). Including Martin Buber’s (1958) dialogical conception of the self, in which the self is never understood in isolation but always as a unity with a counterpart (either in the I-Thou relation or in an I-It relation), we take Heinrich von Kleist’s approach of a shared, co-constitutive bodily and linguistic development of a thought in order to emphasise shifts in perception and the necessity of a counterpart. In his short text, the German thinker Heinrich von Kleist describes speech as a process from the initial premonition to the gradual realisation and

Butler’s work has been extensively taken up both within and beyond science fiction, particularly as its striking relevance to contemporary culture becomes poignantly clear. Butler’s influence in social justice can be noted in the production of the 2015 volume, Octavia’s Brood, which gathers social justice writings inspired by the author, and Parable of The Sower’s mainstream reception can be noted by the book’s listing as a New York Times Best Seller in 2020. Importantly, the main character of Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina (quoted here in the epigraph), experiences what is described in the novel as “hyperempathy,” a condition in which she is a “sharer” of other people’s physical pain when she is in direct contact with them. This shared experience of touch in literary form sets the stage for the mutual experience of touch we consider here.

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completion of a thought that develops from turning to his sister, who is sitting and working at her desk in the same room. Kleist’s suggestion to turn towards a “countenance” enables not yet completed thought to get formed in the cocomposing with a sensorially reacting Other. It is in this act of thinkingspeaking that insight is formed. A thinking that cannot unfold in clarity without stuttering and (intentional) gaps and interruptions in the flow of speech, because thinking in the act of speaking needs time (see also Close Talking, Donata Schoeller, 2019). Building on these theoretical frameworks of touch as a multisensory and social conceptualisation of con-tact, we use examples of our own artwork to consider processes of collaborative, creative co-creation that leave all participants changed. We look to performance practices and microphenomenological tools to emphasise how these encounters both reflect and alter broader social, ecological, and political contexts of participants before and after the encounter. Here, we turn to new considerations of Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the contact zone as applied to multispecies contact and colonialisation, and Aurora Levins Morales’s investigation of the body’s inscription of memories of lived and intergenerational experience, which intimately connects us to our environments and one another, to emphasise the reciprocal nature of perception. Tactile Experience Tactile Memory In describing perceptual phenomena that encompass the short-term and longer-term memory of touch perception, we will use the term "tactilisation" instead of visualisation, a term proposed by Sindri Runudde2 and which allows us to better incorporate sensed images of imagination and memory into performative work processes. The common visual perception of sequences of movements is based on previously learned internalised patterns of movement. As one of the innovators

Sindri Runudde is a Swedish and internationally based dancer and choreographer. Their multi-sensorial approach spans between different fields including sound art, visual art and performance and refers to the body as a living archive. Sindri works from a queer feminist perspective and from lived experience as a freelance artist and with international companies. As part of the 'Skanes Dansteater' podcast series, Elke Mark listened to Kit Brown's conversation with Sindri Runudde about their work "A sensoral lecture" https://open.spotify.com/episode/3I017F0yveiXcp8CQHjhhi and finally met Sindri at the conference "making a difference", Berlin 2021 as a dedicated colleague in our international disability/crip dance community.

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in research on the sense of touch, the experimental psychologist David Katz (1925), talks about familiar tactile impressions stored in the tactile memory that are activated in the re-presentation of previously performed movements in the imagination, which are often accompanied by visual images. According to Palágyi (1924), virtual movement anticipated in the imagination is a primordial phenomenon that enables us to enter into a communicative relationship with our fellow world. Also known as virtual movement fantasies we can, for example -- drawing on experience without moving from the spot -- virtually/visually imagine the route of an expected visitor to the front door as a movement sequence. After hearing the car parked in front of the house, we are able to follow the path of the guest on the basis of acoustic signals (switch off the engine, close the doors, etc.). Since in this representation the visual character of the imaginary images comes to the fore, the reference back to the inescapable, inherent perceptible knowledge must be emphasised all the more emphatically. Based on a multimodal intertwinement of the senses and the interplay of dynamically acting forces, our memory images are permeated by tangible tactile-kinesthetic components. Including the hitherto little-known c-tactile fibers, which provide us with a sense of gentle touch, formative memories are retained, including those of defense of unpleasant tactile impressions. However, the implicit recourse to tactile memory often takes a back seat to the visual impression, so that tactile and (motion-related) haptic perceptions and accompanying affective impressions imprinted in tactile memory are rarely mentioned. In the artistic research process and in the development of artistic works, dynamic, reciprocal influences of haptics and visuality can therefore take effect in two ways. On the one hand, it challenges our projective imagination for a later realisation in a future-oriented way; on the other hand, memory images of a past event can be related to each other in new ways, as shown below in the application of the micro-phenomenlogical technique in Elke Mark´s research on contact. Tangible perception instead of tactile space In his deliberations on tactile space, the French geologist Bernard Carlas (2016) touches on the experience of strangeness and uncertainty in the context of environmental experience. Instead of separating a distal (representational) from a proximal (non-representational) tactile spatial thinking, as proposed by Carolan (2007) to describe social experience, Calas finds this terminology to be narrowly understood and suggests the use of a differentiated conceptual approach. Thus, he proposes to speak of “sensed space relation” and to

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foreground the experience of bodily perceiving processes of “tangible perception of space” instead of speaking of tactile spaces. Establishing Contact: Micro-phenomenology as applied to touch The inclusion of sensed experience in perceptual processes presupposes a verbalisation of the felt knowledge that is experienced. In order to be able to articulate processes of our multi-layered tangible experience, we have worked with the micro-phenomenological method (Petitmengin 2007) and its extension to include a tactile component as a result of Elke Mark´s research (2019). This method can be used by an individual to open up access to areas of perception and their verbalisation that previously seemed closed. This includes the development of an explicit vocabulary to describe not only what is felt but also the differentiated facets of being ‘touched’ or ‘moved.’ Central to the micro-phenomenological process is a conversation between the researcher and the participant, but this conversation is not comparable to a usual dialogue in which questions are asked and answers are given in an exchange. Rather, it resembles an accompanied self-dialogue and a selfreflexive guide to listening to one's own mental and perceptible events. At the center of the technique is the evocation of a past experience. From one's own perspective on the event (first-person perspective), a small-step unfolding of the inherent dynamics and inherent structures of perception becomes possible to the participant through the focus on a single moment of experience. Prereflexive parts of the experience become accessible and communicable. This process emphatically expands the rudimentary vocabulary we use to verbalise sensed emotions and to record our awareness of emotional impressions. As an example, we would like to give insight into Elke Mark´s research on (establishing) contact conducted in 2017. In this process-based study with students from the Institute for Aesthetic-Cultural Education at the European University of Flensburg, the technique of micro-phenomenology was applied to an experience of touch. In order to investigate the influence of haptic impulses preceding decision-making processes, each participant was asked to get in contact with an initially invisible object hidden within a textile bag. The superficially simple task (“Make contact with the object in the bag. Allow yourself as much time as you like. When you are done, give me a sign”) provokes a highly complex initial situation by its openness and targeted placement of possible contradictions. After ‘contact’ was made and a signal given by the participant, the second part of the task follows (“Recount as exactly as possible what happened from the moment you’ve heard the task to the moment you gave me the sign”). This leads to a detailed microphenomenologically structured co-constitutive conversation, in which both

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participants follow the processes set in motion, tracing the structures of perception, thinking and decision-making evoked by the conversation. The approach to the task and its implementation varies greatly among the participants. The spectrum of approaches ranges from purely tactile investigations to various combinations of touch and vision, to exclusively visual contact with the object. In most cases a combination of touch and vision is preferred; two respondents include smell. What each participant’s response has in common is the use of visual perceptual impressions in attributing the establishment of contact. In addition, 'making contact' is often linked to the recognition of the object. In the follow-up conversations, when participants recollecting their experience, inevitably more questions concerning the updating of memory and recollection processes arise. The study was mainly focused on co-perceived sensory impressions, emotions and thought processes that arise simultaneously while carrying out a certain task. Accompanying visual impressions, moving image sequences, or 'film clips', of what is heard or felt tactilely or in movement can be captured using the interview technique and thus felt parts and tangibly anchored knowledge of the experience can be described and included in knowledge acquisition processes of the participant. The tracing of a shift in the level of perception from the visual to an associated perceptible impression is particularly noteworthy from the course of a conversation. One interviewee describes a moment of uncertainty and not knowing how to solve the task to get in contact with the object in the bag. At first, she visualises an empty white image in front of her eyes that gradually turns black. In search of a decision about her further course of action that would lead to the resolution of this somewhat unpleasant situation, the student follows and describes how the image in her mind's eye slowly sinks and suddenly manifests itself as an empty feeling in her throat and chest area. After multiple reformulations and queries which are typical tools of the technique, she finally arrives at the coherent naming of a clearly perceptible impression inside of her body, which she describes as an empty feeling in the stomach, "like when I'm hungry." In the small-step reenactment of the decision-making phase, which took place in a fraction of a second, the momentary state of not-knowing and of emptiness as well as the shift of the levels of experience and perception can be followed precisely. In this study, the experience of touch and movement was chosen as the starting point for exploring the interactions of implicit knowledge in the background levels of perception. By shifting the focus to the pre-structural perceptual field of the accompanying movements that have receded into the background of perception, the multimodal interrelationships in perception and

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thought processes can be examined more closely and relationships between (self-)movement and thinking can be grasped and related on several levels. For Elke Mark, including a tactile component in the micro-phenomenological research eventually led to the development of a tactile-performative research practice. The inclusion of transmodal aspects of felt background sensations into the practice allows Mark and her participants expanded access to dynamic memory events on the tracing of physically anchored movement memories. Example Artworks with Touch as Multisensory and Social Using examples of our own artwork, we will build on Kearney’s framework of touch as multisensory and social to introduce processes of collaborative, creative co-creation that leave all participants changed. We use three different approaches to touch - first, scent/smell as the invisible touch of breath in our nostrils, throat and lungs. Second, we focus on gentle touch at the surface of the skin. Finally, we focus on touch that enters the body: as ingestion (of food or material), or as penetration into the skin. Building on this and drawing on our 'internalised' tactile-kinesthetic knowledge of movement, we would like to focus anew on the (shared) experiences of attraction, ambivalence and resistance of our intuitive performance practices. The hand thinks faster than the brain The authors of this essay first encountered one another as participants in the Augmented Attention Lab, a multisensory workshop in Bratislava in June 2019. Mark’s tactile-performative research practice, and French’s multisensory and multispecies performance practice, came together through a collaborative process where the authors and additional collaborators applied the technique of micro-phenomenology to an olfactory experience of scent molecules used as signals by plants.3 In this preliminary study on smell we considered the rich, interconnected nature of perception and expression, particularly through olfactory and tactile perception, focusing on the mostly unnoticed (hand) movements in background levels that occur when describing or expressing these perceptual experiences.

We presented the work together with other collaborators in the Augmented Attention Lab, as part of the Sensorium Festival: https://2019.sensorium.is/lab. For more information about the lab, see https://sensorycartographies.info/2019/06/27/the-augmentedattention-lab-in-bratislava/ 3

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Figure 3.1 Picking up the jar (Image by authors).

At the beginning of the interview, the participant was presented with a small brown bottle containing a fragrance. (Figure 3.1) This initial situation allowed both the process of picking up and opening the bottle to be included in the conversation. This simple acts of picking up and opening the bottle were nonetheless complex, requiring alternating force and coordination of both hands. However, because the interviewee's main focus was already on the fragrance, little attention was paid to the required incidental, automated hand movements in handling the jar. (Figure 3.2)

Figure 3.2: Opening the jar. Above Lindsey French, below Aloïs Yang. (Image by authors).

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In the ensuing micro-phenomenological conversation about odor perception, however, we first talked about these casual, preparatory hand movements and, to the astonishment of the subjects, differentiated them in detail. This linguistic approach to the tactile-kinesthetic experiences in the background levels of perception became understandable only in retrospect as a helpful attunement phase. Subsequently, the experience of smelling could be described in a much more differentiated way, since the participants reached a correspondingly deepened evocation state after speaking about the tangible, tactile experience of the hand movements, experienced on their own bodies and initially performed almost unnoticed. To return to Kearney’s terms, we can explore manual skills, such as opening a bottle or approaching another person or object, in their tactful movements in processes of intuitive tactile-kinesthetic movements which precede concrete touch. In order to emphasise the relevance of intuitive touch as part of the perception process, we consider the countless 'internalised' hand movements, such as grasping, holding or opening, which we perform hereby almost unnoticed in 'background' layers of thought in order to achieve a certain task. Furthermore, the striking gestural hand movements that preceded the process of description could be seen as another result of the artistic research study. (Figure 3.3) This is expressed in the title of the resulting interactive artwork "the hand thinks faster than the brain," a multi-sensory artwork in which video and olfactory elements were triggered by a viewer’s mirroring of the hand gestures recorded during the micro-phenomenological interview process. In this collaborative encounter, we investigated touch as a multisensory perceptual experience interconnected with, and inextricable from, additional sensorial experiences. In hindsight, we could consider the descriptions of these experiences, and the resulting gestures, as experiences of “tactilisation” as described above. Further, this experience of tactilisation occurred in a social context; as in the tact of Kearney’s con-tact. We could describe the shift in understanding of perception as resulting in this collaborative coming together, as a form of contact, or, what we pose as “con-tactilisation,” a term we propose to emphasise the reciprocal, multisensory, and co-constitutive nature of touch. It is worth noting that in this artwork, the olfactory experience of the scent, though perceptible by the human nose, is also a common scent signal transmitted by and perceived by plants. Adjacent to the human participants and actions were shrubs and linden trees in the courtyard where the work took place. According to known science of plant perception, plants release airborne chemicals, known as Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s) into the atmosphere as signals to other plants and insects (Ameye, 2018; Glinwood, 2016; Trewavas, 2014; Rhoades, 1983). These plants likely also perceived the airborne scent chemicals as the jar was opened and the interview proceeded. Though our

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initial interest lay in the perceptual experience of the two human participants, the encounter nonetheless emanated into the surrounding environment and its inhabitants, and it is this ecological and social context, and reciprocal nature of encounter, that we continue to consider.

Figure 3.3 Gestural hand movements. Above Lindsey French, below Aloïs Yang. (Image by authors).

Following this personal encounter at the conclusion of the workshop, the authors of the paper have not had another shared experience of physical contact; however, the insights from this collaborative experience have rippled out into other performative projects. Using a recent performance piece by each of us, we will consider not only touch as experiencable in multi-sensory forms of encounter, but also the negotiations that occur at these sites of encounter, and the resulting changes that emanate into the surrounding social, political and ecological environments which contextualise such encounters.

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Figures 3.4 and 3.5 (Left) Regent. (Image by M. Eichholz). (Right) Regent. (Image by Ina Steinhusen).

Pollination decree 2021 – Regent The performance Regent was part of an interactive performative event by 18 artists in an abandoned supermarket in Flensburg, Germany which served as an interstitial space for five days of artistic presentations. Sitting on a nearly five-meter-high textile-covered ladder set up in a parking lot next to the supermarket (Figures 3.4 and 3.5), the artist invited visitors to experience contact and touch in a different way under the ongoing pandemic restrictions. Approaching the entrance, visitors had to walk past the Regent who sometimes addressed visitors quietly from above: "With me, you can either become pollinated or you can send me a message – or both." (Figure 3.12) If a visitor was interested, the artist asked them to climb the four steps of the small staircase and to push the sleeves of their clothing up to the elbows for the act of pollination. (Figures 3.6) Using a pampas grass frond, the regent began to slowly and gently stroke the person's forearms. In consultation with the visitor, the "pollination" could be repeated or the touch extended to the head or neck area. (Figures 3.7 and 3.8)

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Figure 3.6 Act of pollination. (Image by E. Priester).

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Figures 3.7 and 3.8 (Left) Act of pollination. (Images by E. Priester). (Right) Act of pollination. (Image by M. Panknin).

Other visitors first read the information posted next to the steps (Figures 3.9 and 3.10) and took the opportunity to write a note on blank pieces of paper and have the regent take it. (Figure 3.11) Everyone was invited to help themselves from the bowl of sunflower seeds to eat them, redistribute, sow, or use them as birdseed.

Figures 3.9 and 3.10 Pollination degree. (Images by Elke Mark).

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Figures 3.11 and 3.12 (Left) Receiving a written message. (Image by M. Panknin). (Right) Talking to visitors. (Image by M. Eichholz).

Figures 3.13 and 3.14 Acts of pollination. (Images by M. Panknin).

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After verbal contact, the two participants had to move toward each other in order to be able to touch each other. (Figures 3.13 and 3.14) Both the regent's leaning forward and the visitors' reaching out their arms were necessary to allow the delicate stroking movements with the blade of grass. Despite the public situation, the visitors took their time to engage in this sensual act of being touched by the soft, paintbrush-like grass as an extension of the hand. (Figure 3.15)

Figure 3.15 Act of pollination. Both participants had their birthday that day. (Image by K. Herr).

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Figure 3.16 Digital announcement for let me sip a future beyond my blood, including screenshots from author’s video as well as screenshots and closed-captioning from a video about mosquitoes (See Quirós 2016). (Image by L. French).

let me sip a future beyond my blood let me sip a future beyond my blood was a performance piece that considered the relationship between the artist (Lindsey French), and the female mosquitoes of Steuben, Wisconsin and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in August 2021 (Figure 3.16), building from conversational and collaborative work with Kristi McGuire. The development of the performance involved a series of actions in service of attracting female mosquitos and offering both nectar and blood, while also attuning to the pure sensation of penetration by a needle. (In keeping with the intimate nature of the first-person experience of the piece, for the following description, the “I” in the writing will refer to the artist.) To begin, I created a mosquito attractant scent: a hydrosol (hydrodistillation) made from sweaty socks, gruyere cheese, and Daucus carota (a species of wild carrot in the family of plants pollinated by mosquitos). Mosquitos in general feed on nectar, but female mosquitoes require a blood meal to lay their eggs. Scent chemicals from these objects were extracted as

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scented water using a DIY (Do It Yourself ) hydrodistillation process. (Figure 3.17) This scent was then applied to my skin in a ritual offering to attract female mosquitos (Figure 3.18). During this same period of time, I participated in a needling workshop, a form of erotic piercing—arguably in sensorial relationship to the erotics of a mosquito bite (Figure 3.19)—in which the surface of the skin is penetrated with piercing needles for pleasure and sensation (Figure 3.20). In the week following, documentation from each of these activities was compiled into a video (Figures 3.21 and 3.22), along with a recorded text spoken during the ritual application of the scent (Figure 3.23). The piece was presented as part of beyONd GREEN/$, curated by M_m