WHILE THINKING ABOUT WHAT WE DID, AND HOW

The development of thinking about art and science as intrinsically different matters, and therefore two fundamentally different spheres is to be assigned – let us bring this to mind – to the historical phase of the 18th century in Europe. Along these lines, thinking about the sexes as completely different beings has to be related to that era. The separating compulsion, as Dieter Wuttke (2003) characterised the phenomenon, stands for a new world view becoming established, in which the orders of knowledge and the sexes were closely interwoven. If we are aware of this historical development and the hierarchy within knowledge and the sexes, the desire becoming obvious in many places to bring art and science into contact again in the 21st century, is more than comprehensible. It can be understood as an instigation to explore the potential of that which is between the poles – the inter, the trans, the hybrid. Not least, this means working on the relations of thought and the relation between different forms of knowledge.

References

Dieter Wuttke, Über den Zusammenhang der Wissenschaft und der Künste, Wiesbaden 2003

A scientist invites a choreographer and dancer for a project. “Science and Art in Dialogue. Theoretical Reflection and Experimental Arrangements” is the title of this undertaking, which developed out of an engagement with the connecting lines of science, art, and gender (Ingrisch 2012). The first experimental arrangement is a space of encounter, of getting to know each other.

References

Doris Ingrisch, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Gender. Denkräume in Bewegung, Bielfeld 2012

We started out with lots of conversations. I, scientifically socialised; KW, who’d had dance training early in her life and then gone her very own way on which we eventually met. What brought you to dance? Why did you end up in science? What were, and are, your themes? What did you think? How did you do it? What happened to you? So many differences, so many parallels. Much that differed, but also much that didn’t.

What is your working process? Is there a first, second, third point? And yours? What happens when you’re developing a piece? After many conversations we decided to continue our getting to know each other in a rehearsal room, and thus on another level – not a room filled with books, records, thoughts and writings, but an empty room. A room with mirrors. Focussing on the body. Seeing the body. Perceiving it. And the shadow of the window frames on the sun-speckled parquet floor.

Pas de deux – a dance in pairs, classically danced by a woman and a man with their movements in exact accordance, often the climax, the most poetic moment of a ballet.
Our pas de deux created a thought space in which we moved and communicated – through text, body, gestures, actions, statements, expression, observation, response, dance, and impulse. Finely attuned movements between art and science, with art and science, through science and art.
We had gotten to know each other. Etymologically, to “ken” (know) comes from Old Norse and is connected with sensing and enjoyment.

Our next experimental arrangement put the focus on Beyond. What happens when I no longer rely primarily on my discipline, you no longer on yours? If we are no longer moving on the secure ground of our disciplines? What are we evoking then? When both of us enter a territory where our expertise will not carry us along? The equivalence on which our work was based – now it lay in the insecurity and the lack of familiarity to which we exposed ourselves together.

My thinking, my expression in many cases takes place via language. The cautious notion of incorporating various other levels of perception into scientific research developed to become a desire. The desire to complement the effectiveness of language in the humanties with additional levels of experience, and thus dimensions of thought, perception, and expression. This means counteracting the separating compulsion and the hierarchies inscribed therein. On the level of thought relations this means intensive experimentation with the As-Well-As, the And, in order to explore it (Ingrisch 2012).

References

Doris Ingrisch, Pionierinnen und Pioniere der Spätmoderne. Künstlerische Lebens- und Arbeitsformen als Inspiration für ein neues Denken, Bielefeld 2012

Starting serious attempts not only to describe various modes of thought, and thus again stay within language, but to experience them myself in doing. To set myself in motion. Giving space to hearing and seeing in other ways. Trying out the potential of forms of knowledge and cognition, playing with them according to the complexity of the world.

Working with images and sounds, with movement and rhythms in a research project means offering a special place to the senses. In our new experimental arrangement, each of us chose an approach of their own. A theme began to emerge. Media came into play. A Pas de Trois began.

Medium – it mediates, is in the middle. So, a magical-technical in-between. It is capable of transmitting information and energy. Or, according to Marshall McLuhan, of extending the sensory organs (McLuhan 1964). Medium – a means of communication, of relation.

References

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, Cambridge 1964

Forms of knowledge and being in process. Putting our professional identities at stake. Consciously thinking our being-in-the-world differently, in spite of taxonomies retaining us in 19th century structures. We are so much more, so much beyond the scientist, the choreographer and dancer.

Not getting absorbed in difference, not getting absorbed in otherness. Recognising ourselves as agents who, if they choose not to remain in the close confines of their disciplines, expand their perception, the spectrum they have at their disposal beyond these boundaries, in which they can move, can be. Which effects will we then unfold? What shows when material-discursive practices are not oriented along hierarchies, demarcations, and exclusion?

We entered into exploring the in-between of movement and moment, of taking a path and backpedalling, undisturbed attention, advance and repose.We entered into exploring the in-between of movement and moment, of taking a path and backpedalling, undisturbed attention, advance and repose.

A continuation of the statement “Video is political in the deepest personal sense”(Torcelli 1996), and a redefinition of alternative spaces. An invitation to expand one’s perception. To fathom realities. Perceiving the punctum. An effect, thus Roland Barthes (1981), that indicates an indescribable element. An element that irrates us, touches us and hints at the possibility of going far beyond association. Here we encounter the atopical, placelessness as the sign of a kind of positioning outside hegemonial thinking conditions.

References

Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, New York 1981

Nicollette Torcelli, Video als Kunst. Von Accinci bis Viola, Weimar 1996

Images, so Vilém Flusser (1989), “mostly point out something in space-time ‘out there’ which they are supposed to make conceivable to us as abstractions (as reductions of the four space-time dimensions to the two planar ones).” During contemplation, we can let our gaze wander, moving with our intention in connotative symbol complexes, establishing relationships, breaking up before and after. A meaning forms in which linearity no longer plays a part, the logic of cause and effect is suspended. They make the world imaginable, their character is magical. Linear writing further promotes abstraction and corresponds with representational thinking, and therefore with a different consciousness. In this way the past can be deciphered as a long struggle between image and text, magic and term.

References

Vilém Flusser, Das Bild, Linz 1989, http://wwwservus.at/ILIAS/flusser.htm

Further themes emerged.
Spaces formed.

Walking, we connect ourselves with the experience of 5 million years of upright walk. We can sense our outside and inside, feel that which we are used to calling identity, in a different manner through the conscious perception of our body in motion. A common space of walking and thinking developed. A caleidoscope of connotations opened up. By allowing ambiguity and complexity, a mode unfolded which, in opposition to that which separates, put the focus via phenomena on relations.

Movement, walking – a form of transformation. “Spiritual transformation”, so Trinh T. Minh Hà (2011). “And that is why you have the whole tradition of leaving a place, putting themselves in a state of instability, and also in a space of movement where they are walking in order to open up their receptivity and their relation to the world.”

References

Transcription from a video conversation with Trin T. Minh Ha 2011, in the framework of the lecture “Miles of Strangeness”, University of Vienna

Which spaces can agents in art and science open up together, transcending historically constructed boundaries? And – how do they do it?

20
Walking/moving as method. Why do we act as we do in a research project? Method, methodos – the tracing back of the path taken, reflection of the actions generating cognition. Meta, after, hodós, way, i.e., the retraced way, cannot only be interpreted as a from-here-to-there, but also as an in-between, a movement in between. How do I generate cognition? What do I include in this process, what do I exclude? And what does this tell about the quality of the insight gained? Understanding movement in the context of the orders of knowledge and gender, conceding body knowledge its appropriate position in knowledge architecture, still poses a challenge for the classical concept of knowledge which is defined via rationality. For it means thinking knowledge in context with movement. Here, the body – and therefore bipolar, female-connotated matters – can no longer be omitted. Performative knowledge which again and again experiences activation in practices (Klein 2014, Bachmann-Medick 2012).

References

Doris Bachmann- Medick, Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2006

Gabriele Klein, Kulturelle Übersetzungen und soziale Rahmungen von Bewegungswissen, in: Cornelia Behnke/ Diana Lengersdorf/ Silka Scholz (Hg.), Wissen – Methode – Geschlecht. Erfassen des fraglos Gegebenen, Wiesbaden 2014, 79-89

Indication 44 of Jean Luc Nancy’s “58 indices about the body”:
“Soul, body, mind: the first is the form of the second, and the third is the power which engenders the first. Therefore, the second is the expressiveness of the third. The body expresses the mind, i.e., it lets it gush out, presses out its juices, extracts its sweat, snatches up its sparks and throws everything out into space. A body is a flare-up.” (Nancy 2010)

References

Jean Luc Nancy, Ausdehnung der Seele. Texte zu Körper, Kunst und Tanz, Zürich/ Berlin 2010

However, one could also speak about a world-making by dance and choreography which occurs through the body and through movement. Gabriele Klein: “As a world of the body and the senses, of movement and feelings, as a world of metaphors, for which words fail us, dance in the modern age, according to the modern dance discourse, constitutes an alternative world, namely a world beyond language and rationality.” (Klein 2011, 17) In this ensemble of discourses – not by chance either – dance was constituted as “the other”. But art can be thought inverted. Jacques Rancière understands art and politics as connected with each other, two forms of the distribution of the sensual, an indication of how closely – much opposed to a separated thinking – the sensual-physical, the perception of movement is interwoven with the production of culture, sociality, and politics (Rancière 1991). Art is “neither political due to the message it conveys, nor because of the way it represents and reflects social structures, political conflicts, or social, ethnic, and sexual identities. Art is political first of all because it creates a spatio-temporal sensorium that determines certain ways of being together or separated, of being inside or outside, opposite or in the middle. Art is political in that it portions a certain space and a certain time” (Ranciére 2006,, 77).

References

Gabriele Klein, Dancing Politics. Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography, in dies./ Sandra Noeth, Emerging bodies. The Performance of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography, Bielefeld 2011, 17-28

Jacques Rancière, Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen. Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien, Berlin 2006

Through movement, we perceive space and at the same time we shape it. In walking, in thinking. By moving through them, says Michel de Certeau, we create spaces. In reflecting about the talking of steps trailing away, he presents the play of steps as the shaping of spaces. “Whereas in the active-passive commonsense model, time and space are located as stable signifiers into which the body enters, within a relational space and time are qualitatively transformed by the movement of the body. The body does not move into space and time, it creates space and time: there is no space and time before movement” (Manning 2007, xiii), so Erin Manning.

References

Michel de Certeau, Kunst des Handelns, Berlin 1988

Erin Manning, Politics of Touch, Sense, Movement, Souvereignty, Minneapolis/ London 2007

Between us – a We, “a part of the world in its unconcluded becoming” (Barad 2012, 38).

References

Karen Barad, Agentieller Realismus, Berlin 2012

While thinking about what we did, and how, and indeed how our actions were developing, there came up terms inspired by Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism. She sees the world according to quantum theory, as an entanglement, an interrelation of forms of knowledge and being. Understanding the world as becoming in the image of diffraction – “a material-discursive phenomenon that challenges the presumed inherent separability of subject and object, nature and culture, fact and value, human and nonhuman” (Barad 2007, 381) – is simultaneously challenging and relieving in the sense of opening up boundaries of thinking which encroach on doing and feeling, stifle it because they attempt to press us into an either-or. Our approach is one that tries to bring the understanding coming from different disciplinary practices not to rival each other, but to communicate. It is an entangled approach, for we trace the common ground, the links in art and science rather than the dissociative features. What can we find there? And how can we make it visible, audible, and tangible?

If we conceive art and science as not separated, we find ourselves inter-acting, actions through which phenomena become material. Material components, subjects, discourses, devices, actions, everything intra-acts, creates reality and changes it. So – practising thinking in entanglements.

While thinking about what we did, and how, and indeed how our actions were developing, there also is the dimension of time, in which our collaboration unfolded.

We worked together for a period of several years, during which many things changed. Attempting to put in a nutshell what this period meant for us, the chronological approach is bound to fail. What we experienced can rather be circumscribed with Byung Chul Han’s thoughts about the fragrance of time: “… the subject of experience has to remain open for what is coming, for the surprises and uncertainties of the future. Otherwise, it congeals to a worker merely working off time. He does not change. Changes destabilise the working process. Contrarily, the subject of experience is never the same as it was.” (Han 2009, 13) It is these contexts in which experience and insight happen. Going into an experimental design, entering into a process, cannot be planned well. And it takes time. It also needs stepping out, a conscious detachment from routines and automatisms, a stepping out of what we know.

It requires a presence. Presence questions the separation of time and space. It makes everything be there. Perceiving, connecting. We practised presence, and experienced a time which was fragrant.

While thinking about what we did, and how, spaces played an important part. Permanent confrontation with the agency of spaces. With spaces allotted to the sciences, to the arts, and those in between. The un-lived and lived spaces. (Baier 2000) We were not only interested in three-dimensional, geometrical, theoretical space, although that, too, intrigued us with its peculiarities. Our interest also was drawn to existential space, the one we live, which we create through existential relationships, and confer meaning to, the “pool of existential orientation from which we continuously draw” (Waldenfels 1985, 184).

We fathomed the spatial, were influenced by spaces, intra-acted with them, configured them, created them in joint effort. Our experimental arrangements invited us, our guests, the audience to this space-time, a spacetimemattering (Barad 2011). Invited to delve into processes of classification. To re-experience them, and discover them anew by challenging our habitual ways of perception.