The conference and the transition day were held at the University of Manchester, from the 26th to 27th of September 2018, and featured the work of UK and international researchers, artists and students that had unndertaken audio-visual research as part of their PhD. The conference keynote speakers were Dr Laurent Van Lancker and Prof. Andrew Irving.
Some of the key aspects of the creative image relate to film and its ontology, namely the ability to capture the movement of reality while preserving it as a series of static frames. This dual nature of film invites both semiotic/hermeneutic and non-representational approaches – relating to film both as a text and as a direct imprint of the real. The latter approach coincides with the ‘affective turn’ in humanities and social sciences in the past few decades, influenced primarily by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and the understanding of film as ‘a kind of nonrepresentational contact’ (Shaviro 1993: 258) with the real, rather than a text to be read and interpreted. However, this understanding of film can also inspire new creative approaches to film practice or practice-as-research, taking advantage of film’s ‘privileged link to the contingent’ (Doane 2002: 142), and, rather than imposing moral, ideological or narrative preconceptions upon the world, opening up to it with intuition and curiosity – thus giving rise to a moving image ‘that does not analyze or explain [but] that re-composes’ (Bresson 1977: 5).
The medium’s possible futures, as well as the different ways in which digital and celluloid images represent or relate to reality. For the medium – by directly representing reality as an indexical imprint of the real (Bazin 2005) – has the potential to carry ‘the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 227), forging an abstract, uncanny reality of the image: a ‘more-than-real’ (Massumi 1987: 92). We sought research or practice in film that had the ability or potential to illuminate new horizons of seeing and representing reality on the level of style, symbolism and narrative, but also to reveal the processes through which film has an influence on our very perception of reality, or through which film can be considered as a reality in its own right.
Connerton, Bourdieu, Varela, Hayles, Lefrevre, Maturana and Merleau-Ponty suggest that humans understand the world through their sensing bodies, implying that humans derive meaning from experience. The awareness derived from our bodies’ sensorial experience and their consistencies is what makes us attuned to different habitats. As Varela suggests, we are ‘embodied minds’, meaning that the awareness derived from direct bodily interaction with technology, environments and the everyday precedes cognition and is therefore a major constituent of the meanings we share symbolically through language. The multiple possibilities of audiovisual media to represent a corporeal sensorium – even when elicited through absence – allow us to deviate from the ‘rhetorical razor’ in human communication that defines the ‘included and excluded, relevant and irrelevant, empowered and disempowered’ (Cronon 1992:1349). One feature of this conference was therefore a focus on reclaiming the inclusion of corporeal and embodied knowledge in the scientific, technological and social spheres, using all methods available (including film, sound and text), thus encouraging practical and conceptual ethnographies that employ visual, collaborative and sensory methods. We welcomed papers that explore how we see and make sense of reality, what reality is in its own right, and what the creative image is in relation to the world and to our sensorial perception.
My research project is investigating the atmosphere of the Hoo Peninsula and how that can be articulated through a multi-disciplinary art practice.
In my PhD research I use interviews, city navigation journeys, map-making activities, group discussions, and a multisensory art exhibition to explore former Burmese refugee women’s multisensory and affective experiences of displacement and place-attachment in Nelson, New Zealand. Through this research, my thesis aims to critically discuss how processes of multisensory place-attachment could enhance emotional and social wellbeing, inform refugee resettlement outcomes, and contribute to an emerging body of international research exploring sensory refugee journeys.
Framed by my PhD research focusing on the production of the ‘phenotypic Other’ in Europe by different technologies of vision, this experimental film argues that montage can be used not only as a trope but as an artistic-scholarly intervention to bring about the ‘absent presence’ of race.
Beyond linear documentary film, immersive and interactive media can help ethnographers grapple with ways of representing an ethnography of the body and senses. This paper presents examples of recent location-based installations that require the audience to experience interactive documentary collectively through kinesis and locomotion.
This presentation talks about the experience of creating dance short films with the students of DansAra Sarral (a dance school in a 1500 habitants village) through choreographies that were first created for the stage. The first experience was with X-TREM (selected in 23 international festivals) and the newest one with QUADRANT, that has won a 1st prize in Brasil. The presentation will explain the work that was done in order to transform both choreographies from stage to the screen, because the audiovisual format gives you the chance of directing the public’s eye wherever you want.
I work with concepts surrounding themes of domesticity, intimacy, and the struggle for habitation rights. I work primarily with found household objects to create sculptures and installations. I am also Creative Director of the Jardim Suspenso Art Residency and Festival, in Rio.
This is an examination of female representation, leading to the determination of which factors contribute towards subversion, realised through the making of an analogous film (Transposition). Emphasis is given to questioning the humorous and entertaining nature of a clown, and understanding how it is reversed into something sinister and/or darkly erotic, alongside whether garments have the power to define or subvert representation, or is the association with them more significant?
The current focus of Kathryn’s AHRC-funded PhD research is on photography-based interventions located within the intersection between dance and disability, following on from an evaluation of People Dancing’s ’11 Million Reasons to Dance’ project.
Drawing on the short documentary by Linda Paganelli, A Journey of Waves, the paper will present how an individual experience of flight does not (intend to) remain ‘reduced’ to merely motion, trauma and survival. Following its translation into a filmic journey, my essayistic survey will dwell on documentary film as a research and creative process that becomes a means of poetic cross-translation of two emotional, social and cultural worlds.
I am interested in the turn to affect, specifically how the body responds to trauma. Within my practice I make use of an embedded combination of text and mixed media—predominantly photography, moving image and sound. My research starts from the premise that trauma ruptures identity and creates chaos not only in the individual but also in group and societal systems.
The lecture uses the term of film montage as a concept that links two heterogenous art discourses: medieval art history, iconogaphy and symbolism on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a technical operation that characterises film. The link works both ways. One way: by moving the medieval icon into the field of film, the icon is actualised, revived. The other way: using medieval icon as an explanatory model for film can put the concept of montage into surprisingly clear language of image.
My work explores the image-political Arctic as a neo-colonial situation, through the figure of the nature guide and strategies of live-narrated montage
Developing upon the use of creative arts practice-based methods such as drawing in collaboration with people living with dementia in a care home setting, I demonstrate a new potential way of knowing, communicating and researching through dementia-friendly methods, which would depict them not only as co-creators but also co-investigators, particularly focusing on their affective performativity.
Adapting research methodologies from the social sciences or using the idea of tacit knowledge to theorise material practices are of no help to artists in search of a generative structure in the studio. Subject matter, methodology and outcomes are often conflated within contemporary art, and one way to identify usable strategies is to simply look at the features of well-known styles and movements.
My current work explores different aspects of how we distribute our attention to imagery and the implications of image-making production. To investigate this issue, I will present several works that disrupt images and moving-images to reveal how disruptions can challenge viewing reflexes.
My photographic practice explores the relationship between the photograph and the museum taxidermy specimen. Dialectical and preservative characteristics are explored through photographic process and haptic representation, to find ways of knowing in the photograph’s shifting ontology between nature and science.
My research project, In Pursuit of Error, explores the photographic mistake in digital and analogue photography and proposes that errors reveal the intricate combination of human and technological acts which take place in the photographic process. The project combines curatorial and ethnographic aspects which explore the space of making inhabited by photographers and artists and the value of the error in creative practice.
The Bogotá Patterns Project is a creative photographic visualization of urban materiality in the capital of Colombia, employing diverse perspectives from contemporary archaeology, urban sociology, and visual research methodology. The project has a special interest in tentative contemporary design archaeology, focusing vernacular typologies of colours, forms, lines and textures.
“Sense of Home Via ICT Applications” is a multi-national qualitative exploration about space modification in the domestic realm by ICT application users. The research is being held in the city of Milan, Italy. the city of Lisbon, Portugal, and the city of Jerusalem, Israel.
Ontologies are modes of organization of meanings constituted by semantic and logical concepts and relations and established either among ideas or among locative nodes that connect digital networks and the respective resident addresses (URLs) inside global information systems, such as Visual Ontologies that link visual concepts and their relationships as the image of a logotype of a trademark which deploys a rhetoric both sensitive (seduce a client) and rational (persuade him/her to buy). Ontologies may be included in several types, e.g. Artistic Ontologies defining aesthetic ideas and their connections, Mediating Ontologies articulating mediator concepts, Hybrid-Logic Ontologies using hybrid concepts and logics which merge textual, visual and audio contents with their relationships.
