Deleuze, G. (2007) For Félix. In: Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Here’s a plug for a session I’m co-convening at the next AAG in New York, in February. I really should have posted about this sooner as the deadline for the call for papers deadline is today, 15 September. If you are interested in doing something then please drop me a line.

For Félix: Transversal Geographies

CFP – AAG, 2012; New York, 24th – 28th February

Convenors: JD Dewsbury (University of Bristol), Thomas Jellis (University of Oxford), Joe Gerlach (University of Oxford)

“I believe I am neither an intellectual nor a revolutionary. I’m just pursuing something I started long ago” (Guattari, 2009a: 177)

“Just as an artist borrows from his precursors and contemporaries the traits which suit him, I invite those who read me to take or reject my concepts freely” (Guattari, 1995: 12)

Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930-1992) in a familiar self-deprecating gesture declared himself an ‘idea-thief’ (Guattari, 2009a: 23), yet it would be misplaced to regard his theoretical, and practical, work as straightforward appropriation. Instead, Guattari, through his ‘visionary cartography’ (Berardi, 2008), was incessantly productive in the cultivation of transversalising ideas: concepts and folding-points of inflection that segue into thinking, writing, becoming and doing differently. Recent newly constituted editions of his writings (Guattari, 2009a; 2009b; 2011; forthcoming; Guattari and Rolnik, 2008) – primarily though Semiotext(e) – attest to the growing interest and demand for translations of his work. Moreover, Guattari has come to be appreciated across a number of disciplines, not just in philosophy (Holmes, 2009; Stengers, 2010) but also in sociology (Genosko, 2002) and cultural studies (Grossberg, 2010; Murphie, 2004), in what has been described as the ‘Guattari Effect’ (see Alliez and Querrien, 2008; Alliez and Goffey, 2011). However, Guattari has received only muted attention in geography (Katz, 1996; Dewsbury, 2000; McCormack, 2003; 2005; Saldanha, 2010), and his work is often conflated with, or occluded by notorious collaborations. Nonetheless, in this session we hope to encourage a sustained engagement with Guattari’s ideas, exploring how they might resonate with contemporary issues in geography, and, as a result, open up our practices towards alternative ways of making connections between science-society-ethics-aesthetics-politics.

Specifically, we welcome papers attending to:

- therapeutic spaces

- eco-logic and ecosophical approaches

- diagramming and the diagrammatic

- schizoanalytic cartographies

- autonomist movements and collective assemblages of enunciation

- modelling and modelisation

- micropolitics; minoritarian and molecular revolutions

- ethico-aesthetics, and the proto-aesthetic

- refrains, ritornellos and habit

On the lawn at the RGS-IBG 2010 Conference, London

The RGS-IBG annual conference was in London this year, at the beginning of September. A three-day event, with sessions starting at 09:00 and running through right into the evening, combined with a daily commute, meant I was exhausted by the time it came to a close. I attended a variety of different sessions, met up with a number of familiar faces and was lucky enough to make some new acquaintances. I also tried to make the most of being in London, and was able to visit the Science Museum, an interesting but half-finished exhibition at the V&A and an event over at Tate Britain.

I

Where to start though? Looking back at my scribble of notes, what I propose to do here is make some very brief comments on what caught my attention during the conference, and include all the calls for papers of those sessions (as they the online programme is only due to reamin online until the end of September). Having recently re-read Latour’s (2005) Reassembling the social, I thought it might be interesting to go along to a session on actor-networks. However, as the discussant Peter Jackson noted, there was a noticeable theoretical eclecticism! Unfortunately, it didn’t feel like this was very productive. The next session I attended was the launch of Peter Adey’s new book, Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Adey opened and closed the session, first introducing aspects of the book and then responding to those who had read his book. These included Ben Anderson and Tim Cresswell, among others, who were full of praise for the book. Anderson was interested in the relational configurations in the book, the on-going composition of relations, and had some questions on method. Firstly, he noted that the book is organised around events rather than specific types of connections, resulting in surprising juxtapositions. How then, he asked, to learn to attend to resonances between events that are drawn out?  Secondly, how is Adey theorising the process of change and the irruption of the new from within this relational account? Cresswell had fewer questions but remarked that the mundane is much harder to account for, and to write. He also noted that the book was an example of geography that is happy to be theoretical. I took a break after lunch, and then sat at the back of the room for a session on anarchist geographies. It was all rather tame though. The closest I came to being surprised was when I nearly fell off my chair; it had only three legs. I did a little writing in my notebook, then listened closely as Hilary Ramsden talked about her research on clown activism. I liked her comments on temporary wrong-footings, and the play on misunderstanding and mistake. Indeed, her paper was quite simply disarming.

II

The session on theorising the sea was interesting, in particular the paper that considered the surfed wave as a relational place, both unstable and provisional. There was an uncomfortable silence after another paper in the same session though, and I was trying to work out if it was because it didn’t offer much in the way of questions, or if it was because the presenters were Israeli. Perhaps both. I couldn’t find anything in the programme that was very appealing for the next session, and so I wandered over to the V&A. There they had an exhibition, called Architects Build Small Spaces, which had finished earlier on in the week. I asked about it and found that parts of the exhibition were still on-site and could be visited. These structures were explorations of notions of refuge and retreat and although I wasn’t convinced that small spaces “can push the boundaries and possibilities of creative practice”, I did rather like the ‘Ark’ project, a beautiful bookcase-tower-archive. I spent the first part of the afternoon at a session that I had expected would be about affect and emotion but turned out to be more about well-being. David Conradson’s consideration of therapeutic practices for affective modulation was fascinating, and I found some of the terms he used very thought-provoking: relational ecologies, orchestration of feeling and affective field. His paper was on the techniques for summoning stillness and how places of retreat operate. I found there to be an interesting overlap between this paper, the exhibition I had just been to, and my participation at the Luminous Green (LG) gathering. Louisa Cadman’s presentation on the art of living well attended to the idea of staying with the present, of staying with the problem. Hers was more a story than an argument and there was a noticeable unease with the audience as to how to engage with it. As for myself, I found myself listening to experiences that were unsettlingly similar to those from LG. Instead of a mint-leaf, she spoke of a raisin. But the same tenets of non-judgement, of awareness, of presencing even, were all there. I was surprised then, to find that some of what I had liked so much about LG was perhaps not as specific to that event as I had first thought. The last session was all about surfaces. Rachel Colls spoke of bodily, and in particular placental, surfaces, which was remarkable. Drawing on Luce Irigaray, the placenta was a device for re-thinking the ways we live together, of new forms of relating. Alan Latham’s paper on jogging as a way of thinking with, and about, surfaces was an exercise in thoughtful self-experimentation, and Hilary, mentioned earlier, told a story of walking in Detroit. There was lots going on, following a finger-walking introduction (which had to be seen to be believed!): Hilary reading, a friend walking her fingers over a projector, and a slideshow of pictures and quotes that seemed to have little to do with what was being read. The person doing the walking of fingers, Libby Straughan, was up next with a talk on taxidermy. There was a visceral video of her practising taxidermy which was hard to watch but nonetheless fascinating. I was more concerned by the seemingly conflictual citations of psychoanalysts and those who are rather less interested in that sort if thing. A certain ontological dissonance perhaps? The last paper maintained the high level of the session, with a lyrical tale of the Aberfan mining disaster, a scrutiny of the surface.

III

The sonic methods session had some technical difficulties but this did not prevent the papers from going ahead. Many of the participants had also attended the ‘Experimenting with Geography’ workshop earlier on in the year but here I was able to hear more about their work. Jonathan Prior’s soundwalks were very interesting, especially the ways in which he encouraged a holding of attention through détournement. His soundwalks are available to download from his blog. The next two sessions attended, both before and after lunch, were on geography and the future. Nick Bingham presented a story of a food inspection of a Chinese restaurant, highlighting the ways the future can be folded into the present. Ben Anderson and Pete Adey had a paper on governing emergencies, and discussed the interval of peril. An emergency, they argued, is only over when the potential to surprise had been exhausted. Sam Kinsley talked about futurity in the making, and explored the notion of communities of practice. He contended that ubicomp (ubiquitous computing) remains anticipatory, always looking to a proximate future. Gail Davies gave a very interesting talk about experimental temporalities (and temporalities of the experiment). I agreed with her argument that experimental practices enact more than one future . Derek McCormack chose to surprise, engaging with the futures of inflation (financial rather than balloon). I  had a giggle when he talked about practising thrift (!) but I was intrigued by his thoughts on the pre-disciplining of the imagination. Leila Dawney invoked a particular set of philosophers (Stengers, Simondon, Nancy, Spinoza) to discuss on-going presencing or becoming. She was especially interested in the imaginative capacities of the body, arguing that imaginative constructions of the future highlight some of the relations in the present. The final paper came from Jamie Lorimer, who spoke of enginnering new ecologies and cosmopolitics, of learning to live with others. Interestingly he also touched upon diagrams, which could anticipate and summon forth futures. I decided to leave on a high, those sessions proving very stimulating, and made my way over to Tate Britain for the ‘The Real Thing‘:

Urbanomic present an evening event at Tate Britain with contemporary sound, video and sculptural work, and other interventions exploring the emerging philosophical paradigm of Speculative Realism and its impact on contemporary art practice.

Although fairly ambivalent about Specualtive Realism, I did follow the recent discussions on its merits on the Crit-Geog mailing list. Moreover, I was interested in how artists might explicitly explore this sort of philosophy and in particular, the question of engaging with realities that exist before, after and outside of human experience. There was a lot to see and to listen to and unfortunately I didn’t manage much in the end. But I did stumble across Mike Nelson’s (2000) The Coral Reef, which had nothing to do with the event, but has really stayed with me since. I’ve included a video below, before the list of CFPs, but I would recommend you visit the installation rather than watch this!

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Can we have political Actor-Networks?

Charlotte Chambers & Katherine Smith

Over the past twenty years, theoretical contributions employing the term actor-network theory (or ANT for short) have enjoyed huge popularity within the social sciences, and particularly human geography, to the extent that some of the original contributors to this body of work have expressed concern at its translation into a specific, almost concrete, academic space (e.g. Law, 1999). Attempts to reclaim the term as something less fixed and more problematic have been made (e.g. Latour, 2005; Law & Hassard, 1999). It is contended, however, that because actor-network theorists tend to have their sights firmly fixed on micro-level analysis, none of the various interpretations (or translations) of ANT have, so far, dealt adequately with the agency of political context in mediating interactions of actors and networks.

This session incorporates a range of papers which employ or engage with elements of ANT, each of which illustrates or questions the centrality of political context and address the question of whether it is possible for ‘actor-network theories’ to engage with politics beyond the micro level. Drawing on topics as diverse as environmental justice, health inequalities, financial services corruption and Tuscan wine production, this session will provide a provocative discussion about one of the most widely applied theoretical lenses in contemporary human geography. The first paper, by the session organizers, will outline some of the key difficulties and debates on this topic.  The second will respond to this directly by arguing ANT is already a viable approach for critical, politically engaged analysis. The final two papers will each present examples of politically critical, empirical geographical work in which ANT is employed, providing further insights into the possibilities and difficulties in using ANT in politically sensitive research. The broader aim of the session is to promote a better understanding of how ANT might be usefully developed and applied within the social sciences to better understand situations that are as complex and politically sensitive as the post-crisis global economy and environment upon which this conference is focused.

RGS-IBG/Wiley-Blackwell Book Series panel. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects: author meets interlocuters panel

Kevin Ward

Anarchist geographies: Place, identity and participatory approaches

Adam Barker, Jenny Pickerill & Gavin Brown

Anarchist theory has had much to say about the importance of place, especially in critiques of how territory is claimed by power – whether the state or corporate interests – but also in proposing different ways of relating to land. Such theory needs to be engaged with by geographers not only in enhancing our understanding of place and identity, but in supporting social justice activism which seeks to challenge these power relations. Ecologically-based concepts such as bioregionalism and examinations of place-based autonomy have brought diverse groups together in discussions of how land is related to and used to sustain non-hierarchical more participatory social forms.  However, anarchist theory has not included much commentary on how place relates to political, social, and cultural identities.  This session seeks to engage with the various ways – contested, overlapping, and often incomplete – that place informs identities, both for anarchist individuals and communities, and for groups that anarchists may find themselves working with (or against).  As anarchists in practice seek to work within localized networks of activists in the anti-globalization movement, or in partnership with Indigenous peoples and communities, anarchists must consider the full range of implications for the development of senses of self and ‘other’, production of cultural and social meaning, and formation of political identities tied to place. Such an approach also asks geographers to develop a more participatory approach in understanding how place is understood and the construction of place and identities through the processes of activism.

This session seeks to consider (but should not be limited by) the following questions:

- How are variations within anarchistic identities tied to locality and place-specific struggles?

-What are the implications for international solidarity, geographically-dispersed affinity, and other networking concepts that must account for place-based identities?

- Do ties to localized identities strengthen or weaken opposition to globalizing power?

- Can experiences on, in, and with, specific places be used to help form particular anarchistic identities?

- What challenges are posed by identities such as those of some Indigenous communities which are place-based but also claim particular and inaccessible relations to places?

- What do the ethics that inform participatory approaches add to understandings of anarchist geographies?

Theorising the Sea

Jon Anderson & Kimberley Peters

The oceans and seas cover approximately two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, not to mention the watery worlds which lie below, forming the largest percentage of our planet. Rachel Carson wrote of the sea, “it lies all about us” (1950, 216), yet it has strangely failed (until recently) to gain much attention in social and cultural geography. The sea is a space often invisible, forgotten (Lambert et al, 2006), marginalised, ‘out there’ (Steinberg, 1999) mystical and strange (Westerdahl, 2005). Yet paradoxically, it has been, and remains, fundamental to the making of the world as we know it (Lavery, 2005, Rediker, 2007). As a “scholarly turn towards the ocean” currently develops (Connery, 2006), this session seeks to consider how we might theorise the sea – this strange, liquid, undulating space which is often credited as being entirely different from the land (see Jackson, 2005, Langewiesche, 2004, Steinberg, 1999). In particular, this session will endeavour to theorise oceanic, maritime and sea spaces not only in terms of interconnections and networks, but also as spaces of power, society, imagination, emotion, materiality, mobility and enchantment. This session invites papers concerned with (but not limited to) the following themes:

- The tensions, contradictions, relationships between the land and sea

- The sea as a ‘place’

- Materiality and sea

- The sea as space of emotion

- Ocean and seas spaces as magical, mystical and enchanted

- Society and the sea

- The fluid, undulating, mobile nature of the sea

Geographies of (dis)ability, (ill) health, emotion and affect

Louise Holt, Jennifer Lea & Hannah MacPherson

This session aims to explicitly connect work on the geographies of (dis)ability, ill health and wellbeing with research on emotion and /or affect. Over recent years, the interest that human geographers have shown in the emotional and (broadly conceived) affective realms has increased substantially, making an impact in most areas of the discipline. From the emotional responses that shape and arise from embodied relationships with particular spatial settings, to the ‘logics’ of affect that shape configurations of economic, social and cultural life, the emotional and affective realms are increasingly being called upon as legitimate ways of knowing the world.

It was critical geographies of disability and chronic illness (e.g. Dyck 1999, Moss 1999, Chouinard 1999) that proved one of the most willing to ‘admit emotions into [the] production of geographical knowledges’ (Davidson et al 2005, 4). Despite that starting point there has been limited sustained dialogue. As such, this session calls for papers that explicitly take this dialogue forward by investigating aspects of the multidimensional and varied relationships that exist between (dis)ability, health and wellbeing and emotion/affect.

What are surfaces?

Isla Forsyth, James Robinson, Hayden Lorimer & Peter Merriman

Geographers have held a long-standing concern with describing and understanding the Earth’s surface and the social and environmental interactions which it enables or constrains, some employing creative methods to produce myriad explanations of surface pattern, processes and peopling (Harrison et al. 2004). However, critical reflections on different understandings of ‘the surface’ have been relatively neglected in contemporary geographical study, with emphasis being placed on geographical concepts such as ‘place’ or ‘landscape’.

Commonly, and metaphysically, we come to know the world, and figure our place in it, as surface-dwellers, moving over ground, across bodies of water or occasionally taking to the air to see patterns of life and habitats from on-high (Cosgrove 2001; Ingold 2008). Meanwhile, much of the commonplace, metaphoric language of the surface is deeply pejorative: beauty is said to be skin-deep or someone is warned they are skating on thin-ice. If surfaces are objects of attraction, they are also subject to our suspicion and distrust.

This session asks what a serious consideration of the superficial might allow, hinging on the question ‘What are surfaces?’ We welcome proposals for papers which have a theoretical and/or empirical focus which critically address different social, cultural, historical and physical engagements with surfaces: human and nonhuman; topographical, topological and technological; imagined, visualized and inhabited; material and metaphoric; reproduced, modelled and designed.

Sonic methods in human geography

Michael Gallagher & Jonathan Prior

This session brings together researchers who are actively using sound to explore geographical issues, providing a platform for methodological development to complement the growing interest in the geographies of sound and music (e.g. Anderson et al, 2005; Cameron and Rogalsky, 2006; Wood et al, 2007). Papers will cover topics such as:

- Sonic research methods: soundwalking; deep listening; multi-sensory ethnography; acoustic mapping; sound design and architecture; acoustic ecology; field recording; sound art and experimentalism.

- The interface between academic research and creative practice in the sonic arts.

- Cartographies of sound and other forms of representing sound.

- Experimentation with different forms of sonic dissemination: blogs, podcasts, performances, radio broadcasts, etc.

Geography and the Future

Ben Anderson & Peter Adey

How are futures governed, enacted, invoked and known? And how might geographers respond – analytically, methodologically, and politically – to the making of geographies through the future? Addressing these questions requires that we explicitly conceptualise the relation between space-time and futurity. However, with some exceptions, including work on figuring futures (Kitchen & Kneale 2002; Pinder 2005), experiencing futures (Kraftl 2007) and practices such as planning, Social and Cultural Geography has rarely explicitly engaged with the category of the future (compare with the amount of work on the past, memory and haunting). This is not to say that the future is absent from geographical work. On the contrary, recent research on climate change, trans-species epidemics, terror, obesity, financial crises and other risks, threats and hazards has shown how acting in advance of the future is an integral, if taken-for-granted, part of specific substantive geographies (e.g. Adey 2009; Anderson 2010a, b; Amoore 2009; de Goede & Randalls 2009; Evans 2009; French & Kneale 2009; Hannah 2009). Carbon is traded, birds are culled, bodies are measured and banks are saved on the basis of what has not and may never happen; the future. We also find hints of the complicated interrelations between past, present and future across a wide range of work within Social and Cultural Geography. A simple list of just some ‘future geographies’ gives us a sense of the sheer variety of ways in which futures may be related to and made present. Futures are: traded in futures markets, promised in contracts, created by birth, commodified by finance capital, secured against, invested in by savers animated by a Calvinist work ethic, divined by fortune tellers, promised in the context of new technologies, coaxed into being by theorists of diverse economies, projected by certain utopians, deterred by nation states, regularised through clock time, prophesised by evangelicals, and destroyed in war, to name only some relations to the future (see Adam & Groves 2007; Anderson 2010a).

The sessions consist of a series of papers that think the relation between geographies/geography and the future by describing how futures are theorised, known, governed and enacted in relation to the following themes:

1. Theorising the future and spatiality/temporality (the future as not-yet, a mystery, virtual, difference, outside, becoming, event).
2. Figuring the future (‘the future’ understood as catastrophe, crisis, disaster and or in terms of progress, providence, or promise)
3. Enacting futures. (How are futures embodied, experienced, told, narrated, imagined, performed, wished, planned, (day)dreamed, symbolized, and sensed? And how are future made present through specific affects, materialities, and epistemic objects).
4. Governing the future (different anticipatory logics such as risk, insurance, preemption, precaution, preparedness or anticipatory techniques such as scenarios, exercises or risk modelling).

'Signal, Event, Affect' conference/colloquium, Aarhus University

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to, and attend, a conference-colloquium in Aarhus, Denmark, entitled ‘Event, Signal, Affect‘. There was a deliberate attempt at trying to create a different sort of space in which to share our work, and there was as much time for discussion as there was to present. Coupled with a small number of participants, a session of conceptual speed-dating, plenty of meals together and spread out over three days, it made for a really pleasant gathering (see also Christoph’s comments on the conference-colloquium facilitating lures for friendship). The sessions – Site and City, Crowded Events and (H)ac(k)tivism, The Signaletic Event,  Event Culture and Affective Interactions – provided some sort of loose structure and the keynotes were inspiring. Unfortunately, Nigel Thrift was unable to attend but this meant that Brian and Erin had more time to talk about their work and forthcoming project, Generating the Impossible. I’m really very grateful to Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen and to Jonas Fritsch, not only for their invitation but also for organising and pulling off such a great conference-colloquium. It was great to catch up with the group from  the SenseLab, and also to meet the likes of Leila Dawney (a fellow geographer), Merete Carlson (who I have since met in Berlin, at IfREX) and Christian Borch (whose papers I have since been reading).

My paper, Experimental aesthetics: The Office of Experiments, was a chance for me to start thinking and experimenting the Office of Experiments. Not experimenting with, “which would induce the idea of a separation between the experimenter and what she is experimenting on or with … [but] a practice of active, open, demanding attention paid to the experience as we experience it” (Stengers, 2008: 109). Here, there is no clear distinction, as in French, between the terms ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’. Whether or not it was a success is unsure, but it did at least generate a discussion and a set of questions. These have enabled me to re-think writing the Office as a temporary and distributed space. The short paper is embedded below with the help of issuu.

Reference

Stengers, I. (2008) A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality. Theory Culture & Society, 25(4): 91-109

Where next for EwG?

The last day of the workshop finished at lunch but we still managed to fit in several presentations, the two designed soundwalks from the day before and a short session discussing feedback and the future of Experimenting with Geography (EwG), the documentation of this event and possible sources of funding for another ocassion. There was a sense of sadness that the event was coming to an end, and there was much talk of forming a new experimental department (or hijacking another one)… Even if that does not come to pass, I really hope that the workshop in Edinburgh was just the beginning of some sort of experimental network, with the potential for future collaborations. There was a lot of swapping of email addresses and my impression was that everyone was keen to share materials from the week. I’m not sure that here is the best place for the audio recordings but if you’d like a copy (and I haven’t linked to their location in the comments soon), then please get in touch.

Following the end of the workshop, now two weeks ago already, there have been an incredible number of emails going round, and an outpouring of thanks to the organisers. If I might, I would like to add my thanks to those who organised, presented and participted at EwG – it was a lot fun. Eric perhaps best summed up the week when he wrote:

Can you come again next week? This one has lacked crackly birdsong, vibrating balloons, soldering irons, city symphonies, anechoic chambers, autumn salmon roe, centrifuges, quarry hammers, avian corpses, men on scaffolding (well it hasn’t, but has in that storyboard way), violin-voices in the foyer, cycle rides to the Wild West and most importantly, the music of your enthusiasm.

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]]> http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/conference/see-hear-make-do-future-collaborations/feed/ 3 http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/conference/public-art-sound-walks-and-experimental-music/ http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/conference/public-art-sound-walks-and-experimental-music/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 23:32:34 +0000 Thomas http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/?p=1325

Double act: Sans façon

Day 4. Thursday morning got underway with an overview of the work being done by Sans façon:

…an investigation between French architect Charles Blanc and British artist Tristan Surtees, [which] has developed into an ongoing collaboration through an art practice.

We undertake diverse projects, both temporary and permanent, predominantly exploring the complex relationship between people and place. We like to see the role of the artist and art as a catalyst in a process of raising questions and inviting one to look and think differently about a place, hoping to create an opportunity rather than an inanimate object.

They do not have a particular medium and instead have attempted all sorts of varied projects. Emphasising that they try to avoid collaboration where it involves incorporating technicians into a project, they work hard to ensure that everybody is on-board from the start of a project. What drives them are the hidden aspects of place; they understand place as having a range of different layers (or operating on a variety of registers?). An interest in micro-geographies (or micro-histories?¹) and telling small stories went hand-in-hand with an appreciation of the richness of working-together, with each other, with locals, with academics, with all kinds of people. Both Tristan and Charles explained how they looked for comissions that encouraged the development of an idea, rather than knowing in advance what a project might be and/or look like.

What really got them thinking differently, they told us, was a get-together (or “inter-disciplinary creative development programme”) called ‘Rough Mix‘:

…an opportunity for theatre makers to collaborate with other practitioners, try out new ideas and introduce them to an audience. We bring together a small group of practitioners from different disciplines and give them time to start developing new projects in a supportive and collaborative atmosphere. The practitioners work together with a group of performers over a two week period before making a work in progress showing at the end. We believe that this project offers a unique opportunity for both established and emerging artists.

To me, having spent time at the SenseLab, it sounded like a particular platform for experimentation. From this meeting, or series of encounters, Charles and Tristan became involved in set design for a piece of theatre, which went on to do rather well. I wondered just how important it was to have a person operate or act as a node for holding the group together and also knowing how to direct it, albeit gently.

Their practical session, following a coffee break, asked us to design an alternative audio-guide to the city. Drawing on one of their previous projects, Sans façon explained that they wanted us to make people move by following footfall rather than a set of descriptions, to compose an experience rather individual sounds. The group split into two (those who knew the city well, and those who didn’t) and then went off in pairs to listen to the city and help compose, back in our groups, some sort of sonic experience where we would walk a score.

I took the afternoon off to explore the city (and read the newspaper), which made for a welcome break from a rather intense week. However, I rather regretted not going along on a tour of anechoic and reverberation chambers, which some of the others had managed… At around 16:00, we reconvened for a series of short presentations by anyone who felt like they had something to show and share. The time allocated for pesentations was an opportunity to do something different, to show a rough-cut of something, to be explicitly experimental, to present unfinished or on-going work. The projects were not as much of a focus of the week as I had imagined prior to arriving at the workshop, and instead served as a soft-focus for the practical sessions. The work presented was really great, especially considering how little time we had had during the week but raised the question (again) of how to respond to work which is creative. This is certainly a struggle for social scientists. Victoria suggested that we might respond by saying all that we had thought of while engaging with a particular piece, rather than critique it. This would not preclude questions but they would be of a different kind (e.g. how would you like to present this piece? how did you score it? how much direction was there with the project?).

The evening featured experimental music performances by Michael’s band, Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo,

making music that explores detail and difference through repetition and layering

and Matt Rogalsky, whose pieces focused on exploration of abject, invisible/inaudible, or ignored streams of information, over at Inspace and part of the Dialogues  Festival. It was quite a strange experience and I found myself unsure of how to respond, or what to think of the evening. I like to think that I am generous, and I certainly did not leave (as a fair few in the audience did); but nor did I find myself really moved (some were whooping at the end of the night). Perhaps I just had my mind on the election. Excuses, excuses!

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Utopia: 13,960 (?), Edinburgh

Day 3. A change to the tiemtable due to ash clouds and so onwards, always onwards, to another aritst: Louise K Wilson. Louise gave a presentation, ‘Listening to spaces, looking at spaces: site-specific audio and video’, where she showcased some of her recent projects. Being an artist opens doors, she argued, and she explained how she had gained access to scientific laboratories, and been fascinated by the theatre of the laboratory. Part of her work was interested in re-staging the laboratory in the gallery and how that might (not) be possible. Louise’s ‘inadvertent collaborations’ (her description, not mine!) resonated with her determination to unnerve herself. This made me think, once again of Isabelle Stenger’s writing on ‘risky research’ and her hope that you allow your work to quite literally work against your ideas, questions and theories. Louise was very open about the sorts of materials she generates – much serves as an aide memoire – and she has experimented with privileging different media. For example, for one short film, she developed the soundtrack prior to shooting the video. More recently, Louise has been attempting to record what cannot be heard. Here, I immediately thought of Chris Salter’s work on Just Noticeable Difference (JND)¹. Throughout the presentation there was an overwhelming emphasis on process, and much less on the end-piece. She mentioned that she had started doing some writing to allow her work to be something else (to transform perhaps?) but when I looked online, I found a much earlier piece, written for Angelaki called ‘Stories from the research labs’²!

The rest of the day did not have quite the same structure (or feel) to it as the rest of the week; in fact, it was a little disjointed. The next session was, and there was a choice, either video analysis or build-your-own contact microphones. I chose the former, led by the geographer Eric Laurier. I have to admit I was a little sceptical of the session, perhaps partly due to my distrust of the word ‘analysis’, but found it very stimulating and interesting. Eric told us how he regularly runs ‘data sessions’ where a group of people get together to watch a video over and over (and over) to see what happens in it. He was keen to stress that the aim is to get at what is going on, at what people are doing, and was anti-CSI in the sense that you are not looking for something hidden. So, it is ‘just’ what happens, with no hidden agenda. At the sessions, the person who brings the video will also have produced a transcript, which serves as a document to think with, as well as to annotate. The transcript we were handed seemed rather different to any others  I had seen before and included far more information and a greater sense of the temporality of the actions. We were shown a video (not quite 3 minutes long)  of two men chatting in a car several times and asked to pay particular attention to sequences and categories, to bring out what we were noticing, in the hope that collectively we might give life to the script.We took it in turns to make a few comments and/or observations; I found it remarkable that although many of the gestures and actions were notated, there was no much of the many instances of leg-rubbing and was curious as to where/when the transcription is finished. Eric explained that the technique had been developed about 40 years ago and served both as an apparatus for making more visible and as a reminder of what happens, what they are doing, and how they do what it is they are doing. The protocol was fairly complicated: ((non-verbal)), +[overlap], °more quietly°, emphatically, >faster<, <more slowly>, were just a few.

In the afternoon there was free time and so I nipped over to the Fruitmarket Gallery, and ended up bumping into another participant from the workshop! So that was nice and relaxed. Later on, we reconvened at the annexe at the Geography Institute for a talk by Nigel Thrift, provisionally titled ‘Experimental methodologies’. I met Nigel and he apologised, explaining that he would be re-presenting a paper that he gave at CRASSH a few months earlier on. ‘LIFEWORLD INC. – And what to do about it’ was just as good the second time, although slightly altered, perhaps for the different audience. The paper was concerned with new forms of power and of interrogating power, traced a shift from epistemology to ontology, and explored movement-space (becoming in to existence, Erin Manning’s resonant-grid) rather than simple displacement (actual; movement already taken). The talk was broadly divided into two main parts, ‘Empirical economy’ and ‘Empirical turn’; the first dealing with socio-technical happenings and the second pointing to areas which might be re-worked. It was perhaps the second part which interested me the most, as Nigel discussed ways of re-figuring parts of  social science methodology: re-working what is meant by the case study, faster modes of proceeding which keep up with some of the things going on (cross between social science and journalism), social science fiction (conjuring up of dramatised analyses of social structures and situations, e.g. The Wire). He asked us to think of social science much less as a way of gathering data all the time, but much more of ways of using data that are associative, and pointed towards ways of re-working spaces, moment-by-moment. The first two points were brief (1. Re-working of phenomenology; 2. Biopolitics of space – the use of biological metaphors as ways of proceeding) but the last, 3. Writing, was more substantial. Nigel contended that writing is starting to change its form and hoped that social science might induce and produce new forms of notation, which would mix different registers of experience together. Although I think this is an important point, I was left wondering how we might do this, and was unsure if Nigel’s comment about the chase for a 27th letter was said tongue-in-cheek or meant rather literally. In this case, is more better? He gave the example of maps as a means of re-working the familiar, of “not just re-naming but re-worlding”. Writing the world differently.

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Recording, installing and performing sound in space with Matt Rogalsky

The following day began with a presentation by Matt Rogalsky, ‘Recording, installing and performing sound in space’, and was followed bu a practice session. Matt opened with an 11-minute video piece which was beautiful: slow change over time, stasis with movement within it. A real-time video which resembled a still-image, except for the chance movement of leaves and the sound of ice melting. Drawing inspiration form the experimental musicians Alvin Lucier and John Cage, Matt outlined his interest in process-pieces and embraced chance and the accidental. Learning by doing, he showed us some of his work which were rehearsals of previous experimental pieces (repetition and difference?). It was more than simply showing on a screen though; Matt wanted us to experiment ourselves. Asking us to blow up a balloon (I’m normally terrible at this) and then hold it carefully, we would walk around the room we were in as stereo speakers would play a sine wave. Where the waves meet there are patterns of interference and lines of silence. I was so caught up in exploring the vibrations and waves that I failed to take what must have been a very funny photo of a room-full of people moving around with balloons in their hands (and plugs in their ears). The following session involved Matt firing a gun to produce impulse responses of the the different spaces we were in (the earplugs came in useful again). An impulse response is a short recording of the echo of a particular impulse (in this case the gun being fired) and can be used in conjunction with audio software to recreate particular sound-spaces. For example, film crews may take impulse responses of the different locations in case they need to add lines later and make them sound as if they were spoken in the same place.

After lunch Victoria Claire Bernie presented her work (‘Fieldworking films and fictions’) and discussed her on-going set of questions which drives her art. The various sub-headings of her talk were strikingly geographical: ‘On landscape and representation’, ‘On mapping and truth’, ‘On mapping and fiction’ and ‘On seeing differently’. Victoria mainly talked about her most recent project ‘Slow Water’:

a project to map the present condition of water in Scotland through the device of a site-specific visual arts residency at SAMS, the Scottish Association for Marine Science’s research laboratory at Dunstaffnage, near Oban on the west coast of Scotland. Designed to operate between the disciplines of visual art and research science, the residency is an address to the representation of knowledge of place in art and in science. It is an attempt to learn from the intellectual, material, physical and conceptual logics of the other; to deploy the resources of digital video sound and image installation, photography, drawing, interview, ‘found’ sound and image collection, collation and representation in the realisation of an inhabitable map.

Whilst in Scotland, she was involved in both lab-working and field-working with marine scientists and her work was both graphic and photographic. The accompanying ‘practical’ session was a challenge for the participants to take seriously Victoria’s technique of storyboarding, which she employed when creating videos. The storyboard for Victoria was a preparation for what she might see, a preparation for the field, a preparation of planned creativity or ‘designed opportunism’ as she put it. With a logic of recording as construction, she urged us to think the storyboard as an object for focusing and/or generating dialogue. We watched the opening 16 or so shots of Krystof Kieslowski’s (1993) Three Colours Blue, instead of reading a text on how to do this. We were then asked to walk the city for an hour or so, and let Edinburgh tell us a story or find one ourselves. We were allowed to take no more than 20 photos, which could be annotated, and each would give an idea of a particular shot (still photography as a way of thinking/creating moving images). Since then, I’ve been keen to experiment with storyboarding and thinking about shooting moving tableaux, rather than photos…

In the evening, a short film programme, ‘Fieldwork’, was arranged and curated by Matt Lloyd. The films all engaged with space and place in some way, and were fascinating (see the list below). In particular, John Smith’s film Blight was incredible and Takshi Ito’s Spacy was something else! Blight

revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. The images in the film record some of the changes which occurred in the area over a two-year period, from the demolition of houses through to the start of motorway building work. The soundtrack incorporates natural sounds associated with these events together with speech fragments taken from recorded conversations with local people¹

and Spacy is:

an odd experiment: … simply 700 photographs of the inside of an empty school gymnasium, shot in various different orders, frame-by-frame².

Pollphail | Matt Lloyd | UK| 2009 | 10min

Cobra Mist | Emily Richardson | UK | 2008 | 7min

Seven Primary School Spaces | Ben Ewart-Dean/Michael Gallagher | UK | 2008 | 12min

Replay | Matt Hulse | UK | 2005 | 9min

Blight | John Smith | UK | 1994-96 | 14min

Spacy |  Takashi Ito | Japan | 1981 | 10min

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Experimenting with Geography: See-hear-make-do, University of Edinburgh

I am just back from a trip to Edinburgh for a rather unusual conference/workshop called ‘Experimenting with Geography: See-hear-make-do’:

an event dedicated to developing a diverse range of craft skills associated with audio, visual and site-specific methodologies, at different city locations, both inside and out-of-doors. It will take place at the University of Edinburgh, 3rd-7th May 2010.¹

The application forms were due in January and since then there has been a steady build-up to the five-day event, with an online forum. This was a space for us to introduce ourselves (e.g. myself) and for us to begin thinking about projects that we might like to explore when we met up. I travelled up on Sunday evening by train and checked in to a small but nice guest house a few miles from the centre. The programme began Monday afternoon with an introduction by Michael Gallagher, who had organised the event. Although he was self-deprecating and claimed his talk was “just the boring stuff” there was something else going on.The conference/workshop, it was hoped, would provide a collective and expanded sense of what is possible along the boundaries of academic-artistic practice, and how to go about it. An attempt to create a new community of experimental researchers who might develop a diverse range of craft skills. The projects that had been mentioned were not obligatory, but would provide some focus throughout the conference. Towards the end of the week, if we felt like sharing some work with the group, we would arrange sessions for ‘crits’ (critical feedback, as found in art-schools, rather than the Q&A at academic conferences).  More workshop than conference, the event was to be informal, convivial, experimental, collaborative and impose no obligations. Each half-day would comprise an introductory talk (of some sort) and then a practice-session.

First up was a presentation by Hayden Lorimer, a geographer whose writing I admire². It was no surprise then, that he was to talk about narrative and style. His paper, work-in-progress we were told, was titled ‘Some thoughts on narrative and style. Or, can geography produce special effects?’  and was, in his own words, a provocation with no clear answer. The paper was composed of six parts (1. Narrative Styles and Genres / 2. Scaling Narrative / 3. Inhabiting Narrative / 4. Learning to Value Narrative / 5. Styles of Learning Narrative / 6. The Politics of Style) and was a call to change cursive practices, to extend the notion of narrative and to re-consider geographical writing as a form of art. Hayden’s concern for leading with stories goes against those who claim that a geopoetics favours style over substance, instead arguing that, whilst it is not without risk, it can convene the particularities of place.

Through the process of storying into shape a place, self and world blur; tone and atmosphere are conjured up. It also asks questions of how we respond to these writings: is critique and evaluation possible, and if so, what shape might these take? Stories do not invite questions in the same way and there are no journal guidelines outlining the merits or mechanics of a good story. What space for a presentation without closure, for a celebration of the inexplicit? I asked Hayden if we needed to create new journals, new outlets for these kinds of writing but he thought it would instead be better if people tried to submit to established journals, and to try to change practices and approaches this way. After all, it’s not a case of getting away with it, more a question of getting on with it. Perhaps I might need to re-submit the paper on fieldwork… The paper ended with a hope that more geographers might be willing to experiment and, foreshadowing Nigel Thrift’s paper later on in the week, noted the need for more languages, new expressions, and more poetic, emotional and personal styles of writing.

The second half of the afternoon was ‘Songs from before – creating the conditions for appreciative listening’ and was animated by two questions:

What might it mean to speak up imaginatively for the archive’s existence as a site as much as a set of sources? What might it mean to give greater voice to those social contexts orbiting out steadfast consultation of documentary content?

To give the workshop, and those methodological provocations, greater grip and focus, it pivoted around a single historical item/object/text: an illustrated sound-book, called ‘Songs of Wild Birds’. Listening, discussion, reading, interpreting, and later, our own recordings. A sound archive, bird-song as a mobile event (transformed, warped) and a querying of the relationship between ‘archive’ and ‘field’. Not bad for an afternoon.

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Experimentality: Experimental Subjects, Lancaster University

The week before last (14-15 January),  I made the trip up to Lancaster University for a conference on ‘Experimental Subjects’, part of the current Ex?erimenta!ity series.

Experimentality is a year-long collaborative exploration of ideas and practices of experimentation in science and technology, the arts, commerce, politics, popular culture, everyday life, and the natural world. Participants in a series of linked events will use the notion of the experiment to explore vital questions about the relationship between knowledge and power, freedom and control in the modern world.¹

I missed a few of the earlier conferences as I was out of the country but took the chance to attend whilst I am ‘between’ field-sites. I was pleasantly surprised by how many people were present at the event – somewhere between 30 and 40 – and the papers/presentations were interesting, if varied. Some of the highlights included an exploration of different sorts of experimentation (experimenta fructifera and experimenta lucifera) by Bronislaw Szersynski, who later went on to argue that experiments create the conditions for the emergence of an event. He drew on Giorgio Agamben’s work at times, which is something I have not really engaged in (yet)… In the same session, although not presenting, Adrian MacKenzie was keen to focus on experience: where is the experiment experienced? Are there sites of intensified experience? Unfortunately, these questions were elided.

On the Friday there was a fascinating talk by Lisa Blackman who was interested in practices of experimentation as forms of experimental stagecraft and was perhaps the only speaker at the conference who engaged with affect (as an aside, she mentioned a forthcoming special issue of ‘Body & Society’ which tries to grapple with affect). She made reference to Stengers’ concern with ‘risky’ research: allowing questions to be re-qualified as the research unfolds.²

Perhaps most fascinating, for me, was the talk by Neal White. I have been in contact with Neal by email for several months so it was really good to meet up and chat. I am exploring the possibilities of working with him as part of my series of fieldwork sites/interventions/moments. Interested in the work of Trevor Paglen (who may have coined the phrase ‘Experimental Geography’) and fresh from a recent collaboration with the UCL Geography Department on a project (‘Dark Places’), Neal is no stranger to geography. However, the main reason I got in touch was because Neal is the founder and coordinator of the ‘Office of Experiments’:

An intermittent institution dedicated to experiments, experimental knowledge and intuitive logic. THE OFFICE OF EXPERIMENTS aim is to respond to or create a context for the production and display of materials, practices and events in which the experimental element is paramount, if not rationalised, as art.³

Drawing on Rheinberger (1997), White argues that experimentation, as a machine for making the future, has to bring about unexpected events. He is interested in the relation between experimentation and events, whilst not reducing it to ‘spectacle’ (arguing that most people expect spectacle rather than participation). His concerns are not dissimilar to mine: to problematise the subject/object relationship; to question the roles of viewer and artist; and to re-examine the space(s) in which experiments can take place. We are hoping to continue our conversation in early February.

There was time at the end of the two-day conference for a round-table discussion which raised some important themes, and asked ‘Why experiment, and why now?’ Tellingly, the texts that were most often referred to were far from recent⁴.  Indeed, when looking for one of the books since returning from the conference, I stumbled across a review of it which noted that:

One of the most interesting and important trends in the history and philosophy of science has been the recent work on experiment. Most philosophy of science, and sometimes even history of science, either neglects experiments – how they are done and what role they play – or treats their results as unproblematical. Peter Galison’s How Experiments End is a major contribution to the growing body of work that is correcting that view.⁵

It makes me wonder what happened to that body of work, as it seems to be rarely referenced. Perhaps I have just been looking in the wrong direction! On a slightly different, another thing that struck me was that the students who were helping out were wearing lab-coats. I wondered why they were rehearsing a particularly scientific notion of experimentation. Perhaps it was mildly subversive that social-scientists were claiming the right to experiment but I thought it was a missed opportunity.

The next conference in the series will be ‘Experimental Objects’ on 18-19 February.

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Royal Geographical Society, London

Only just back from Cologne and about to head off for another conference. I haven’t really had chance to reflect much on the trip since returning, although I rather wish I had presented something (anything). As it turned out, at one session the speakers nearly didn’t show, for a session on Deleuze & Ethnography, and I was half-ready to give an impromptu talk with Joe…

On Tuesday I shall be travelling to Manchester for the  Royal Geographical Society’s (RGS-IBG) annual international conference; this year the theme is ‘Geography, Knowledge and Society’. The online programme looks great and I’m particularly excited that one whole day is devoted to ‘Art and Geographical Knowledge’.

Art and Geographical Knowledge explores the relationship between geography and art

A look at recent publications, conference programs and exhibition titles indicates the growing scope of the inter-relationship between art and geography. As the works in the exhibition and under discussion in the papers makes clear, this relationship between geography and artistic practice has a long history and takes a range of forms as boundaries between geographers, artists and curators blur. Bringing together critics, collaborators, creators and curators the aim is to explore the scope, methods and potential of art as a form of geographical knowledge.

It’ll be a good chance to meet geographers (and artists, or anybody else for that matter) who are working in a similar area to myself. Other potential highlights include a paper by Sarah Whatmore, Andrew Barry and Bruno Latour, as well as a session on ‘Urban Imaginaries’. I shan’t be speaking at this event either but I do hope to be this time next year!

[The photo was taken earlier on in the year, when I visited the RGS for the inaugural Doreen Massey lecture]