‘Breathe Wind into Me, Chapter 1’: A Mixed-media Presentation to Explore How Art Itself Activates and Constitutes New Forms of Knowledge

Abstract

In The Minor Gesture (2016), Erin Manning raises the question: how does art in and of itself activate and constitute new forms of knowledge, and can such knowledge be engagingly captured within the strictures of methodological ordering (Manning, 2016: 26)? For this article, I argue that something that was not known that becomes known through art creation and is disseminated as such is as quantifiable as any other form of knowledge under the heading ‘academic research’. New forms of knowledge require different forms of evaluation and a rethinking of what arts-practice as research can do.

Taking my own recent video, ‘Breathe Wind into Me, Chapter 1’, as a starting point, this article addresses how practice allows for a re-envisioning of the traditional role of the researcher. Using an amalgamation of text, moving imagery and sound, from current and past research, I will be discussing new knowledge, embodied and otherwise, that could only have ‘surfaced’ through making. I will discuss ‘the haptic’ as an important component of research and inquiry, where the transmission of ‘affect’ creates a particular form of embodied knowledge through being touched by the work. In addition, I will connect Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s idea of haptic technologies as matters of care, and a means of ‘unpacking and co-shaping a notion of care in more than human worlds’ (2017: 95). Through methodological abundance (Hannulah, 2011), including auto-ethnography, I use my past, my memories and my experiences as a making and unmaking of the world. Auto-ethnography, in this instance, is a reformulation of ethnography or anthropology, an in-depth examination of context incorporating cross-disciplinary approaches where the research is one of enquiry and discovery, thinking through making, staying open to the emergent properties of the intra-psychic as well as the intersubjective.