Taking Arts Informed Research to a Conference

What is the abstract and how does it lead you into a conference ?

Arts informed research is about embodiment How do you refer to your research in a worded abstract? What is most important to share or continue in your research if there is participation? What aspects are relevant to a common exchange? How do you keep the research growing as part of a conference?

I am presenting a transdisciplinary arts based research project that moves of the rhythms of the body/mind that is chosen to be the knowledge of the individual exampled as of the researcher/academic. My method, and methodology as theory, combine as I unravel worldviews. I use visual art, photography, and embodied practices in a creative process of art projects that redraw a living locale through the senses. I abandon the fixed problem and environments, the subject and object, the reifying acts of time and space in a city, for a researcher creator as person; nature as restorative engagements; and technology as common design. The project tests aesthetics, cultural theory, feminist, transformative, poststructuralist, and environmental and health practices. My findings are the next steps of the process. I will engage the co-creative through presentation of art and discussion that experiments with communication and art as part of this creative ongoing.

An abstract and presentation as accessible and a part of the project How do you make an abstract and presentation using art accessible to your audience as transdisciplinary and open to new ways of using art in academia?

Where are we? A model of an installation was created to ponder how we interact with a world; where we “know” or solidify a relationship of a body to a world. The installation plays with how we might determine in actuality, the balance between active bodily functions and the abstracts that link and sustain them beyond what we have called the natural elements of environments. I use an animated model of an art installation in which the participant plays with the abilities of the reactive room to respond. The responses are sound and graphic incited via tactile actions tracked by infrared sensors, kinetic acts tracked through reactive cameras, and the sound of breath and voice moved through microphones. The room interacts at the point where one might solidify ones’ realities into the formation of shared knowledge. More interestingly the installation begs the question of where do we “require” change through embodied abstractions, orientations, as we play with these as dynamics in relation to the body as a construct. The technology responds within its design as unique to each individual taking out complicated cultural structures yet revealing a very fixed design base. Distinguishing what is whole and part as designated by a technology, as of an action of referencing and representation, comes into question. The installation examples a need for plotting when paradigms of reaction with our technologies seem to facilitate change more readily and more incisively as tools of abstraction. It offers reflection on the fixing of stabilizing actions by whom, for whom and for what purpose as a function of human design. It offers reflection on alternative uses of technology in a worldview where we are now lost without it but continually do not want to be driven by it.

The Presentation Set up and Engagement What do you need to engage your research in presentation as an art show, performance or discussion? A gallery setting A performance stage A room for discussion and projector and laptop?

Playing in and of the Light – the Engendered Body Seeks Release. One of the main theorists of engendered acts Judith Butler, suggests that the theatre can act as a site to review how gender is an “illusion”, a set of “stylized repetitive acts”. ( Butler,1994, p. 270). I consider through two projects how to use an arts based practice to move with life to reveal these constituting acts existing even on stage and to find the dynamics of the individual facilitated in ways other than held bodies. This presentation reaches beyond just gender to look at the focus of a fixed body to dissolve representation into dynamics. Academia’s body of knowledge is seen in relation to the body as a concept held and played on. The release of the individual is attempted through performance and film that rest with the sensual as reactions to light as seen and as tactile. The first example is a short performance piece to reveal through movement and light how academic discourses placed on a body, (represented by the researcher), as race, or face, any idea, can be released into dynamic active senses via motion used in an environmentally opening relation to the audience. The piece is entitled “Playing in the light, Playing of the light” and plays with the action of light as an idea that either shapes a body or is of the dynamics of an individual moving. Alternatively, in a film entitled “Powerlines”, created by Helen Hall, electricity replaces light as a holding construct shown as causing electrical illness. A dancer moves in the flat camera eye and graphics and a sound score illustrates how the performer is and represents a shaped set of dynamics caught in invisible networks. Examples will be provided of a practice of art that reveals how to move this research beyond a fixed body of knowledge. Butler, J. (1994). Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. In S. Case (Ed). Performing feminisms. (pp. 270-281). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

How does your research grow at a conference? A chance to re-look your research in presentation and transdisciplinary discussion and build into your current or new fields. A chance to meet people within and beyond your field and mode of research and advance like interests. A chance to continue your practice A chance to find out about new opportunities: for funding; for teaching; working; presenting; doing research; publishing your research in the conference proceedings or in a journal or book that you hear about.