Paper Short Abstract:

Like micro phenomenological interviews, live drawing can provide a common ground to turn flaky insights into more durable riddles, conjuring elusive moments into colourful keepers.

Paper Abstract:

Sponsored by a Danish foundation, the Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting project (EER) started from a transdisciplinary involvement with micro phenomenology. This interview method provides a common vocabulary and method to evaluate and dive into perceptive events. (Petitmengin 2016) Taking it as a common ground, a group of artistic research practitioners are merging their experimentations with those of neuroscience colleagues, and vice versa.

As I was invited to document one of their workshops with ethnographic sketches, my practice took place into a tapestry of many approaches geared toward the same poetic yet carefully qualified kind of shared exploration. The activities of two days sparkled with many daunting moments of perceptive insight. We stretched textiles to feel their ghostly figures, contemplated heaps of soil and lichens, played around with generative AI, engaged in neuro choreographies, and even played music. What is it that we really were gathered to do?

Like micro phenomenological interviews, live drawing can provide a common ground to turn flaky insights into more durable riddles, conjuring elusive moments into colourful keepers. Isabelle Stengers suggests that building upon an ecology of practices would foster respect and attention between modern science and other ways of knowing. (2023) More than a definite target for the project, the EER members claim to “hold a space” for their ideas to meet and transform. (Eliasson & Roepstorff 2022) What do these spaces look like, that can accommodate such precious inconstancies? How can we take care of them “on their own terms”?