- Convenor:
-
Lambros Malafouris
(University of Oxford)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel, drawing on research and using examples from the 'HANDMADE - Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making' project (sponsored by the ERC), will be exploring the potential of a new methodology, i.e., Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging for the anthropology of craft and creativity.
Long Abstract:
It is often claimed, both by anthropologists and skilled practitioners, that making is a dialogue between maker and material. How can this dialogue be captured, followed and understood from an anthropological perspective? This panel, drawing on research and material from the 'HANDMADE - Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making' project (sponsored by ERC), will be exploring the potential of Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging for the anthropology of craft and creativity. Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging is an evolving methodological apparatus designed to facilitate the heightened sensitivity needed for the anthropological study of craft through the assemblage and juxtaposition of multitude view points on the process of making. This perspectival juxtaposition is made possible by a combination of multimodal visual captures (i.e., photography, video, drawing and mobile eye-tracking). Each of these multimodal visual captures affords a specific spatio-temporal perspective from which to identify and observe morphogenetic events of interest (e.g. creative gestures and modes of enactive signification) as well as follow their memory traces. Multimodal visual captures are set and employed in the context of multi-sited participatory observation. Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging should not be confused for a method targeting primarily the 'visual' aspects of making. Quite the contrary, it is a method designed for 'capturing' and 'visualising' multimodal aspects of creativity and skilled practices (including skilled vision) what often remain invisible or are hard to observe otherwise. The basic idea is that the juxtaposition of different media enables the discovery of connections that are often obscured when seen from a single perspectival point.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 9 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
I present a film showing the development of an art project from initial conception to final installation. The film visits "The Archaeology of Cognition" a multimodal exhibition which presents creative activity as a system and where we are taken for a walk through the workings of an extended mind
Paper long abstract:
As an artist and following Material Engagement Theory, I understand creative behaviour from a systemic perspective in which human activity and human environment coalesce into a single extended mind that exhibits its own agency. One way of exploring such a system is to monitor the evolution of an art project from initial, disconnected material explorations to the final installation of a work in an exhibition. Over the last two years I have done just that; recording the activity in my workshop, activity which ended in September 2022 with the installation in the Swiss Ceramics Museum of a work entitled, "Tekenu’s Intent". Alongside the museum installation, I presented a parallel exhibition "The Archaeology of Cognition" in which I laid out, quite literally, the workings of a mind struggling to come to grips with its own intentions. Conceived as a sketch in 3 ½ dimensions, the exhibition showed how a disparate band of gestures, materials and things gather at a particular point in time to make common cause. Together the band make its way towards another point in time, shifting shape, material and understanding before finally settling down (provisionally at least) as "Tekenu’s Intent".
Like Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging, the archaeology of cognition exhibition took a multimodal approach, presenting a collection of artefacts, artworks, images, digital software, videos, notebook extracts as a network of intercommunicating nodes. I present a film that walks the viewer through this extended, material mind as it thinks (things) its uncertain way towards a resolution.
Paper short abstract:
Thresholds of Touch, a performance experiment, is a collaboration between an artist, composer & social researcher. We discuss our use of video to explore artistic embodied strategies to engage with participants by layering visual responses & reenactments to create an analytical dialogue on touch
Paper long abstract:
This presentation presents excerpts from a video that reflects on the interactive performance experiment Thresholds of Touch that took place one month before the first UK Covid-19 lockdown. The experiment was developed through a two-year interdisciplinary collaboration between the authors – a digital artist, a sound composer, and social researcher, founded on a shared interest in touch and the challenges of researching it. The performance invited participants on an expansive journey through different aspects of touch rituals, self-touch, and touching others, the environment and objects, while critically exploring thresholds of touch and touch as care. We discuss the method of the video, and the performance itself, to interrogate touch through an empathetic dialogue with our and the participants’ experiential touching bodies filtered through our disciplinary lenses. The video explores artistic embodied strategies to engage with the participants including through the layering of participant visual and written responses, our re-enactments and live-tracing of participant responses, and our spoken and written reflections to create an analytical dialogue with the performance, and as a route to newly research and attune to touch.
Paper short abstract:
Inspired by the HANDMADE project, I contribute insight from using photography and film in Greenland to study how traditional kayak hunters align environmental awareness between generations. Perspectival imaging is used to explore the interdependence of body, environment, technology, and mind.
Paper long abstract:
For anthropologists, perspectival kinaesthetic imaging offers opportunity to access enactive and ecological dimensions of creativity. Inspired by the HANDMADE project, I contribute insight from using photography and film in Greenland to study how traditional kayak hunters align environmental awareness between generations. Hunters assert that there are forms of Inuit knowledge that can only be renewed through the physicality of the skill. To this end, they train for disorienting and dangerous scenarios such as a capsize, where plunged upside down into frigid water, they must respond to a range of adverse situations. Rolling is a requisite skill for becoming a hunter, and therefore part of how animal behaviour and environmental change are apprehended. But what is the character of knowledge in this ability to act creatively when capsized? Using examples form fieldwork, I will explore moments of learning captured from the shore, from support boats, and from waterproof cameras strapped to the kayak’s deck. Perspectival kinaesthetic imaging is demonstrated here is a powerful tool to examine the developmental interdependence of the body, environment, technology, and mind.
Paper short abstract:
Crucial aspects of skilled performances are often obscured by visual modes of observation. Drawing on field recordings with Algonquin First Nations in Canada this presentation explores the multiple meanings of sound that emerge while tracking the kinaesthetic skills of Indigenous canoe builders.
Paper long abstract:
Working through a combination of diverse media in multimodal ethnography opens new possibilities for learning to recognize important differences in ways of sensing across cultures. In the study of craft and the handmade, sound offers an exciting glimpse into the extra-linguistic dialogue between the maker and their materials.
In this panel presentation I draw on field recordings with Algonquin First Nations in Canada to explore the multiple meanings of sound that emerge while tracking the kinaesthetic skills of Indigenous canoe builders. Unless entering the realm of dreams or imagination, what meets the eye stops at the surface, whereas the resonant properties of sound have the capacity to draw the mind deep within the materials into areas that are invisible. My research uncovers how the Algonquin have developed their auditory attention to use the acoustics generated by their ecological activity as a refined tactile guidance system. These sensory attunements give rise to a way of being in the world that encourages multiple forms of listening where the natural sounds of trees are fully canvased for ‘speaking’ about the teachings of ancestral knowledge.
As ethnographers it is important to question our own sensory constitution so as not to succumb to the limitations of occularcentrism. Since the senses are culturally and historically constructed as much as they are biologically and physiologically determined, working through a combination of diverse media uncovers crucial aspects of skilled performances that defy declarative language and are obscured by visual modes of observation.