Mick: Five invitations to ‘help invent the conditions for invention’:4
1.
What about we embark upon an experimental creative-practice research journey together, moving through deserts, through the Performance Studies international (PSi) conference at Stanford University, CA, and back to the desert, in a big four-thousand-mile circle?
2.
I invite you to contribute to our collective Shuttle by bringing ten copies or versions of an offering to ourselves, the Shuttle crew. Your offering might be thought of as an initial gift to one another and a gift to get our project landing and on the road. Whether material tools, props, resources, curiosities, materials, nutrients, or immaterial stimuli, these ‘things’ can be explored, used, played with, or performed along the course of our journey. By having multiples of ‘things’, we will get to explore how we make ourselves both a group joined together by Shuttle and individuals with differences.
3.
In addition to the ten ‘crew’ travelling for twenty days through south-west American deserts, forms of remote participation are invited to explore the ambiguities and conjunctions that resonate with desert experience, such as near–far, presentness–remoteness, intimacy–immensity, real–imaginary, and duration–ephemerality.
4.
We need your help to give Shuttle grounds from which to explore! The crew warmly invite Tucsonans to bring local knowledge, forms of guidance, and items of pragmatic or symbolic value that Shuttle may take forth. Contributions become part of the mobile Shuttle performance kit and cargo. Remote crew will contribute creative works. You might tell us a story, give us a recipe, or draw a mud map of where we should go. We hope to accept good-luck trinkets, bumper stickers, culinary items, scholarly materials, unique local soundtracks, creative surprises, and gestures of homecoming or farewelling and running alongside as we take off into the sunset.
5.
Would you like to join me in a daily practice during our mobile laboratory? I propose that for a fixed duration, let's say for seven minutes and thirty-six seconds every day, with a nod to John Cage, that we pause at different locations en route and have the Shuttle van circling at full-steering lock in a clockwise direction, while I invite you to join me in circling on foot in an anticlockwise direction.
With a shared interest in performing the emergence of an interdisciplinary co-creative practice, we bring forth here a journey through elliptical passages of play, movement, and patterning of relations – tracing lines of desire that performatively enact what we have come to value in process. Embarking upon open-ended creative research induces a giddiness arising with the uncertainty of ground falling away: of not knowing before the emergence of live practice.
People are most happy when they are moving towards something not quite yet attained. (I also wonder if this extends as well to the sensation of physical motion in space. I believe I am happier when I am in a plane or car because I am moving towards an unidentifiable [sic] and unattainable [sic] goal). – Andrea Zittel3
We orbit around our individual mobility and the mobilities collected in our gathering, shuttling the dynamics of uncertainty that encircle us. Ten individuals shuttle through relational configurations with one another in iterative ways, transitioning through practice and the spaces in-between, exploring how horizons of practice might converge. Shuttling emerges: as the name for a divided mobile focus that enables us to investigate the in-transit emergence of co-existing operations of practice. Shuttling through the affects and subjective sensations of dislocating movements and creative potential. Shuttling as a movement-enmeshed modality in among our interdependent dynamic and ecologies of things with human and other-than-human forces. Shuttling as an unsettled and unsettling poetic device in the making, one that gathers our co-creating intensity as it orients our orbits to return upon themselves.
In June 2013 the Shuttle crew descended on Tucson in the Arizona desert, some of us from international air space – ‘permitted aliens’ and a few nationals, with four remote crew interacting from a distance. To be conditioned suggests a sense of conditioning, of preparedness, or making ready. This brings with it the contradictions and vicissitudes of context – the ‘co-creating’ and the ‘situational’ of everyday encounters with space, place, and people. Nevertheless, to begin, or to develop, or to push these encounters through and with our practices, we are, somehow, always ready.
The crew is assembled of people from diverse disciplines, generations, and cultural backgrounds who have a preparedness for generous co-creating and refusing predefined roles. A social dynamic evolves through the pursuit of individual and collective desires and the uncertainty of relations and positionings.
Self-authorising initiative is demonstrated when and how it emerges, affecting others, shaping a ludic, improvised rapport and complicity. An operative language orients and patterns the cycles of co-making and remaking social dynamics.
We are doing what we are doing …
this is being played here now
yes, and …
this ___ is meeting that ___.
The processual forming and reforming creates a constellation of patterns as we humans are subject to the conditioning of one another, of the social body, and of unhuman and elemental forces. An invitation for gifts, prompts, and inscriptions of advice on our vehicle of passage gathers local knowledge and expertise to situate us in our journey:
Don’t put your hand where you can’t see (… scorpion!).
Drink as much water as your mother would like you to.
Find Lake Lahontan + Swim.
Read up on Chaco Canyon alignments.
Hang a chain of Mexican milagros from the rear-view mirror.
Read Wallace Stevens’ The Man with the Blue Guitar.
Assembled forms of cargo adapt to our other ‘baggage’. We make passage and we take passage through practical and playful creative practices.
The creative-practice research journey is articulated in the patterning of movement through conditioning, co-creating, and situating. Patterns of motion emerge in the shuttling across registers of knowing and unknowing, shuttling with ideas and embodied understanding, shuttling among the human and unhuman, and shuttling through acts of creative production and reception.
There are cultural and material points of difference in any social and spatial encounter. This is also a line of connection for all on the Shuttle journey, not least because the individuals are collected here and now. All have to adapt: to one another and the limits of our tolerance; to fluid environs and emplacement; to appreciating the difference between agonism and antagonism; to modes of conditioning in encounters across creative, cultural, and social differences. We sketch out our mobile, reflexive modes of performative creative-practice research among other-than-human and elemental forces. These set in constant negotiation and interplay the making and remaking of how a ‘project’ is constituted and undertaken and emanates forth. The journey unfolds along a looping line, shuttling emerging practices among diverse environments that unsettle. A temporary intentional community in a Chevy van shuttles among natural, military-industrial, and political environments, among land art and traditional indigenous cultural landscapes, and among imperatives of fleeting time and impermanent circumstances presently to practice. Ever-dynamic subgroupings and individuals constantly shuttle within this community.
On returning to Tucson after three weeks on the move, the journey was not complete. Shuttle journeys on and through incompleteness.
Artist residencies, self-organised research travel, artistic practices incorporating curatorial practices, and artist-led spaces and projects can be forms and contexts of creative research activity that enable practitioners to shift habitual creative work conditions and re-engage in practice anew. Sharing our interest in the performative making of co-creative practice, we shape a mobile, self-organising, peer-to-peer-based process of creative practice research. Conditioned by our different creative practice backgrounds (Mick, an artist working in socially engaged public performance practice; Beth, an architect exploring performance in and of space; and James, a cultural anthropologist as a research-artist in creative social practice), we are joined by others: performance makers and designers, a performance artist and choreographer, a landscape architect and educator, a sociologist filmmaker. Assembled together, we cultivate desires for generative processes that reveal differently textured qualities of practising iterative creative movement, that de-centre and make strange for self and others, that seek adaptation through dislocation, that inhabit the ethic and ability of being able to respond.
Wilfully constructing a temporary collective – on the move, between known and unknown sites and situations that will move us yet further – we involve remote crew members to inflect and riff upon our emerging mobile practices and anticipate the disruption of other, unknown partners for whom we’ve reserved an ‘open’ seat in our shuttling van. Anticipating non-linear, non-hierarchical interventions, a relational space is opened up, engaging the imaginary of Soja’s ‘third space’ or Rancière’s ‘third term’ through our creative actions, as we interpellate amorphous configurations of collectivity through the third artist:
We can identify many modes of collaborative practice, many ways of being together […] the concept of the ‘third artist’, marks a form of creative praxis that emerges at the intersection of these complex, overlapping relations. – Grant Kester2
Beth: To make conditions for making, unmaking, and remaking. To set conditions to unsettle.
I map timelines conditioning containment and dispersal, speed and stillness. I map lines linking landscapes, land-art sites, ancient sites, and borderlands.
Territory is always the coming together of spatiotemporal coordinates (and thus the possibilities of measurement, precise location, concreteness, actuality) and qualities (which are immeasurable, indeterminate, virtual, and open-ended), that is, it is the coupling of a milieu and a rhythm. A refrain is the movement by which the qualities of a specific territory or habitat resonate and return to form it as a delimited space, a space contained or bounded but nonetheless always open to the chaos from which it draws its force. – Elizabeth Grosz5
Where the line is drawn is not accidental. Through the line, I consciously draw parallels to intentional, experimental, utopian communities – Taliesin, Drop City, Arcosanti, and many others – that were drawn to desert environments to test their ideas.
I am drawn to how works of land art perform not as objects of art but as conditions, vehicles, for perception of the place in which they are inscribed, embedded, excavated, anchored.
Conditioning my preparation for journeying is Robert Rauschenberg’s development of a new setting each day for Merce Cunningham’s Story from what he found on site, at hand.
I question what tools and practices to bring into this mobile condition, to make space, as a vehicle to experience the desert’s vastness, or to construct a counterpoint to it; to respond to the collective, with the collective; to be made each day from the same elements, but differently, according to the setting, climate, and cultural context. I transport with us a spatial tool kit for exploring possibilities. I wonder what its limits are beyond known potentials, the unforeseen possibilities instigated by new conditions, and play.
I wonder how we as a collective and the space we make each day will shuttle between attaching ourselves to the magnetic pole of our home base (the vehicle) and venturing away in larger orbits to explore other relations and conditions.
James: My kin Muriel has lived in Tucson for many years now. Coincidentally, when I arrived in Tucson she was not there; she had travelled to our shared childhood home on the Isle of Skye. Here (there) in Tucson, she is part of the Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) Phonology and Phonetics Group at the University of Arizona.6 In the old school photograph below, from Glendale on the Isle of Skye in the 1950s, Muriel should also have been included, in the front row with my mother (who is there, in the middle). It would have been Muriel’s first school photo but she was displaced from her Gàidhlig home for that year, to struggle with alienation in the big city, from which she would soon return, as she only spoke Gàidhlig. This is her (our) language, which she works with in Tucson.
Fásach, the name of the hamlet in Glendale I grew up in, is also the Gàidhlig word for ‘desert’ or ‘wilderness’. This references the conditioning of, or the limits on, cultivation in the area. Nevertheless, it was my cultural seedbed. I floated with the butterflies over the long grass and crofts of our glen, in and out of open doors and kitchens, on my mother’s coat-tail, listening, observing, imagining and performing. We call it cèilidh – visiting, coming together – sharing culture and practice. I learnt stories and genealogies of land and place and songs, dance, and poetry of commemoration. An indigenous child, an indignant child: a way of becoming. The culture of cèilidh is in common with and not a commodity of culture. Unarticulated, this is what I carried to Shuttle, this is what I recognised in Shuttle: a communal call to the ‘desert/wilderness’, a call to land and life, and adaptations of the material and social.
My practice is social, or the social is my practice – a double ontology of practice, and oneness with material being. The social does not always have words or explicit symbolic value, it can be a subtle, vibrant, mobile, fluid, congealing, disruptive matter of encounter; it is a doing through being (here and there).