Research Catalogue

In progress Dorsal Practices — Murky Back Thinking is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. How does cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? The dorsal orientation foregrounds active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

"New ideas might be conceived and developed more rapidly in disciplines that are more abstract. The inductive methods of experimental innovators in painting makes their enterprise resemble the more empirical disciplines considered by psychologists, while the deductive approach of the conceptual innovators makes theirs resemble the more abstract disciplines." David W. Galenson, "The Life Cycles of Modern Artists", NBER Working Paper Series, 2003. My use of the diagram and the image aims to convey the simple message that art strives for evolution; meaning to strengthen the mind, to research capabilities, to communicate a disinterested, though not necessarily apolitical, view of social changes, to overcome banality and offer an alternative way of looking at the world.

Looking for layers, finding fragments.

In January of 2022, I traveled with my family to Catarata Gocta, a two-tiered waterfall in the high rainforest, just outside of Cocachimba in Peru’s northeast. I seized this opportunity to conduct an artistic research experiment combining field recording, mystical participation, dream work, philosophy, and psychology. I incite and analyze dreams, peel back the perverse layers of my capitalist induced fantasies, exhaust liquid metaphors, engage in forms of mystical participation, discuss whether it’s even possible to record a place at all and draw connections and conclusions whose coherence is, well, maybe not so coherent. This essay touches on Sonic Journalism, the psychologies of Jung, the art criticism of Sontag and Berger and the art of Cage, Duchamp, and Hunter S. Thompson. The field recordings and images presented here are shreds of evidence supporting my own twisted brand of Gonzo Journalism. It is a tight rope walk across microphone cables and book spines, fueled by coffee, internet databases, and obsessive listening. The gravitational current pulling the waters of Catarata Gocta earthward is the dense center around which this essay orbits. Stretching across its horizon, I feel myself emptied, my thoughts laid bare and made available for self-examination.

This article provides insight into the choreographic situation LUFTIG, where the idea of air as conveyor of tactile experience is passed on, reworked and performed by children and adults. It examines how shifting the focus from movement language to a distinct expressive idea affects the choreographic process, and looks at how involving young people as choreographers and choreographic material affects the aesthetic experience of the now for artists and audience. Drawing on Tygstrup's idea of transformative time (2018), Gumbrecht's concept of the broad present (2018) and Taussig's thoughts on the adult's imagination of the child's imagination (2003), the author argues that in performance work where children are both choreographers and choreographic material, the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination and the actual actions of the physically present child are at the same time mutually dependent on and at odds with each other, leaving the adult teetering on the edge of contemporary reality and primordial retreat. In the work proces, the child has a special propensity for easing the work for all which can only be deployed if we are able to circumvent tendencies of mutual projection of imagined imaginations. This requires a singular work process, where we - children and adults alike - can inhabit questions together without relying wholly on our previous knowledge of and experience with known performance parameters.

Our main interest is based on understanding spatial relationships from first-person experience, from our virtual and real body. Through the act of walking, movement in real time, we become cursors that dash across the interface of reality. A continuous process that brings us closer to the production of meanings, new relationships and representations, and also a dialogue with space and time, and the network. This article seeks to present a series of disruptive experiences, documented by the authors themselves, which constitute an exploratory framework of space to discover different symbolic interrelationships, and sketch out constructions of the common space in haptic, political, social and cultural mode. It offers a repository of unexpected, intersubjective encounters, from the empirical practice of walking, which arouses new perspectives to be able to interpret circumstantial spaces, to lose oneself in ‘non-places’, or reflect as to how to approach the landscape and/or the city by opening new imaginaries that add value to the ‘glocal’ place that we traverse and/or inhabit.