Sounding the futures imaginary: A collaborative intra-modal storying methodology

Rachel Horst

The pandemic is not one coherent narrative but an unbounded multiplicity of narrative ravellings. One theme that can be traced through the course of the past two years is the undoings and redoings of normalcy, including normalcy in qualitative research. Our digital literacy research group took up the pandemic as a canvas upon which to story new futurities and possibilities for qualitative research in physical separation within the context of slow-moving upheaval. At the outset of the first physical lockdown in March of 2020, we began a collaborative and multimodal futures fictioning practice, storying new communicative possibilities and potentialities. Over the course of fourteen months, we reached into each other’s imagination, isolation, temporality, and physical environment via story and sound. This exposition charts our diffractive fictioning methodology, in which we collectively map communicative practices and collaborative meaning in virtual spaces in a time when coherence and consensus have become radically fractured. A cyborg skunk moves through this assemblage of poetry, sonification, narrative, performance, theory, and silence, flicking its many imagined tales and nudging its noses at the wreckage of the normal in search of difference.

Conclusions

Covid-19 provided a productive strangeness and temporality from which to imagine ourselves into the future. The protracted and profoundly alienating experience of this moment has been described by many as having a science fictional quality. Infusing the texts of the story is this non-fictional fictionality and the real uncertainty of what will happen in the days ahead, let alone the years and decades. Skunk Tales is therefore a pandemic tale, sounding a future that is quickly receding into the past, while simultaneously signifying new possibilities for dynamic arts-based conversations between subjectivities, technologies, sounds, and meanings. Our diffracted writing was a performance of theory, fear, yearning, and creation in crisis and has implications for 21^st century writing pedagogy and research, arts-based research, futures studies, and digital literacy research. We agree with Skains who makes an argument for engaging students with all of the “sign systems available” in digital contexts. She continues, the “future of writing is multiplicative: multimodal, collaborative, participatory, and distributed” 23. Our bricolage of methodologies gestures towards this multiplicative future of writing, a future that may be up to the task of producing what Stengers suggests are “other kinds of narratives, narratives that populate our worlds and imaginations in a different way” 24; Skunk Tales is our contribution of one such difference.

References

Alexander, Dagmar and Jonathan Wyatt, 'Infusion: Kitchen research practices, collaborative writing, and re-conceptualising the interview,' Qualitative Inquiry, 24, no. 2, 101.

Andrews, Jim, 'Material Combinatorium Supremum,' Vispo, <http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts/combinatorium.html> [acessed 6 May 2021]

Barad, Karen, 'Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable,' New Formations, 92 (2018), 56-86.

Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durha: Duke University Press, 2007)<https:/doi.org/10.1215/9780822388128>

Bergson, Henry, Creative evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell (New York: Camelot Press, 1911) <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26163/26163-h/26163-h.htm> [accessed 6 May, 2021]

Cecchetto, David, Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)

Emerson, Lori, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) <https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt6wr7dw>

Gale, Ken and Jonathan Wyatt, 'Working at the Wonder: Collaborative Writing as Method of Inquiry,' Qualitative Inquiry, 23, no. 5 (2017), 355-364. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800416659086>

Galloway, Alexander R., ‘The Unworkable Interface,' New Literary History, 39, no. 4 (2009), 931-955. <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.0.0062>

Haraway, Donna, 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,' Feminist Studies, 14, no. 3 (1988), 575-599. <https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066>

Hayles, Katherine, 'Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,' October, 66 (1993), 69-91. <https:/doi.org/10.2307/778755>

Horst, Rachel, 'Narrative Futuring: An Experimental Writing Inquiry into the Future Imaginaries,' Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 6, no. 1 (2021), <https://doi.org/10.18432/ari29554>

Hulbert, Adam, 'Uneasy Intimacies,' Reimagining Communication: Mediation. ed. by Michael Filimowicz and Veronika Tzankova (New York: Routledge, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351015431>

James, Kedrick and others, 'Singling: Text Sonification and the Literacoustics of Language-to-MIDI Transformations,' Community and the algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics, ed. by Andrew Klobucar (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2021), 101-126.

James, Kedrick and others, 'A Patch-Work of Pedagogical Potential: A Syn(aes)thetic Approach to Technologically Enhanced Multimedia Text Production,' McGill Journal of Education (in press).

McCormack, Derek, 'Devices for Doing Atmospheric Things,' Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, ed. by Phillip Vannini (New York: Routledge, 2015).

McKnight, Lucinda and others, 'Whiteout: Writing Collaborative Online Poetry as Inquiry,' Qualitative Inquiry, 23, no. 4 (2017), 313-315. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800416673664>

'Narrative,' Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative> [accessed 25 April 2021]

Shulz, Jim, 'Living in a Science Fiction Movie: Covid-19’s Preview of Climate Change,' Medium. 21 September 2020 <https://jimshultz716.medium.com/living-in-a-science-fiction-movie-covid-19s-preview-of-climate-change-be0f7818314e> [accessed 6 May, 2021]

Skains, Lyle, 'Teaching Digital Fiction: Integrating Experimental Writing and Current Technologies,' Palgrave Communications, 5, no. 1 (2019) <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0223-z>

Stengers, Isabelle, 'Wondering About Materialism,' The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds. by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, (Melbourne: Australia, 2011), 368-380.

Voegelin, Salomé, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, (New York: Continuum, 2010).

Voegelin, Salomé, Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, NY, 2021.

Wiederhold, Brenda K., 'Connecting through Technology during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic: Avoiding “Zoom Fatigue,”' Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, 23, no. 7, (2020), 437-438. <https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2020.29188.bkw>

Exposition navigation:

Context and research questions >

Methodologies >

Representations and Extrapolations >

Conclusions >

Tip

Tip