INTRA-VIEW digital


A project extension by Doris Ingrisch and Adelheid Mers

December 2021

 

The intra-view is an intra-active, embodied world building exercise, collaboratively developed by Ingrisch (Vienna) and Mers (Chicago) on site in Vienna. Intra-views take place dialogically among Ingrisch, a Gender Studies scholar, Mers, an artistic researcher, and invited participants from the field of performance and performing arts. World building can be summarized as boundary-making and unmaking, taking place among agents. Our method explores how we articulate practices from within collaboratively evolving triangulations, taking place across diverse ways of knowing. 

 

While the title, intra-view, is inspired by Karen Barad's writing on performativity as "the world’s iterative intra-activity"(2003, 823), our goal is located in the vicinity of recent discourses about epistemic diversity, taking place across literatures on Art Research/Aesthetics (Mersch 2015, Clavo 2017), and Decolonizing Research Methodologies (Tuhiwai Smith 1999, Betasamosake Simpson 2017). We are deeply concerned about the state of world building today.

 

Key to our 2019 AR Pilot project was that each invited participant selected the physical setting/staging in which an intra-view was enacted. We learned that the sites most conducive to furthering our explorations were expansive enough to allow for easy mobility, while also affording a measure of quiet, for example a reserved performance practice space, and a gymnasium.   

 

Since 2020, such conditions have been foreclosed. Since then, we have focused on 1) reflection and publication, and 2) adapted other works for digital spaces, while also 3) entering into deepened conversation with colleagues, globally.

 

As we now find ourselves no longer within an exception, but an ongoing state of distancing, we are forced to ask:

 

What happens when explorations in dialogic intra-action rely on mediation through digital platforms?

 

This question is prompting the following considerations:

 

  • How and to which degree does dialogic intra-action rely on joint, physical presence?
  • How and to which degree does dialogic intra-action rely on locomotion? 
  • How and to which degree does dialogic intra-action rely on visuality, orality, and tactility? 
  • Which modes of digital mediation are conducive to exploring the foregoing questions?
  • Which modes of documentation can serve the inquiry, and which can support thoughtful assessment? 

In response to the above, and extending our earlier, co-located Intra-view research, this project uncouples auditory and corporeal space. It is a common sight that people use their commutes, or time spent exercising, to conduct phone conversations, bringing their minds together while their bodies traverse far apart spaces. Recent research has found that participants in such conversations envision the other person as stationary (Bailenson 2021).

As part of this research extension, we are inverting our laboratory design, now creating digitally facilitated, joint auditory environments that overlay explicitly separate, visual-tactilie-olfactory somatic experiences that are intentionally exercised and referenced. Using mobile microphone headsets, we less rely on quiet and no longer need to be stationary. With access to global digital networks, we no longer need to be co-located. We have long known that scaffoldings, be they languages, cosmogonies, or other architectures, shape world making habits while remaining deceptively in the background. In a world of digital platforms that explicitly splinter our reality, we have an opportunity to forerground their impact while we are still at least somewhat disoriented. At the same time, concepts such as intra-action, particularly when applied in the context of epistemic diversity, as we are doing with the intra-view, will be exceedingly helpful in assessing and reshaping the meaning of agency towards building the world anew.

Bailenson, Jeremy N.(2021) Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue. Technology,  Mind and Behavior. Volume 2, Issue 1. DOI: 10.1037/tmb0000030.  

Barad, Karen (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. in: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 23, no. 3


Mersch, Dieter (2015). Epistemologies of Aesthetics. Zurich: Diaphanes

 

Clavo, Maria Iñigo (2016). Modernity vs. Epistemodiversity. e-flux journal #73

 

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books


Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake (2017). As we have always done. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Ingrisch, Doris and Mers, Adelheid, with Gstättner, Maria. (2019) AR Pilot Project Intra-view 

1) Ingrisch, Doris (2021). Knowing in Intra-Acting. Arts-based Research als Weg des Welt-Gestaltens. In: Annegret Huber/Doris Ingrisch/Therese Kaufmann/Johannes Kretz/Gesine Schröder/Tasos Zembylas (Eds.), Knowing in Performing (147-160). Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

 
Mers, Adelheid (2021). “The BRAID: Moving Across Dimensions from Representation to Performativity.” In:  Birte Kleine-Benne (Ed.), Exploring Dispositifs. Berlin: Logos Verlag. (print and open access) https://www.logos-verlag.de/ebooks/OA/978-3-8325-5197-1.pdf more
 
2) Mers, Adelheid. (2021) Micro-practices for a New Gentleness. Performance Studies international convening. RC open documentation. 
 
3) Clavo, Maria Iñigo and Ixtetelá, Benvenuto Chavajay (2021) Science, Consciousness and the Lake Vienal. in: Adelheid Mers and Daniel Jiménez Quiroz (Eds.) For a New Gentleness. CSPA Quarterly 33.

Heike Roms (2020) Training for performance art and live art, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 11:2, 117-125, DOI: 10.1080/19443927.2020.1769377