The research thematic PERFORMING PROCESS focuses on the question: What is at stake in focusing on the process of practice — the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing. This might involve attending to those epistemological aspects of artistic exploration and experimentation — including sensuous, affective knowledge; bodily knowledge; the value of trial and error and of ‘feeling one’ s way’; intuition, ‘not knowing’ — that have habitually been marginalised by a certain knowledge economy that tends to favour rational and discursive logic, where knowledge is transmitted, traded and ‘banked’ as product, rather than necessarily activated as a live, embodied process.1
Embedded. Enacted. Embodied. For Henk Borgdorff, “Artistic research … is the articulation of the unreflective, non-conceptual content enclosed in aesthetic experiences, enacted in creative practices and embodied in artistic production.”2 He argues that, artistic research involves non-conceptual, non-propositional knowledge: "focus of artistic research is placed … on embodied and enacted forms of knowledge and understanding – forms of knowing and understanding that are intimately bound up with practice and that cannot easily be translated into or transmitted by language”.3 Curator-theorist Sarat Maharaj uses the term ‘knowing-thinking-feeling’ for describing those modalities of knowing irreducible to dominant rational discourse or the logic of scientific methodology.4 For research scholar Robin Nelson, the multimodal epistemological model for research in and through artistic practice (or even arts praxis) involves a triangulation of know-how (comprising “insider close-up knowing”; experiential, haptic knowing; performative knowing, tacit knowledge, and embodied knowledge) and know-what (tacit knowledge made explicit through critical reflection), combined with the know-that of cognitive propositional knowledge.5 His framing of know-how draws on Donald Schön’s work on the “reflective practitioner” and “knowing-in-action,”6 philosopher and polymath Michael Polanyi’s writing on the tacit dimension of knowledge,7 and enactivist accounts of embodied knowledge (for example, the work of philosophers Francisco Varela and Alva Noë8), which for Nelson demonstrate that “cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but it is rather the enactment of a world and a mind.”9 Between know-how, know-what, know-that, or even no-how (to borrow Maharaj’s phrase10) artistic process and practice often operates at the threshold of many different species of knowledge, troubling easy classification. Indeed, as scholars Dorothy Leonard and Sylvia Sensiper state: "Knowledge exists on a spectrum. At one extreme, it is almost completely tacit, that is semi-conscious and unconscious knowledge held in people’s heads and bodies. At the other end of the spectrum, knowledge is almost completely explicit or codified, structured and accessible to people other than individuals originating it. Most knowledge of course exists between these extremes."11
However, as Borgdorff asks: “What is the epistemological status of these embodied forms of experience, knowledge and criticism?”12 What is at stake in attending to the embodied knowledges enacted and embedded within PERFORMING PROCESS. What is invoked by terms such as ‘embodied knowledge’, ‘tacit knowledge’, ‘implicit knowledge’, ‘practical knowledge’, ‘non-propositional knowledges’ – how are these terms mobilised and understood? What histories, ideas, even assumptions, biases and privileges might need to be acknowledged? What frames of reference are called upon or ignored? How are such ideas operative within other disciplinary contexts? How might attending to embodied and implicit forms of knowledge have a political dimension? How is the body activated in the cultivation of embodied knowledge? Which bodies? Whose bodies? How do different bodies enable different possibilities of embodied knowledge? How is the notion of embodied knowledge shaped and informed by different lineages of ideas and practices – e.g. choreographic, somatic, phenomenological, feminist, posthuman etc.
1. This framing text is drawn from various sources: Emma Cocker, (2016) ‘Performing thinking in action: the meletē of live coding’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 12:2, 102-116, and the chapter “What Does Live Coding Know” in Alan Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Geoff Cox, Alex McLean, Thor Magnusson, Live Coding: A Users’ Manual (MIT, 2022); and “Prologue” in Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Choreo-graphic Figures – Deviations from the Line (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), pp.6 – 21.
2. Henk Borgdorff, ‘The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research’, in Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, London: Rout¬ledge, 2011, p. 47.
3. From Borgdorff, “Reasoning through art” Inaugural lecture (10.02.2017),
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2017/03/reasoning-through-art
4. ‘Xeno-epistemics: Makeshift Kit for Sounding Visual Art as Knowledge Production and the Retinal Regimes’, in Documenta 11, Platform 5 Catalogue, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002,
5. Robin Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 37.
6. Schön, Reflective Practitioner.
7. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1983).
8. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Francisco J. Varela, Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom and Cognition, Stanford: Stanford University Press; 1999. Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
9. Robin Nelson, Practice as Research, 43.
10. However for Maharaj, ‘knowing-thinking-feeling’ is not (only) about placing faith in a form of tacit knowledge if this describes an already embodied know-how. Instead, what is activated is a known-not knowledge closer perhaps to Maharaj’s articulation of the flux of no-how, “distinct from the circuits of know-how that run on clearly spelled out methodological steel tracks. It is the rather unpredictable surge and ebb of potentialities and propensities. . . No-how embodies indeterminacy, an ‘any space whatever’ that brews up, spreads, inspissates.” Maharaj, Know-How and No-How. See also Sarat Maharaj, “What the Thunder Said: Toward a Scouting Report on ‘Art as a Thinking Process,’” in Ambrožič and Vettese, Art as a Thinking Process, 154–160.
11 . Dorothy Leonard and Sylvia Sensiper, “The Role of Tacit Knowledge in Group Innovation,” California Management Review 40 (1998): 113, cited in Nelson, Practice as Research, 38. They are referring to the role of tacit knowledge in group innovation.
12. Henk Borgdorff, ‘The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research’, in Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, London: Rout¬ledge, 2011, p. 47.
Bibliography/links
John Bengson and Marc A Moffett, Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind and Action, (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Barbara Bolt, ‘A Non-Standard Deviation: handlability, praxical knowledge and practice led research’, for Speculation and Innovation: applying practice led research in the Creative Industries, 2006.
Barbara Bolt, ‘The Magic is in the Handling’ in Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2007), pp. 27 – 34.
Barbara Bolt, ‘Heidegger, Handlability and Praxical Knowledge’, See https://acuads.com.au/conference/article/heidegger-handlability-and-praxical-knowledge/
Barbara Bolt, ‘Material thinking and the agency of matter’, in Studies in Material Thinking, 1(1), 1-4, (2007).
Barbara Bolt, Felicity Colman, Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward, (eds.) Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life, (Cambridge scholars Publishing, 2007).
Paul Carter, Material thinking: The theory and practice of creative research, (Melbourne University Press, 2004).
Christine Fentz and Tom McGuirk (eds.) Artistic Research: Strategies of Embodiment, (NSU Press, 2015).
Neil Gascoigne and Tim Thornton, Tacit Knowledge, (Routledge, 2014).
Sabine Gehm, Pirkko Husemann, Katharina von Wilcke (eds.) Knowledge in Motion: Perspectives of Artistic and Scientific Research in Dance, (Transcript, 2007).
Carole Gray and Gordon Burnett, Making Sense: ‘Material’ thinking and ‘materializing pedagogies’, Interactive Discourse, November/December 2007, Vol. 1, issue. 1.
Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, (Routledge, 2013).
Tim Ingold, ‘Of Work and Words: Craft as a Way of Telling’ The European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes. Vol 2, no 2 (2019). ISSN 2612-0496.
Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, (University of Chicago Press, 1987).
David Knight and Torkild Thanem, Embodied Research Methods, (SAGE, 2019).
Georg Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, (Basic Books, 1999).
Jennifer Leigh and Nicole Brown, Embodied Enquiry: Research Methods, (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Bengt Molander, The Practice of Knowing and Knowing in Practices, (Peter Lang, 2015).
Sarah Nettleton, & Watson, Jonathan. (Eds.), The body in everyday life, (London: Routledge, 1998).
Alva Noë, Action in Perception, (MIT, 2006).
Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture, (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The primacy of perception, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The phenomenology of perception, (Colin Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1962).
Simon Penny, Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment, (MIT, 2016).
Michael Polyani, The Tacit Dimension, (University of Chicago Press, 1966).
Michael Polanyi, Knowing and being, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
T.E. Rosenberg and D. Fairfax, Guest Editors, Studies in Material Thinking, Vol 1., No. 2.
Lawrence Shapiro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, (Routledge, 2014).
Barbara Tversky, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought, (Basic Books, 2019).
See also Journal of Embodied Research - https://jer.openlibhums.org/
Reading Group
Embodied Knowledge(s) (12 May 2022)
During this reading group we engaged with two texts for exploring ideas around the embodied aspect of both tacit and implicit knowledge, in relation to the “inarticulable or contingently unspoken” dimension of artistic processes and practices, alongside considering how “such understanding is epistemically salient, particularly to our capacities to address what it means to attempt to make political change on personal or collective levels”. Alexis Shotwell, “Implicit Knowledge: How it is Understood and Used in Feminist Theory”, Philosophy Compass 9/5 (2014), p.322.
The first text was the Tim Ingold's, ‘Telling by Hand’ in Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, (Routledge, 2013), pp. 109–124. In this text, Ingold begins by challenging Michael Polanyi’s argument in The Tacit Dimension [when he asserts that ‘we can know more than we can tell’] that ‘telling’ involves ‘putting into words’, moreover, the act of both specification and articulation. For Ingold, “telling is itself a modality of performance that abhors articulation and specification”, (p.107). He continues to unfold different understandings of ‘telling’ that resist specification – acts of storytelling, alongside a form of personal knowledge that “grows from and unfolds in the field of sentience” (p.111). He elaborates the notion of the ‘humanity of the hand’ drawing on Martin Heidegger’s notion of handlability, exploring the relation between hand and word, and the possibilities of ‘correspondence’ between maker and material.
The second text was Alexis Shotwell, "An Aesthetics of Sensuousness", in Knowing Otherwise: Race Gender and Implicit Understanding, (Pennsylvania University State Press, 2011), pp.47 - 70. In this text, Shotwell explores a connection between aesthetics and politics, between implicit understanding and political transformation. She asks: “What does the turn to the aesthetic give theorists who are trying to think about the categories of the human, about practices of freedom and about heterodox knowledges?” (p.48) Her text outlines four different dimensions of ‘implicit understanding’: (1) Foundationally non-propositional knowledge; (2) Embodied understanding; (3) Potentially propositional knowledge currently held as tacit or distal; (4) Affective and emotional knowledge (p.48). She situates the notion of ‘an aesthetic of the sensuous’ in relation to certain lineages: Following Marx, she argues that “the realm of sensuousness holds tremendous potential for working against the alienation of oppressive social relationships” (p.69) and realities. Within Friedrich Schiller’s writing, she identifies the ‘aesthetic condition’ as characterised by the notion of free play. Drawing on the writing of Herbert Marcuse she argues that the “aesthetic dimension has the potential to rupture a given reality” (p.48), through a form of radical estrangement. Within Baumgarten’s work, she observes a call to “return to the sensate” (p.61). However, whilst Shotwell finds these accounts “highly useable”, she reads them “against the grain” (p.66) in order to challenge the unspoken biases, privileges and inequalities contained within the concepts of freedom, harmony, and humanity therein. Shotwell reads against the grain of human-centrism or ‘human exceptionalism’ in order to explore the possibilities for new kinds of ‘livability’, a ‘new common sense’ [new sensus communis] based upon relationality, interconnection, and freedom dreaming, arguing how [only] “this sort of socially situated, embodied knowledge can function as impetus, sustenance, and imaginative motor for individual and collective change” (p. 70).
Reading Group Attendees
Emma Cocker
Danica Maier
Andrea Moneta
Darren O'Brien
Sarah Tutt
Fu Xing
Gathering of questions arising through discussion
How might tacit knowledge become transmissible and communicable?
How can sensuous knowledge be shared?
What is at stake in sharing? Why share? With whom? What are the implications of sharing?
Are knowing and telling the same, as Ingold’s asserts?
What is at stake in telling? What is at stake in not telling? Why tell? Why not?
How do modes of knowing and telling differ/relate within different disciplines contexts such as the 4As Ingold engages: art, architecture, anthropology, archaeology? What cross overs and conversations might emerge between these fields of practice?
How is the difference between telling and articulating embodied knowledge – what is at stake (perhaps even lost) in the act of articulation?
What different ways are there of telling? How might this be explored through non-linguistic means, through other media than language?
Consider the calluses on the hands described by Ingold – how might a sense of hardening enable a higher level of sensitivity?
How are “tools” engaged with reference to embodied knowledge? How are tools understood and activated? How might they inform, shape, impinge upon the kinds of thinking and knowledges arising in and through practice?
How might the reclamation of value for embodied knowledge operate in relation/resistance/complementarily to others forms of knowledge (including rational, discursive propositional thinking)?
What role does language have in relation to embodied knowledge?
How do words relate to the hands, following Heidegger’s argument around ‘handlability’ within Ingold’s text?
How might storytelling operate in relation to embodied knowledge?
How is the relation/different in writing about and writing from?
What does it mean to explore the possibilities for becoming more human human?
How might developing one’s sensuous capacities enable a deeper engagement with the world and others?
What is the role of writing, drawing, or other forms of inscription in relation to embodied knowledge? Do the issues raised by Ingold in relation to tools of the hand (e.g. pen or pencil) and technologies (e.g. typewriter or computer) apply equally to writing and other modes of communication?
How are other aspects of the body implicated in the matter of embodied knowledge, beyond the hand – what of the feet, the back, the hips etc? Where in the body might ‘mind’ or even ‘thinking’ be operative? Where does thinking take place?
How much does one need to ‘know’ of the discourse and debate of embodied knowledges in order to invoke it within a research practice – does herein lie the paradox or contradiction of embodied knowledge within a research context? Is the theoretical (propositional) discourse on embodied knowledge therefore contradictory?
What might reading/discussing/engaging with the wider discourse and debate of embodied knowledges enable, open up, which might not be activated only in and through one’s own practice? Where are its limitations, contradictions?
How might aesthetic knowledge operate in different ways – compare the model evolved in close connection to the senses and sensate, and the model connected more to the imagination and the imaginary? What different potentialities do they each enable? Where do they overlap or differ?
How is the relation between sensuousness and censorship?
What is meant by ‘correspondence’ in Ingold’s terms?
Does craft activate different embodied knowledge to art, is it mobilised in different ways? Is the unsettling effect or force of rupture/affirmation present in each of these fields? In different ways?
What aspects of embodied knowledge are lost/gained through technological advancement? How is our own experience of technological mediated embodied knowledges?
How does theatre and performance enable the speaking of the unspoken, the making tangible of the intangible, the making visible of the invisible and how might this dimension of theatre differentiate it from entertainment?
What rituals are activated in the making explicit of the implicit, the speaking of the unspeakable? How does ritual mediate between embodied and sharable knowledges? How do ritual practices allow access, enable things to become perceived?
What practices and tactics can be explored for making the tacit experientially sharable and accessible?
How might we shift from a universalising notion of embodied knowledge towards acknowledging the specificities of lived experience? How then to speak of a ‘common’ sense of embodied knowledge? Is this an impossibility? How might the notion of embodied knowledge need further nuance? How to explore the common whilst allowing for the singular and particular?
How might the discussion around the autotelic and play resonate with these discussions on embodied knowledge? Does play presume certain freedoms, and are these freedoms contingent (on what)?
How do we shift from limiting forms of ‘common sense’ to a ‘new common sense’ capable of emancipatory potential?
How are the (enlightenment) values of harmony, freedom and human-ness problematised within Shotwell’s argument – how does this challenge/unsettle/affirm the implicit values and knowledges of our own practices and ethos?
What kinds of emergent embodied knowledges emerge through a more radical destablisation of human-centric, human exceptionalist thinking?
How is the experience of embodiment and embodied knowledge shaped by a more sensuous engagement with the non-human? What new modes of “liveability” emerge through a more expansive engagement with notions of embodiment?
How does embodiment and embodied knowledge reflect/enact a sense of one’s interconnection and entanglement with others, with other agencies, human and non-human?
How does (or does) the political imperative of Shotwell’s text enliven or transform the notion of ‘thinking through making’? How might the wider exploration of the relation between aesthetic thinking and embodied knowledge and political/social transformation contribute to the field of artistic research and practice?
How might Shotwell’s exploration of the relation between aesthetic thinking and embodied knowledge and political/social transformation fold into a conversation within the field of artistic research and practice, whilst remaining sensitive to the broader political imperative at stake in such a text?
What is at stake in exploring the potential of knowing otherwise – beyond rational propositional knowledges?
How is the notion of “struggle” opened up or transformed through this discussion – is there an emancipatory dimension therein? How does this relate to the discussion around struggle and ease explored in previous conversations (e.g. in relation to the conversation on Autotelic: Towards Flow?
How does the aesthetic and embodied forms of knowledge activate the dual force of both rupture (of the ‘as is’) and affirmation (of ‘what if’, ‘what might be’)?