The door opens, and you and three other people enter a large white space. A person sits with their back straight in a plain office chair, located slightly off the room’s center. A black line taped on the floor separates you from the person. Two black crosses are taped on the floor, one situated on a diagonal angle away from the chair, the other closer to you but still behind the line. You have been given a small white card with a pair of eyes printed on it and instructed to engage with the situation.1

When the participants in the research project WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER were faced with this playful invitation, they knew their actions were going to transform the situation. Despite the participants adding themselves to the room or turning the person in the chair, nothing happened. The person on the chair either kept still or insisted on moving back to the original position, staring straight ahead. The participants’ curiosity engaged them enough to figure out the logic, and little by little, the actions of the participants began making sense even if the riddle was not solved. 

Apart from the person in the chair, another person in the room knew the answer to the participatory experiment. This person had planned and prepared the situation, opened the door, and now stood gently on the side, observing. This person, Philipp Ehmann, theatre maker and transdisciplinary multimedia artist, was one of six experts who were invited to share their facilitating practice inside the one-year pilot artistic research project WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (November 2021 until November 2022).

WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER focuses on the role of the performer-facilitator and especially on facilitating a low threshold for audience/visitors to engage in participatory encounters that depend on active contribution or collaboration.

The project emerged from the artistic participatory practices of the main researchers, choreographer Charlotta Ruth and visual artist Jasmin Schaitl. Ruth’s artistic curiosity can be described as expanded choreography,2 with an exploration of ludic structures at its center. Her practice is based on methods of scores, games, and play, usually in group settings. The works range between dance scores, analog and digital writing practices, to large-scale participatory environments (e.g., Treasure Hunting WUK Performing Arts 2016 and Questionology3 brut wien 2021) where visitors become part of a flexible, creative ‘machine’ enhanced with digital components and algorithmic processing. Schaitl’s participatory work engages the mind and sense of touch and is inspired by mindfulness practices and performative, bodily approaches. Her practice moved from creating visual artworks and performance pieces to creating frames for autonomous experiences for the witnesses and participants of a performative event or an exhibition. These works invite personal memories to be reactivated and re-experienced. Through creating frames for retrieval processes of memories, participants are simultaneously exercising their skill of imagination, a crucial tool for humans to envision and be aware of their role in the multitude of complex future scenarios. Ruth’s and Schaitl’s different approaches to facilitating participation provided two adjacent tracks for exploring participatory performance and laid the ground for interdisciplinary research to emerge. In this paper, we will specifically look at participation and the facilitator role through the lens of participatory sense-making, a concept borrowed from social cognition analyzing “the interaction between individuals in a social encounter” (De Jaegher/Di Paolo 2007, p.1).

Understanding the term participation from a social cognition perspective requires a brief glance into the foundations of the field, starting from Premack and Woodruff’s publication introducing the concept “theory of mind”. The Theory of Mind is the idea that people ascribe mental states to each other and use these states to infer knowledge, beliefs, and actions of another person (Premack/Woodruff 1978, p. 525). Inputting states of mind is the initial step necessary for determining how one should engage with each other on the levels of physical and psychological coordination. Micheal Tomasello extended theory of mind to claim that coordinated interactions should be more attributed to a uniquely human trait – shared intentionality – which is enabled through participating with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions. He hypothesized that this sort of participation “requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others […]” (Tomasello et al. 2005, p.1). Shared goals and intentions transform an interaction into coordinated action with ‘we intentionality’ – collective desires then result in interdependent creation.

Our Entry Points into Participation

We refer to participation through participatory art as developed in the canon of French 20^th century art practices of Surrealism, Dadaism, Happenings, and Situationism. In the realm of performing arts, the ‘performative turn’ marks a point in time when audience participants in performances were granted more autonomy and freer (inter)action, referring here to works such as Fluxus happenings by Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann or Claes Oldenburg in the 60s and 70s in New York, who welcomed direct audience involvement into their pieces. This interaction is afforded through the simultaneous presence of the actor and spectator during the event, described by Fischer-Lichte as “co-presence” (Fischer-Lichte 2008). Each individual, each physical co-presence, affects what is happening in that present moment, and a feedback loop is created between performer/situation and audience/participant. This allows and requires a constant re-evaluation of a situation, which in consequence, opens up more possibilities for facilitation, making visible the importance of having tools to navigate such transformative situations. We believe that facilitating participation through artistic settings is a relevant process for participants to engage in a uniquely offered scenario. Their engagement in such novel situations encourages the development of creativity which carries a ripple effect into non-artistic fields, such as daily life decisions, political engagements, educational involvement and so on. Nevertheless, we are aware of the decades of critical outlook on participation and its transformations or misused applications (cf. Miessen 2017), as well as the complexity and possibly problematic development of staging spectators within not exclusively immersive theatre (cf. Schuetz 2022).

In WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER, we have researched how co-presence is modulated at different degrees through an artistic practice-based approach, when the performer-facilitator moves to the periphery of the encounter. The research was fueled by a curiosity to investigate the tacit knowledge at play in the active work of a facilitator when modulating participatory situations and, through this knowledge, develop vocabulary and reflection frameworks for sharing methodologies of facilitating participatory practices. As the research is based on performative practice, it is important to note that we think of facilitation as a specific type of performing where the attention is geared towards the situation and the participants and how relational material is stirred rather than a more classic performance or lecturing format where the performer is at the center of attention. We invited cognitive neuroscientists, and performer Imani Rameses as a core member of the research team. Rameses was invited to assist us both understanding what happens inside participatory encounters through a neuroscience and cognitive science perspective, as well as developing conceptual frameworks and vocabulary that can be bridged beyond artistic practice-based knowledge into social cognition and scientific interdisciplinary research. The project further invited guest researcher practitioners Philipp Ehmann, Mariella Greil, Dennis Johnson, Anne Juren, Krõõt Juurak, and Christian Schröder as experts of facilitation in the fields of choreography, visual and sound art, art therapy, game/play, and mindfulness. Their participatory practices and approaches share the common denominator: placing the participant at the center. 

In this paper, we are looking at the facilitation of artistic participatory encounters through the lens of social cognition. We specifically apply the concept of participatory sense-making (PSM) to describe and develop our findings. Based on our findings in this practice-based research setting, this paper will also elaborate on how social cognition can be expanded through artistic research. We are aware that the interrelation between the situation and the participant is complex and needs to be addressed, for instance, in relation to degrees of immersion. In some situations, the roles of the performer and audience resolve. There was “no audience only different levels of participation” (cf. Worre Hallberg 2017, p.132).4 Based on the theoretical framework that Ruth uses in her ludic and systemic approaches, we also considered how the concept of the ‘magic circle’, borrowed from game theory, supports immersion. The magic circle describes how the framing of a game draws a line around a situation where other rules are established, even if reality continues parallel to the game.

Research on participation often focuses on the participant account; see, for instance, Sarah Hoghart and Emma Bramly’s text on one-to-one performance (Hoghart/Bramly 2017, p. 137-142). In WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER, we are researching the facilitator. When focusing on the facilitator role, we are investigating tools and approaches for modulating participation. When examining facilitation, our thinking was supported by performance studies researcher Astrid Breel’s distinction between “processes” and “participatory outcomes”. Participatory outcome results from a work “[in which] the artist has created a pre-determined structure that the participants contribute within; their participation is the performance” (Breel 2017, p.37). Participation as a process, on the other hand, invites the audience/participant to co-create the performance. By examining how the facilitator plans for participation and how they are engaged in a constant live modulation of relations, we hope to articulate and create an understanding of how this artistic knowledge can be trained, practiced, and transferred to other areas of social exchange.

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Elanor Rosch offered a theory of embodied cognition to understand the coordination of action as modulated by one’s own body and the modulation being informed by one’s perceptions of the expressiveness of another body (cf. Francisco Varela et al. 1991; cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; cf. Shaun Gallagher 2005). They specifically emphasized the importance of the embodied action as a foundation for the interaction process itself, later refined into what is known as ‘enactive cognition.’ The enactive perspective of cognition is a sort of “non-reductive naturalism” that views cognitive processes as deeply entangled with action, i.e., making sense of the world arises from how you enact the world – cognition is a form of practice in itself (cf. Di Paolo 2007; cf. Thompson/Varela 2001; cf. Varela et al. 1991). Cognitive and psychological theories on the mind and bodily inferences, intentions, and the general ability to understand others culminate into a comprehensive schema for understanding the significance of participation within social cognition. 

For WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER, we focused on Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo’s concept of participatory sense-making. Grounding their ideas within the enactive approach, they offered a new approach to understanding social interaction (cf. De Jaegher/Di Paolo 2007). Similar to the key principles of the enactive approach, participatory sense-making is an inherently active process: the environment needs to be acted upon for meaning to arise (cf. De Jaegher/Di Paolo 2007). De Jaegher and Di Paolo define participatory sense-making as 

[…] the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby individual sense-making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own. (De Jaegher/Di Paolo 2007, p. 497f). 

To understand the subtle but essential notion of moving from individual sense-making to social sense-making, one must look at what De Jaegher and Di Paolo consider two determining factors for participatory sense-making: 1) understanding what constitutes an interaction to be a coregulated and autonomously processed e.g., walking on a sidewalk without bumping into each other, and 2) understanding how meaning and meaning-making are generated from cognitively engaging in the interaction itself, e.g., the process of collaborating with someone without using words.  

For WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER, we initiated our collaborative research with a re-contextualization of the main researchers’ practices by focusing on the character and degree of participation in previously realized performative works. We shared our practices, actively and retroactively denoting the qualities and emergence of each respective participatory element. This first phase was tightly co-shaped in collaboration with Rameses’ knowledge of neuroscience and cognitive sciences. This led us to extend our vocabulary for participation within artistic participatory formats using concepts from social cognition. In a second step, the practice-based peer-to-peer exchange took place with invited artist-facilitator experts Ehmann, Greil, Johnson, Juren, Juurak, and Schröder. During two intensive laboratories, we examined the vast realm of performative, artistic methods and frames that invite participation to which principal researchers and guest researchers contributed. Each lab consisted of four consecutive days, where Ruth and Schaitl shared and experienced their participatory practices en vivo, together with the invited guest researchers. Based on this exchange of practices, each researcher took the role of both facilitator and participant in the other facilitators’ practices. This research environment enabled us to carefully and critically reflect upon different approaches that allow participation while also enabling enough time to experiment and expand ideas that arose on-site when the different practices met. We investigated how voluntary or agreed actions unfolded and how to balance gestures of inviting, guiding, and facilitating in order to observe as well as enable the process of sense-making. Through phenomenological interviews, we further tried to grasp the active and spontaneous decision-making and sense-making process at play when we were facilitating. These interviews were conducted by Rameses. Her interviews took a phenomenological look at each researcher's practice (guest experts and main researchers) by inviting them to share more insights about their respective practices. PSM was then used by Rameses, Ruth & Schaitl as a lens to understand different facilitator methods for reducing thresholds and modulating the participatory situation. In other words, with the help of PSM as a lens, we were mapping artistic tools for preparing the space; devising methods of caring for or nudging participants through different approaches; and collecting concrete examples of how people can enter the experiment in a state of comfort, curiosity, flow, or in some cases, urgency and immersion. We specially became curious in how the facilitator can create a space for potential contingent sense-making. Returning to the opening case study by Philipp Ehmann, using the lens of participatory sense-making, the interaction could be understood in the following way:

Rules/Logics: Active Coupling Regulation and Maintaining Individual Autonomy

A) Active Coupling Regulation: 

De Jaegher and Di Paolo suggest active coupling occurs between individuals when one, or ideally both, individuals are regulating how said coupling occurs (De Jaegher/Di Paolo 2007, p. 490). For example, in the opening case study, there is an active coupling supported through the regulation of the interaction between participants and the situation, i.e., between participants themselves and the person in the chair that reacts when the chair is moved, for example. This interaction gives the participants feedback on whether they are getting closer to solving the participatory riddle and allows them to actively regulate how they engage with each interaction. Though engaging with the clear aim of solving the riddle, the participants are engaging in a more process-like participation where the common figuring out becomes the performance experience – not only the goal.

Krõõt Juurak shared their participatory practice, Performance Therapy. It was attended by students and researchers of the University of Applied Arts Vienna as well as artists from the free scene. Krõõt Juurak’s Performance Therapy invited us as participants to attend the interaction through becoming more than ourselves. Instead of the expected format of a name round, we were invited to pick 1) a name, 2) a pronoun, 3) a present mood, and 4) a future desired mood. Each participant voiced their new identities, and Juurak wrote them onto a flipchart for everyone to see – carefully spelling names and pronouns correctly. Something important happened right before this introduction. Juurak told us a more personal anecdote of an invisible child, a character in Moomin (which Juurak afterward explained was a spontaneous idea). The anecdote invited us as participants to welcome insecurities or enter a situation with a more open attitude. We believe this loosened the role autonomy between the facilitator and us participants.

As previously mentioned, we used phenomenological interview methods, mostly informed by microphenomenology,5 to interview each facilitator after they shared their practice. In the public series, these interviews were conducted with the participants being present. Juurak’s perspective on this specific moment of their facilitation looked the following way:

I started the session by explaining what Performance Therapy is, and that I do not actually fully know what it is, but basically it is doing things (tasks) and expecting the tasks to work on us therapeutically. Then I told a little story about how, when I was supposed to plan for this session the same morning, I instead started watching Moomins with my 4-year-old kid, and how the content of it blew me away - the episode was about a child who had become invisible because their care-taker had been overly sarcastic. [...] Then I proposed to go in a circle, like in a workshop where everyone will state their name.

Krõõt Juurak, written record of the practice contribution “Performance Therapy” in the frame of WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER Saturday series October- November 2022 Angewandte Performance Laboratory, Vienna, 2022.

Again, Juurak’s spontaneous personal inserts, along with their practice of renaming, affected how much the autonomy of the participant and the facilitator could be maintained. Within participatory, performative contexts, questioning or putting identity at play is often theoretically connected to Judith Butler’s concept of the performativity of Gender. To use identity as a participatory process tool, however, is also an established practice within gaming and role-play where you create gaming identities or enter into a character. To us, Juurak’s example challenged our perspectives on what identity means and to what degree a fixed notion of identity is necessary for social interactions. With the lens of PSM: It questions to which degree a fixed identity is needed for a social interaction to create sense-making. De Jaegher and Di Paolo mention that identity informs one’s sense of autonomy and that we must recognize which identities are at play within each “interactor” (De Jaegher/Di Paolo 2007, p. 495). Within participatory, performative practices, it often becomes rather difficult to recognize which identities are at play when the facilitator is purposefully ambiguating said identities. Perhaps the more meaningful recognition is then to question: what type of sense-making can occur when identity becomes a malleable material for the interaction? What happens to autonomy when we are inviting in other identities and possible non-identities?

From a Facilitator’s Perspective

Additionally, using the interactions inside participatory performance as an example, it becomes clear that ‘making sense’ is dependent on active feedback between the situation and the participant, which again expands the meaning of maintaining autonomy. The tools used by the facilitator of an artistic encounter often establish situations in which novel understandings and experiences of sense-making can emerge. The social encounter develops based on who the participant actively becomes within the frame (magic circle) established by and in relation to the performative situation. This artistic perspective illuminates how interactions in more everyday social situations cannot be looked upon as fixed relationships. If we treat identities not as fixed states but rather as states of becoming, the interaction transforms into expanded domains of relational dynamics. Here, it is interesting to think about how Bruno Latour has criticized the name of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) for expressing something static where, when understanding interaction, it needs to be kept in motion. 

Being connected, being interconnected, being heterogeneous, is not enough [...] It’s the work, and the movement, and the flow, and the changes that should be stressed. (Latour 2004, p. 63) 

Participatory practices demonstrate the interworking interplay between how social situations unfurl and eventually take shape, taking place as temporary and sometimes fictive situations in the social world. When actively moving in and out of these temporary belongings, the everyday social environment also becomes more tangible by resonating with the experiences in the magic circle of participatory situations, forming a more nuanced understanding of what makes up “the social.” 

Our Contribution 

Nontrivial Effort, Immaterial Material Exchange 

As demonstrated above, when examining participation by applying PSM theories to participatory performance practices, there may be room for expanding the ideas of participatory sense-making to include unique circumstances, such as role-ambiguity and participant-situation interactions. Based on our artistic and practice-based research, we began expanding the PSM logic by focusing on two important interaction parameters: 1) Nontrivial Effort and Immaterial Material Exchange as two key areas of interest for guest researchers reflecting on enigmatic interaction experiences. 1) What happens when participatory sense-making arises between a participant and a situation? 2) How do role ambiguity and responsibility affect individual autonomy, which consequentially impacts the capacity and the nature of how sense-making arises in interactions? We suggest that these two parameters, that emerged from within the frame of participatory art practices, not only answer our questions but prove influential to the understanding of interaction dynamics in other fields. 

Nontrivial Effort

It’s often not easy to delineate to which degree an individual has controlled, contributed or shaped an experience – rather, our experiences we make when attending artworks move in an ebb and flow of collective singularity. However, the sense-making we experience, the grasping of logic, relates to the feedback loop we engage in when participating. By this, we mean the feedback between what we contribute and how this contribution in turn shapes the situation, or, to put it in other words, the coupling regulation. In other writings on participation, “agency” is also discussed (Breel 2017, p. 55ff). Agency, as argued by Breel, however, does not include reciprocity. Agency can be given, but being given space to do something does not automatically encompass how it logically contributes, is embedded in, or even affects the situation. To better understand sense-making, we borrowed the term nontrivial effort from ergodic literature – literature that requires nontrivial effort to traverse the text (cf. Laitinen 2022). The term was initially introduced by Norwegian literary and game scholar Espen J. Aarseth and describes a text that requires readers to be engaged unconventionally, beyond the inevitable eye movements and occasional page-turning (cf. Aarseth 1997). From the perspective of facilitating a participatory experience, the author has, in ergodic literature, left space for the reader to actively engage in co-creating the text and meaning-making. Inspired by this literary genre, we suggest that nontrivial effort are at the core of participatory sense-making. The facilitator engages the participant to a degree that has a concrete effect on the outcome, turning it into a process. In other words, the degree of contribution or nontrivial effort towards the situation or experience increases sense-making. From a facilitator’s perspective, this largely means letting go of control for the exact outcome and entering more process-oriented participation, co-creating the situation with the participants. However, this remains a fine modulation between the facilitator and the process at play. If we, in the opening example, imagine not only withdrawing the facilitator to the periphery but also deciding not to care about the rules, sense-making is broken. In the opening case study, nontrivial effort is required for the participatory element of the situation to evolve into a co-created experience. Nothing happens if the participant does not engage in or put forth the effort. At the same time, if the participant invests effort without receiving feedback from the situation, the participant might quit the interaction, and sense-making ceases to occur (a simple example here would be pushing a button without any effect). The situation depends on the (non)-trivial effort of the participant, and the participant depends on the (non)-trivial feedback from the situation – “a codependent relationship” (Laitinen 2022). 

Juren shared one of her fantasmical anatomies lessons during the first lab. While lying on the ground, with eyes closed, Juren’s voice, amplified through speakers, guided us as participants into bodily sensations, formations, abstract or sometimes absurd and surreal feelings, expectations, and reconfigurations. This verbal guidance connected touch and imagination and invited mind drifting.

Obviously, it is essential for participants to make an effort to enter the imagination and stay tuned to the audible voice. At the same time, if the participant actually puts effort into following or does not follow the voice’s imaginative guidance, it does not affect the outcome for other participants from an outside perspective of the facilitation. Guidance into one’s own imaginative realms of body and mind happens mostly within the participants’ body and mind complexity. Interestingly, one could argue that a pre-recorded fantasmical anatomy lesson works in the same way as a live lesson. Juren explains, however, that her live voice guidance is crucial and is each time adapted and transformed in accordance to how she can sense and adapt her guidance in the very moment, verbally and non-verbally, adjusting to tones or pauses, to support the participants’ mental travel. Therefore, not only her voice, but also her presence acts as a force that holds space and supports the growth of nontrivial effort from the participant. Such a live lesson implies a co-dependent relationship between participants and facilitator, as in the opening case study.

Juren’s perspective on her facilitation when asked if there is a way to describe how this connectedness with the participants is initiating:

When it affects my own body. Repetition, feeling the white floor, feeling the density of the walls. It’s not easy to cross over. I was doing this thing on my own and when we start to have a specific texture in the context we are in, I feel that is the moment when something starts to work - I am at work as much as the people.

Anne Juren (interview 18.05.2022, excerpt)

The presence offered by Juren’s facilitation holds the space for the participants to feel that they have the freedom to drift while also feeling like their mental imagination and its wanderings are valuable to the experience – a nontrivial contribution to the performance. Juren’s practice shows how pivotal it is for the feedback loop between the facilitator, participant, and situation to be interconnected. The facilitator is the enabler of the situation while, at the same time, allowing it to be porous enough that the participant is able to make sense of the encounter using their own potential – an exemplary demonstration of co-creation.

Immaterial Material

We, the two main researchers, encounter and engage with what we call “immaterial material” through our experience of working in performative art contexts. In dance, for instance, both time and space are very crucial elements for composition, even if we cannot touch them as material objects.

Philipp Ehmann responded in the following way when interviewed on how he facilitated the situation of the opening case study explained:

You need to structure time in a way that allows for an uncommon arrival at where you need to be emotionally and physically. Slowly the time frame it requires to negotiate a space maybe makes it easy to negotiate and access another space. For me as a facilitator, time stops. [...] Time for the people in the immerse is different from time for the facilitator. 
Philipp Ehmann (interview 22.06.22, excerpt)

There is a nuance that rests not only in how the facilitator’s words are presented but also in how the facilitator’s guidance builds, gives, and holds space, consequentially creating a whelm that affects how immaterial material arises within the minds and bodies of the participants.

For example, in literature, the subtext can be considered as immaterial material. The situations invite the reader into an active thought process. Similarly, in participatory art, the relationships between visitors as well as their reactions, imaginations, and/or thoughts, become material ingredients informing the way the performance progresses. In a participatory, performative event, the visitor or participant arrives as a physical being with individual backgrounds, thoughts, and life circumstances that affect how a person reacts and responds to the given situation. One can think of it as if everyone brings an individual potential subtext along.

Therefore, to suggest that immaterial material, such as the planning of time, enables sense-making within the subject-situation interaction, we must be aware that the subject is already in an active and ongoing participatory sense-making with themselves before encountering additional influences from the performance situation. Considering such preluding and arguably provisional states, we turn towards affect theory as a lens from which to conceive the potentialities of immaterial material before and after the performative situation. We consider them to be “forces in the in-betweenness and residing as accumulative besideness” (Seigworth/Gregg 2010, p. 3). The subject then acts based on those forces that were present before entering the performance, which then informs those forces that are generated and engaged with during the performative encounter. The meeting of forces (the foregrounding force of the subject and the performative force of the situation) occurs and incrementally generates what affect theories call the plane of potentiality – within that plane, the countless potentialities of sense-making wait to emerge.

The individual, emotional, and social package that each person brings into a participatory setting is an unpredictable, vivid, transformative element that is sensitively handled by the facilitator by inviting, providing space, and working with flexible planning that is open toward the contingency of the participants’ contribution. The way in which the facilitator invites these particular immaterial materials influences the initial ability of the participant to feel invited to engage with the situation and the role ambiguity they may elicit. The immaterial material here must work directly and immediately with the participants or as a support for the participants to linger so that role ambiguity does not become overwhelming and/or disorienting. Otherwise, the person will perhaps become frustrated and lose the desire to interact. This initial immaterial material elicitation sets the situation and makes space for the participants' minds to make their own connections, eliciting the participants into a motivated approach toward participating in the practice (cf. Eysenck 2013; cf. Bandura 1999).

The facilitator’s job is to, through instructing with time, space, props, words, body, … resolve or play with the creation, questions, and negotiation that happens in the mind of the participants. As in any social interaction, a participant will be more perceptive if they can relate and understand how to engage. The complexity of how relational immaterial material is elicited from the facilitator as well as from the participant informs the nontrivial effort required to engage in the practice. In the second step, this influences the choices made within the encounter.

Thoughts on Participant-Situation Interaction

De Jaegher introduced ideas of social interaction to mean:

[...] if there is only interactional organization, we cannot yet speak of a social interaction. Similarly, if one of the participants completely dominates the interaction, we are not dealing with a social interaction (it would be like interacting with an object, not with another subject) (De Jaegher et al. 2016, p. 6).

The PSM approach could benefit from an expansion into more hybrid subject-object relationships. The participant is not merely interacting with the objects in space or the facilitator’s instructions. The participant is engaging with the situation and their own decisions. The idea does not speak against the concept of participatory sense-making; both De Jaegher and Goffman argue that the interaction does not require another subject to be physically present because the social norms are so pervasive that usually, people continue to behave socially “appropriate” as if someone was present (cf. De Jaegher 2016, cf. Goffman 1956). Even if you are alone in a subway you would still tend to behave the same way as if you were not alone. This is due to the social environment you find yourself in and that you are used to, no matter whether someone is actually physically present. However, De Jaegher and Goffman have not done extensive research into what type of social interaction is at play when these types of participant-situation interactions occur. 

Through the practice-based experiences inside the two labs and the public series of four events, this research project aimed at learning more about facilitating participation. What is especially noteworthy is the situation when a facilitator moves to the periphery. In this case, the sense-making is generated through the situation, and a more process-based participation is enabled. This project led to an applied and directly experienced understanding of PSM. As artistic research always grows from and is nourished through an existing artistic practice, it is often transformed back into an artistic expression (in various media and artistic formats). What we have discussed in this paper is also being applied in the facilitations we practice on a regular basis. Our research, therefore, remains vivid and can address open questions and temporary conclusions. This constant movement of applying, experiencing, reflecting, adapting, and reconfiguring is what artistic research, embedding scientific research, such as our project, can actively contribute to a wider and more complex application of PSM. This is where we see potential, not only in relation to the concept of PSM, but also for interdisciplinary research embracing artistic research.

When coming across relevant ideas on De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s concept of participatory sense-making, the framework undoubtedly supported us in creating a certain analytical distance from which to understand participation. At the same time, we are surprised to notice that many researchers speak on social interaction without operating on a socially engaged level. This may be because participatory sense-making is difficult to embody within scientific methodologies due to their self-demarcated objectives and empirical claims and limitations. As demonstrated in this paper, participatory performative practices can function as an excellent research environment for understanding what constitutes the “social.” The necessity of artistic research to be included in the discourse on social cognition – to broaden, extend, and also apply new methods into scientific and cultural contexts is thus urgent.

As of now, social cognition and, specifically, cognitive science comprises six dominating fields: philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Gentner argues that cognitive science was, is, and should continue to be pluralist (cf. Genter 2019). Pluralism, in this case, means including many different fields of science without hegemony. As proposed by Mark Dingmanse, “interaction constitutes cognition” (Dingmanse et al. 2023, p. 2), this would mean that to comprehensively understand what it means to cognate, researchers themselves must learn how to interact and integrate multiple perspectives into their work. This is what we continuously train through performative practices. The notions of participation, social, and interaction would benefit from a truly interactive discourse where we make sense of social cognition with more transdisciplinary methods. We propose that a fully pluralist framework would embrace many different fields of research, including artistic research.

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Interviews

Anne Juren, written record of the practice contribution “fantasmical anatomies” in the frame of WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER Laboratory “Performances for the Mind” 18th May 2022, at the Angewandte Performance Laboratory, Vienna.

Krõõt Juurak, written record of the practice contribution “Performance Therapy” in the frame of WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER Saturday series October-November 2022. Vienna: Angewandte Performance Laboratory 2022.

Philipp Ehmann, written record of an interview during the Laboratory “Choreographic Clues” in the frame of WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER, 22nd June 2022. Vienna: Angewandte Performance Laboratory 2022.

Fig. nr. 1: Jasmin Schaitl, chair, 2022, setting photograph of Philipp Ehmann’s work during the lab “Choreographic Clues”.

Fig. nr. 2: Jasmin Schaitl, eyes, 2022, photograph of the card from Philipp Ehmann’s work, given to the participants during the lab “Choreographic Clues”.

© 2024. This work by Imani Rameses, Charlotta Ruth and Jasmin Schaitl is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 

reposition ISSN: 2960-4354 (Print) 2960-4362 (Online), ISBN: 978-3-9505090-8-3, doi.org/10.22501/repos