‘Gatherings’ are the second level of operation of the doctoral study ‘Architecting Bodies by Immersive Gestures’. The first level of operation is called ‘responsive walking’ and is of direct embodied immersion of the author/learner’s bodymind while looking for the mess in urban environments and adopting a micro-perspective by means of walking and embodied creation. The second level departs from the assumption that embodied immersions in mess by responsive walking are desettling and urge sense-making. By creating video-assemblages, performance-lectures and conversation pieces processes of embodied sense-making are explored. Thereby, the challenge is to avoid the pitfalls of quick dichotomic, hierarchic and disembodied understandings of bodymindly engaging with the environment. To resist slipping into these categories – that are so readily present when sense-making is discursively elaborated – the notion of ‘pregnantness’ and the notion of a ‘propelling hypothesis’ are proposed. The former is a bodymind state that allows to imaginatively presence not-yet and becoming significances of embodied engagements with environments. The latter is an operative design instrument that allows the responsive shifts in hypothesis to become the very mechanism of a form-giving practice that reflects whimsicalities and contingencies. In order to work towards ‘pregnantness’ and follow the ‘propelling hypothesis’, gatherings interweave autobiographical, fictional and referential voices (i.e. the work of others) through one another. Also different media (i.e. body, drawing, writing, photo, video, sound, animation, modelling), low-tech assembling and analogue-poetic thinking are put into action to bring more sensory, ephemeral, affective and imaginative aspects of bodymindly relating to the environment into account.
