A collection of international artists, designers, performance makers, and researchers1 is assembled to journey through the deserts of the North American south-west in 2013, performing an enquiry into their practices while engaging with the aesthetic, political, cultural, and environmental resonances of desert ecologies. As a temporary, travelling community interested in movement, environment, and performance, the project crew mediate and perform individual and co-creative practices that shuttle between registers of knowing and unknowing through performances of mobility.
The Shuttle crew set forth into peer-to-peer practice development processes that are collected by a dramaturgy of moving through co-creating conditions and situations. As creative practitioners we co-join around a shared desire to embark openly upon a journey that is entrusted with hopes for creative discovery.
How might conditions of journeying foster the development of creative practice modalities of knowing and knowledge? How do the qualities of particular conditions inflect how creative practice as research emerges and is reflexively re-created? In contrast to an impulse to capture certain ‘productive’ conditions into institutional forms, the Shuttle crew are attracted toward the uncertainties of creative practice that only come to be known contingently through the actual, particular engagements of situated-in-journeying practice.
This exposition unfolds the possibility of methodology – an inflection of ideas in action, improvised in the everyday, to generate praxis. Departing from discipline, being interdisciplinary, trajectories open up a non-linear quest to unsettle orders of value for practice as research. We presume to share some of our readers' desires to reimagine the methodological centring of practice as research. A layered account is gathered here that generates its own language, propositional theory, and relational ethics through situated practice.
A creative-practice research laboratory in motion unfolds, with its inter-subjective and shifting conditions, co-created and co-authored in multiple ways, emerging as a speculative mode of exploring the constraining, generating, and potentially transforming qualities of creative practice through a heightened awareness of the dynamics of movement. We move through the dynamics of shuttling the conditioning of creative practice, the co-creating of practice-as-research experiences, and the situating of events-in-motion that come to re-create practices. This exposition traces the dynamics of an accumulating experimental creative-practice-as-research milieu through shuttling operations:
conditioning >
circling >
mobilising >
patterning >
co-creating >
un-knowing >
vitalising >
othering >
situating >
returning >
enmeshing >
post-humanising >
The configurations of voicing the plural groupings of ‘we’ and the individual ‘I’ are spatialised, sensory, and reflexive. Multiple voices. Multiple movements. Orbits falling in and out of arrangements. No need for consensus. Processes revealing and enriching a processual creative research practice.