The Wake of Ontology

• In Event: Pedagogies of Ontology: Interventions and Intraventions of Practice-Based Research

Abstract

Objectives:
Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) and Brian Massumi (2011), this paper brings forth the concept of the wake as a way of extending the pedagogy of ontology, the duration of ontology, and the medium of ontology, ultimately describing the intravention as a ‘wake of ontology.’

Theoretical Framework:
Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) argues that the occurrent arts, inclusive of artistic interventions, transforms ways of knowing because spatio-temporal (re)configurations that engage the body disrupt habitual ways the body inhabits space. The intervention, provoking experiences that were immediate and palpable, produced an embodied sensitivity where emotional response, affections, reflections, stimuli, and aversions (De Brabandere, 2014) formed a clamorous heterogeneity, best described as an information overload (Nechvatal, 2011). Held in this immersive position, the instructional team conceptualized the term intravention, a space in which artists/researchers, could come together to create new cultural relations, potentials for self-(re)formation. As a thing-in-the-making (Massumi, 2011), an intravention does not bring thinking to an end; it is an event that provokes participants to keep thinking (Ellsworth, 2005).

Modes of Inquiry:
This research utilizes a practice-led approach (Bolt, 2010; Wall, 2012) situated within living inquiry (Irwin, 2004; 2013), in which the wake, a trail left on the water’s surface made by a moving vessel, is rendered through a series of artworks employing various media including video, digital photography, paint and installation.

Data Sources:
The visual artworks along with researcher-produced observations and journals recorded throughout the intervention are examined to explore how the artwork enabled further thinking about deeply help notions of teaching, learning and art. The artistic process, forming subsequent intraventions of its own, revealed how “theory emerges from a reflexive practice at the same time that practice is formed by theory" (Bolt, 2010, p. 29).

Results:
As an active site for inquiry, art practice created the time and space necessary for the graduate research assistant participating in the research — as an artist, educator, and researcher — to reflect on some of the difficult knowledge (Pitt & Britzman, 2003) that Becoming Pedagogical provoked. The wake, depicting a journey towards a destination that is unknown and uncertain, obstructs the view/direction in which participants are headed. This stance renders the potential with which arts based educational research is unprescribed and emergent, holding participants in a reality of relations so that pedagogies of ontology may unfold. Reflecting on the multiple roles engaged in the research project allowed the artist/researcher to think more ethically about the pedagogical possibilities of contemporary art practices while examining some of the challenges of working with participatory methodologies within the structures of the academy.

Scholarly Significance:
Practice-led research renders the wake of ontology as a performance through creative acts that are indeterminable, untimely, and relational. Emerging from the middle and growing at the edges, these moments, both material and immaterial, expand understandings of the capacities and potentials of arts based educational research that aims to provoke new and creative thought where old ideas once existed.

Author

• Natalie LeBlanc, The University of British Columbia