Walks and Barcodes: An A/r/tographic Inquiry of Place Through Time

• In Event: Material and Digital A/r/tographic Explorations in Community

Abstract

Objectives: This inquiry unfolds a personal photographic walking practice that invites us to wonder and wander with the question of ‘how far does one need to walk before they have moved?’ with a pedagogical emphasis.

Theoretical Perspectives: This walking inquiry bases its conceptualization and practice on the arts-based educational method of a/r/tography to explore notions of movement, unfamiliarity, and estrangement. A/r/tography considers research as a process of inquiry within a complex and holistic understanding of relationality where meaning is presented with the artistic interplay of subject, process, and outcomes (Springgay, Irwin, Kind, 2005, p. 899, 902; LeBlanc, Davidson, Ryu, Irwin, 2015, p. 371). The emphasis on relationality enables the consideration of various relationships such as “chaos and order, complexity and simplicity, certainty and uncertainty” (Irwin, 2003, p. 63) and the spaces in between. This consideration of things in relation and multiplicity also draws from Aoki’s (1991/2005) “and” (p. 260).

Methods and Data Sources: The photographic practice is visually and conceptually inspired by the anonymous online gallery called Movie Barcode and On Kawara’s date series paintings. By representing the movement of time and the subject within it through a photographic composition of photos taken in hourly intervals, the concept of time and place is represented as simultaneously individual yet cosmic, static yet transient, and familiar yet strange. Through taking hourly photos every day as well as an intentional process of selecting and juxtaposing them into barcodes, the conceptual underpinnings create a rhythm of pedagogically moving between what is known and not-yet known through artistic practice. Before all the photos taken throughout the day are arranged into the final image, the outcome is obscured. The final image, however, is also a representation of what was present. The rhythm engages homeward estrangement and return of “returning to what was past, returning to a present we might not now recognize because we are different” (Pinar, 2015, p. 182).

Results: The exploration of physical and conceptual movement through photographic walking inquiry challenges assumptions of familiarity, including the reductive assimilation of lived-experience as data. The images that result and the description of the process encourage an understanding of teaching and learning with a complex and relational perspective of being with movement.

Scholarly Significance: This research offers a non-representational visual rendering of familiar as unfamiliar, encourages one to consider the importance of residing within the ongoing assemblage of the coded history of process and product, movement and stillness, and lost and found meanings in a/r/tographic inquiries.

Author

• Ken Morimoto, University of British Columbia
  Presenting Author