Living Inquiry: Going the Theoretical Distance

• In Event: Gradients-in-Relation: Distance as Continuous Variations in Artography

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:

The purpose of this paper is to outline the theoretical underpinnings of artography as continuous variations. A parallel between artography and phenomenology can be traced in the notion of living inquiry, with life writing as part of the practice. We continue to build upon this connection in ways that the pandemic has advanced, specifically in attending to our geographies-of-self-in relation. In doing so we enter in the artographic middle, infusing a host of positions, such as Gugutzer (2019), who sets a proposition for an emergent neo-phenomenological approach “based on the felt body and on situations” (p. 187).

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:

Adding a pandemic layer of virtual-place perplexity, the modalities of the project and the pedagogic potential activate a sensorial resonance as part of our learning and teaching at a distance. In effect, the “coming age of pandemics” as Peters (2020) suggests, foregrounds our archival impulse in this case with a tendency for Deleuzian tensionality that is sustained and sustaining in the doubling of folds that unfold.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:

To assess the theoretical potential of continuous variations, a survey of literature to identify conceptual definitions, debates and disagreements served as the basis for this paper. Document and content analysis serve as methods to highlight the parameters that inform our artographic possibilities expressed in this symposium.


Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:

Working with the practices of team members in this symposium, the theory-practice nexus is unpacked and deliberated, and provides the baseline data and evidence underpinning the theoretical framework of the first paper.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:

We are adapting to keep within a measurable distance between theory-practice, virtual-actual, body-environment, and by doing so, curating distances where we are striving to enact “conditions of instability, contingency and change,” in an endeavour to reterritorialize our artographic sensibilities (Hawkins, 2014, p. 54). Our inquiry serves as pedagogic pivots, that is, a deliberate “evocation of artistry” in an effort to foster more “responsive engagements with the world” as we come to know our distancing by degree (Hawkins, 2014, p. 34).

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:

We align with Gugutzer in our ‘thinking in constellations’ and “the subjective states of affairs (facts)” as affective involvements, which for arts educators lends further to the vitality of a creative impulse as “embodied happenings” with, in and through our distances (pp. 188, 189). A neophenomenology lens offers a methodological kinship that resonates in particular with “divergent theoretical paradigms” and attends to aspects that occur at the ‘macro-, meso- and micro-level of interconnectedness’ and between entities that are integral to meaningful practice in the everyday (Gugutzer, 2019, p. 194). For instance, the tensionality of distances inverts normalising practices, shifting our orientations of public-private to new entanglements: isolated publics now virtually in our homes, and public isolation defines our physical worlds.

Author

• Anita Sinner, University of British Columbia