Creative practitioners inside academia are often tasked with explaining how their embodied practices constitute research. The Peribiophoty project reverses this paradigm to ask: how does academic research constitute embodied practice?  By considering the personal and intellectual contexts (peri), surrounding academics and their biographies (bio), through audio-visual representation (photy), we investigate how academic thinking is embodied thinking. The notion that “traditional” research only involves the brain is challenged by the audio-visual representations of thoughts and ideas embedded in objects, experience, time, and interactions. Peribiophoty makes its propositions about academic thinking through embodied presence and rhythmic juxtapositions of gesture, things, place, text on screen and voice. It evokes the narrative pasts and selves of the project’s literature, history, and digital games scholars as substantively entangled with their ongoing research programs and demonstrates that their academic research is necessarily an embodied and embedded practice.

The affective atmosphere approach to filmmaking emerged from a practice-as-research project entitled Affective Cinema, which seeks to explore the unique expressive potential of film by offsetting its function as a vehicle for coherent communication of narrative and drama. Affective atmosphere as a production approach is about the focused and present becoming with reality that is not interrupted by separation between periods of filming and not filming. The approach instead complicates the separation between actuality and pro-filmic reality, and it equally complicates the separation between the habitual effect of the self and the representation of a fictional character. Affective atmosphere is about the sustained embodied presence of performers within the atmospheric conditions of the film set, which form the atmosphere of the resulting moving image. The approach is informed by the philosophical concepts of atmosphere, Merleau-Ponty’s flesh and Deleuze’s affect. The underlying practice-as-research seeks to understand what atmosphere is and what audio-visual expression it can lead to on film; this understanding then informs practical exploration of and experimentation with film drama and aesthetics. 

Taking difference seriously is a key anthropological aim. Recent debates in anthropology surrounding the ‘Ontological Turn’ have brought to the forefront the need to recognise the extent of epistemological colonialism in anthropological accounts. Proponents of the Ontological Turn have suggested that to take difference seriously anthropologists should engage in recursive anthropology: enabling the concepts they encounter through fieldwork to reconfigure anthropological concepts. Where the OT stumbles is in failing to recognise that it is the entire orthopraxy of anthropology that needs to recursively be reconfigured when encountering difference. Herein we offer an experiment in allowing the way of knowing/being of laboratory theatre to affect anthropological orthopraxy, in this case a conference presentation. We argue that opening up the entire craft of anthropology to difference through collaborative processes offers a path towards decolonising anthropology and a method of enquiry that enables processual and ecological attention. The experiment we present aims towards developing a regenerative form of anthropology, attentive to histories of exclusionary relations of power of all sorts.

In January 2020, I spoke with Lucy-Lou Marino, Gold Ray Martin, and Todd Roosevelt Martin about their experiences as performers in “As deep as I could remember, as far as I could see”, a performance by Swedish-Palestinian artist Tarik Kiswanson for Performa 19 Biennial (New York, November 2019).The interview was conducted through a card game to encourage them to think, talk about, and reenact their participation in the performance.From the recordings of this “performative interview,” this video-article creates a fictional dialogue between the children performers, the artist, and the Martiniquan writer, poet, and philosopher Édouard Glissant, whose “Poetique de la Relation” is a major influence on Kiswanson’s artistic work.Immigration, exile, relation, poetry, identity, and language emerge from the crossing of voices, images, and writings captured in New York City at different times and contexts.

This video article expands upon the Poetics of Relations, the embodied research of VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes), which informs their performance-based filmmaking theory and practice. Since 2010, the artist duo inquires into the pillars that constitute the cross-contamination of the two art forms of time-based live art and filmmaking. Their films have been produced geo-psychologically in a variety of locations around the world: from the remote regions of Chilean Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego to the Antarctica; from socio-cultural areas of conflict like Kashmir and North-West India to the volcanic island of Formentera; and during a month-long performance walk through Germany, Poland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Each of the films focuses upon a particular research and artistic subject. In this video article, their film projects are taken under the pinhole to look into what could constitute a manifesto of sorts in which the embodied research process identifies the essentials constituents of their practice, and elaborates on the integration of filming, story, time, space, character, action, objects, text, sound, effects, atmosphere, production and editing.

The craftsperson’s workshop, the academic workshop – how comparable are they? Historically, craft workshops have been sites of sustained cooperation, imbued with elaborate social rituals and hierarchies, and are considered places of experimentation. Through close engagement with materials, tools, places, and other bodies, the body itself is acknowledged as a ‘learning’ and ‘knowing’ entity (Sennett 2008). Academic workshops, similarly, have rituals and hierarchies, and aspire to be experimental venues. Framed as cerebral affairs, however, their embodied dimension is far subtler and easier to overlook. This video essay focuses on an academic workshop that took place in Maastricht, in the Netherlands, in July 2018. The workshop focused on teaching and learning, particularly attending to how learning is related to the environment in which we learn, how materials and sensorality influences the development of embodied skills, and how technologies and global contexts shape learning. Over four days, 40 participants – all academics or practitioners – ran or participated in panel discussions, movement and object exercises, practical workshops, and a public event which delved into this topic, exploring how it related to their academic work. The main venue choice was very specific – a hotel school completely staffed by hospitality students. We learned alongside them. It was, in some sense, a skillshare workshop. We took seriously the assertion that making and performing are also acts of thinking, and that meaning is created and expressed in multiple modes (Kress 2010, Brown and Banks 2014, Kullman 2014); the workshop was inherently interactive, often using experiments and exercises to structure dialogue in creative ways, and involved contributions from makers and other practitioners. This video essay uses closely-observed insights which emerged from the video of the event, to consider what this workshop on learning and embodiment offers to thinking about the nature of the academic workshop more broadly, and its potential relationship to the kinds of craft workshops Sennett describes. It speaks in conversation with literature which recognises a relationship between bodies, environments, and materials in knowing about the world (eg. Pink 2017, Lave 2019, Ingold 2013) also drawing on literature which explores the nature of how we gather (Parker 2019). It adds new insights through exploring three themes from the small group workshops that aren’t always prominent in the literature – that are perhaps difficult to explicate in words – framing the workshop as a place of learning and apprenticeship: fumbling, traces of places, and the tactile-digital. Through reference to these themes, the videos link academic experimentation and embodied learning. And while these themes all emerge in the literature above, the video component reveals the extent to which we found them to be entangled – bodies with places, with materials, with digital landscapes. This palimpsest of interactions, and how they are inter-related, is difficult to recognise in a written treatment.

This video article is based on a recorded return, in 2018, to the site of a performance for camera repeated weekly on Harakka Island in Helsinki during the year of the goat (2003–2004) as well as for a day and night during Easter that year. The video installations made fourteen years earlier are inserted in miniature format within the recent recording, complemented by journal entries from the day and night. The voice-over text discusses concerns relevant at the time of recording the performances and displaying the installations for the first time, such as the question what is repeated, what stays the same. It uses these works to exemplify one possible understanding of Karen Barad’s notion agential cut.

This video article presents an interdisciplinary approach dealing with the reconstruction of the lost embodied knowledge of wearers of late medieval harnesses. Our research is based on inquiries surrounding material culture (arms and armours and the relevant clothing), as well as studies of the technical literature known as fight books. The hypotheses drawn from these are then compared to results obtained from experiencing and experimenting modern-day enactments of gestures while wearing an accurate replica of a harness. Once the difference between experiencing and experimenting is explained, we outline and discuss selected results from our research processes.