Many thanks to Misha, Steve and Kelena for finishing out the last week of Contextualizing Making Sense. I think all three of your posts brought out the incredibly delicate balance that cross-disciplinary collaboration requires. In any collaboration, given a set of participants, each one must bring his\ her own expertise and engaged critical voice to the process.
In merging our practical and theoretical interests, Tim and I have collaborated in both creative and curatorial endeavors each bringing a different perspective to our joint ventures. While I tend to envision the practical as an artist, Tim's work as a writer and theoretician brings to the mix a more theoretical voice. What this merger allows for is a relational space where theory and practice conjoin at times and at others resist. *As artist, writer, curator, teachers our practices often originate in the seeds of instinct, whim, and hunch and then proceed through play and work via research, reading, discussion, investigation, often ending up in reflective critical analysis only to return to the fold of our instincts again. It is our collective observation that the process of “Making Sense” enfolds pleats of uneasiness, questioning, and restlessness. The destabilization of this process incites and excites us to flow through the momentum and energy at certain junctures NOT Making Sense that push us through the flow of productive processes.* ** * Our collaborative work has long been influenced by broad reflection on matters of performativity especially as it relates to politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, memory and fantasy, as well as the broader social paradigms of technology, culture, and art. What’s been exciting to both of us to realize how each of our various interdisciplinary interfaces combining practice and theory has led us to do such projects as moderators of -empyre soft-skinned space. * This month on empyre, In examining the collective notion of Sense, our mission was to provide an opportunity where the virtual space of empyre and the real spaces of the Pompidou, Paris and the participants of the Making Sense Colloquium would collectively consider the possibilities of the act of making sense through an inclusive understanding and the broader notion/translation making sensorium a space where practice and theory converge as performance and space (both virtual and real). Through this inclusive reflection that was simultaneously practical and theoretical we attempted to collectively move between making and thinking art and philosophy. We thank all of our guests who participated in our discussion this month for their generosity in sharing their ideas. This morning as we close our discussion we are writing from Berkeley, California where we have been enjoying a visit with Ashley Ferro-Murray. We travelled to the West coast to see her collaborative performance with CNMAT musicians, David Coll and Rama Godfried who worked with six performers to create a relational space where movement and sound, real-time interaction via sensors with networked information made Noisense. The mediatized space of Noisesense, enabled a sensorium of spectacle, sound, movement, and theoretical thought that presented to the audience spaces where critical thought and engagement could network out from the performance. Informed and carefully crafted collaborations will generate the fruit of theoretical thinking and from our point of view that is when these sorts of experiments do lend themselves to successful marriages of practice and theory. With that both Tim and I sign off for the month and welcome Melinda Rackam who will introduce the November discussion on empyre. Our apologies to her in closing a bit late. We look forward to her upcoming discussion. Renate and Tim
_______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
