Experiments and Intensities
New hybrid gallery / book series from Winchester University Press
Curator-General / Series Editor Yvon Bonenfant
About Experiments and Intensities
Performance as Research across disciplines
Q. What is the Experiments and Intensities series?
A new hybrid series of innovative artist-style publications, bringing together elements of the curated exhibition/performance series, the academic journal, the Francophone tradition of the cahier and the artist’s book to engage with performance as research in the languages of art. Winchester University Press will be publishing volumes/numbers of this series to a central electronic platform as e-books with full ISBN. Periodically, physical objects may be published in unusual (artist-book) style formats, when artistically appropriate to the theme of the volume.
Q. Why do it? What is the mission statement for the series?
1. First context: ART, PERFORMANCE, PRACTICE, EXPERIMENTALISM
As we spiral further into the 21st century, in the industrial and post-industrial worlds, our lives are ever more saturated with technologically mediated performances. Many performing artists continue to explore liveness and hybrid live/mediated artistic output; other rebel against electronic mediation; others do both.
Humans construct themselves performances in entirely new ways, using new tools, as well as old ones: social networking, internet presences, avatars, surgeries. In this context, questions of liveness, mediation and experimentalism transform quickly. How can performance intend to push, expand, explore, re-imagine, awaken cultural dialogue now? What are the urgencies underpinning practices that try to experiment with form, content, working methods, and audience reception strategies across varied territories? What about performed art as research matters?
Stanyek and Piekut use the term ‘rhizophonia’ to describe the sound world most of us now inhabit – a world where we are constantly stringing together bits of sonic experience, emanating from the ‘live’ and the ‘recorded/mediated’ worlds, a world we navigate in new ways. Extending this label into other sensory spheres, we are certainly now living in a rhizovisual world, and heading quickly toward the rhizokinaesthetic and rhizotactile, within which fragments of live (fleshly) and technologically mediated experience are knitted together inside us by our own sense of voyage across territories of experience. This sensory experience ‘comes at us’ in new ways due to the ways fragments of experience laterally recombine in social networking technologies, internet-based experience, and the saturation of the world with technological interfaces. Yet living, felt bodies are still with us.
Alongside, and differing from, the notion of being cutting edge and ‘avant-garde’ – a positioning of work in the context of the new and innovative idea or product or concept, which is a profoundly modern/capitalist approach to valuing that work – is the space of artistic experiment: trying ‘other’ stuff out, negotiating other pathways, challenging precepts and assumptions to engage in dialogue in other ways. What that ‘other’ stuff is depends on cultural and social and aesthetic context, artistic intention, resources, space and time. This is a place where ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are impossible to measure, but where the intrigue of engaging with performed art that tries something is alive and vital.
2. Second context: THE ACADEMIC WORLD/(RE-)SEARCH
The last decade has seen a flurry of interest and debate around Performance-as-Research, Practice-Led Research, Artistic Research, Research-Creation, Artistic Science, and other terms that attempt to define advanced-level artistic experiment penetrating and informing developments in academia. Across varied national territories, from the Nordic countries to Australia, from Switzerland to Canada, from the UK to South Africa, conservatories, universities and art schools are increasingly attempting to create spaces where artists can engage with ideas that push the boundaries of artistic doing and academic thinking in ways that neither the art industry nor traditional academia achieve alone. Sometimes these movements have borrowed from the most conservative elements of traditional ‘hard’ science, or have tried to adapt more traditional methodological approaches to artistic experiment. In other cases, the work done under these labels tries to profoundly question the ways that we think we think, the ways we think we perceive, the ways we think we feel, the ways we feel we feel, and the bodies of values we might call aesthetic and social. They also engage with the ephemerality, the impossibility, the challenge art poses to our ‘logical’ ways of knowing.
However, there are still very few spaces within which communities of interest can engage with performance in the language of artistic metaphor within a research/experimentation context. Most of the ‘scholarship’ around practice as research so far has consisted of attempts to interrogate or design methodologies, attempts to define the field, and surveys of how the field has been evolving. We often rely on traditional strategies to articulate the results of artistic experiment through attempts to engage with writing forms that are best valued by the world of academia.
The notions of ‘rigor’, peer review, and ultimately, whether and how art work can be valued as legitimate research continually haunt this process. Sometimes they undermine it. Sometimes they enrich it. We think it is time to move on.
3. Mission
The mission of the series ‘Experiments and Intensities’ is thus to straddle the above worlds in ways that explore what performed art and the academic context might be able to do for one another, for the varied communities of audience for the artwork, as well as for students that engage with each of these, for society, for aesthetic value systems, and for social value systems and cultures, in ways that focus on the languages of art.
Independent artists of performed art, artists working in the academic context, and academic-artists might all wish to submit work to these publications in order to create fruitful dialogue that has significance for multiple communities of interest.
We want the series to explore how performed art is sometimes difficult, impossible, charming, rewarding, disturbing, exciting, counter-cultural, reifying of culture, intercultural, beautiful, ugly, amusing, nasty, chewy, repugnant, activist, inarticulate, blunt, dopey, oversimplistic, cheap, expensive, lo-fi, hi-fi, highly polished, rough, slick, dirty, clean, antiseptic, moving, depressing, uplifting, and hope-inducing, and above all how art often yokes together opposites – addressing the preceding registers and more in ways that logic just can’t explain, but which interrogate culture and value systems through the creation of sensual and not just intellectual personal experience.
We are interested in how we can research through/with/because of performed art, and articulate the results of this research through metaphor, felt experience, and intellect. We want to engage with artistic experiments at an advanced level of sophistication, in all of artistic sophistication’s manifest forms: ranging from the sophistication of selective simplicity to the sophistication of complexities.
While writing will be a part of many of the volumes of this series, ‘readers’/viewers/listeners, indeed, the audience for the work will encounter artistic-style outputs first, rather than commentary, analysis, or verbal theorization. Plenty of fora already exist within which theorization comes first. Careful design of the audience interface will mean that poetics come before explanation/ocularcentric analysis. When writing forms a part of a publication, the authors will be encouraged to write in ‘other’ ways, borrowing freely from the tradition of experimentalist writing or inventing other ways of writing within the formats provided. In this way, we also hope to be of as much interest to audiences wanting to engage with artistic metaphor as those doing research.
Q. What will your approach be to rigor and selection given that this series straddles art and academic publication?
In performed art-as-research, questions are constantly raised by the academic world about scholarly ‘rigor’, peer-review, etc. Simultaneously, the artistic world wonders if ‘academic’ works are actually any ‘good’ as art. We respond to those concerns as follows. Each volume of this series will be curated-edited by two or more collaborators with an interest in and expertise in the field, be that emanating from the academic or the professional artistic sphere. As works are submitted for review and potential inclusion in the volume, these issue curators will consult with appropriate members of our curatorial-editorial advisory board to help judge whether the work belongs in the given volume and engages with sophistication. This sophistication must challenge in an advanced way. Submitters of work might be asked to modify, realign, etc their submissions in order for these to be cohesive enough and challenging enough for audiences, or their submissions might be out and out rejected. The results will not be identical to the results of either normal curation processes (usually in the hands of one charismatic expert) or academic peer-review processes, but will borrow from both to provide checks, balances, arguments and their resolution through multiple inputs. We hope that with each subsequent volume, the collections will interrogate the very notion of rigor and raise difficult questions about what rigor means in the world of performed art today, in the age of selective, idiosyncratic, and sometimes even decaying virtuosities and with a resurgence of indiscipline.
Q. What do you mean by publishing?
The Experiments and Intensities series acknowledges, like many other academic and artistic publications, that publishing is transforming, and will continue to transform dramatically, in the next years. The use of an electronic platform for our first editions acknowledges this. We wish to try to engage other audiences than standard academic publication, and are taking advantage of electronic platforms to do this. At the same time, we wish to engage with the question of ‘Why have paper books/tangible published objects’ today? We are seeking funding for future editions of artist-book style publication in order to respond to this challenge from an artistic perspective.
Q. Can I propose a curated-edited collection of a physical artist's book?
Yes, for more information or to propose a thematic volume, contact series curator-editor Yvon Bonenfant at yvon.bonenfant@winchester.ac.uk
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