View Issue No.1 via Inflexions.org
NODE: No. 1- How is Research-Creation?
edited by Alanna Thain
TANGENTS: No. 1 – edited by Christoph Brunner and Natasha Prevost
How /Now
At the start of his essay in this issue, “Clone your technics: Research-creation, radical empiricism and the constraints of models” Andrew Murphie makes a claim for the ‘how’ of research-creation: “Although ‘research-creation’ often feels dramatically experimental – and is genuinely exciting – it is not unusual. Not only is all research research-creation but research-creation is a common cultural condition, even if traditional institutions sometimes pretend otherwise.” Minding the gap of research-creation involves attention to the ongoing everydayness of the singular. The brief dash that separates the two terms might leave one feeling breathless—how to move from one to the other, from the pedestrian rigor of research to the dramatic gesture of creation? Such a movement entails more than words—here, in the “Nodes” section of Inflexions, these collected essays explore the potential of language not as only as expressive medium but as one element of a composition of forces, exploiting linguistic overtones that strive for a precision of feeling without making claim to exhaustive meaning. In the very phrase research-creation, the dash is deployed to delay and extend meaning, to render language strangely visible or to convey a strange mouthfeel (how do we speak such punctuations?) in its sensational elements. Research-creation animates the strangeness in the everyday by reminding us of a lived reality of relation too often obscured by a retroactive distancing between mind/ body, self/ other, subject/ object, artist/ artwork, discovery/ invention. In making the subject of our first issue “How is Research-Creation?” we at Inflexions not only want to call attention to the already creative work of writing, thinking and producing concepts, but at the same time, reactivate the rigorous mystery of research as what Deleuze terms a ‘dark precursor’ rather than simply a searchlight in an archive, to imagine the synthetic work of research as making space for the new.2 Research implies an attentive posture, an openness to what is already happening, an expanded perception of what we are already participating in. Priority falls not onto one term or another in the assemblage of research-creation, but to the ‘creative inbetween’. (continue reading introduction here)
