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NODE: No. 2 – Rhythmic Nexus: the Felt Togetherness of Movement and Thought
edited by Stamatia Portonova
TANGENT: No. 2 – Rhythmic Nexus: the Felt Togetherness of Movement and Thought
edited by Natasha Prévost and Bianca Scliar
Web Design and Art Direction by Leslie Plumb
Excerpt from the Introduction:
Affective Commotion” (Inflexions n.1), Alanna Thain defines inflection as “the moment of sensible changing prior to a determined destination, a ‘transformative tendency’ ” which is also “a form of the gaze, one attuned to the movement of modulation” (Thain, 2008: 11). As the genetic element of an incipient curvature, an inflection is always doubled by a tendency or an attentiveness of the eye predisposing itself to follow the transformative curve. Inflexions, a journal of research-creation, shares this task of fostering and following the movement of modulation across different creative fields, at the same time “generating doubled visions of the world that may (…) also induce contagious mutations” (2008: 11). Contagiously affected and affective, perception itself is revealed as a source of new inflections and of new worlds, every research activity always implying in its rigorous methodologies an accentuated propensity towards the ‘new’. The challenging goal of research-creation is thus identified by Thain with the playful and disquieting vertigo of minding and then travelling along the dashed gap between the two terms. Playful, because every research conceived as an attention for singularity requires an exploration of the creativity of the in-between and the ‘verge’; disquieting, because it requests us to expand and play with that “moment of uncertainty and potential,” to hold to its unknown forces long enough for a non-exhaustive but precise form of expression to emerge. In order to accomplish this singular task and be able to sustain the force of emerging novelty, the in-between dash as a marker of semantic delay between the two moments of research-creation needs to be differentially repeated, calling forth the addition of a further term and a further conjunctive relation: research – creation – (as) collaboration: every research is creation is collaboration (and vice versa). Being already implied by the expanded gap between the activities and attitudes of research and creation, the relational nature of collaboration appears as the differential element, the crucial condition for the taking place of compositional experimentations of all kinds. Paraphrasing this argument through Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical vocabulary, we can define collaboration as the creation of a nexus, a ‘togetherness’ of occasions of experience, every actual entity being in its turn the temporary singular ‘encapsulation’ of many different and diverging potentials. Re-animating an expression that not only moves between the essays in Inflexions n.1, but also constitutes a generative conceptual momentum for the works presented here, we can understand collaboration through the words of Whitehead, as “the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and (…) the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves. The many become one, and are increased by one” (Whitehead quoted in Thain, 2008: 2). Collaboration is that participation of elements, that co-working of conjuncted and disjuncted parts that allows the formation of doubled, or multiple, visions of the world; a pluralistic sensitivity for the myriad unnoticed events that are always happening ‘within’, ‘without’ and ‘with’ us. (continue reading introduction here)
