Abstract
In a entangled collective assemblage, we create and invent data, we perform the data, and we become data through our engagement in materialities/charcoals/movements/rhythms/sounds . . . We challenge written language, by bodily surfacing haptic technology that interfaces through vibrations and sensations in with us/them/you. Our experimentation invites to think and do research differently by unfolding the conditions of what is not yet thought of to come in research.
Like all other creatures human being do not exist on the “other” side of materiality but swim in an ocean of materials.
recording . . . #starting in the middle
Drawing is fundamental to being human—as fundamental as are walking and talking. For whenever we walk or talk we gesture with our bodies, and insofar these gestures leave traces or trails, on the ground or some other surface, lines have been, or are being, drawn. (Ingold, 2011, p. 177)
Lines as data, drawing as data, making and gesturing as data, creating data, and data that create . . . not synchronized swimming. Our liminal making in empty space (Brook, 1968) becomes visible in lines drawn by walking, touching, breathing, acting, and image-making with digital devises.
We are in many artistic making processes exploring the possibilities/affordances of charcoal and dust on paper and body. We create and invent data, we perform and explore data, and we become data through our engagement in materials and the materiality in the event. We are in the middle . . . affectionate and devoting crossing lines and borders inventing new artistic methodologies in early childhood education to become. This hypermodal assemblage is a contribution to these ongoing processes.
recording . . . #assemblage
hypermodal # (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2eTwSAq8JU for the film)
Going beyond visual observations not recording the presence as linear and simple, not giving the visual eye dominance our/hers aspiration for the not yet there is coming alive . . .
We’re seeing, in the form of the object, the potential our body holds to walk around, take another look, extend a hand and touch . . . The potential we see in the object is a way our body has of being able to relate to the part of the world it happens to find itself in at this particular life’s moment. What we abstractly see when we directly and immediately see an object is lived relation—a life dynamic. (Massumi, 2008, p. 4)
recording . . . #hypermodalities as data/inventions
Drawing upon the professional practices of educators, artists, and researchers, it entangles and performs what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as a rhizome, an assemblage of objects, ideas, and structures that move in dynamic motion performing waves of intensities that create new understandings. A/r/tography transforms the traditional relationship between theory and practice by recognizing the movement found within a rhizome. (Irwin, 2013)
I/them are becoming a/r/tography through our artistic inventions, experiments, image-making, filming, theorizing, discussions, and hyper-entangling. Their experiment and messiness is frustrating her, maybe it’s the rhizomatic that creates discomfort? Perhaps it’s all about the possible possibilities, the meshwork, the lines, and the mutating data material that are expanding the spacetimematterings (Barad, 2007). Digging zigzagging deepwider it becomes messier . . . everything is entangling . . . doing art affects . . . doing research affects . . . moving risky methodologies to come . . .
In hypermedia framings, we connect you/her/all to explore possible multimodal perspectives on remembering, affects, actions, and events. Our creative living and inventing actions with material and materiality are not yet here. In co-operative collective writings, images and film montage fold and unfold “another occurrence” (Ledger, Ellis, & Wright, 2011, p. 164) in here and now emergences and leakings. Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, in Johnson, Milani, & Upton, 2008, p. 5) take hypermodal exploration into “semiotic modes of the linguistic (spoken and written language), the visual (image, gesture, typography and graphics) and the phonic (sound and music) . . . into new domains intra- semiotically . . . arranged and co-deployed, inter-semiotically.”
We are in our/their hypermodal experimentations with semiotics and our materials. Becoming as people to come, “mass-people, world-people, brain-people, chaos-people” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 218). For Deleuze, we are not the “origin” or agent of our thoughts and actions, but the affects produced by our thoughts and actions; in other words, we are the affects of our “ways of existing,” or what Deleuze (following Nietzsche and Foucault) also calls “styles of life” (Deleuze, 1995, pp. 91-100).
In questioning other methodologies, I/you create multiple recordings seeking thickness of interchange between all the elements of creative practice, responding to “what is on offer” . . . (Ledger et al., 2011, p. 165). Our experimentalism challenges the appearance of data (Reinertsen & Otterstad, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013). Hers ontology goes beyond logics of meaning, reason, objectivity, knowledge, and truth. There might be difficulties with something given out there—still assuming binaries between body/mind, subject/object, human/material . . . data hierarchies, data categories are nevertheless evident for some . . . what might inquiry, meaning, authorship, copyright, ethics, beauty, temporal events, and relationality become?
Experimenting with the thickness of “what is on offer” (Ledger et al., 2011, p. 165) opens for affectively penetrating all the conditions and connections in our hypermodal data/assemblage, by unfolding the conditions under which something new, “as yet unthought-of arises” (Rajchman, 2000, in St. Pierre, 2013, p. 225). An experimental practice can be considered as an emergent assemblage resisting specific ways of doing art/istic hypermodal inventions/connections to the world.
Appearance of data, data, data . . . dataswarming, massdataing, datamining, databombing, dataswimming, datacrushing . . . data as illusions, a proliferation of surfaces, smell of things, pulse and rhythms, the scenery, gaze in the air . . . the bodily movements through the space, the hand, art-creating, thinking processes not yet there . . . we are entangling excitements, doubts, and wonderings . . .
Our experimentalism/assemblage might have many names . . . scratched as nomadic empiricism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987)
. . . we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau. (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987, p. 22)
Recording . . . #materials/textures/ haptic
Ingold (2007) encourages to “take materials seriously, since it is from them everything is made . . . to describe the properties of materials is to tell stories of what happens to them as they mix, flow and mutate” (p. 14). Through document/art/ary intra-action with charcoal, ash, paper, and bodies, data appear in different invention/stratums in spacetimematterings (Barad, 2007).
Lines as traces from bodily intra-action may appear as textures on the surface and,
. . . the surface are where radiant energy is reflected or absorbed, where vibrations are passed to the medium, where vaporization or diffusion into medium occur, and what our bodies come up against in touch. So far as perception is concerned, surfaces are therefore “where most of the action is.” (Gibson, 1973, in Ingold, 2007, p. 5)
The surface separate things are interfaces between materials. The paper surface is merging with charcoal. The skin, our body-surface is entangling with charcoal, and the color of our skin is in different shades of gray.
Haptic engagement is close range and hands on. It is the engagement of a mindful body at work with materials and with the land, “sewing itself in” to the textures of the world along the pathways of sensory involvement. (Ingold, 2011, p. 252)
By walking drawings, their bodies are close to the material and materializes, we are becoming the material . . . creating with my/our hands and feet she is setting print marks in dust. This is actually traces of grease from my/our skin that fixes ashes to paper surface. Fragments of our bodies are left in the drawings, merging in to surfaces. Dust from charcoal is absorbing skin and for a while, the dust is a part of my/our body surfaces . . . haptic drawing . . . haptic data . . .
Haptic images and haptic cinema affects, . . . how it is possible to intra-connect sensations of textures and tactility in film. In haptic visualities, “the eyes themselves functions like organ of touch” (Marks, 2000, p. 162). Haptic visualities are connecting senses of touch and bodily movements with materials, textures, and the memory of skin, haptic memory, memory-data arises and escapes . . .
recording . . . # affect/databecoming
Her/their/mystory/(Reinertsen, 2013) our bodies are drifting across strata, both actual and virtual. When is memories of affect becoming our forces making the hypermodal data material possible and alive? The sensing body occupies affective our assemblage. Manning (2013) is inspiringly saying,
A looking becomes a touching, a feeling becomes a hearing. But not on the skin of the body. Across strata, both concrete and abstract, that constitute an assemblage. This assemblage is a sensing body in movement, a body-world that is always tending, attending to the world. (p. 2)
“. . . here is a shift between looking at and collecting data on to being in and engaging in ways of knowing about the worlds and actions of other people” (Pink, 2011, p. 27). Tending and appearing to the world is affects. Affect is that which is felt before it is thought; the visceral impact on the body—before it is given subjective or emotive meaning (Hickey-Moody, 2013; Pedwell & Whitehead, 2012). Affect is, hence, very different from emotion: It is an a-subjective bodily response to an encounter (Massumi, 2002). Emotion comes later, as a classifying or stratifying of affect (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Thrift, 2010). By thinking/feeling data (Manning, 2009; Massumi, 2008) and what is on offer (Ledger et al., 2011), bodies and affects are connecting through love as sensations of spontaneities and intensities, and desire is working in her body (Otterstad, 2013).
Body as; “an interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected by more and more elements” (Latour, 2004, p. 6).
Our/their sensory capacity of the body affect is turning on. When she/I encounter smelling, touching, and scraping the charcoal’s surface bring me back to my mother’s cellar, the lime and charcoal (white and black) mixing also symbolizing life and death. Articulation isn’t necessary. Mystory/body is responding to the encounter before I know what to say. Affects are in motion. Meeting the sound of scraping charcoal on paper makes my body hair rise as an uncomfortable affect and I try to move my hearing. “Pain shifts the texture of a movement. It makes the quality of the movement felt: a particular intensity in the durational attitude of the movement has differentiated itself” (Manning, 2009, p. 46).
Recording . . . #not the end
Our worldly hypermodal inventions include so many more the one.
what is out there?
who are we?
Jodi and Teri’s invitation texts for this special issue produce actions and encourage us/their thinking in multiple lines. American and Norwegian spacetimematterings for inventions become instant events again and again.
Always more than one (Manning, 2013). We are three bodies mutating to five, Jodi and Teri (editors), and seven, with William and Emil (film co-creators)—ethics and trust to come. Entangling photos, film-cuts, pulses, bodies, joy, and laughter, taken from many devises, spontaneously from angles professionals filmmakers might have thought otherwise . . . open for something not yet thought of. Different scenes are making producing a film to come—making multimodal actions alive . . . Entanglements intertwine our/her/‘method assemblage’ (Law, 2004, p. 144). Assemblages have “uneven topographies” and the multimodal possesses is similar to emergent properties (Bennett, 2010, p. 24). These properties create dynamics and flows of affect, figurate, and reconfigurate bodies over and over again.
Doing hypermodal assemblage as we do with our text, document/art/ary, our blog and pictures on Instagram is a matter of trust and devotion to do methodology interventions across disciplines and professions, space and time. 3 + 2 + 2 + many = infinite amounts of perceptions of realities and multiple stratums of data. Data are growing as mutating virus that spreads in air and fluid spaces. These are affordances in hyper-realities in the (actual and) virtual world we are living. Data transformed from charcoal, breath, skin, and movement to pixels turn into . . . materiality given by code (Watz, 2010). From solid materials to immaterial materiality in cyberspace? Or surprisingly appearance of materials in a never ending ongoing material flow . . . “Materials always and inevitably win out over materiality in the long term” (Ingold, 2007, p. 10).
Post comments to http://anythingbutsynchronizedswimming.wordpress.com/or tag your picture on Instagram with #anythingbutsynchronizedswimming . . . and add stratums of data to bodily experiences with artistic movements and inventions with materials and co-invent hyper-data.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to William Jobling and Emil Trier for artistic entanglements in making the film.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received financial support from Faculty of Education and International Studies, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway.