Conduits for transformation: Spatializing the essay, towards an embodied pensiveness

This article traces a connection between the literary essay and the audio-visual installation in order to consider how a spatialization of the essay can create the conditions for affective experience. The composition of the audio-visual installation can condition an environment for an embodied pensiveness where the moving image and sound act as conduits towards affective transformation. I discuss essayistic architectures in relation to poetic structures and ways in which both, through their play of associations, can access spaces where language cannot articulate fully. I use as a case study my audio-visual installation, Straying, to discuss how this approach was particularly useful in exploring the relationship between body and environment, the making and unmaking of the self in relation to the places we inhabit. The space of the installation is a transformative and transformational space, where the audience and work make and unmake one another through meandering of thought/body instigated by the dynamics between image, screen, space and sound.