Scene - 1-2: The Art of Making: Methods for Research, Dec 2023

As the world experiences the end of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown era, I have been conducting a project that investigates the function and meaning of the creative making process. Using the steps to making as the research focus, I ask: why does designing and crafting feel and function like a change-making ritual, more than a routine? What evidence of the metamorphic energy of making lies within each finished creation? Through a review of other scholars’ work, from fields including ritual study, psychology, art and pedagogy, I began to understand the process of creation, and how it can promote positive transformation. Most important of all is the transformation of materials, ideas and inspiration into millinery. To begin, I found that the art of creative research propels the maker into a liminal stew of ideas and actions, where only the forces for and against the act of making are evident. The choices of materials and applications gather increasingly on the studio table, and the question of the meaning behind the process grows curiously deeper…

My artistic practice and research explore automatic processes used throughout time that develop conceptual and physical aptitude in the performer; to transcend the status quo and experience alternative versions of embodied reality. In homage to Elvis Presley and the spirit of Rock and Roll, I define automatism as a process formulated as Automatic Corporeal Gesture in a Flash (ACG) where I work to make art without fear from an inspirational sensation in my body. ACG is inspired, authentic action that I do in a creative act through some kind of plan or set of parameters to get a material result; it is automatic action through diffraction in an apparatus, to produce material with qualitative data that can be considered for its meaning after the performance. Like having a conversation with someone, this approach helps me to understand things as they are, learning about their qualities. In ACG I combine my vibration with the vibration of what inspires me. It is a relational act of co-agential meaning making. It is a performance process that uses perception and action intrepidly while in an apparatus to maintain corporeal balance, integrity and momentum during an event. Practising ACG changes qualities in material, which changes the way meaning is made from it. These changes are always particular to each event. Our senses are physical and extra-sensory. My imagination contains qualitative, empirical data. I am using my corporeal senses to perceive my imagination’s inspiration, as I would also use my other senses and their correlating extra-sensory capabilities to perceive the material world around me. The meditative groove of my ACG is a trance dance. Trance is maintaining the entrainment of one’s body to a frequency which focuses perceptive consciousness. How a piece is created carries discursive information. Qualities of the movement of the body and the marks it makes speaks about our corporeal condition as well as speaking of its perception of qualities through/of itself and its local and extra-local environments. I use ACG to learn about the qualities that experience has had in my body, and this knowledge increases my ability to be more responsible and accountable as a receiver and transmitter of discourse, which is the function of my relationality. ACG helps me to access my full body, and it allows me to coordinate and integrate all my other senses and their correlating extra aspects into my creative action. ACG is what keeps sparking the dynamic process in which I realize my creative potential, and where I can expand my abilities to perceive more of the qualities of life.

This article discusses the intersections of art-making and research enquiry, focusing on methods, materiality and intentionality. In response to the request to contribute to an archive of creative methodological processes, the author examines a methodology he is developing for co-creating artistic acoustic ecologies with the Great Lakes. It raises questions about the role of practice-based research in generating new forms of enquiry and systems of knowledge while examining the barriers to achieving legitimacy for artistic practices within the research landscape. The article explores ethical, technological and artistic considerations within the context of the author’s auto-ethnographic lens of an artist working in an era that demands verbalization as a primary articulation of knowledge and cultural expression. The author, a practising visual artist, musician and Ph.D. student in the research-creation-based Media and Design Innovation programme at Toronto Metropolitan University, discusses the need for concrete examples of how artistic research methods are effective.

Art practice has an unusual history inside the university sector. Often originating from specialized academies, as disciplines they usually began life through a focus on practical work. This gave rise to small institutions that have been subsumed into larger ones, becoming colleges or schools within universities rather than continuing their independent lives. The advantages of this are clear: structural, financial and cultural opportunities that come with the status of university subjects. What this article argues is that there has been a considerable price to pay in being so accommodated. Creative practice subjects in a qualifications framework, and to some extent in exercises like the Research Excellence Framework, have been required to adopt intellectual enquiry processes in order to burnish their claims to knowledge. Mostly, these come from the humanities. This article examines the impact of this on creative practice, on acceptance of the research elements of it and on distinguishing the difference between arts-based enquiry and humanities models of interpretation and analysis. That these are increasingly incompatible requires rethinking of the relationship between arts and humanities that is so taken for granted.

The relationship between the written and artistic work in practice-based Ph.D. dissertations is often ambiguous, leaving the student to languish as they navigate ill-defined expectations tied to a daunting ideal of ‘scholarly writing’ they feel pressured to meet, uncertain about its purpose in relation to their artistic practice. This ambiguity about the place of writing in practice-based Ph.D. programmes has been at the forefront of debates in the European Union’s Bologna Process. In this article, Álvarez investigates the problem writing presents in the context of doctoral programmes in which creative practice is the cornerstone of the thesis project. Probing expectations that the written portion of the dissertation serve an exegetical function that explains the significance of the work of art, Álvarez examines the ways in which written requirements in practice-based Ph.D. programmes trouble foundational premises of art-making in relation to knowledge-making and offers a way of framing writing that collapses the hierarchy being writing and art-making.

Review of: 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, Marina Abramović (dir.) (2023) English National Opera, 8 November 2023

Review of: The Red Shoes, M. Powell and E. Pressburger (dirs) (2023), 75th Anniversary Release, UK: Archers BFI Southbank, London, 29 November 2023

The Red Shoes: Behind the Mirror, Exhibition at the BFI Southbank, 10 November 2023–7 January 2024