Touching Outward : Art-Making at the Seam Where Care Meets Risk

Touching Outward; Art-making at the seam where care meets risk What it is to touch? If we think with, and take seriously a fluid ontology, can we recognise embodiment itself as fluid? Drenched with unknowing and drenched with sensation and made possible by movement, vibration and magnetism. This video article engages with the potentiality for research in marine sustainability to develop through poetic logics, visual, filmic, relational art practices that bring diverse communities into conversation, to ask; “How might we engage artistic processes to better understand actual and perceived risks to marine sustainability and facilitate community engagement, beyond the circulation of scientific publication? Touching Outward; Art-making at the seam where care meets risk presents two artistic maps, iterations of a single project that explores methods for engaging diverse publics to imagine, feel, consider and care about marine-related issues of risk which impact oceans and coastlines. These artistic maps explore institutional, social and cultural factors influencing coasts and oceans in Aotearoa New Zealand. Embodiment is at the heart of these collaborative projects. We think of how embodied experience folds through imagination to create potentials for unseating convention, perspective, actuality, reproducibility, common sense. Our transdisciplinary project was developed by four artist-researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, each of us working beyond our conventional practices– a geographer, a performance maker, a visual artist, and a film maker. We are moving between philosophy, social science, pedagogy, ecology, performance, poetry, installation and film. The framework of weak theory provides a kind of permission to reach beyond the conventions of our disciplines, to make space for modes of embodied research that entangle abstract and material concepts through relational, artistic and pedagogical intentions. Throughout the process and development of this artistic research, we question where a body begins and ends, how the voice as a vibratile force touches through time and space, and how moving image as a body of textures and cuts might contribute to methods of weak theory (Wright, 2015) and transdisciplinary creative practice. 17 Longley et al. Journal of Embodied Research DOI: 10.16995/jer.34

Throughout the process and development of this artistic research, we question where a body begins and ends, how the voice as a vibratile force touches through time and space, and how moving image as a body of textures and cuts might contribute to methods of weak theory (Wright, 2015) and transdisciplinary creative practice. As authors of this article, we are all islanders, we have always lived on islands. We are used to having a view of the sea amongst daily life. To read the palette as salt-tones wash is to read everything as vibration. The weather reaching and morphing across us all. The horizon is non-binary, it bleeds its atmospheres to varying degrees.
"Matter is condensations of response-ability" (Karen Barad, 2019). We are four artist-researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, each of us working beyond our conventional practices: a geographer, a performance maker, a visual artist, and a filmmaker. We are moving between philosophy, social science, pedagogy, ecology, performance, poetry, installation and film. philosophy, social science, pedagogy, ecology, performance, poetry, installation, film.
The framework of weak theory provides a kind of permission to reach beyond the conventions of our disciplines, to make space for modes of embodied research that entangle abstract and material concepts through relational, artistic and pedagogical intentions.
Artistic methods form the core this embodied research -from our different backgrounds, we aim to employ practices that allow space for complex ideas to move in a language which is fluid, spacious, and affective. We employ poetic and visual forms in ways that aim to provoke rather than explain, to encourage those who encounter our work to form a felt relationship with it. Embodied research entwines with visceral, sensory, haptic, and spatial modes of relation. If we think with, and take seriously a fluid ontology, can we recognise embodiment itself as fluid? Drenched with unknowing and drenched with sensation and made possible by movement, vibration, and magnetism.
The wonderful thing about this body is that the fluid that makes up around 70% of it has been consistently recycled since this earth began. There's this very slow duration water cycle enabling the production of this voice, as it touches out to your ears.
In making a valid contribution to the Journal of Embodied Research, is it necessary that we feature the fleshy forms of human bodies?
Or might we think of bodies in other ways? We perceive the body of the oceans as facing multiple, complex risks. And we are bringing the embodied resources of our practices as artists and social scientists to explore these risks through the following research question: "How might we engage artistic processes to better understand actual and perceived risks to marine sustainability and facilitate community engagement, beyond the circulation of scientific publication?" How might we engage artistic processes to better understand actual and perceived risks to marine sustainability and facilitate community engagement, beyond the circulation of scientific publication? We are moving in the seam between art and science.

The Unseen
Artistic Map 2.

Every Accumulation Shifts the Music of Things
This video article presents two artistic maps, iterations of a single project exploring methods for engaging diverse publics to imagine, feel, consider and care about marine-related issues of risk which impact oceans and coastlines.
These artistic maps explore institutional, social and cultural factors influen cing coasts and oceans in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Embodiment is at the heart of these collaborative projects. We think of how embodied experience folds through imagination to create potentials for unseating convention, perspective, actuality, reproducibility, common sense.
We're focusing on how creative processes may initiate forms of engagement in social-ecological research. [06:20]

[Karen:]
Artistic mapping is a creative methodology for visualising worlds in uncon ventional ways, articulating complex social, cultural and geopolitical issues.

Cultural
Geo political (Duxbury et al. 2018) We propose that artistic mapping is a valuable tool in interdisciplinary sustainability research as it provides a means to work across diverse settings and ontologies.

Possibility
Exploring artistic and cultural mapping allows space for the imaginary -wherein the spaces between reality and possibility are made porous and interlayered.

Alternative views
We want to emphasise political and critical vitality, and to make poetic, tactile and spatial maps to chart space, time, experience, relationships, ecologies, moments and concepts.
"We might now talk about 'writing in the expanded field', a field in which writing's conventional autonomy -that is its objectivity, its truthfulness and its transparency -is in question, as writing has opened out fully into its material and conceptual contexts … in this expanded field language has weight, and it has material and visual 'freight'. It has graphic presence that also 'carries' meaning. Language can act as a form of dynamic exchange, a powerful conduit between the material and metaphysical or conceptual." (MacDonald, 2009, p. 100) Artistic interventions into the field of mapping may bring unprecedented connections between the material and the abstract, the actual and the virtual, the tangible and the intangible, the objective and the felt.
Artistic interventions into the field of mapping may bring unprecedented connections between the material and the abstract, the actual and the virtual, the tangible and the intangible, the objective and the felt.
Artist-academic Paul Carter proposes that "an important emotional landmark in any cultural mapping project should be the reenactment of strangeness, the encounter with the inexplicable that commands a new self-awareness." Maps are formed by conventions and values. Artists can rewrite these through questioning, juxtaposition, and disruption of accepted models.
Artistic maps create space for dwelling-with the concepts which they map, working with felt affect rather than accountable truth, evoking complex, interconnected relationships between ecological elements. "Maps are tools to capture the incomprehensible, unconscious or structurally "invisible" qualities of space. What they describe is the basis for new realities. As maps both disclose and re-shape what is already in experience, they give it meaning and introduce new layers of perception." "Maps are tools to capture the incomprehensible, unconscious or structurally "invisible" qualities of space. What they describe is the basis for new realities. As maps both disclose and re-shape what is already in existence, they give it meaning and introduce new layers of perception." (An Architektur with a42.org. Geography of the Fürth Departure Centre, 2007).
Our methodology also draws on weak theory as a critical frame to enable collaborative, interdisciplinary practice.

Weak Theory
Geographer Sarah Wright draws on the work of [Eve Kofosky] Sedgwick and Sylvan Tomkins to define weak theory: Where strong theory demands comprehensiveness, exclusivity and grand claims, weak theory supports partial understandings and multiplicity, and allows for both contradictions and inconsistency.
"Where strong theory demands comprehensiveness, exclusivity and grand claims, weak theory supports partial understandings and multiplicity, and allows for both contradictions and inconsistency" (Wright, 2015, p. 192 To enhance the utilisation of marine resources within environmental and biological constraints; and, to improve decision-making and the health of our seas through ecosystem-based management.
Ecosystem based management is a holistic and inclusive way to manage marine environments and the competin uses for, demands on, and ways New Zealanders value them. We are one of a tiny group of artist-researchers with a project dominated by scientists and social-sciences, engaging creative practice to stimulate critical reflection and action.

Critical reflection Action
We understand hope as a disposition that can generate feelings of possibility and seek to examine how bodies become hopeful and how hope and care are "entangled in the circulation, and displacement, of other affects and emotions." HOPE Possibility Bodies become hopeful Hope is "entangled in the circulation, and displacement, of other affects and emotions".
Hope signals the possibility that the "spatial/temporal here and now may become otherwise" (Anderson and Fenton, 2008, p. 76).
Hope signals the possibility that the "spatial/temporal here and now may become otherwise." Becoming hopeful involves an individual being attuned to the ability to affect and be affected by the emotional and affectual processes within which they are enmeshed and to imagine their futures otherwise.
as a way to avoid the pessimism and foreclosing of possibility that can come when considering environmental change We adopt this disposition as a way to avoid the pessimism and foreclosing of possibility that can come when considering environmental change from a risk perspective. Risk has been defined in multiple ways. Examples include risk as an expected value, a probability distribution, as uncertainty, and as an event. In our work, we see risk as the potential for exposure to harm and loss, and focus on how the social and cultural context and personal experiences influence how people understand and respond to risk. A core element of Gabby O'Connor's work, The Unseen, was embodied colla boration between young people, artists and scientists to make an artwork -manipulating rope, tracing spaces, moving fluidly in conversations and spaces of inquiry.

RISK
The pairs paired up, joining their rope art together.
The process of making together through shared kinesthetic practice develops space for co-created ideas.
These independent ideas are then woven into a larger whole, mapping bodies of interaction, listening and response.
The independent ideas are then woven into a larger whole, mapping bodies of interaction, listening and response.
1600 people have participated in one of 37 workshops to produce the multiple collaborative artworks that become The Unseen, an art, science and community project in Nelson, New Zealand.
The Unseen considers audience as an ecosystem. An ecosystem of com munities considering their local marine space, how it is being researched, measured and understood. And how it is changing. The collective artwork created functions as a map. A maps of our thoughts, our understanding and cooperation, of understanding our watery spaces, our interconnected ecosystems. And of hope, of imagining futures.

HOPE
Together we co-create knowledge maps, embody complex information from a wide range of subject areas delivered through story telling about our marine space.
And we start with place. A place that the participants know. Our stories are rich with knowledge and there is space to fold in everyone's experiences.
What was the coolest thing that you discovered about the marine environment?
That there are blob fishies.

The different layers of the sea and what creatures live there.
That there is a machine that can find out the ocean's temp.
I discovered that there are heaps of different layers in the ocean. Water glider rocker and how it comes into the water and above +0 discover the planet of the ocean that there are different layers and whales can go through nearly all of them Every Accumulation Shifts the Music of Things is an experiment in artistic mapping which makes a creative attempt to map -through filmmaking and creative writingthe intangible physical and emotional landscapes of risk, related to key issues in our Sustainable Seas research project.

Nelson
This video visually alludes to a range of potentially "risky stuff" related to the research site at the core of this project: fisheries, orchard run-off, forestry, agriculture, neo-productive landscapes, dairy farming, mixed land use and climate change. This poetic work translates language drawn from marine science such as "cumulative effects" and "tipping points" to generate a poetic logic, which is organised around imagery drawn from the sites where the marine scientists are working, to track the sustainability of New Zealand seas. This video asks you to consider the bodies of creatures that can't be seen, but with whom we co-create the world. Homes we can only imagine based on observation, in which we cannot dwell. Yet every dwelling matters. Every accumulation shifts the music of things. You hold the word consequential in your mouth and it tastes like the clarity of sea water changing tune, the slight difference for swimming or for a fishes' breathing, the slight tip that can't be seen at all Tipping Points Plumes Accumulating As we looped the ropes, we considered the dwelling of insects and non-human species and their disrupted eco-systems -from natural state, to forested state, to a harvested state. The species that dwell in a disrupted eco-system are having to learn how to re-dwell each time. If humans continue to plant again, the cycle continues and each time different. Each time the landscape is changed, an ecology is changed. The disruption to dwellings on land is mirrored in disruptions to dwellings in estuaries and seas.
As we loop the rope, we consider the liminality of sediment. It's soil that's been mobilised by water and it travels, it becomes a sign of erosion or degradation.
what about the breathing of all those living things requiring particular densities of ground?
The various environments of earth make homes we cannot feel.
Homes we can only imagine based on observation, As we filmed, we focussed on these landscapes as bodies, and on the lively, nonhuman bodies that are implicated in our changing marine environments. Coiling ropes, fishing boats, forestry, orchard work.
We chose to have two voices read the poem and to work with tonality, volume, speed, and duration as accumulating elements, to engage the musicality of voice and language as an abstract quality.
In this way, we carefully considered how sound and tonality touch out to the listener.
"Touch isn't about something… Sound is touch at a distance." "Sound is touch at a distance" (Anne Fernald, cited in RadioLab, 2007).  Every Accumulation has many shots with an unmoving camera, a strong formal composition, and moving water. A tidal sense of time moves visually and poetically throughout the work. There is a play between the evocation of specific landscapes and their relationship to environmental risk.

The Unseen
Artistic Map 2.

[Alys:]
These artistic maps align with Paul Carter's emphasis on the "re-enactment of strangeness" in cultural mapping. We frame the value of this work as enabling, as Jane Bennett describes, "a counter-cultural form of perceiving." In doing this research, we take seriously the idea that "learning is a process of emergence and co-evolution of the individual, the social group and the wider society" [Giouvanakis et. al., 2010, p. 17]. These experiments in arts-science-education research, find hope in spaces of imagination, creativity and collaboration, as they provide an alternative punctuation within a world of increasing risk and uncertainty.
Hope signals the possibility that the "spatial/temporal here and now may become otherwise" (Anderson and Fenton, 2008, p. 76) This video article engages with the potentiality for research in marine sustainability to develop through poetic logics, visual, filmic, relational art practices that bring diverse communities into conversation, to ask; "How might we engage artistic processes to better understand actual and perceived risks to marine sustainability and facilitate community engagement, beyond the circulation of scientific publication? Touching Outward; Art-making at the seam where care meets risk presents two artistic maps, iterations of a single project that explores methods for engaging diverse publics to imagine, feel, consider and care about marine-related issues of risk which impact oceans and coastlines.
These artistic maps explore institutional, social and cultural factors influencing coasts and oceans in Aotearoa New Zealand. Embodiment is at the heart of these collaborative projects. We think of how embodied experience folds through imagination to create potentials for unseating convention, perspective, actuality, reproducibility, common sense.
Our transdisciplinary project was developed by four artist-researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, each of us working beyond our conventional practices-a geographer, a performance maker, a visual artist, and a film maker. We are moving between philosophy, social science, pedagogy, ecology, performance, poetry, installation and film. The framework of weak theory provides a kind of permission to reach beyond the conventions of our disciplines, to make space for modes of embodied research that entangle abstract and material concepts through relational, artistic and pedagogical intentions.
Throughout the process and development of this artistic research, we question where a body begins and ends, how the voice as a vibratile force touches through time and space, and how moving image as a body of textures and cuts might contribute to methods of weak theory (Wright, 2015) and transdisciplinary creative practice.