submission:
4th International AIE Conference: Art, Research and Education
TAI University School of Art
Madrid, Spain
TAI University School of Art
Madrid, Spain
Tracing trust and relationality through co-composition
Iain Findlay-Walsh
Tristan Partridge
These two experimental films draw on our experiences of collaboration in relational research methodologies, (auto)ethnographic inquiry, and sound art practice. They form part of our iterative processes of exploring ‘co-composition,’ an evolving practice of hearing, and sounding, differentially situated collectivities. These are processes that rely less on trusting the judgment of others and are instead built by developing shared intuition(s). Structured within everyday digital communications contexts characterized by universalizing, overwhelming fleetingness, trust-as-praxis instead asks us to operate at speeds that enable mutual conversations to take place – through commitments to embodied forms of interaction that foster care, sensitivity, and reciprocity.
We use the terminal present to refer to a widespread condition of uncertainty in a current global context largely defined by multiple forms of crisis and domination – a context in which any sense of normalcy or stability is consistently disrupted or undermined.
Beyond the constitutive temporal dimensions of the terminal present, there are further overlapping political, somatic, and environmental aspects that give it shape, often emergent within processes of communication or critique.
Beyond the constitutive temporal dimensions of the terminal present, there are further overlapping political, somatic, and environmental aspects that give it shape, often emergent within processes of communication or critique.
We explore what it is to consider co-composition – diverse process of creativity and knowledge co-creation – as re-immersion in shared worlds of abundance.
Where mutuality determines its own pace.
Where abundance is not overwhelm (nor a media surfeit characterized by the immediacy and linearity of digital feeds) but is instead an exploration of relational boundlessness – and the limitlessness of the imagination – while still acting within, and acknowledging, a fiercely finite (and unequal) world.
This approach is set against a dominant economic race toward maximization, which demands minimizing the spaces in which diversity might flourish.
Where abundance is not overwhelm (nor a media surfeit characterized by the immediacy and linearity of digital feeds) but is instead an exploration of relational boundlessness – and the limitlessness of the imagination – while still acting within, and acknowledging, a fiercely finite (and unequal) world.
This approach is set against a dominant economic race toward maximization, which demands minimizing the spaces in which diversity might flourish.
While we understand identity and personhood as normative predicates for agency and action, we seek to repurpose those options and to re-compose ourselves as non-selves immersed in the sensory, ceaseless, relational flows of abundance.
These forms of re-immersion explore ‘slowing down’ not as sacrifice or becoming/doing ‘less.’ Rather, slowing down can become expansive, can be about becoming ‘more’ – concerned with expanding our worlds of kinship, commitment, and relationality.