Research Study #3:Laughing materials!
Opening touchpoint
An important part of my research methodology is facilitating or feelcilitating workshops and gatherings. For this PhD I am interested in workshopping as a type of fieldwork or ‘feelwork’ where touch offers methods for critical reflection and knowledge making.
The spaces I host are art experiences blending making, participatory performance, ritual and discussion resonating with Sarah Pink’s reframing of workshopping as less as transfer of knowledge from master to participant with an objective to cultivate skill and more of a exchange cultivating practices of attention and processing. They are spaces of the unexpected where we learn together. Importantly, they are more often peer-to-peer comprising people of diverse backgrounds, disciplines and experiences where I too am a co-learner. For the purpose of this review I will unpack one recent workshop in depth, ‘Laughing Materials!’
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Research discovery
Laughing Materials! was one of four workshops I devised as part of an experimental project called The Gut of A Place. Four creative workshops focused on four different methodologies exploring touch as a way of connecting us to the ecology of our bodies, the body of a place and the bodies of each other. Each event blended interactive installation, ritual and sensory experience through listening, sound-making, smelling, fragrancing, tasting, collaging, moving and drawing as forms of touch. This was hosted in a multi-roomed house with a courtyard emphasisind that we can connect with ecology wherever we are. I was interested in exploring artist-led tactile methods to practice a “sensuous geography” (Rodaway and Serres, 2008), where surroundings are transformed into a “sensate archive whose histories, materialities, and vitalities are made legible through touch” calling in Moten & Harney’s tantalising notions of “skin talk, tongue touch, breath speech, hand laugh.” I also wanted an opportunity to study my own workshop practice, distilling my processes and reflecting why I think these particular formats generate knowledge.
Laughing Materials! explored listening as a form of touch, riffing off the provocation that listening is inherently tactile - vibrations run through the airwaves, through our eardrums, bones and hair. This experience would explore sound making as a way of documenting our body in a place and consider it a form of touch that elicits unheard voices and insight. Through guided prompts, we would learn, perform together, generate material and reflect as we go turning the whole experience into a rich space of creativity - designed to liberate and loosen but also challenge. Touch would be a way of thinking out loud through doing and conjuring new languages or auditory residues to articulate our experiences which would be turned into an audio collage inspired by the works of Shenece Oretha and Blanc Sceoul. This kind of practice is situated amongst scholars acknowledging the importance of the body and senses in gathering knowledge about a place including Neimanis’ FEELed Lab (2022) and Crone et al’s (2022) theorisation of artist-led fieldwork.
The first activity involved warming up our sonic vocabulary, recognising that our sensory language is under-developed. We tasted different unrecognisable foods and reflected on their volume, instrument, and emotion. This was an invitation was to embolden participants to liberate their imagination but also understand the cross-modal nature of sound. The next activity involved foraging for sounds and searching for personal resonance - tapping, rolling, speaking into things, using different body parts and found objects as a way of listening. I invited participants to crudely record before we reconvened and DJ’d our sounds together! Object mediation creates something powerful and I recall writer British-Pakistani Noreen Masud in her book A Flat Place, relating complex trauma and (flat) English landscapes, “where language fails, where human connection stalls, objects help. Hard china. Cold metal. Shells, and bones. Things I can rub on my face, tap against my teeth, balance on my fingertip”.
At this point we could reflect on the feelings emerging from the space and then found clips online from YouTube and sound libraries to add further texture. This process unearths something that is often missing in the presentation of sites in ecological work - the fact that spaces produce affects and have multi-sensory autobiographies. For this I might refer to Ryan’s (2016) Emotional Geography; Weik von Mossner’s (2017) Affective Ecologies; Erin Robinsong’s Geohaptics; Feminist Marxist geographer Doreen Massey’s ‘Landscape as provocation: reflections on Moving Mountains’ and even Edward Said’s ‘imaginative geography’.
As we built up confidence in eliciting sound and exercising our sonic language, teams were tasked to make an analogue, DIY instrument to elicit the stone, sky, water, plant and wood voices of the spaces. This was an exercise in thinking about the apparatus we use in fieldwork and data gathering. Participants imaginatively sonified the space - one used a broom to create a wind and thus sky sound; another creaked a door to elicit the wood voice, another made a symphony of pebble-based stone sounds. They also remarked on the challenge of thinking abstractly feeling stumped by the tasks at times. Perhaps this is a kind of feel-recording and finds shared resonance with artist Tony Breil’s Touch as Listening folly workshops and the extensive acts of feminist listening anthologised in Revell & Shin’s Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear. As a final task we considered how we’d like others to experience the sound, recognising that the sound could be replayed in material formats beyond a ‘cleaned up’ audio file on a set of speakers. Where and how we listen is as important as what we listen to. For example, we discussed distributing the sound in different places at different volumes, on different devices, and requiring different bodily positions (reaching up, crouching down) in order to listen.
There is something punky about this fieldwork. Recording on simple equipment and crudely assembling together embraced amateur production resonating with Jennifer Gabrys work on citizen sensing where together we “activate environments and environmental concerns, and thereby give rise to new possibilities for experimental forms of participation and public engagement through inventive experiences.” What emerged as we recorded was a different kind of data set that could be listened to, layered, paused, played at different volumes, creating different experiences, interpretations and imaginative connections that reveals new dimensions.
Implications / opportunities for further inquiry
Creating emotional data sets infused with bodily knowledge, developing ways to make spaces breathe and reveal their hidden dimensions
Democratised research-making that decentre the professional as the curator of knowledge - how can everyone play a role in ecological stewardship, including the places themselves
