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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Marine Sustainability
• Ecology
• Risk
• Poetic Inquiry
• Transdisciplinary Research
• Weak Theory