. . . …Valence… . . .

excerpts from chapter 5

Though my formal training is rooted in visual art, primarily in digital display technologies and often in a solitary manner of making, over the past decade, I have collaborated and worked with archivists, physicists, dancers, choreographers, startup tech companies, writers, and somatic practitioners to create works that were formed through a process of emergence, in which there is no one author. What occurs in this co-authoring is a crystallization of dynamics in which a practice emerges - we learn to hear what is meant in the searching, ponderous language of the querent and, in turn, make our own offerings to our collaborators. On several occasions, I have worked with my collaborators iteratively, building upon past projects methodologically, formally and conceptually.

One such collaborative relationship began in 2018 when I created a six-channel video installation entitled Slipstream. Slipstream revisits the choreography and mirrored stage design of dancer, choreographer, and inventor of pre-cinema projection technologies Loïe Fuller, whose likeness appears in the installation as an elusive apparition. Fuller’s ethereal choreography of the Serpentine Dance was reimagined and performed in Slipstream with dancer and choreographer Katie Ewald.

Slipstream furthered my research and reinterpretations of inventive women who cultivated unprecedented positions of creative command in entrepreneurial, scientific, and performative undertakings during periods that otherwise negated women to inhabit these roles, as seen in previous works such as Doline (2014), an installation that interpreted the sound collage of electronic musician and composer Delia Derbyshire as kinetic sculpture; Sophie (in Absentia) (2019), an augmented reality app that invites users into the room of Sophie Germain, a French physicist, mathematician, and mathematician as she studied covertly amidst domestic and societal oppression; and the multimedia installation, 21st Century Fox Sisters (2010), an interactive installation space where the Fox sisters, famous child mediums of the 19th Century, are reimagined as producers and directors of a multimedia spectacle.

21st Century Fox Sisters, 2010, Jenn E Norton, detail

In addition to dancing in Slipstream, Ewald’s performance work inspired a sculptural video installation I had created in 2015, entitled Arms Reach. A custom configuration of Christie Digital MicroTiles, which functions like video display building blocks, Arms Reach depicts a haptic labyrinth, navigated by pain, tactility, and thermoception as the sensorial guides in this maze that can only be solved through touch. Lessons and methodologies learnt during the creation of these works were carried forward with Ewald and me, inspiring new creative endeavours and explorations.

Upon the creation of Slipstream, Ewald and I spoke of collaborating on a broader, more process-based project, aligning my research on Sophie Germain (which was exhibited alongside Slipstream in an augmented reality series entitled Resonators in 2019 at the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery), and Ewald’s practice as a choreographer, movement therapist, and dancer.

In our many conversations, what emerged as a through line of conceptual interest was our interest in Germain’s research in elasticity and the intricate patterns that emerge through vibrations, as seen in Chladni plates. Germain produced a mathematical equation for surface elasticity, which articulates the phenomena of the emergent geometric patterns induced by the oscillation of surfaces. Through sound waves, the nearly imperceptible disruptions of surfaces displace particulates such as sand or poppy seeds, creating ornate, organic formations of symmetry.

We formed a collective with an interdisciplinary group of people that either Katie or I (or both) had worked with previously. From remote locations, we began to look at how mathematicians and physicists, such as Germain, botanists, biologists, and healers alike, had embraced the study of geometries seen in Chladni plates and the Fibonacci sequence, some in more formal ways, while others did so more intuitively. The assembled group of dancers, somatic practitioners, teachers, therapists, academics, musicians, visual and media artists and community developers are Shary Boyle, Joyful Joyful (Cormac Culkeen and Dave Grenon), Kevin O’Connor, Katie Ewald, Julia Garlisi, Andrea Nann, Coman Poon, Bry Webb, Leslie Fisher, Ame Henderson, and myself. We began our collaboration with a presentation on my graduate research, looking at Resonators, David Bohm, Karen Barad, site-specificity and remoteness. Located in multiple cities and countries, we met through videotelephony software, presenting our research and findings to one another, and practiced somatic exercises that allowed us to experience one another’s respective environments sensorially. These exercises included deep listening, sounding materials found at arm’s reach, moving about in our respective spaces to find air currents, temperature changes, and the thresholds between light and shadows, all demarcated by our bodies in movement. Later, we met as hybrid in-person and remote groups, exploring sound vibrations, electromagnetic phenomena, and entrainment through empathetic exercises - we operated as a multi-disciplinary pedagogical and research-based creation.

In the summer of 2022 in Kingston Ontario, I hosted a large group of our collective over the duration of a week at the Isabel Bader Centre of Performing Arts Queen’s University. Working jointly and in smaller groups under the working title of All the Rage, we were divided into somatic (movement, dance, empathetic exercises), sound, and technical collaborators, we developed a vernacular to define our emerging practice, created dance phrases and generated site-specific sounds and forms to explore resonance and elasticity. Our work was deeply experimental and was cultivated through our interdisciplinary dialogues. “Interdisciplinarity,” Roland Barthes wrote in 1972, “is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something interdisciplinary, it’s not sufficient to choose a “subject” (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object, that belongs to no one.”

What emerged from our time together was a large-scale instrument that was finely tuned to the resonant frequency of the space and was responsive to our bodies and voices. Bry Webb and Dave Grenon sourced metals from a junkyard that belonged to Grenon's relatives. Webb cut the metal scraps into shapes to create Chladni plates. The six pieces were then suspended on wire in a hexagonal configuration and emitted sound towards the centre, similar to the configuration and effects of Slipstream. The metal was fitted with transducers that received signals that Grenon transmitted, tuned to find the resonant frequency of the studio of the Isabel Bader Centre.

When the metal received a signal from the transducers it quivered, shimmering with the sonic vibrations, casting caustics about the room, resembling trembling brass, silver, and copper flames. The room itself vibrated with the instrument, transforming sound into a haptic experience as the space was a buzz with vibrant matter. To me, the empty space of the studio seemed more discernibly plentiful in this oscillation. As we walked through the internal space of the installation, the timbre of each metal plate and gauge could be discerned, each signal sounding uniquely.

The six channels of the Instrument were observably directional - when standing in the centre, a slight turn of the head would shift the channel heard. The dancers moved through the instrument, feeling sound in their bodies, exploring the geometries within the structure viscerally.

We experimented in various ways through the Instrument. Using motion capture to record their movements in space to demarcate the geometry in space in another manner, their choreography recorded as data. We used sound reactive circuits to visually punctuate their steps across the floor. Cormac Culkeen sang into an input to cascade their voice through the series of plates, transforming a singular voice into a multitude that sung the metal aloud, creating a choral-like round that encircled viewers standing inside the hexagonal ring.

Named after German physicist and musician Ernst Chladni in 1787, a Chladni Plate produces distinctive patterns when vibrated with specific frequencies. Sprinkled with sand or poppy seeds upon the surface of the plate, the plate can be sounded by a bow or with a transducer. The patterns are a result of opposing oscillating lines within the plate, that are further defined by bounding negative spaces where there are no vibrations, which are called nodal lines.

Figure 31 | Illustration of Chladni patterns on a vibrating plate.

We figuratively explored the idea of nodal lines in another version of the Instrument we constructed in November, 2022, at the Arcadia in Toronto, hosted by Coman Poon. I affixed a web camera above the space to create interactive regions of the space inside of the Instrument. We recorded sounds of the metal and linked them to the active regions using video tracking software. When the dancers passed through these zones, the clanging metal recordings were played through the plates. Ewald moved through space to find our nodal lines, and explored the range of quietness spatially and with attentive care to delineate their boundaries. The experiment was again conducted with tones in lieu of the percussive recordings, as Culkeen listened and responded to harmonize with their voice and feedback across the cascade of plates. In both instances, Ewald was sensitive to signals in space, searching, acting as a receiver, transforming space into sound waves that are in synch (or parallel) to the signal. As Bohm relayed with the analogy of the radio, once sensitive to the signal, the receiver (Ewald) therein inputs a meaningful order (something we can hear and discern) into the Instrument, an order that originated from a level beyond herself, manifesting this signal into movements within herself.

The Instrument was a structure and site of communion for our collective, like the spider uses its web as an extended cognition, it was an externalized expression of our thinking, wherein our collaborative efforts, experimental approach, exploration of materiality, resonance, liveliness, and presence emerged as a practice of continual calibration.

This emergent process was one of tuning - tuning of place and space though active perception, in which certain signals were channeled to the fore as discernible amplifications. In thinking of emergence, it is useful to look to its etymology. The Latin root of emergence is emergere, which means, ‘bring to light’, ‘to surface’, ‘to arise’ or ‘come forth’. To my mind, emergent processes are evocative of Bohm’s example of the rheomode model, to ‘relevate’, meaning, to lift something into attention, to levitate it into relevance. Of emergence and research-creation based practices, Loveless writes, “Emergence is relevant to research-creation not only because it is a recurring descriptor in writing on research-creation and its synonyms - which it is - but because it refigures disciplinary research objects in ways that invite us to think interdisciplinarity-as-emergence: as productive outputs that exceed what is demonstrably present in their constituent parts.”

‘How to Make Art at the End of the World’, Loveless ponders, in her 2019 manifesto for research-creation. Loveless examines the seeping, porous strata of interdisciplinary research-creation through a feminist, psychoanalytic lens and embraces eros as a means to consider the insatiable, diverse curiosities of cross-study research-creation practitioners. Loveless goes as far to describe the academic wanderlust as a form of promiscuity, coining the term ‘polydisciplinamory’ to characterize the relationship of the researcher/creator to trans-disciplinary knowledges.

“Research-creation, […] is a practice of love. It is an erotic, driven, invested practice. And, as such, it fails to fit into those models that see interdisciplinarity as a way to streamline and multiply research productivities. It is too disruptive for that. Research-creation follows desire, and builds spaces and contexts that allow the time and space to experiment in unpredictable directions.”