BODY OF KNOWLEDGE: ART AND EMBODIED COGNITION

CONFERENCE EXHIBITON:

THINKING ROOMS
FOR
ENACTING KNOWLEDGES

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY BURWOOD CAMPUS/

SEARBY STUDIO SPACE /HD2.006
27- 29 JUNE
THINKING ROOMS FOR ENACTING KNOWLEDGES
Opening Thursday 27 June, 5:30 – 7:30pm

Opening speaker:
Prof Emma Kowal, Convenor of Science and Society Network / Alfred Deakin Institute

The exhibition will be on display throughout the conference >> 27-29 June
Opening on Thursday evening 5:30 – 7:30

Location is in the Searby studio space HD2.006

(adjoining the Sage Restaurant, BoK2019 caterers)

EXHIBITING ARTISTS:

Patricia Cain
Liz Cameron
Frances Joseph & Miranda Smitheram
Scott Andrew Elliot
Beth George, Michael Chapman, Kate Mullen, Pia Ednie-Brown
Henry Daniel
Thinking Rooms for Enacting Knowledges

Jondi Keane (Exhibition curator, BOK2019 Conference convenor)

The temptation is to assert that art enacts the description science constructs. However, that would
fall back into the two-culture divide—art AND science. Instead, theories of cognition offer a way to
understand how every modality of engagement, every nuanced connection and relationship shifts
the way we hold and co-construct our shared environment. Thus, the challenge is to glean the direct
effects and ubiquitous affects, active in a field of intra-actions 1 and inter-actions. The proposition
being—the more aware and reflective we are the more we can participate in reconfiguring and
inflecting, joining and separating, intensifying and distributing the persistent features of the world.
The embodied reflexivity required to participate in this process—as one centre of awareness or as
part of a collective node—can be called the practice of embodied cognition.

In a world rife with practices, every mode of engagement has a texture, dimensionality and duration.
Its persistence or changeability is subject to infinitesimal initiating and gross blunt forces of the
human-non-human condition. Thinking Rooms for Enacting Knowledge Exhibition makes perceptible
these subtle textures to display a range of thinking in action and through materials. Each exhibitor
activates processes and practices in order to demonstrate, enact, voice and advocate the ways that
perception is action, and making is the distribution of thought into the niche constructions in which
we live.

The production of difference is crucial to the relationship of art to embodied cognition and is the
starting point and inspiration that Patricia Cain’s past Thinking Room installations have provided. The
exhibiting artists give us a glimpse—from varying starting points that include painting, drawing,
architecture, dance, textile, spatial practices, and writing practices as well as interviews and working
notes—of how “making” holds a network of relationships differently. Each project in the exhibition is
the conversation starter to a longer discussion and the proliferation of diversity.

In formulating the BoK2019 conference events, the organizing committee aimed to provide multiple
opportunities for knowledge exchange and, in addition to the usual congress of conferences,
attempt to incite and track the traces and transfers, moments and manifestation of knowledge that
often go unnoticed. This was the impetus for the Audit Traces project where a team of researcher-
practitioners would look for these unnoticed traces at the conference and feed them back to the
delegation. The significance of the exhibition and the Thinking Rooms for Enacting Knowledges
Exhibition and the Audit Traces project inside a conference, invites us to engage in what artists-
turned-architects Arakawa and Gins call “daily research” 2 and to that end, begin to diagram living
knowledges in the sites where life happens.

1
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham
and London: Duke University Press: 33,56,58 and Chapter “Intra-actions Matter 72-186.
2 Gins, M and Arakawa, S (2002) Architectural Body. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press: 95-100.
Audit Traces: charting the processes of interdisciplinary exchange and knowledge transfer
between arts and sciences

Scott deLahunta (BOK2019 Conference Organizer)

Audit Traces is an experimental undertaking to track, record and report on potential collaborations
at the intersection of art and science within the framework provided by BoK2019. The concept refers
to a generic language and modelling of processes that can help show how knowledge originating in
one discipline might come to impact practice in another. Where processes of different disciplines
overlap, what occurs at this intersection of ideas and methods may not appear in the end products
of a collaborative research program. Audit Traces can help draw attention to what happens or might
happen in these overlaps.

The inspiration for this comes in part from the philosopher Evan Thompson’s keynote presentation
at the first Body of Knowledge (2016) at University of California, Irvine. In his keynote, Thompson
described how movement practices in the arts could be understood as “research practices that can
contribute directly to cognitive science”. In his concluding remarks, he called for a new research
program on mindfulness based on a more “equal footing” or balanced collaboration between artists
and scientists, suggesting that the BoK2016 conference could be a catalyst for this.

The concept of knowledge transfer and exchange between arts and science has been the topic of
much discussion and debate, pre-dating developments in practice-as- or practice-based research in
the arts. One of the core challenges is the different ways the arts and sciences account for and value
knowledge. Audit traces attempts to identify how specific classes of knowledge—including tacit,
embodied and experiential—are used and transformed not only within the arts and sciences, but
also when arts practice is informed by science or when arts practice informs science. The goal is to
offer routes to improving understanding of what and how something is learned in the context of
interdisciplinary work and increase the potential for knowledge transfer between these domains.

For BoK2019, a small team of researchers under the guidance of Scott deLahunta will be
participating in different parts of the conference. Hosted in the CUBE space, the new
interdisciplinary research laboratory at Deakin, the Audit Traces team will work together in dialogue
with delegates to create a map of where and how various forms of interdisciplinary exchange and
collaboration, implicit and explicit, symmetric and asymmetric, global and local, direct and indirect,
permeate the event. During the final plenary event on the Saturday, the team will share their
discoveries with the conference.

Audit Traces Team: Dita Banjeree, Ashlee Barton, Scott deLahunta, Charlotte Evans, Sarah Neville,
Martin Potter, Aeron Skidmore.
Moving Knowledges

Rea Dennis (BOK2019 Conference Organizer)

To begin this writing, I went for a walk. It was about 15 degrees Celsius and there was a low sun
characteristic of a Melbourne winter morning. My experience of temperature and light affect me.
The streets are familiar and the move outside opens my senses. My skin detects the variation as I
pass through shaded areas. I hear two ravens squawking and the distant sound of a car. I turn the
corner, the trees shimmer; my eyes soak in the mix of gold, red and brown of their leaves. A flood of
warmth fills me. I notice a wisp of breeze. I walk on and an idea for this piece takes shape. I take care
not to give too much attention to it, entrusting instead the finesse of the body-led cognitive
practices that are underway.

Somatic practices like walking act to make the world my body in the way Ann Pirrucello 3 suggests. I
shift my attention from the light to the colour to the feeling in my gut. I am emotional, a smile
crosses my lips. I sigh.

We have become inside creatures, where the opportunities to be immersed in nature is reserved for
weekends and holidays. My regular walking practice sets out to resist this, bringing me into contact
with nature and opening my awareness to perceptual experiences that contemporary life can mute.
The walking and the nature both alter my capacity to think and know with my whole body that
sitting at a desk and being indoors inhibit. Taking the practices outside brings a kind of biophilic
charge to the way we might think about somatic practices.

Biophilia breaks down the way we think about the inside-outside balance in our lives. From the
Greek,
bio, as in life
philia, as in love of…
Biophilia simply means love of life, where life means all living things, even the universe.

Often synonymous with architecture which interprets biophilia as bringing the forest inside, in
biophilic performance we set about designing experiences that take audiences outside. Performance
has a remit to foster engaged conversations, to interrogate assumptions, juxtapose opinion, and
invite audiences to care, to feel, and to embody knowledge. A biophilic lens reinforces the way
performance design engages with risk, demands playfulness, and perhaps most importantly argues
for the integration of natural, cultural and spiritual worlds. An outdoor performance invites
audiences to engage with the natural world, to take notice of themselves and others, and to take
care of nature and of ourselves. Biophilic performance design will take us on a walk, place us in
nature, by the river, in the quarry, on the mountain and remind us of ourselves as nature.

Take a walk outdoors today.

3 Ann Pirruccello (2002) ‘Making the World My Body: Simone Weil and Somatic Practice’, Philosophy East and West, 52(4),

p. 479. Available at:

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.1400274&authtype=sso&custid=deakin&site=
eds-live&scope=site (Accessed: 15 June 2019).
Patricia Cain

THINKING ROOM

‘That fundamental act of perception is precisely that drawing out into the visible, something that
wasn’t there as visible previously. Thus, the great genius of being alive, of having a brain, is actually
to bring forth that reality’. Francesco Varela speaking at the ‘Art meets Science and Spirituality in a
Changing Economy Conference in 1990 (Wijers, 1990:130)

My ‘Thinking Room’ installation is part of the Conference exhibition and also forms a key aspect of
my keynote presentation, all of which becomes a conversation about growing into the need for
practice.

‘Thinking Room’ is a self-curated space created within 4 temporary walls, in which I show my
movement of thinking through material projects created over the last 15 years. Each visual art
project relies on a methodology of making emergent thinking visible.

Three walls feature completed projects: Drawing: The Enactive Evolution of the Practitioner:
Drawing (on) Riverside: and, Seeing Beyond the Immediate.

The fourth wall (the position from which I currently speak) envisions a future project, ‘Making
Autistic Thinking Visible’, which draws upon the narrative of past development but also makes
visible, the growing act of ‘informare’. From my position of internal First-Person participatory
methodology, this new project imagines ways of co-production with others who also think
differently, and considers what forms of processes, systems and organisation our communal
structures might take to facilitate this.

I use my example to ask and consider: What is embodied/enactive practice like? What are its
qualities? What is its place as a research context? How do internal practices contribute to discourses
concerning external contexts?

BIO: Patricia Cain is an artist and visual scholar who lives and works in Scotland. Her book Drawing:
The Enactive Evolution of the Practitioner (2010) redefines drawing as an enactive phenomenon and
is a first-person account of the development of a practice-led methodology to access lived
experience of the creative mind. Fusing art practice and cognition, she is interested in accessing
hidden aspects of thinking - such as creativity, experiential learning, spiritual growth. Her practice
gets its uniqueness from her particular multi-layered thinking style which is focused, complex and
visual. She makes thinking processes and experience visible as the artwork, through mapping, digital
modelling, narrating and curating studio work - shifting importance away from ‘artefact’ to
‘development of artist’. Since completing her practice-led PHD at Glasgow School of Art in 2008, she
has focused on self-curating multi-media exhibitions as experiential installations, which allows her to
create layers of points of access to the complex network that emerges for an audience: the artwork
is the artist-led narrative and interpretation and connects with others to reveal a more fundamental
experience. To view her ground-breaking solo exhibition Drawing (on) Riverside at the Kelvingrove
Art Gallery and Museum (2011) see https://www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/patricia-cain-artist/.
Patricia’s current project Making Autistic Thinking Visible explores how autistic thinking and the
development of autistic identity (Self) can be made visible. Her interest is in evolving autistic-led
creative research methodologies that can reveal the nature of neuro-diverse thinking style
Patricia Cain – Thinking room – detail. Photo by Patricia Cain.
Liz Cameron

Professor Liz Cameron is an Aboriginal Visual Artist, Designer, Researcher and Lecturer based in
Victoria, Australia. Liz embraces the visual and interconnected worlds on both traditional and
contemporary knowledges associated with arts, health and healing. Her works are imbued with an
immense knowledge of Country (land and sea) rendered with passion through exploring creativity
within making from a contemporary standpoint whilst acknowledging past traditional practices. Her
Ways of Making and Seeing, form elements of visual literacies that portray story lines through the
use of colour, form and context.

Creative Ways of Making and Seeing within traditional Australian Aboriginal healing practices, not
only contain narrative information but also cultural intent that allows for emotional healing through
psychotherapeutic processes. Traditional creative practices serve as a cultural porthole in obtaining
a sense of wellbeing through achieving greater self-insight. Ways of Making and Seeing within
creativity is a spiritual transforming process that fosters conscious and unconscious reasoning
through a cultural lens. Transformative psychological approaches of cultural embodied sense making
offers a unique insight in how trans-generational experimental knowledge through visual interplay
has validity in today’s society.

BIO: Professor Liz Cameron is associated with the Dharug Aboriginal Nation, located Hawkesbury
River area in NSW. Liz commenced her early career in nursing and later completed a Diploma in Fine
Arts, Post Graduate studies in Indigenous Social Health, and a PhD in Indigenous Philosophies. In
2010, Liz was nominated and awarded the National Indigenous Education Ambassador of Australia;
2012 presented in Top Ten Women’s researchers at Macquarie University and 2013 awarded the
National Indigenous staff scholarship awards.

Liz’s research interests include Indigenous land and sea management (Caring for Country), creativity
within cultural form and function, (traditional Aboriginal healing practices), Indigenous health
(preventative social/emotional) and is a practicing artist. Liz has a personal passion in the arts and
sciences involving Aboriginal aspects of optimal internal and external health as a transformative
process through Indigenous ways of knowing. With a drive to create positive change, Liz’s focus is to
share ancient forms of knowing to advance others in bridging the understandings of creativity and
science through the interplay of imagination and intuition within healing.
Liz Cameron – snake skin. Photo: Jade Stewart
Frances Joseph & Miranda Smitheram

Performing ecologies of dress

This design-led project Phenomenal Dress responds to the premise that the materials of our physical
world are not commodities but are part of an interconnected state of being, a lifeworld. The primary
collaborator is Karekare, an ironsand beach on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand.
Through sensorial and experiential field research and creative practice, the researchers respond to
the phenomena, socio-cultural and environmental forces of this place. The documentation
presented explores the interrelationships of body and world through a process of making-with,
described through sketches, prototypes and performances of environmental dress. While dress has
traditionally been cut and fashioned in reference to the topology of body and understood as a mark
of distinction between the human and animal world, we rethink these notions of dress. Within this
project the body is reconsidered as part of ecology- a collective and terrestrial body- and
incorporated through our shared and interdependent materialities.

Drawing from posthuman theory and mātauranga Māori frameworks, the methodology
acknowledges a complexity of relationships, adopting the traditional concept of whakapapa as layers
of connection, a genealogy of people, place and things. Agency, as the capacity to act and to make
choices, is co‐constituted and emerges within the complex, changing relationships of human and
nonhuman things. The examples documented here are lively matter, grouped by gestures, forms,
behaviours and affordances.

Local materials, textile structures and processes are considered and responded to through
embodiment; the researcher’s corporeality, bodies of water, conglomerates of rock, genealogies of
land. The mutability of cloth exemplifies the ontogenetic approach to matter that underpins the
project, in which form is emergent rather than pre-defined.

The project charts collaborative, multi-sensory strategies that engage temporal, material and
embodied dimensions, resulting in physical and digital artefacts, performative engagements and
new methods for more than human collaborations.

BIO: The projects’ lead human researchers are Dr Miranda Smitheram (Ngāi Tahu, Swedish, Irish and
Scottish heritage) and Professor Frances Joseph (Pākeha [New Zealand European] descent with
English, Jewish and Celtic heritage). Drawn to the magnetic sand, beauty and power of Karekare
beach, Dr Smitheram and Professor Joseph have spent 2 years experimenting with mediated
material and textile systems in response to this unique ecosystem.
Frances Joseph & Miranda Smitheram – Performing ecologies of dress
Photo Miranda Smitheram, Karekare beach, 2019
Scott Andrew Elliott

A Conversational Approach to Practice

My practice is built upon a direct bodily engagement with interior built surroundings. Through a
process of investigating a site towards an embodied understanding of the environment and the
relations it engenders, a dialogue begins to emerge between the human and non-human agents that
compose the environment. From the human agents’ position (myself as an artist along with my
collaborators), an attention to the language and utterances of an architectural site becomes paired
with an attention to the changes that the engagement with the site evokes within us. This process
aims to recognize the contribution of multiple agents, living and non-living. Such an approach
proposes a diffused notion of authorship where artists and site collaborate towards an expression of
their interrelations.

Presented here are two examples of this creative process: Building Movements and Adaptations.
Both were collaborative projects, and included lengthy processes of discussion, writing,
investigation, experimentation, and building. Each began with a bodily engagement with the
selected architectural site, carried out through a physical exploration and an investigation into the
utilitarian infrastructure of the building, and this was furthered through material experiments,
introducing new materials into the environment to observe their interaction with the existing
architecture. This led to conversational writing and drawing, and developed ideas through the
dialogue between both human and non-human agents. The material, architectural interventions
presented in these projects were not the culmination of the process; rather, it continued through
further reflection and exposition. I see this practice as iterative, with each project building upon the
antecedent and engendering new directions for this research to undertake.

BIO: Dr Scott Andrew Elliott is a Canadian artist and independent researcher. His work examines the
interstices between art and architecture through both theoretical propositions and built works. This
work aims to parse out the ways that architectural environments or installations can be designed
towards questioning our human relationship to built-surroundings. He has lectured and exhibited in
Canada, Finland, Estonia and Australia, and completed his PhD at RMIT University. His recent
academic publications have speculated on how bodily change can arise through aesthetic
encounters with built surroundings through investigations into art historical and literary examples.
Scott Andrew Elliot – The Space Within (2010). Photo Scott Andrew Elliott.
Beth George, Michael Chapman, Kate Mullen, Pia Ednie-Brown.

Surrogate Drawing

During the days prior to the opening of the BoK2019 Exhibition Thinking Rooms for Enacting
Knowledges, four architectural and art practitioners will engage a drawing process seeking empathic
interaction. Surrogate Drawing is a collaboration that explores questions of embodiment and
“aesthetic incunabulum” through the medium of drawing. The collaboration looks to displace
authorial control and create a feedback loop between multiple bodies in space, connected through
the intuitive process of drawing. The outcome of this collaboration is less about the work itself, than
interconnectedness of bodies in space, in which the drawing is a connecting medium.

Recent research in neuroscience has established the inherent relationship between bodily
movement and brain activity with a number of studies that have been done in the space of dance
and choreography. Currently, there has not been a large amount of work done in regard to how
these connections can be related to the process of drawing, and particularly collaborative drawing
processes, involving more than one participant. Experimental drawing in this space opens onto
neurological studies in the broad space of empathy, which explore the relationship between
behaviour and its “mirroring”. This research suggests that the witnessing or sensation of an act is
decoded and recorded through a response and that drawing is a medium that can enact and record
this process.

The exhibit establishes a physical framework to elucidate and prompt a cognitive one. The first
participant will relay drawings, via projection, onto a larger surface. These marks can be traced,
elaborated, and responded to by one or more additional drawers over time. Another participant
records, analyses and reimagines the interaction, creating a third loop through feedback in text,
diagram and analysis. This assemblage of bodies enter into a non-verbal communication of which
the drawing is the residual artefact.

BIOS:
Dr Beth George is an educator and practitioner in architecture, with a research focus on urbanism,
cartography, design and drawing. She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle's School of
Architecture and Built Environment.

Dr Michael Chapman is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle. His research is

concerned with the theory and politics of architecture, with an emphasis on the domains of
aesthetics, art theory, critical theory, avant-garde studies, psychology, neuroscience, communication
theory and modernism.

Kate Alida Mullen is an independent curator, writer and artist based in Melbourne. She has worked
extensively in the curation and programming of galleries, is a published writer and exhibited
practitioner, and has engaged with Indigenous artists through a range of organisations.

Dr Pia Ednie-Brown is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle. Her research

has explored ethics, innovation, emergence, and emerging technologies, particularly in relation to
creative practice research methodologies.
Michael Chapman – Sketches for BoK Exhibition process
Henry Daniel

anthropos

anthropos is my attempt, as an artist and academic, to examine a particular process that can best be
described as movement in search of resources of one kind or another; new ideas, new lives, new
jobs, fleeing war, poverty, hate, prejudice, etc., and in moving we redefine the notion of community
and identity. In many ways, human beings have not changed the reasons why they move from place
to place. However, I believe the circumstances that instigate such movements, and the nature and
results of the movements themselves, have become far more complex. Working across disciplinary
platforms but prominently featuring dance, theatre, performance, film, installation and new media
technologies, anthropos is a collection of images, videos, texts, performance notes, and academic
writings generated by my current multi-year research project “Contemporary Nomads” (2017-2021).
It examines patterns in these large-scale movements of bodies across international spaces by
thinking of them as a transnational choreography, one that speaks to the deep fragmentation that
exists between communities within as well as outside national borders, and between social and
political institutions and the ordinary people they were meant to serve.

BIO: Henry Daniel, PhD, Professor of Dance, Performance Studies and New Media Technologies,
scholar, performer, choreographer, and Artistic Director of Full Performing Bodies, Daniel’s research
concentrates on strengthening notions of Practice-as-Research (PaR), Arts-based-Research, and
Research/Creation in Canada. He has a professional background in dance, theatre, and new media
with a career that started in his native Trinidad & Tobago and continued in the USA, Germany, the
UK, and Canada. Daniel’s current research project “Contemporary Nomads” takes it inspiration from
what cultural theorist Stuart Hall once called "the prototype of the modern or postmodern New
World nomad, continually moving between centre and periphery” (Hall in Rutherford, J. 234:1990).
hdaniel@sfu.ca | www.henrydaniel.ca
Henry Daniel – Nómadas. Photo by Henry Daniel.
Special Thanks to:

Co-sponsors
The School of Communication and Creative Arts;
The Science and Society Network (Alfred Deakin Institute;
The School of Health and Social Development - Disability, Inclusion & Advocacy at Deakin The
Senselab, Concordia University, Montreal

The BoK2019 Conference Organizers:

Rea Dennis
Scott deLahunta
Emma Whatman
Jondi Keane

Designers
Angela Rivans
Meghan Kelly