Rediscovering Time.

Abstract

This article will disseminate the findings of an ongoing Practice as Research project created by practitioner- researchers Lizzie Sykes (screen-based artist) and Cathy Seago (dance artist). Since 2010 the collaboration has generated new work through somatic and filmic questions about content and presentation. The works have captured a variety of temporal qualities experienced by the artists in a range of sites. An aim of the collaboration has been to experiment with the ways in which the kinetic experience of making can be shared within a final work and can subsequently move spectators via skin and screen membranes into a particular experience of time. An overarching question that has emerged from the research has been that of how a temporal quality of place can be negotiated and disseminated through somatic-digital processes and their outcomes. An aim of this article is to articulate how a feeling of place can be usefully defined as ‘place-time’. Throughout the PaR we have explored a number of questions around: the nature, proximity and materiality of the lens; the presence of a ‘felt-space’ in developing emergent work; the effect of ‘place’ in generating somatic and digital outcomes; the interplay of our relative disciplines; the function of distinct ‘phases’ of workflow in the discovery of new knowledge through practice. Reflection via letters and discussion has uncovered consistent themes across this body of work, for example, in the triangulation of location, movement and technology, and the role of near-ness, live-ness and persistence. Using theoretical frameworks offered for art in relation to site by Irwin (1985), Hunter (2015), Solnit (2005) and Wrights and Sites (in Wilke 2002), and building on Walon (2015) we have identified a gap in the literature with regard to our focus on the temporality of making art in place-time. This co-written article, an extension of our practice, offers new insight into temporality in digital/ dance collaboration and installation.