Making-Lines: Experimenting with movement, affect and aesthetic causality through arts-based educational research

Rousell, DS, Cutcher, A and Irwin, RI (2018) Making-Lines: Experimenting with movement, affect and aesthetic causality through arts-based educational research. In: Embodied and walking pedagogies engaging the visual domain: Research co-creation and practice. Common Ground Publishing. ISBN 9781863351324

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Abstract

In this chapter, we experiment with mobilising an aesthetic ontology of ‘the line’ as it moves across and between the interpenetrating fields of art, education and research. Through a series of collaborative experimentations, we aim to track the conceptual and material movements of walking-lines, drawing-lines, writing-lines, and reading-lines as abstract vectors of creative production, intensity, mobilisation and becoming. This involves exploring a speculative typology of lines based on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Ingold (2007; 2015), together with performativity and collaboration as fundamental underpinnings for arts-based educational research. Our starting point is a participatory installation which we inaugurated as part of an international symposium on walking as art, research and educational practice. From there we experiment with ways that abstract lines might be followed and proliferated through speculative practices of walking, drawing, writing, and reading. These experimental practices allow us to work with the forces and intensities of lines as autonomous vectors of affect, disrupting hylomorphic models of causality that have traditionally positioned the artist/writer as ‘master’ over flows of materials/words. This shift towards a fundamentally aesthetic metaphysics of causality has far-reaching implications for art and its education, as we tentatively develop a series of speculative propositions for a line-oriented ontology predicated on vectors of movement, affect and pedagogy.