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1 Introduction

Artist residencies no longer only occur in specialized studio venues dedicated to artistic production, but take shape in schools, farms, campgrounds, airplanes, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and even incorporate mobile devices such as vans or bicycles. Typically residencies provided living space, work facilities, and occasionally financial support, recent residencies operate within existing activities and routines and thus, offer artists unique opportunities to engage specific sites and/or audiences (Morrell 2013). These residencies materialize what Pablo Helguera (2011) calls transpedagogy, a term used to describe projects that “blend educational processes and art-making in works that offer an experience that is clearly different from conventional art academies or formal art education” (p. 77). In transpedagogy the pedagogical value is not the transfer of art skills or techniques but rather the pedagogical process becomes the artwork.

A further characterization of such residencies is their relationship to ‘movement.’ While in some cases the residencies are literally in motion, existing as a bicycle or as a long walk in a forest, residencies that take on more permanent structures are still attuned to movement. This is not movement between two points, but what Manning (2011) refers to as “absolute movement” (p. 15). In “absolute movement” a body in movement exists in and is created through movement, differentiating endlessly. This movement is intensive, flowing, and affective.

In this paper we examine the primacy of movement as a proposition of research-creation through a ‘case study’ of an artist-residency in a secondary school. In using the term ‘case study’ we envision an aberrant case as an ecology of inhabitation. As such, the case is not a sum of parts but a conjunctive, itself an interstitial space of movement. Propositions differ from instructions. They are not pre-determined, rather they emerge out of the event. Thus, in thinking about movement as a proposition of research-creation it should not be construed as a criteria, but rather that which co-composes research-creation in the act of research-creation. The residency Walls to the Ball was a collaborative project between artist Hazel Meyer, a grade 10 and grade 11/12 art class that interrogated sport, movement, textiles, gender and collaboration. Meyer had executed the project in a number of exhibition venues and through various artist residencies over the past 5 years, however this was Meyer’s first residency within a public school. For 14 weeks Meyer worked with two classes at a Toronto secondary school. The residency enacted what Garoian (2012) calls “a processual art education where its research and practice does not end with a project, a lesson, a course, or at its disciplinary boundary, but coexist spatially and coextends temporally to enable ways of saying and doing, teaching and learning through art that is caring and compassionate, empathic and boundless” (p. 286).

In the first section of the paper we briefly outline new materialist orientations to qualitative research and situate research-creation’s affinity with this methodological turn. We then begin our exploration of movement-sensation. Expanding our arguments about movement-sensation we turn to social choreography in order to explore the relationship between movement and community. We consider how recent discussions of zootechnologies or swarms, while resisting methods of analytical investigation, can offer new ways of thinking about collectivity and political subjectivity that is ontogenetic, indeterminate, and of an ‘ecology’ in co-composition. Movement, we will argue, is germane to emerging post-humanist explorations within educational research, and a crucial component for re-imagining research-creation methodologies. Through affective thinking about movement and political-tendings, this paper highlights the productive connections and mattering available in artist-residency projects in schools, and queries how we might think materially about research-creation as a “speculative (future-event-oriented)” practice and a “pragmatic (technique-based-practice)” (Manning and Massumi 2014, p. 89).

2 Materialist Methodologies of Research-Creation

Research-creation can be described as the complex intersection of art, theory, and research. According to Manning and Massumi (2014) it is an “experimental practice” that “embodies technique toward catalyzing an event of emergence” (p. 89) that cannot be predicted or determined in advance. Although many scholars, particularly Manning and Massumi, would argue that there is a danger in articulating research-creation as methodology or method, it has been configured as such in some literature. As a methodology, it is multi-disciplinary and is used by artists and designers who incorporate a hybrid form of artistic practice between the arts and science, or social science research; scholars attuned to the role of the arts and creativity in their own areas of expertise; and educators interested in developing curriculum and pedagogy grounded in cultural production where there is a “mutual interpenetration of processes rather than a communication of product” (Manning and Massumi 2014, pp. 88–89). While research-creation shares some similarities with what has commonly become understood as arts-based research, we contend there are a few distinguishing features. First, research-creation places creative activity at the core of its practice. As Erin Manning (2013) notes, often arts-based approaches simply fold art into the midst of other qualitative research methodologies. For example, typical qualitative methodologies are used to ‘collect’ data and then an art form is used to represent the research findings. This perpetuates an idea of art as separate from thinking whereas the hyphenation of research-creation engenders “concepts in-the-making” which is a process of “thinking-with and across techniques of creative practice” (Manning and Massumi 2014, pp. 88–89). Second, and intricately tied to the first feature, are the theoretical propositions of research-creation. Although research-creation is not aligned with any one theoretical framework, it has a strong affinity to what is currently being defined as ‘new materialist’ research, which calls for a renewed emphasis on materiality in research. Materialism abandons the idea of matter as inert and subject to predictable forces, instead positing matter as indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways. Thus, a materialist ontology recognizes the interconnections of all phenomena (human and non-human). At its broadest, new materialism can be said to concern a series of questions and potentialities that revolve round the idea of active, agential and morphogenetic, self-differing and affective-affected matter (Barad 2007).

In contemporary art criticism, new materialist frameworks have shifted the focus from representationalism and discursive interpretations of ‘art,’ to examining how matter matters to understandings of cultural production (Barrett and Bolt 2013; Cull 2009; Zepke and O’Sullivan 2010). Barrett and Bolt (2013) have argued that dominant methodologies in the arts privilege textual, linguistic and discursive understandings. Art, they contend, has been “constructed in and through language” (p. 4). In contrast, materialism re-thinks cultural production as a material practice that exceeds its interpretive frameworks.

Within qualitative inquiry the turn to materialism has marked a number of different methodological approaches including diffractive readings (Barad 2007), schizoanalysis (Coleman and Ringrose 2013), affective methods (Hickey-Moody 2013), and our own work on diagramming (Zaliwska and Springgay 2015). Here we attend to research-creation as a materialist practice by thinking through the concepts of movement-sensation and swarming. Alecia Jackson and Lisa Mazzei (2013) argue that in thinking with theory, researchers need to put “philosophical concepts to work” by showing how theory and practice “constitute or make one another” (p. 5). This resonates with Springgay’s (2008) arguments that contemporary art does not simply reflect or represent reality, but rather art instantiates thought.

The Pedagogical Impulse was a 3-year research-creation project that initiated a series of artist-residencies that took place across a variety of educational sites in Toronto (www.thepedagogicalimpulse.com). Meyer met with the grade 10 and 11/12 classes twice a week during her residency and used slide shows and a workshop-format to introduce the students to a range of contemporary artists. As the classes unfolded, Meyer had the students rip fabric into long 1-in. strips, de-thread the outer edges of the torn fabric, knot and braid the strips, and attach the braids to two wire basket ball hoops set up in the art classroom. She showed the students a number of macramé and boating-style knots. There was a basketball in the space, and students enjoyed shooting hoops during class. The art teacher commented that many non-art students liked to drop by the art room where the basketball net penetrated the otherwise coded learning space, which was traditionally separated from movement and sport.

After weeks of braiding labor in the art classroom the students hung the two expansive nets in the gym (each approximately 40 f. long), and tied the two netted-constructions together in the middle. The sprawling, organic net form spanned the length of the gym. The class invited the school community during lunch hour to interact and engage with the net. Participants jumped over the yellow tangled net, skipped and slapped the net, and dribbled the 15 basketballs that were in play, while one student used a drum kit to create a rhythmic beat in the gym space. As research-creation project these activities constituted one of the many entanglements of the larger research project.

In addition to research-creation, corresponding qualitative methods were used to record the Walls to the Ball project. The research team conducted interviews with Meyer and the classroom teacher, used digital video and still images to document the cultural production in the art room, facilitated open forum class discussions and a blog with the participating students. All of these ‘methods’ were brought together using a materialist orientation to qualitative research through a process of diagramming (Zaliwska and Springgay 2015).

3 Thinking in Movement

Cleave the notion of the body beyond the human. Connect it to all that co-combines with it to create a movement of thought (Manning 2013, p. 31).

In the opening pages of his book Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi (2002) contends that a body moves and feels simultaneously, “It does both at the same time,” he argues, [i]t moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving” (Massumi 2002, p. 1). This corporeal connection between movement and sensation, he continues, is a matter of change, or more precisely variation and difference. Every movement invokes a change in feeling, which simultaneously invokes a change in movement so that movement and feeling “have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably” (p. 1). The moving-sensing body is indeterminate, open to an elsewhere and an otherwise. It is conjunctive and co-composing, and as such is concerned with issues of collectivity or relationality – a swarming of sorts, we will argue.

According to Erin Manning (2011) movement can be thought of as “relative movement” and “absolute movement.” Relative movement borrows from a humanist framework. The body is described as active or moving, while the room is viewed as inert and in stasis. Manning (2011) notes that relative movement is where: “form preexists matter. The matter—my body—enters into the form—the room;” body and room are pre-given and ontologically distinct (p. 15). In the case of a classroom or school, the pre-determined space consisting of walls, desks, books, blackboards, and hallways defines the limits of the students’ bodies.

In relative movement, human bodies and objects are understood separately from the space in which they reside and movement is something that happens in-between, designating an interim between two points that maintains and respects the individuality of these points. In other words, movement that passes between such points (or bodies) does not transform the bodies themselves. When a student enters the classroom and sits on a chair, the classroom, chair, and student all pre-exist each other and movement exists independent of each point, consequently, each entity retains its own self-sameness. Deleuze (1986) relates this type of movement to the fixed camera, which pans between immobile sections in a shot. Movement is created in the panning or the movement of the camera between the two “fixed” points of reference.

In the instance of absolute movement, a body in movement does not simply move between points, rather it exists in movement. A body is movement, differentiating endlessly. In absolute movement bodies do not precede the classroom nor the net-art work, but are in a “ceaseless process of interactive metamorphosis: becoming” (Tianinen and Parikka 2013, p. 209). In absolute movement the room and net reconfigure as the students’ bodies recompose as “…a field of relations rather than a stability, a force taking-form rather than simply a form” (Manning 2013, p. 31).

Take for example, the project Walls to the Ball. Relative movement would describe the basketballs moving between student’ hands, net and floor. Movement would exist between objects. Relative movement would perceive of bodies moving around in the classroom and the various independent movements needed to braid, knot, and construct the net. And while all of these movements might be considered interconnected, each movement would be understood as discrete and individual, and privilege movement as human-organized and human-controlled. This means that objects in the art room move because of the actions of the students’ bodies. Movement is causal. What sets an object in motion is a body acting upon that object. The body throws the ball. The fabric is torn and braided by bodies.

Absolute movement shifts this humanist orientation to conceive of all matter as moving, vital and agential. If bodies (human and non-human) are in movement, differentiating and intra-acting then they are always active, self-creating, productive and intensive (Barad 2003). Matter becomes “indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways” (Coole and Frost 2010, p. 10).

While describing the research-creation, Meyer noted that the installation “…became this absurd and yet wonderful weird growth.” Manning (2013) would explain that rather than thinking of bodies/objects as ‘having a form,’ movement-sensation is “taking-form’ or a ‘bodying’ (p. 10). Similarly, for Deleuze and Guattari “there are no longer any forms or developments of forms…There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 266). As an example of bodying, consider the net in the gym. As opposed to a net installed in the gym that students act upon as agents, the body-net-gym co-composition shaped an emergent ecology.

When movement becomes habitual, Manning (2013) notes, when it is reduced to an endpoint (to school, to work, to net) it becomes “…compacted, overarticulations muted by overarching directionality and predimensionalizing” (p. 39). Body-net-gym as an ecology of practice cannot be choreographed in advance. Thus, the net in the gym cannot be understood as enhancing student engagement, or as relational, participatory art, for this would suggest that students and net approach each other already formed. Rather the encounter of body-gym-net-movement-sensation are immanent to its unfolding.

In the classroom documentation, we see another instance of ecologies of practice. In these images, students’ bodies, desks, stools, fabric, braids, balls, the sound of ripping and swelling conversations, are vibratory and in motion. They are no longer points or objects between which movement happens, rather they are all bodying in movement-sensation. This movement, endlessly differentiating, is what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming. It is not simply the bodies of the students that are in movement, but all matter in the classroom is vital, and in movement.

Deleuze and Guattari write, “a line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it come up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 293). And it is this middle, that they speak of, that is “fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement” (p. 293). This has enormous implications for thinking about ‘thought’ as ontogenetic and material. Shifting from the Cartesian model of a body coming to thought through consciousness, and the mind, severed from or in absence of a moving body, absolute movement underscores ‘thinking as movement’ or as Manning (2013) writes: “To move is to think-with a bodying in act” (p. 15).

This movement of thought is affective; it is intensive. Intensity is felt and manifested in the skin, at the interface of the body with other bodies/things. This intensity Massumi (2002) notes, is non-linear and unassimilable. Affect, in a Deleuze and Guattari framework, is not congruent with emotions. Emotions, Massumi would argue are qualified intensities. Once a body has taken in and formed or shaped an ‘intensity,’ and named it so to speak, it becomes an “emotion.” “It is intensity owned and recognized” (Massumi 2002, p. 28). Moreover, affect is not individual, it does not belong to a body/object. Take for example the yellowness of the net. The intensity of yellow is already and immediately co-composing with previous and subsequent affects of yellowness (luminosity, warmth, or bitterness). There is a complexity to its intra-actions, an ecology, or a field of relation. “There is no ‘body itself’ here because the body is always more than ‘itself,’ always reaching toward that which it is not yet” (Manning 2011, p. 15).

The yellowness of the net reminds us that every event is intensively relational and collective; it is “pastnesses opening directly onto a future, but with no present to speak of” (Massumi 2002, p. 30). Movement-sensation then concerns the very dynamism of change or “the being of becoming” (Deleuze 2006, p. 23). This is pure difference – a difference that does not emanate from end points but keeps on differentiating from within itself.

In research-creation we need to challenge the idea of movement being a move from one position to another, to a movement that opens up possibilities and experimentation. In her work on early childhood education, Olsson (2009) notes that education needs to re-think ‘positioning;’ she writes, “Any time positioning comes first, one is allowed to see movement only as intermediate stops on the way towards the goal. In other words, the focus on positions does not allow for movement preceding positions. It creates a grid that permits only the stop-over moments to be seen” (Olsson 2009, p. 49). Absolute movement, pure difference, enables pedagogy to become ontogentic – emergent, vital, and mattering.

On the class blog one student wrote:

A big yellow, awkward looking thing sprawled across the middle of the gym, dividing it horizontally. It suspended slightly, bouncing to the rhythm of basketballs thumping on the group. As I went closer, it became clear was it was: a giant braid. Not just one, but also many? Many braids forming a tube from one net to another.

Manning (2011) suggests that the intensity of movement can be felt in the in-between or the interval created by the movement of bodies: “This interval is ephemeral, impossible to grasp” (p. 30). The interval is the fold around which the bodies, fabric, room and net began to take shape. “Movement is the qualitative multiplicity that folds, bends, extends the body-becoming toward a potential future that will always remain not yet” (p. 17). The bodies of the students didn’t so much as move each other, rather their bodies were recomposed out of the interval; improvised and relational. Olsson (2009) states, “thinking proceeds by laying out its ground at the same time as it thinks” (p. 51). When we move beyond viewing object positions as preceding movement, thinking shifts from an epistemological formation towards a thinking-in-movement, a thinking-as-bodying. In movement-sensation thinking and knowing are not predetermined but fueled by the pedagogy of infinite variations.

In a thinking-as-movement, posthuman classroom configuration, the bodying procedure of participants and emergent pedagogical ecology can be thought of as activating through a kind of swarm intelligence. Swarm intelligence is theorized as “…natural and artificial systems composed of many individuals that coordinate their activities using decentralized control and self-organization” (Lewis 2010, p. 205). While theorists across varied disciplines draw on swarm theory to contextualize cultural phenomena, we want to think about swarm intelligence and its relationship to movement-sensation and research-creation.

4 Swarming as Politicality

Transindividuations remind us that every event is a node of activity that is intensively relational (Manning 2013, p. 25).

In the past decade, swarming has become recognized both technologically and socially as a method for understanding collective organization (Lewis 2010). Scholars have used the concept of the swarm to think about the relations between insect ecologies and media ecologies, where vibration, variation and movement are primary techniques. Swarm turns technology “from a human cultural enterprise into a folding of intensive forces in environmental relations. It signals a creative tension between life and matter as intertwined” (Parikka 2008, p. 344). We draw from recent discussions of swarm intelligence to further understand the movement-sensation within the Walls to the Ball residency. In connecting absolute movement with swarming, we want to think about the residency, and research-creation, more generally, politically. However, we want to deviate from the typical discussions of political art, which operate through a set of assumptions about emancipatory or humanist politics, and focus instead on movement as a ‘tending’ political. This is a politics of flows and unpredictable unfoldings (Rotas and Springgay 2013, p. 281). Countering the perception that an artist ‘brings-into’ a classroom political art, which might ‘rescue’ the students, we argue that body-net-gym swarming is ontogenetic and processual, and is about politicality as intensity, as immanent, and as bodying.

Swarm theory suggests that ‘intelligence’ isn’t located in a single subject but that it emerges from the collective. Moreover, this collective is distributed and without a centralized control structure. The movement or intra-actions within the swarm, while random, are self-organizing and emergent. Lewis (2010) writes, “the swarm has an embodied, collective and de-centralised intelligence that surpasses any one singularity within the swarm” (231). Furthermore, Vehlken (2013) argues that swarms should be viewed as ‘zootechnologies’ rather than ‘biotechnologies’ because swarms are not derived from ‘animated’ life (bios) they manifest from the unanimated (zoé) entanglements of the swarm: “Zoé manifests itself as a particular type of ‘vivacity’, for instance as the dynamic flurry of swarming individuals” (p. 113). This is inline with feminist materialist scholarship, such as the work of Braidotti (2005) who insists that the Deleuzian body/media is an ecology; a collective entity that is “an embodied, affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes and transforms energies and forces” (p. 211). In the instance of the gym sequence of Walls to the Ball, the students, sounds, and net created a vivacity and flurry in the normally ordered space of the school that hinted at the swarm’s inherent ability to adapt to changing circumstances and environments and in turn, affect that environment. A student commented:

While the installation was happening, I saw a lot of people playing with the net we made, in the middle, and others playing ball games. I was amazed to see people playing ball while jamming with the beats I was playing [on the drum set].

The installation was a rhythmic dance of bodying. The reverberating sharp thudding of 15 orange basketballs bouncing on the polished wooden gym floor, rubber-bottomed shoes screeching, the swooshing of the net, the laboured breathing of students panting, sweating bodies, sweating floor, screams reverberating, all this, played in time with the clatter of beats of the drummer. The body-net-gym sequence becomes a process of materializing and responding to propositions posed by matter.

In swarm theory, rather than the view that technology (art), is based on the ‘human’ hand, cultural production becomes a radical and intensive potential, and as such becomes central to a politics that is non-anthropomorphic. The capacities of bodies swarming with net-gym-drum-braids-balls becomes unlimited and proliferates. As the movement of balls, bodies, nets, and beating drum folded into another movement, we felt the potential of the event, the opening of movement to the virtual. These folds of movement cannot be repeated. Rather they morph, coagulate and disperse from fold to fold, not point to point. In Walls to the Ball each movement toward created infinite variation of folds. These folds are, “…a traveling node along a fluctuating line that has not beginning or end” which envelop “a world infinitely spongy and cavernous, constituting more than a line and less than a surface” (Deleuze cited in Manning 2011, p. 23, 36). In the gym the nets were tied together, extending the full length of the space. Balls could be tossed into, over, and around the nets. Rather than functioning as a measurable point, the net became a folding point, a “circumvolution” that became movement itself. Deleuze (1987) states, “we are made up of lines” (p. 124) in moving relationships carrying us “across many thresholds towards a destination which is unpredictable” (Semetsky 2013, p. 17). The tangled lines and folds of the net, bodies, balls and rooms were not pre-existent to the event, and not independent of the whole.

As Thacker (2004) states:

A swarm is an organization of multiple, individuated units with some relation to one another. That is, a swarm is a particular kind of collectivity or group phenomenon that may be dependent upon a condition of connectivity…that is defined by relationality. This pertains as much to the level of the individual unit as it does to the overall organization of the swarm. Relation is the rule in swarms…A swarm is a dynamic phenomenon (following from its relationality). (unpaged)

The use of swarming as a cultural technique can change the way educational researchers view student movements, however swarms are “are problematic objects of knowledge: they disrupt the scientific processes of objectification by means of their dynamics in space and time” (Vehlken 2013, p. 112). Through the act of swarming, the swarm “baffles our view of the ‘swarm’ as an object of knowledge; as a chaos of spatial, temporal, and intereactional information” (Vehlken 2013, p. 115). In order to view body-net-gym as a swarm requires researchers to set aside the Cartesian procedure of segmenting problems into sub-problems and/or “individual movements” (Vehlken 2013, p. 119) because such an approach will fail to make sense of the swarm as an ecology.

So what are we to make of absolute movement and swarming for research-creation? What does this movement-thought do? Rather than a perspective that understands the bodies and net as separate, one acting on the other as predetermined structures, movement-sensation conceptualizes the body-net-gym as ontogenetic and produced through ecologies. Understanding an artist-residency not as a summation of parts but as the “dynamic relations among component parts of the system” (Vehlken 2013, p. 120) or what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call a “vast plane of composition” (p. 173). This composing produces itself through movement-sensation, “opening, mixing, dismantling, and reassembling increasingly unlimited compounds” (p. 177). The task for research-creation then is to move beyond the reliance on meaning and information to think about research via compositions and ecologies, which in turn are political.

5 A (k) not Conclusion

On the nexus of being and becoming, a body is more expressivity than form (Manning 2011, p. 22).

Returning to Massumi’s (2011) work on movement-sensation we want to think about our conjectures of Walls to the Ball as a political. However, this is not to convey as sense that the ‘art’ is political art or that Meyer’s residency could measurably account for student empowerment. While student interviews, blogs and classroom discussions pointed at their excitement and enjoyment in working with Meyer, when the residency was over, the balls were returned to their cupboards, the desks and stools in the art room were put back in straight rows, and the students returned to conte line drawings of lemons. What we want to think about is the politicality of movement-sensation, or what Massumi calls a “potential politics…forms of life in the making” (2011, p. 169). If Walls to the Ball is ontogenetic – emerging through movement-sensation – and politics is about the potential of animating forms of life, then the body-net-gym politicality becomes “creative [rather] than regulative, inventive more than interpretive” (p. 170). Massumi contends that political vocabulary needs to expand in order to consider movement-thought, how swarms of non-local relations compose ecologies that are always in flux, affective, and relational. Rather than the individual as a political subject, politicality concerns itself with the:

intensity with which a process lives itself out. It is not concerned with how the process measures up to a prefixed frame of correct judgment applied to it from without. It concerns the intensity of a form of life’s appetite to live qualitative-relational abstraction creatively, as an immanent measure of its changing power of existence: forces for becoming. (p. 171)

The politicality of Walls to the Ball, or artist-residencies as research-creation in general, lie in movement-sensation and the swarm. As Vehlken (2013) argues, “Collectives possess certain abilities that are lacking in their component parts. Whereas an individual member of a swarm commands only a limited understanding of its environment, the collective as a whole is able to adapt nearly flawlessly to the changing conditions of its surroundings. Without recourse to an overriding authority or hierarchy, such collectives organize themselves quickly, adaptively, and uniquely” (p. 112). From this extended understanding of swarming we might begin to reshape a posthumanist, materialist, and ontogenetic future for educational research.

Much art education research remains embedded in the theoretical and pedagogical clutches of Eurocentric humanism that views students as autonomous and self-determining and classroom spaces as static. Taking a decidedly materialist, posthumanist and affective approach to theorizing research-creation in pedagogical spaces, we reject the unitary human subject and replace it with what Braidotti (2013) calls a more “…complex relational subject framed by embodiment [and] affectivity and empathy,” (p. 26) and what Manning (2013) calls a “field of relations,” or a “force taking form rather than simply a form” (p. 31). Movement-sensation, we argue, is crucial for challenging humanist orientations to research, where its not so much a matter of “anything” can happen, but that “so much can happen that we do not know about” (May 116). Furthermore, in thinking about research-creation as an ecology of propositions, rather than a set of pre-determined instructions or criteria, art becomes less about something (form) we make (directed) and instead instantiates, potentializes, and becomes thought.