Creative Inquiry
Sound, Motion, and the Brain: An Experimental Data-Driven Creative Output on Movement Improvisation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ioannis Sidiropoulos
The paper presents a doctoral study that delves into the intersection of sound, motion, and brain activity, with a particular emphasis on the creative output generated from the collected datasets. The research integrates movement improvisation, audio stimuli, cognitive neuroscience, and neuroimaging to explore how music and environmental sounds influence movement improvisation and brain activity. The project incorporates fifteen audio stimuli to examine whether participating dance-trained performers exhibit similar movement patterns through improvisation. Additionally, relevant patterns of brain activation associated with movement improvisation are observed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Data analysis of movement (using Motiongrams and Laban Movement Analysis) and neuroimaging data (using FMRIB Software Library) reveals insights into performers' responses to audio through improvisation. Integration of these datasets identifies similarities to inform the creation of the experimental data-driven creative work. The paper discusses the creative output of the research, demonstrating the application of interdisciplinary methodologies in inspiring and shaping experimental artistic creations.
The Time of Critique
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Patrizia Mc Bride
This paper probes the import of the idea and practice of critique as drivers of inquiry in the humanities. I start by tracing the historical trajectory of critique since the 1960s, from its role as a skeptical hermeneutic tool used to open up disciplines to insurgent methodologies and subaltern voices to its unmasking as a limiting “sensibility” (Rita Felski) bent on a form of debilitating, “paranoid” reading (Eve Sedgwick) that preempts more fruitful forms of engagement with literary and cultural artifacts. I then outline a typology of the philosophical practice of critique as a formal method that has historically enabled inquiry into the relation between knowledge and action, theory and practice. Drawing on Rodolphe Gasché and others, I briefly discuss the Kantian and Nietzschean understandings of critique as philosophical bookends for critical practice in the humanities. The bulk of my paper is devoted to juxtaposing Bruno Latour’s and Judith Butler’s more recent analyses of the temporal logic of critique. For both, critique requires situating oneself in the present while accepting its contingency, which entails embracing the contingency that drives the critique’s own operations. Awareness of contingency neutralizes the temptation to project a desired normative framework onto a phantasmatic future, which is critique’s biggest hazard. In exposing the temporality of critique to defuse its utopian vestiges and temptation for transcendence, Latour and Butler show how critique can infuse the humanities with a buoyant sense of immanence born of the question “what difference the present moment makes” (Foucault, “Enlightenment”).
Ingeborg Bachmann on Why We Write: A Revisionist Reading of Requiem for Fanny Goldmann
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Douglas Brent Mc Bride
Why write? This is the question that opens the English edition of "Requiem for Fanny Goldmann", an unfinished novel by Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973). By the end of the 70-page fragment, the narrator can do little more than acknowledge the futility of trying to discover the “truth” of Fanny’s “long and dark and untellable story”, a tale that is, as the narrator observes, as “untellable as all stories”. In a final attempt to draw some kind of balance from the exercise, the narrator concludes that a writer “can only hold onto what is tangible [...] and write down the sentences that are spoken, so that something is said by which one can begin to glimpse what really happened”. This is to say the truth of the lies that constitute the facts of Fanny’s ultimately unknowable and, of course, fictional life. This paper takes as its point of departure a close reading of Bachmann’s reflection on the power and limits of writing in “Requiem for Fanny Goldmann”, to argue with Jonathan Kramnick (Criticism and Truth) and Rita Felski (The Limits of Critique) that literary studies, by making rhyme and reason of humanity’s vast archive of written verse and lyrical prose, is able to make truth claims about this very material aspect of reality, to the extent that the discipline employs formalist analysis of language and aesthetic judgment in the practice of close reading as a form of writing about and with texts.
