Dr Christina MacRae and I got a bit excited and poetic about our symposium contribution to the DigilitEY conference, Manchester 7th-8th March 2019. [see page 13 for our abstract]
We used a piece of film data from one of Tcam's first outings in the Near & Far project. We slowed it down and thought about it.
Using the virtual to explore what hap-pens when adults “don’t talk” but in-stead use space, sound, materials, and bodies to converse with children?
Movement 1: elastic of rhythm:
Elastic-in-motion seems to make hands move, stretch, hover, clutch, sway, roll. This jumping with elastic takes form through texture of shared interval between two children – of gesture riff and murmuration. These rhythms affect each other; they meet as diffracting forces – as polyrhythms.
We become aware that the children are actually making music with the elastic as they move functional rhythms to becoming-expressive with rhythm. We become aware of the music through our eyes and senses other-than-sound.
Manning considers rhythm to be the key element of relational movement. And relational movement is always an improvisation. Not moving to a rhythm but moving rhythm. She says (of dancing with a partner) that - Moving the relation is a rhythmic encounter with a shifting interval”. (2009:34). And she contests that rhythm could never be measured as such because: it operates conjunctively. It is the and…and…and…of the rhizome that never finds a territorialization. (2006:132)
The elastic-and-child-and-child-and-elastic ensemblemoves rhythm as conversation, as connection, as duet, as a chorus – a heterogenous choral work with bodies, elastic and many other things in the room -including the talking we cannot hear and the many affective things we cannot sees or sense. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call a machinic opera- a synthesising of orders, species and heterogenous qualities. Refrains that stumble, stretch, transform and take flight.
At the time Words had seemed to dominate the territory with their ubiquitous naming, narrating, directing and describing. These order-words seemed as oblivious to this nuanced, elastic conversation as this tCam footage is to the sound of talking which permeated the room. We consider how rhythm holds a complexity that is more-than-words - of emerging gestures and kernels of bodily expression extending forward as literacies to come.
Movement 2: elastic of film:
It is the elastic potentialthat we put to use as a de-colonising methodology. Film has a unique capacity to give attention to the virtual potential of movement. This is what Hansen calls the “thickness” of the living present (2004).
By making the relationality of allbodies more perceptible (both human and nonhuman), film, and in this case, slow-motion film, offers a philosophical medium that de-centres the human body in relation to the passage of time. Film is animated, it can be edited, it can be played at different speeds, and it can be silenced. The literal act of slowing data down can become an act of methodological resistance to fixing data in time, so that data is less about time, and instead, becomes what Ingold calls the “stuff of time”.
This process, what we are calling video-sensing, pushes us to think more deeply about time, speed, and intensity.
As the two of us together view two children’s bodies responding to the contracting force of the elastic, we video-sense an uncanny quality of moving bodies that are animated automatically as a relation of movement.
Our viewing is partial, we cannot feel the resistances, or the forces that are affecting the children’s bodies, our sensing only goes so far, but “to see is to move” (ibid), and our thinking moves as we watch children in relation to elastic.
Slow-motion video amplifies small movements and makes the pulse of transitory rhythm’s perceptible. It is not that these micro-movements were simply too small to be seen, or that film offers us actuality with more veracity so that we witness time in its continuity. It is more that AT the time and IN the event our eyes are always working at the edge of what is intelligible. It is film’s elasticity that makes us aware of how much we miss and allows us to re-compose our seeing.
Film hints at what Manning calls the “quasi-virtual transition states of movement”, de-naturalising the act of seeing. Its potential is to make us aware of the hovering interval in which the virtual resides
It has the capacity to “make us realise that time is not given but created” (Frampton, 2006:203).
Movement 3: elastic of improvisation
The practice of improvisation is an experimental dealing with what is not yet known, that which is emerging, the virtual, that which is yet to be discovered. The children improvise through and with elastic and each other unencumbered with the adult logics of representation. The improvisation is conversation, it is duet, it is a chorus – a heterogenous choral work - a machinic opera.
Although Deleuze and Guattari never explain music or how music comes to be. They talk about the world through music and they return again and again to children’s improvised tunes in order to manifest their idea of the Refrain, making and unmaking and re-making territory. They understand improvisation as the force which moves us from an existing territory and joins with the forces of the future – cosmic forces.
Improvisation makes the children’s refrain elastic, combining senses and nonsense. The meaning of the elastic, dancing, refrain is nothing but itself. It cannot be reduced to words without losing its power. But it is deeply connected. This is an a-grammatical, sensemaking event which means. Maclure (2016) suggests that the stability of language emerges through rhizomatic movements and rhythms of bodies. These elastic, polyrhythmic, refrains and rhythms attest to the interconnectedness of thought and body and movement and materials and sound and … and…and…
This contests the Cartesian disconnect of mind and body – of making children sit still, immobilised in order to focus their minds. We wonder what constitutes a meaningful conversation for young children. As Maclure says there are more ways to connect than through the exchanging of messages or the deciphering of meaning (2016). And it is through the practice of improvised, elastic connection - connections which change, transform and adapt - that young children can perhaps teach adults a thing or two about rhizomic and transversal thinking.
Finally, we offer a proposition that improvisational practices in the temporal arts, which have intrinsic, indescribable, un-reducible knowledges that are based in interaction, emergent understanding and affect might offer early childhood pedagogy a generative and expansive reconceptualization of young children’s communicative capacities and literacies.
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