Knowledge formation as performance: transfer of situated knowledge.

We have recently through a series of full-scale performance research laboratories been searching for ways to articulate on the experience of involvement. We could call it those momentary situations, where we are in a performative state. More precisely the interest is in the artistic use of this conscious state of simultaneously perceiving and performing in the flow of things. The artistic knowledge on performative states.

These momentary altered states are also closely related to the well known shared situation of the performance event. That is the socially structured relationship between the performer and the visitor, within which the art of being human is artificially articulated and negotiated.

This paper will propose how performance research laboratories can be the meta-methodological structure when investigating, articulating and generating knowledge on performative states of attention, experience and action.

At the time of the conference we will have realized all three phases of this research project. They are done in collaboration with and in the facilities of Kanonhallen.dk, a 30 x 60 meter black-box performance space in central Copenhagen.

We will present our research in methodologies of situated knowledge, exemplified by the research done in these three occasions.

The meta-methodological structures, which evolve using performance laboratory sessions, are almost indistinctable from compositional structures of performance events – only different in their intentions, and therefore in the participatory positions of the involved people. It seems to be necessary to involve oneself as performers to be able to explore the situated knowledge on experience. Suggesting a use of Performance as Research in Practise, when investigating and articulating on performative experience.

This research project has two main objectives.

To find ways to instantiate specific phenomenal occurrences, performative situations and compositional strategies as conceptual events in themselves. As theorizing through formal procedures on artistic processes – as ‘abstracted in practise’. That could be clearly specified procedures of how to bring oneself into a specific mode of experiencing – or formal use of lightsetting, media and objects that instantiates a certain formation of attention.
To develop on meta-methodologies on how to orchestrate artistic research projects which are functioning distinct as research generating knowledge for artists in process – and which are distinct different from artistic exploration, and objective analysis.

We reach into this project from well-established practises within our specific performance tradition – to meet with the complex traditions of scientific approaches to research. The task is partly to re-negotiate meta-methodologies in coherent ways – to merge traditions of knowledge transfer.