Sound Walking for Moving Potentials

107 Visual Arts Research Volume 43, Number 2 Winter 2017© 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Walking as controlled falling: A train is not-not running through town Charles Garoian It is a contemporary proverb that walking is controlled falling. Continuity embraces discontinuity as walking includes falling.The momentum of walking is the excess of its activity over each successive step.The ongoing quality of walking is that trans-step momentum. Each next step is momentous, in its own little way [merit]: it is the event of a caught fall. The catch renews the walking ’s functional context.The rhythm of falling and catching organizes an indefinite series of varying contexts for the walking-event’s continuation. Brian Massumi, 2002, pp. 217-218 [The materiality of walking constitutes] the practice of ‘mattering’…The essential nature of things is not an Aristotelian plot nor a Hegelian dialectic, and does not lead to a goal. Therefore, it cannot be the object of a quest, as for the grail. Instead, it goes round and round and on and on… Brain Me Up Somebody or is it Scotty Christine Ballengee-Morris Embodiment affect and sensation; arts in/as everyday practice; and performativity After reading Kimberly’s Shifting Concepts in Art Education and the story of Maria and her walk with sounds, I gave a great deal of thought about how this observation/ participation by Kimberly inspired her to rethink research .This story reminded me of embodiment—giving concrete form to an abstract idea—especially considering Kimberly’s participants in this project, StoryWalks, becoming curators through sharing memories. She stated that “memory and stories reside not in a single person’s head but in a field of relations that are felt upon the body in the material forces of building, pavement , smells, sounds, memories , past and present.” She mentions milieu (Deleuze & “ C h o o - C h o o ! ” “ C h o o - C h o o ! ” Long, sustained pitches on each vowel sound now arrive more rapidly, urgently . Maria walks forward with the others. “ C h o o - C h o o ! ” Other children are choo-chooing too, but Maria catches my ear and eye. She breaks a bit from the group, her stride now taking on a new rhythm. Musician /artist PJ Hirabayashi is leading a walk in which she and the children listen to, locate and produce sounds in their neighborhood. They also talk about neighborhood sounds that they don’t hear on their walk yet comprise the larger city’s soundscape. Minutes before Maria’s exclamation, PJ had discussed the city train that, while not currently moving and making sounds, could be heard when it is in motion. “What sound does a train make?” she had asked the children. “ C h o o - C h o o ! ” Several of them responded. Kimberly Powell The Pennsylvania State University Sound Potentials for Moving Walking Designed in collaboration with Jeffrey Cornwall VAR 43_2 text.indd 107 1/26/18 10:57 AM 108 Visual Arts Research Winter 2017 Rebecca Solnit, 2000, pp. 146147 Texxture [two x’s] is the kind of texture that is dense with offered information about how, substantively, historically, materially , it came into being… But there is also the texture —one x this time—that defiantly or even invisibly blocks or refuses such information; there is texture, usually glossy if not positively tacky, that insists instead on the polarity between substance and surface, texture that signifies the willed erasure of history. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2003, pp. 14-15 In her paper,“Soundwalking,” Kim conceptualizes art education researchwriting as ground zero, a pivotal point of performativity where walking is constituted as controlled falling. She proposes the counterpoint of researchwriting as homologous with soundwalking: characterizing their contingent encounters and alliances momentous (Massumi), their occurrences organizing indefinite, texxtured contexts (Sedgwick), and their conjoined practices mattering in nuanced and consequential ways (Solnit). Here, in this writing, I’ve positioned some of my own thinking about researchwriting in art education alongside Kim’s to explore and experiment with their texxtured betweenness ; their multiple lines of ideational flight; and, their potential encounters and alliances. In other words, this Guattari) and the notions of...