The second grouping of speakers focused on the knowledges that can be gained through collaboration.
Felicity Molloy, currently teaching in Massage Therapy at Otago Polyetchnic, gave a performative discussion of an early project conducted at Unitec. SpaceMaking involved groups of students from dance and architecture in the generation of reflexive collaborative works that in the process intruduced new frameworks to each other's disciplines. The openness to different forms of practice and different ways of knowing was obvious in the stunning images of dancers entwinned in architectural 'muscles.' Felicity also introduced the potential for somatic ways of knowing, where knowledge is more than skin-deep.
Artist Claire Beynon demonstrated that intensity with which collaboration can generate new thought. Working closely with scientist Sam Bowen, Claire has developed forms of tacet knowledge that go beyond what either discipline can contribute alone. Dealing predominantly with aesthetic surfaces drawn from her experiences at Antarctica, Claire took us on a journey through working methods that showed the art object slipping and sliding between multiple plates. This was also a deeply scientific process where wonder dominated certain processes and miniature creatures were found to behave aesthetically, selecting one red stone to finish their constructions.
Julian Priest ostensibly presented a report from Riga. Tracing the history of the international festival for new media culture symposia at rixc http://www.rixc.lv/ he articulated a key understanding for the day: that the methods of art and science that we were discussing were not science journalism. That form of objective distance and study is not the creation and generation of new thought or new ways of knowing and doing. Drawing on his history as a network activist, and the kinds of collaboration that he ends up conducting between the two halves of himself, Julian ended with a discussion of energy. Thinking through the operations of energy as not just force, but a movement where the transference is not always uni-directional Julian argued that tactics are essential to constructing different ways of knowing.
