United & Severed: Collaborartive Research and Cognitive Authority

United & Severed: Collaborative Research and Cognitive Authority

Prof. Kristine Diekman and Dr. Karen Schaffman

Congress on Research in Dance, 2008

Empathy and Media, College Art Association 2009
ISEA, 2009

United & Severed: That Window of Time is a collaborative project that embraces feminist values of collectivity and intersubjectivity as central to the process of corporeal research and art making. The collaboration consists of a dance artist and scholar Karen Schaffman, media artist Kristine Diekman, two sculptors Anna O'Cain and Richard Keely, and three participants, Ivy Kensinger, Michele Caputo, and Kim Anderson. For this paper, "we" refers to Karen Schaffman and Kristine Diekman, who conceptualized the project and collaborated on the audio and video. Our work attempts to translate kinesthetic and sensorial experiences by providing an opportunity for the participants to share their stories and creative actions in an immersive, installation space for the public. Through interviews and artistic exchange, the women reveal personal perceptions of traumatic injury. Our project deals specifically with shock injury, a subject that operates entirely too close to all of us, since shock injury abruptly changes lives in just one moment.

In our project, we offer a collective impression of the corporeality of people living with traumatic injury to forward a deeper understanding of the post-traumatic experience. Our strategy is to maintain a commitment to the voices and movements of the participants, and at the same time experiment with the making of poetic representation and alternative narrative forms. By fore-fronting the words and actions of the women, we attempt to disengage ourselves from the hegemonic forces that isolate the experiences of those who are bodily challenged. The work employs multiple authorship and opposes spectacle. We invoke each participant’s sensibility by using her "cognitive authority." This term is borrowed from feminist disability activist and theorist Susan Wendell to indicate a renewed empowerment for disabled people. In Wendell’s words, cognitive authority means, "the authority to have one’s descriptions of the world taken seriously, believed, or accepted generally as the truth."[1] In this way, United & Severed is composed of autobiographical narratives. We turn to the participants to describe their extraordinary corporeal circumstances.

Here's a clip from the project. You’ll listen to the voice of Ivy Kensinger, a young woman severely injured in an automobile accident. This portion of the video is set in a grove of trees burnt during the San Diego wildfires in October 2007.

Play clip, Ivy's narrative

As artists we intend to stir the imagination and intellect to awaken the multi-level senses of the public. We hope to transport the viewers through an unsteady experience by creating a fractured narrative composed of visual and auditory sensations. This feeling is similar to shock injury, where what happens in "that window of time" is abrupt, ruptures the continuity of life, and redefines a person's corporeality. We edit the participants' stories to accentuate the tension between wholeness and fragmentation to invite viewers to relate with compassion and empathy by giving them a poetic space to contemplate and face their own fragility and mortality.

Play documentation slides (not yet available)

The sculptural aspect of the installation is comprised of a tree that was burnt in the San Diego wildfires (2007). Through a deliberate action, the tree was cut down as if surgically removed limb by limb, and then reassembled in order to consider re-composition. According to O'Cain, the treatment of the tree and resulting sculpture suggests transformational capacities for motion, and gives light to interior and exterior ideas of space.

The audio component is vitally important enabling acoustic intersubjectivity. In the project, we create imaginary spaces within the “heads” of the listeners using the technology of wireless headphones. Wireless headphones allow viewers to internalize the women's voices and other ambient, environmental sounds while experiencing their own mobility. Viewers listen to the audio and examine the sculptural objects as they negotiate moving about the installation space. The immersion of looking, listening, and moving, creates an "intertwining of the senses" (to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty[2]), and calls the public to an awareness of their own embodiment. In addition, the solitude of the headphones reminds us how isolating the experience of disability can be.

End slide show

The flexibility of technology enables mediated fragmentation and multiplication of perspectives. Feminist art historian and theorist Amelia Jones coined the term "technophenemonology" to press ways that performing subjects are politicized and socialized in their embodied relationship through technology to self/other and self/world.[3] Enacting technophenomenology, our installation becomes an interface for intersubjective understanding and invokes a sensate response in the public. The creative process entwines womens' personal experiences with the video, audio, and sculptural elements. Their bodily relationships to the world are not hidden. Instead, the traumatic subject is revealed and embodies a political and social proclamation of the body.

Here is a clip of Kim Anderson, a writer and teacher who is quadriplegic. In this section, Kim explains her physical relationship to the world. We invite the social act of looking, not gazing, instead the "gaze" is turned back on the viewers to contemplate their own physical abilities.

Play clip (Kim Anderson 1)

This sequence is documentary in style. We utilize synchronized sound and edit with minimal fragmentation. Although we "see" Kim fully disclosed in her wheel chair, she subverts normalized notions of being in the world. She tells us, "I forget that normal people's feet hurt." By inquiring, "Can you feel your leg when it falls asleep?," she asks us to reflect upon the functionality of our bodies. By doing so, Kim questions whose body is normal.

This next clip is of participant Michele Caputo, who shared writing and dialogue throughout the process. The sequence shows the conflict between paralysis and sensuality.

Play clip (Michele)

When she says, "I have wide bones," Michele conveys to us that despite her paralysis, her perception of herself is fundamentally strong. Michele's hands exude determination. Through the mediation of technology, we are permitted to witness, even be sutured to, Michele's sensuous experience of her body. The combination of a close-up shot, depth of field, slow motion, and the intimate quality of the audio creates a coherent and fluid relationship between the viewer and Michele. This section of the video, however, is not without tension. The topic is problematic because we recognize there is both a fascination and repulsion of looking at those who have been violently injured or disabled. This is especially confrontational when "those people" express their sensuality publicly. Michele openly describes her body in terms of duality, her "lobster claw," which is utilitarian, and her "good hand," which is expressive. The sensuality of her movements is magnified to the level of "hypnotic" because, although it is coming from a person who has paralyzed body parts, she is in fact, very alive and sensate. She is hypersensitive. Intercut with the movement of Michele's hands, is the digging up of the tree roots. This pulling of the roots from the flesh of the ground further substantiates this tension. It remains ambiguous whether the roots are being discarded or instead salvaged because they still hold life. At the same time, Michele articulates her perceptions and thoughts concerning the contagion and fear of a paralyzed body. This conflict between paralysis and sensuality (death and life) discomforts some viewers. In Bataille's words: "On the one hand the horror of death drives us off, for we prefer life: on the other an element at once solemn and terrifying fascinates us and disturbs us profoundly."[4] Michele's monologue demystifies her body and reminds us of the inevitable. She expresses this most ironically: "the immortality myth is gone for good."

In our concluding section, we would like to return our discussion to the strategy of fragmentation, which we have employed throughout the work. We use video to slow down time, create gaps, and magnify disruption to aesthetically imply the experience of post-traumatic stress. This next clip is a representation of the body in crisis. The voice is again of Kim Anderson, who communicates with her computer using military alphabet.

Play clip (Kim Anderson, text with ghosting)

In this sequence Kim describes the ongoing pain of her physical condition. The public’s ability to decipher Kim's statement is disrupted by the multiple collisions of sound, text and movement. The video doesn’t give easy access to the content of the statement, but Kim's cognitive authority is heightened, and her statement and method of writing conveys her physical reality. Viewers have expressed both empathy and frustration when listening to Kim, because for them, her voice-activated technique appears laborious.

This difficulty in comprehension is compounded by a performance of crisis, where Karen's/my body performs loss of control and hyper-vigilance. In an explosive panic, the fragmentary archive of trauma is vividly embodied through jumpy movements. The body in crisis is ghosting, performing memory and that which goes unseen, metaphorically and literally. These qualities draw awareness to non-sequential and fragmented experience embodied in those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. PTSD is a neurological dysfunction that is caused by a disrupted personal life narrative. As we use this disruption to inform our editing, so also we use the strategies of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a therapeutic technique that seeks to fill gaps in the narrative and heal trauma. Through a series of sessions, the traumatic event is retold and pieced together to desensitize the person and decrease symptoms of stress. The goal is to link the traumatic moment as one of many experiences situated in a whole life narrative. Through the telling and retelling, which is accompanied by somatic stimulation (such as tactile tapping or creating back and forth eye movement), the brain reprograms ruptured experience. The "severance" of one's life is then integrated, or "united," into one's life timeline. This technique of reconstructing the archive, informs how we employ experimental narrative and choreography in the video. As artists, reworking the narrative of trauma through choreographed repetition laced with critical interruptions, staged performance, and repatterning of recorded interviews, unsettles the original meaning of the archive. This creates a new understanding of the traumatic experience, which we hope translates to the public and gives voice and visibility to the women in the project.