Observation, distillation, aggregation : Framing aesthetic encounters in the atmospheric millieu through expanded art practice

Drawing from a range of light-based and atmospheric phenomena observed in everyday situations, this research project explores the threshold across which the ordinary and the extraordinary intersect. It examines art's role in framing these alignments and its potential to help us understand what constitutes aesthetic experience. Acknowledging the highly specific, ephemeral and often ineffable character of such encounters, the research has been conducted as experimental fieldwork. The setting for this fieldwork is defined by that which is familiar, provisional and durational by nature ‚Äö- the immediate everyday environment. These qualities also define the subject matter (which include the rainbow, dust, and birds in flight) and methodological tools (such as the chair, the window, and the camera obscura). The practical research is centred on familiar manifestations of the light and air. Diverse media have been employed, including series of paintings and drawings, voice recordings and video documentation of chance atmospheric encounters, gallery-based sitespecific installation and performance. The project draws together a field of artists and theoreticians who reject representational models in favour of directly framing experience. Central to the research has been the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and its interpretation as an approach to art practice by Simon O'Sullivan. Other writers informing the project include Alva N‚àö‚àÇe, Brian Massumi, Richard Holmes, J‚àö‚àÇrg Heiser, and Anna Dezeuze. The contextual field is further defined with visual examples that apprehend the light and/or air, discussed through selected works by John Ruskin, Gabriel Orozco, Spencer Finch, Ariane Epars, Francis Al‚àöv¿s, Robert Barry and Olafur Eliasson, as well as the methods of Romantic scientist Humphry Davy. The research has implemented open-ended working systems that allow an accumulation of responses over time. With an intention to communicate personal aesthetic encounters, parameters were established through which I could respond, intervene, and often push against. Expanding the research to consider how others' experiences might be included, frameworks for participation were introduced. These methodological systems or 'armatures' were themselves investigated for their potential to both contain and stimulate aesthetic awareness. The research unfolded as a series of related encounters. As such, the project seeks to extend the creative 'moment of meeting' into the presentation of these processes. The submission does not bring together a series of resolute works but instead assembles multiple responses to phenomena at different stages of inquiry, with the intention of setting in motion complex reencounters, where viewers engage in the here-and-now collectively. Expanding on existing models of art practice that resist definition and permanence, the project contributes a new experiential body of work. The research does not arrive at objective knowledge but instead a place of subjective awareness, proposing this place of un-knowing might be conclusive in itself.