The Passionate Knower

Sensing or translating thought processes from text to material, movement, or sound reveals the gaps, lumps, points of reference and intrigue, associations and analogies  that help passionate knowers to navigate discourses. It reversely influences what they want to know and why. Understanding and making are intertwined in an iterative process. 

Following a causal chain is not the same as understanding a concept, being able to transfer it, use it, and see through it. Having understood something means being able to translate it, means having a feeling for it, having internalized it, understand it beyond finding adequate vocabulary to talk about it.

Knowledge was produced in the making of artifacts/ spaces/ encounters. The result is a representation of the process, the process itself is embodied BUT HIDDEN.

"embodied knowledge – person views all knowledge as contextual and embodied. The person experiences him/herself as creator of and as embodying knowledge, valuing her/his own experiential ways of knowing and reconciling these with other strategies for knowing as s/he lives out her/his life." 

Barbour, Karen N. (2002). Embodied ways of knowing. Women’s solo contemporary dance in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Unpublished doctoral thesis. The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.

"... artistic research seeks not so much to make explicit the knowledge that art is said to produce, but rather to provide a specific articulation of the pre-reflective, non-conceptual content of art. It thereby invites ‘unfinished thinking’. Hence, it is not formal knowledge that is the subject matter of artistic research, but thinking in, through and with art. 

Borgdorff, Henk. (2011). The product ion of knowledge in artistic research. In: The Routledge Companion of Research in the Arts."

"First, we must release the stranglehold exerted by views of knowledge as a fixed and eternal state or mental relation, in order to focus, instead, on knowing as a process of inquiry rather than a final product. Second, we must recognize the role of the body, especially our sensory-motor processes and our emotions and feelings, in our capacity for understanding and knowing."

Johnson, Mark. (2011). Embodied Knowing Through Art. In: The Routledge Companion of Research in the Arts.

„… in ignoring messiness, and dreaming of its eradication, we discover that we have messed up our own world.“ 

Stengers, Isabelle (2017). Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Polity