PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Bob and Lee | UK

Commit to Memory: Replacing Site

(in which Bob and Lee spend twelve hours at a loss)

In their essay ‘Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning’ (1989), educationalists Brown, Collins and Duguid discuss the context-specific manner in which ideas, theories, and concepts can be explored practically, considering how ‘situated cognition’ uses practical models to communicate theoretical structures, rather than the more commonly used abstract methods of communication. This concept has been influential in shaping our approach to research and practice, allowing us to develop the concept we have termed ‘operational knowledge’. ‘Operational knowledge’ refers to knowledges developed through intuition and experience, as much as through the objective analysis of data.

Partly Cloudy, Chance of Rain, the practical component of our conjoined PhD, sought to generate the creation of operational knowledge for both its exoteric and esoteric audiences, by the location of a site-specific performance within the quotidian space of the motorway service station. Similarly, the Internet sited We Will Remember You (www.dogshelf.com/wwry.html) provides a strategy of resistance in encouraging the placing of ‘antithetical’ narratives in the non-place of the airport lounge, the shopping mall and the motorway service station. Like Partly Cloudy, Chance of Rain, our next piece O (Consensio) returns to actual site, and will focus on a singular non-place, in this case the shopping mall.

Located within transitory space of a corridor, the performative paper we intend to present at the PARIP 2005 conference will seek to develop knowledge in the transaction (both haptic and cognitive) between the user of the space, the space she is in and the performer/academic. We ask an audience to witness the traces of our passing through the non-place (Augé).

Our previous papers have sought to tell the story of our research practice, but unlike many of those practitioners engaged in research which is located in performances spaces, a simple relocation of our practice would never have worked. Commit to Memory seeks to create a space in-between our earlier papers and our practice. The heteroglossic structure of the paper will utilise anecdotal, academic and performative discourses, and encourage the audience to engage in both a haptic and cognitive response to its placing. By interrupting itself (through its multivocal discourse) and by encouraging interruptions from spectators Commit to Memory will seek to advance a more grounded response to our previously abstract models, through the development of a tentative operational response to space.

Operational knowledge is connected to, and experienced in, the places in which it is exploring, however this performative paper seeks to initiate a form of operational cognition so that the audience may take their varied response to the paper with them into the non-places that they might encounter. Thus, with the presence of the audience, the performative paper has the possibility of becoming multivocal, and even multi-locational; therefore questioning further the concept of the non-place as a unified, coherent and stable experience of place.