The perception of one’s own vitality

I am a core member of activist group Quit Coal, and my work with the collective, particularly with regards to direct action events, provides the bedrock for my research. My research combines studio-based work, reading and writing theory, as well as an active participation in Melbourne’s environmental activist sector. These three elements create an interdependent feedback loop within my practice.

My studio-based work is an extension of my activism. During my candidature, I have responded to the Quit Coal and Friends of the Earth (Quit Coal’s umbrella organisation)
collectives, making works shaped by the conditions, transindividual thinking-feelings and methods of these activist groups. I am particularly interested in the material and audiovisual traces of direct action events: reworking footage, matter, memories and concepts that were generated at actions.

My theoretical research is a response to the questions posed by my activist and studio practices. My direct action experience has led me to an interest in the indeterminacy of the event. My understanding of indeterminacy is indebted to Gilles Deleuze; I characterise indeterminacy as the understanding that no thing is predetermined because existence is predicated on slipping in and out of the virtual. As such, indeterminacy must be accounted for as an actual and central condition of the event. Following Brian Massumi, I have come to the belief that indeterminacy is internalised in the body as affect, which I define as a prepersonal bodied experience of potential. I therefore attempt to account for indeterminacy by employing affect-oriented readings. I have taken my title from Massumi’s early piece the Autonomy of Affect, in which he describes affect as inculcating “nothing less than the perception of one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness.

The outcome of this approach of interweaving studio work, affect theory, and protesting is rhizomatic, in that its effects are diverse and it is difficult to trace which lines of enquiry
have seeded which outcomes. In my activist work, the process has precipitated a breakdown of sorts, as my commitment has moved from groups and methods of
engagement with an emphasis on ideological force, policy and measurable outcomes, to approaches that affirm indeterminacy and collective experience. This realignment
corresponds with a changing studio process, which has moved from a practice of mediating archival DA materials after the fact, to an attempt to engage with the feelings,
logics and traces of the event at the level of their own processes.