notes

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[[What does the field look like?]]

It will look like a blizzard of the possibilities in the situation, emitted from parts of people and things they are hidden on, faces, tracksuits, footy boots, rucsacs, cones, grass, the clouds, offering glimpses into the times and places they are from - and moving out into space to compete for the viewers attention. 

Below is a description of *the field*, a key concept in gestalt therapy. Gestalt therapy focuses on what emerges between us instead of focusing on what's happening inside individuals. It's had a huge impact on how I feel about myself and my art practice.

My understanding is that gestalt therapists develop a particular embodied sensitivity to feelings they experience as being strange or off in rrlation to a client. These part formed, dissociated feelings are present in the field as the presence of absences, undeveloped parts of the self that haven’t had the support they need to develop and become integrated into who we are. Though this has parallelles with transference and counter transference their thinking is less concerned with with who a thought or feeling belongs to, it's understood as something in and of the relationship that is more than the sum of it's parts. 

Through my work with Sharon, I developed my capacity to pay much more attention to what is happening in my body and use that to discover and begin to integrate parts of myself I had repressed.

I'd always thought that if I found the right kind of digital visualisation format then I and other people could bring their neglected thoughts to it. I'm now realising that there needs to be at least some kind of therapeutic space to support people to feel and articulate their proto-emotions. I'm also realising that I can't depict thoughts and feelings directly, as abstract things. I just need to find different ways for people to communicate by moving and arranging material things, bodies and images in scenes - with the aim to reveal the affects of emotional energies, intentions and absences in between.

This would be different to providing wellbeing support alongside an artistic project or art for wellbeing. It would be therapy to enrich the quality of the artistic collaboration. 

For future artworks I would like to offer ghestalt therapy sessions for people I'm working with, focusing on body work, helping them to feel and describe how their body responds emotionally to the situation. Which past experiences are pressing on that and what they feel might be going on with other people. My role would be to develop creative activities that help the group describe proto-emotions in relation to the space of their bodies, each others bodies and in the space between. 

The focus would be less on trying to recreate a scene from my life, instead it would be more using that scene as a stimulus and then seeing where the energy is for them now. Use a mixture of activities through which we communicate with each other by moving things around the scene, both physical and augmented reality objects, with imagery from scenes in their lives and from tv, games, films etc.

Much of the artistic work will be in choosing which materials to bring into the scene. 

The undulating squishy energies of emotions in an around our bodies affecting and being affected by the material fabric of the space we're in. The flickering speed of feelings, thoughts, conversation, movement and body language compared with the slowness that furniture, wallpaper, trees and roads fade, grow and decay.

Enacting a scene with a group, finding ways to manifest things that could be said, thought, felt and done in that situation. Revealing the social, psychological, behavioural and social affordances affordances of a situation by manifesting its absences. All the things that the people in a scene could feel, think, see, say and do. Including things they imagine other people (present, absent, known personally or known through media) doing and experiencing. 

Manifesting traces of disembodied voices, movements, gestures, actions and expressions captured reenacting and reimagining the scene and from people in the group doing other things, communicating through different media and in different situations.

Everyone in the group does some therapy focused on their response to the scene, whatever it brings up for them. 

Then for the artistic production they come together and communicate through different activities by moving material objects, movements and gestures, vocal but not verbal sounds, printed and virtual imagery, particle systems. Everything but verbal communication.

 We can all bring our enhanced capacity for psychological/emotional awareness to those creative activities, but we don't have to talk directly about what we discussed with the therapist. 

Question. The thing I always go back to at the root of my practice is the tension and conflict my Dad and I had as I used his garage to make art, the mess I made and how so much of the intentionality of our relationship was brought to the surface through that argument about how tidy or messy the garage should be left. What is the media equivalent of that? Disagreeing with friends about the meaning or how good a piece of music film or game is? What we should watch? What should be shared?

How can I use popular media as well as physical materials as medium to capture the inherent tensions in a scene? Where are the gaps or cracks in the conversation? Where are the things we say that feel off? What if we found a way for our social media feeds to be present in between us and explored the tensions, cracks and relationships between them? How do these videos, posts, memes affect and reverberate with each other? Picturing the field as social media and analogue media. The tensions between John's latest conspiracy heroes rant defending family values against perversion and posts defending kids rights to choose their gender in my mastedon feed hang in the air. I'm imagining the field made visible by disturbances between these different media contents floating in the space between us.

**Two types of activities to capture tensions in the field**

- Activities that feel for tensions in the space between
- Activities that manifest tensions through materials in between