Hermeneutic of performing knowledge

Excerpt

As we confront the impact of new hermeneutic tools of computer mediation in the form of social media and semantic Webs, we reflect on the performance of knowledge in collaborative, distributed and shared environments, the ways performing practitioners such as artists, architects, scientists, anthropologists, designers, philosophers, and managers explore this performance in various contexts in making sense of our world. The performer, in an attempt to interpret the practice, ‘necessarily interrogates the boundary between possible and impossible, between the tacit and the objective, thereby both expanding the notion of what performing knowledge might mean and accessing something closer to what the practice offers.’ In a theatrical performance, human incarnation transforms into an active and engaged body, ‘opening and projecting the performance to the world’, in a visual splendour. A phenomenologist may say that this performance expands hermeneutic in ways in which reality can be present for people, constituting a relationship between humans and reality, on the basis of which reality can be present in specific ways. Here, interpretation is existentially embodied in perceiving human beings. For Tim Ingold (2013), Performing Knowledge is about Making in the sense of creating knowledge, building environments and transforming lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture are all ways of making, and all are dedicated to exploring the conditions and potentials of human life. Ingold ties the four disciplines together in a way that has never been attempted before. In a radical departure from the conventional studies that treat art and architecture as compendia of objects for analysis, Ingold (ibid.) proposes an anthropology and archaeology not of but with art and architecture. He advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or ‘correspond’ with, one another in the generation of form. Ethnographers see performing knowledge through the lens of the challenges and potentials of self-reflexivity in performance, suggesting that ‘in conceptual terms, it works towards thinking about the political capacities of performances and of ethnographies, as processes of witnessing and articulating testimonies, which are themselves informed by a politics of knowledge.’ At the Performing Knowledge Project (1984), Performing Knowledge is about the stories of people and the communities they inhabit. It is about exploring these stories, what they look like in line and colour, what they sound like with melody and chord, and how these stories help us make sense of the world we are involved in. Every person has his or her story to tell: every community, every family, every institution, every issue, every piece of ground, and every thing. When we remember the country of our birth, when we stand in the middle of a parking lot, and when we walk with an ageing parent, each possesses a history that provokes a tale, a tale that makes sense of the knowledge that inspires it. These stories are all around us; they are deep inside us as well. We hear these stories everyday. At the BLUEorange Gallery (Borusky et al. 2015), Performing Knowledge is seen through the lens of the Body, through live performance, photography, and video. In this performance, artists communicate an array of current issues that limit and confine the body. Each artist uses a body or their body to publicly exceed limitations and confinements inherent in culture, politics, or society at large. Seen through the prisms of organisational knowledge, communities of practice perform as social actors of knowledge sharing, construction, reconstruction, distribution, and negotiation of knowledge. …