Thresholds of Performance: Between Body, Laboratory and Text.

Situated within the Department of Drama within Queen Mary University of London, this project proposes a weaving of research activities that allow for points of connection between performance, biosciences and writing to engage in and investigate a new poetics of the body.

It asks how can the fields of art, science and creative writing be refigured through performance and how are the intersections between art and the biological sciences is useful for rethinking the cultural body, especially in the intersections between or 'thresholds' of areas or types of knowledge.

Performance and live art are crucial to my research project, including the centrality of liveness and documentation in thinking about bodies, laboratories, and texts. My research aims to raise questions that have implications for scientific discourse, but also folds back upon the study of art and performance, troubling assumptions about the body, desire, power and knowledge.

It will develop strategies for making work along a continuum between performance, writing and the 'biological arts'. Central to this is the idea of the artist as the non-expert within science, getting their 'hands wet' with the stuff of life, working with living biological material and protocols and restaging these as art activities, performances and art works, rather than with scientific agendas. Appropriating biotechnical processes into the realm of art practice -- through the production and dissemination of 'biomedia' -- allows new relations to occur, readings to be made and meanings to evolve that depart from classical Western notions of the body and of life. I argue that performative actions within the laboratory produce unlikely poetics, including new conceptual spaces for critical thinking. This project will provide me with an opportunity to test out these imperatives through a range of research outcomes.

The outcomes will include writings, performances, visual and written documents, a series of interdisciplinary salons, and a book, all of which will reflect a rich, rigorous and innovative model for interdisciplinary practice.

Beyond the academic beneficiaries outlined above, the proposed research seeks to impact arts professional or practitioner groups, relevant development agencies, as well as the wider public in general.

All these impact groups are viewed as participatory in the production and dissemination of knowledges. Therefore impact is not just approached in how material and outcomes are delivered and to whom but explored for the ways in which ways of approaching ideas can be seen as useful and relevant, focusing specifically on the role of the artist can create meaningful activities and networks through which research activities can be creatively and usefully engaged with and participated in.

The active strands of the research's questions and its interdisciplinary activities across art, the biosciences and cultural discourse strongly position it to impact significantly on potential audiences outside of the academy, particularly in regard to presenting and examining scientific knowledges and approaches that are uniquely engaging and questioning. The novel and creatively enquiring nature of the research methodologies implies dynamic and meaningful public engagements with hybrid scientific/artistic knowledges, and their wider cultural implications.

I have already undertaken short periods of research in institutions that host biological arts practitioners, including SymbioticA (University of Western Australia) and University ofBirmingham, and have presented work in group exhibitions and festivals of emergent media, including Sk-Interfaces (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, 2008). Through these opportunities, I have established important relationships with other practitioners working in the intersections between performance, visual art, and the biological arts. The proposed research will build upon these relationships, by creating a new body of creative research that will stimulate discussion, and facilitate the development of the fields. To ensure this impact upon fellow artists, the projected research methods include research trips to two key biological arts contexts, and the proposed outcomes include an artist publication and performance-lectures, which are two modes through which I plan to disseminate my research findings. The proposed performance outcome will also contribute to this impact.

Relevant development agencies, such as The Arts Catalyst, will be involved in the research, and will benefit from the project, by bringing the field of biological arts practice to a wider audience.

The research will have an impact on beneficiaries within the public sector, including performance festivals, galleries and museums. Especially, curators will be enabled in their research into diverse artistic practices, through the wealth of knowledge that will be provided through dialogue, as well as in the critical knowledge produced in the salons. The public sector may use the research to facilitate programming and expand public education schemes around contemporary performance and the biological arts.

In order to ensure a wider audience for my findings, as well as to disseminate the influence of the wider research context, I have developed the interdisciplinary salon. Devised as a non-academic mode of dissemination, the salon brings together speakers from different fields of research, including artists, scholars, arts professionals and other specialists, to present unrehearsed ideas and engage with audiences. The two series of salons, hosted at various sites around London and the UK, will be a crucial way to ensure that my research impacts upon a wide range of beneficiaries including members of a wider public outside of academic audiences. The artist book will develop this impact further, by providing a comprehensive, accessible overview of my research practice, exploring the aims and objectives, research questions, and res