Emergence as Method

Named after the Ukrainian Orthodox prayer for the dead, the Canadian feminist Decameron Collective’s Memory Eternal (Вічная Пам'ять) is a single user a Virtual Reality work designed for Quest 2 that features seventeen distinct storytelling works which include 360 video, interactive and spatialized sound, AI generated images and video, film, as well as text. Set in a surreal and watery landscape, the works investigate our shared experiences of grief and loss at personal, societal, and planetary scales. The design of the world and the works in it center around a question: In the wake of crises, what do and should we remember, and how? Interactants’ journey through the world takes them through experiences of mourning, sitting with, and awakening to new futures. Research objectives: Memory Eternal was an experiment in finding interactive forms for grieving and memory work in response to personal losses, war, and the climate crisis. Speculative practices: The generation of the world and works in it is the product of a speculative feminist praxis asking what important relationships to the past and what forms of futurity can be attained through digital storytelling and research co-creation. The work results from years long conversations, inquiry, and artistic experimentation between the members of the Decameron Collective (Jolene Armstrong Kelly Egan, Lai-Tze Fan, Caitlin Fisher, Angela Joosse, Kari Maaren, Siobhan O’Flynn, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, and Monique Tschofen) anchored in an ethics of care. Documenting / bearing witness: Memory Eternal designs an experience that asks immersants to bear witness to individual grief, as well as participate in collective acts of grieving at a historical moment of overlapping personal and planetary crises. How can haptic and immersive interactive forms engage the thickness of lived histories? How can digital worlds create spaces of encounter that bring vastly diverse, heterogenous yet overlapping experiences together? Theoretical framework: The theoretical frameworks that informed the production and our current understanding of the work includes memory studies (Nora, Van Abbele, Young ); (an)archives and living archives (Springgay, Sabiescu, Siegel); autotheory (Fournier, Vanyecken, Strom, Puig de la Bellacasa); interactive documentary and co-creation (Gaudenzi, Cizek); care ethics; and research-creation (Springgay, Truman, Loveless). Methodology: The Decameron Collective’s methodologies have been informed more by research creation principles than by those of interactive documentary, digital design, film, or scholarship. Our work is emergent, dialogic, and collective. We begin with an intention, often thematic. Broader research questions emerge through the creation, and engagement with each other as co-creators, as well as with audiences and scholars. Emergence opens space for somatic thinking and knowing as legitimate forms of knowledge. It allows for the making of surprising connections, following threads we previously did not know existed, and experimenting with dimensional thinking. And emergence centre the dialogical. As such, emergence is more of a strategy than a method, a resistance to rigid methodologies that privileges interaction as opposed to results. We will be discussing both the possibilities and the intellectual and aesthetic risks of this methodology.

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