Currently, I am developing a method for feeling out resonances (analogous to the way emergency first responders might search for vital signs) between urban spaces, and the affective experiences that might relate people to these spaces. Developing this method involves collaboration with artists who use or create archives in their work about urban experience. In my research I draw upon theory in Psychology and Geography, and practices in Performance and Conceptual Art, which include: collecting found objects, collage and pamphlet-making, documentary photography, dance, maintaining a weblog of writing and photography about creative urban archival practices, and the design and implementation of situation-specific multi-player games and performance.
About my dissertation (Work In Progress)
Environmental Psychology, City University of New York
This is a theoretical dissertation addressed to the field of Urban Studies, especially as approached by social scientists in the disciplines of Environmental Psychology, Geography, and Sociology. The aim of this dissertation will be to highlight and explore affective and aesthetic experience of the city as an important, yet oft-overlooked aspect of urban life within the social sciences. This dissertation introduces and explores the concept of “resonance” as a way of approaching the study of affective and aesthetic experience. Resonance, most loosely, refers to the rhythms of flow and arrest, quickening and stillness, of emotion and feeling, people and things, which form the ever-changing shape of everyday life in cities. It also refers to the process of bringing disparate, unlikely elements (people, places, things, emotions, experiences) into odd, yet compelling relations. Resonance relates to the city as an entity in flux—both as an imagined and material place—in which unlikely moments of contact are likely to occur. The concept of resonance is shaped and developed based on readings in clinical and developmental psychology, philosophy, anthropology, art and literature. It is proposed that the concept of resonance provides particularly fruitful theoretical and methodological suggestions, and opens fertile paths for understanding and engaging affective and aesthetic experience as vital aspects of urban life. The concept of resonance will be elaborated by way of several examples drawn from innovative practices involving the creation and use of archives to explore and understand affective and aesthetic experience of the city. Archives are understood here to be kinds of “resonance boxes” because they are able to house a variety of objects, or documents, or subjects, which tend to have loose relations with each other. Archival practices are considered as methods for feeling out, or even creating, resonances in affective experiences of the city.
