Timothy Nouzak

The language of movement
Chiang Mai
2022

The language of movement concluded the first chapter of Timothy Nouzak’s current research project Transient relations: towards a transindividual embodied research dispositive, a first step to understanding systemic sustainability and intercultural exchange through the lens of social science and embodied cognition.

In collaboration with: Silpakorn University Bangkok, PTIS - Prem Tinsulanonda International, ARThailand Chiang Mai and Artist Residency Thailand
Concept and Idea: Timothy Nouzak
Artistic Documentation: Woraphon Aintayot

The chapter started with a two week symposium in Bangkok, co-hosted by Silpakorn University Thailand, where the focus was set on re-negotiating the idea of “hospitality” through the current social impact of COVID-19. The work was followed by a two week guest lecture led by Timothy for teaching practitioners, educators and students in collaboration with PTIS Prem Tinsulanonda, where it focussed on notions of ‚access, sensing and translation‘ within an experience-based educational movement learning context. The research chapter concluded in the frame of „Artist Residency Thailand (ART)“, in collaboration with ARThailand in Chiang Mai.

Transient relations: towards a transindividual embodied research dispositive focuses on developing socio-scientific and artistic practices that deal with sustainability and intercultural exchange within systemic processes through the ideas of situated and embodied cognition. A dialogical relationship to the body through practices of collective listening and sensing forms thereby the core of the first research chapter. Simple performative acts such as stillness, looping or isolation signify and illuminate compositional forms of agency within systemic environmental processes, that help to formulate alternative embodied presences in movement, performance and daily life.

Throughout the different settings, theories of situated and embodied cognition helped to foster relational processes of transformation. Situated cognition in regard to experience-based learning contexts posits that the transfer of knowledge is inseparable from doing, suggesting that knowledge is situated in activities within social, cultural and physical contexts. Within the research chapter The language of movement, this shift has lead to think about didactic transfer and cognition through a performative lens, where thinking and interaction doesn’t rest on the idea of a disembodied mind, but rather on a network of occurrences and activities performed by a diverse array of heteronomous agencies.