Media-Making as Healing Practice
Reflection on the Soft Data Translation Process
April 8, 2022
Write about your experience creating your framework, gathering, and translating the soft data. If you come back to this a few months from now, how will I understand what was going on?
What were you exploring? In what ways were you exploring this?
My intention in creating my framework was to explore when and how I experience anxiety, and ways in which I can act not purely in reaction to it. I used to think of it as a kind of 'pushing past' or overcoming anxiety, but here I'm trying to think of finding portals to new places and ways of being, or of breaking the chain of my patterns / which have come from a much longer chain of my history (familial, cultural, individually embodied).
I knew that I wanted to write down what I did each day during my tracking. I didn't do that during the week I tracked with the Resilience Journal, and found that it felt like I didn't have a point of reference when I looked back on it.
While gathering the data, I decided after the first day that in addition to tracking my experience of anxiety, I should also note down my physical state as an additional point of reference.
In translating the soft data I was exploring ways in which I could translate my fear of taking up 'too much' space and time into a concept for an installation. (I only went this far because the Recess deadline coincided with this period of time!) The along the way drawings and screen recording of me moving with thoughts of the day felt more truthful and 'in process' than a push for a complete picture in the Recess application.
Here are some paintings and drawings I made in reflecting on the process of collecting Soft Data.
Upward Spiral Chainbreaking Portal
Bodymind refusal
Screencap of a screen recorded improvisation: an experiment in note taking / facing the fear of taking time and watching myself.
What were some questions that came up for you during this process?
While I was using my framework I kept on wanting to add more dimensions, like time (which I experimented with but didn't know how to integrate).
A major question for me was also how paying attention to this was changing the way I behaved, though I realize that's kind of a moot point because self-reflection always happens? I guess it's a question of how paying more attention and taking the time to write things down and make marks of a living changes the living.
What did you discover? What was surprising or unsurprising?
Post all of this, I realize that if I did this again I would add a general emotion dimension to my framework. I think I didn't think to do this because I thought of tracking anxiety as already tracking an emotional dimension, but… both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, I realize now that the negative is not the only narrative.
There will never be a complete picture of me, (or of anyone, but I think the picture is incomplete if there is only pain and no pleasure, toil with no joy. Within any crevice, however painful, if one looks there is always light somewhere.)
Otherwise the narrative is incomplete. Thinking about the recess app / more clarity about why I've been thinking about trans visibility and what is needed recently – it's not just about visibility for all the bills passed against trans people / all the violence / or examples about exceptional trans figures / it's about joy too and it's about the everyday the remarkable nature of the very extraordinary in the ordinary and the ordinary in the extraordinary.
I think it was surprising that I'm now working with Cole on movement things, who I very deliberately 'pushed past' feelings of anxiety to reach out to reconnect with + schedule rehearsal with during the week
I'm not sure if I would have done that if I were tracking that week.
Maybe I would have. But I remember feeling like I wanted to 'collect' a circle portal on my framework (like earning a gold star) in the moments when I did that.
What will you take with you? What will you leave behind?
And I don't need to collect all the portals! It's okay if there's a day when I collect none! There is nothing to collect, only places to move through. I know that I am anxious that I'll miss a 'crucial' portal but there is no such thing! Remove this false narrative! The way is sweeping and wandering is part of it.
How has this informed your artistic practice?
I treated my framework as a stopover to 'getting' somewhere. I treated it as a sort of 'scratch sheet' so it's more messy than I'd like it to be, not done with as much care as I'd like to have put into it. At a past point in my life I would have been a perfectionist about the framework and made it neater than I'd like it to be, motivated by too much ambition (which I often conflate with care)... In moving forward, I want to embrace process and care within it, which also means embracing time.
At the same time, I’ve learned that I need to work in a multimedia way (dance, move, write, draw) in order to process and move through, but that not everything I produce is what I think of as my
To borrow Don Christian Jones’ words from their workshop at Performance Space this past Sunday:
“It’s okay to move slow. What’s important is that we do not stop.”
I don’t want to stop, but I want to move slower. Slower than I think.