Tree, Rock, Water Bodies: A Journey into the Landscape with Digital Companions to Discover Imaginative Knowledge / Adianna Apodaca (2021)

Imagination is a complex and multi-modal cognitive activity that has been culturally and historically overlooked in Western societies in the making of important contributions to knowledge. This practice-based research explores how the relationship between body, technology, and nature can bring about a collaborative and evolving experience of imagination with the aim to discover imaginative knowledge. Within a film and movement improvisation practice, the research attends to the relational aspects of imaginative phenomena when journeying into natural and digital landscapes with ‘digital companions’. Methodologies adopted to evaluate imaginative potentialities include multiple philosophical (phenomenological, post-phenomenological, and ontological), somatic, and epistemological perspectives that focus on the relationship between embodiment, imagination, and technology as they pertain to knowledge formation. In order to draw out, capture and reflect upon imaginative phenomena in the research exploration, a moving-documenting-making-moving method cycle was developed. The method cycle, being situated within Schiller’s kinesfield, created moving-with, making-with, and reflecting-with processes that illuminated imagination’s essential role in establishing embodied knowledge (situational, implicit or tacit) through cognitive and social play. The research demonstrates that through the various post-phenomenological and ontological relations within the creative practice and methods of research, the digital technologies when mediating experience of the landscape, bring about a reimagining of space, and create a collaborative and evolving experience of imagination that transforms the self.