Moving, shaking and tracking: Micro-making in video, performance and poetry

Ethnographic video requires the makers to grapple with the idea of ‘constituting a compositional present’ (Stewart 2007), rather than a static notion of truth or representation. This audio/video performance project sits at the intersection of affect theory, feminist and performance studies, and extends these discourses into new materialist considerations of the posthuman and more-than-human. The piece takes up Bennett’s (2010) challenge to any distinction between dull and vibrant lifeforms through the project’s attention to the ways in which both ‘nature’ and person- made objects play an agentic role in the everyday of living and travelling. Video and audio-informed research can be, in our view, themselves enactments of new materialist mappings of research spaces and practices, suggesting new paths for methodological and conceptual becoming. In this ‘micro-making’ (that is, a making practice built up out of brief video clips, flash performances and the brevity of poetry), the three co-authors enact notions of entanglement (Barad 2007; Ingold 2010) as a ‘meshwork of interwoven lines of growth and movement’ (Ingold 2010: 3) by bodily engagement with machines and machine-bodies that propel us forward and intervene in everyday practices and performances.