The leaky dimensions of film and war, or some connective tissue

A desire to understand a thing can precipitate a range of acts on the part of the researcher on their quest for knowledge. For an artist-researcher the materiality of their practice often plays a key role in their ‘coming to know’. This writing interrogates how particular materialities played into my research process in coming to ‘know war’. All of the gestures along the way were intentioned toward arriving at ‘knowledge’ through the body. The essay looks at the materialities of language, sculpture, performance, and moving image and their various potentials for creating knowledge events – encounters where we can come to know through experience. The central question in the research becomes: can a moving image work make war felt? This writing is an exposition of a short film I made in the process of this research and how temporality, duration and an ekphrastic practice can work to create such a knowledge event. This is a performative piece of writing that enacts the play of elements that drive creative-practice research. It shows up the complex tangle of the personal and bodily, the theoretical and writerly, which co-create our coming-to-know.