Writing in the Expanded Field IV: Touching Feeling Writing

BACKGROUND: Writing in the Expanded Field (WEF) is an experimental writing and publishing project designed and facilitated by Lucinda Strahan in partnership with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Taking a perceived ‘crisis’ (Stanhope 2020, Haylock and Patty 2021) in art writing as a departure point, it applies expanded writing methodology (Strahan 2019) to discover “new, flexible and dynamic knowledge forms” (Watkins and Krauth 2016), incorporating publishing and spoken word as key sites for new digital rhetorics (Porter 2010). Each edition of WEF explores a new question aligned to the curatorial themes of an exhibition at ACCA. In response to Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH, and following Kosofsky Sedgwick (2002), WEF IV asked: how might we write from positions beside and adjacent-to, bringing attention to surface and texture, and embodied feeling to open space for queer ways knowing and writing art? CONTRIBUTION: This folio gathers artefacts produced in Strahan’s role as the research designer, project leader and facilitator, as well as editor and author. The range of creative practices, including participatory and collective modalities, are specific outcomes of the research design. The collected spoken, print and online works represent hybrid post-digital (Ludovico 2012) rhetorical modes. These works give expression to ways of knowing and writing that can be understood as queer, as well as feminist in their plurality, their formal and rhetorical fluidity that transgress stable categories of meaning, writing and reading conventions. SIGNIFICANCE: This research was commission by ACCA as part of an ongoing research partnership led by Lucinda Strahan. Its outcomes are located and showcased in ACCA’s Digital Wing which fosters innovation and future-focused practices through sites of experimentation, development and collaboration.