Rock/Body: Performative interfaces between the geologic and the body

岩石/身体汇集了来自艺术和人文科学、社会科学、地球科学、健康和实践艺术家的研究人员，研究地质和人体之间的表演界面。它将超越自然/文化在地质上的界限，通过将表演的人体作为地质物质和力量的表达，以及对地球系统动态未来变化的暴露和反应的主要场所。与电影《比利·艾略特》（Billy Elliot）中所呈现的紧张关系不同，该研究网络将考察矿工和采石工人的劳动群体与舞蹈演员的表演群体在一起而不是分开思考时，为探索地质学和生物学如何在具体的人体中融合并影响其文化生产形式而建立特权场所。此外，鉴于普遍化的“人性”在最近的科学论述中被不加批判地假定为占主导地位的地质因素，该项目将对这种普遍化的人性概念提出问题，并将其开放给现有的关于种族、阶级、性别、性和能力的学术辩论。不同的物体可能会以不同的方式受到不断变化的地球过程的影响，并且在它们作为地质媒介的能力方面具有不同的能力。为了充分解决这些问题，需要由学者、科学家和创造性实践者支持的跨和跨学科的合作方法，这些实践者很少有机会以非等级的方式相互交流知识和方法。因此，通过对岩石/人体界面的重新概念化，该网络将在科学、艺术和人文学科的交叉点上解决更广泛的问题。即：种族、阶级、性别和性别差异与人类作为地质主体和代理人的作用的关系；矿物枯竭的政治美学，因为它既存在于岩石（开采和采石）中，也存在于因高强度劳动和表演而筋疲力尽的人体中；以及对时间的感知，以及审美可能成为一个特权场所的方式，从那里可以获得更丰富的经验和对深层时间的了解，以及人类与地质的新联系，得以实施。该网络的中心将是在2016年举行的一系列三次研究研讨会，共有23名参与者，其中包括科学家、人文学者和创造性实践者。第一次以“肉体/矿物”为主题的研讨会将在诺丁汉的英国地质调查局举行。第二个主题是“萃取/耗尽”，第三个主题是“时间/持续时间”，这两个主题都将在埃克塞特大学进行（一个在康沃尔校区，另一个在埃克塞特主校区）。虽然仅限于参与者，但研讨会也将通过新闻稿、公众可访问的互动网站和Twitter feed向外开放，参观者可以在其中评论和讨论每次研讨会的进展情况，并免费向公众展示参与艺术家的作品，包括一件特别委托的现场表演作品，以回应网络。此外，更广泛的学术受众还将通过PI和Co-I撰写并提交给同行评议期刊的一篇文章，以及组织一个会议小组并向一个主要的国际学术会议提出建议，来访问该网络的活动。希望该网络将为未来的跨及跨学科研究项目，以及学者与创意实践者之间的新合作创造条件，从而延长资助期限。

Rock/Body brings together researchers from the arts and humanities, social sciences, earth sciences, health, and practicing artists to investigate the performative interfaces between the geologic and the human body. It will move beyond the nature/culture divide geologically, by taking performing human bodies as both expressions of geological matter and forces, and prime sites of exposure and response to future changes in the dynamics of earth systems.Departing from the tension presented in the film "Billy Elliot" between the hard-labouring landscape of coal extraction and the seemingly feminine or emasculating middle-class and urban world of ballet dancing, the research network will examine the ways in which the labouring bodies of miners and quarrymen and the performing bodies of dancers might, when thought together rather than separately, constitute privileged sites for exploring how geology and biology might converge in concrete human bodies and affect their forms of cultural production. Further, and given the way in which a universalising "humanity" has been uncritically posited as dominant geological agent in recent scientific discourse, the project will problematise such universalising conception of humanity and open it up to existing scholarly debates on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, and the ways in which differentiated bodies might be differently vulnerable to changing earth processes and possess different affordances when it comes to their ability to act as geological agents. To adequately address those issues calls for collaborative cross- and inter-disciplinary approaches supported by scholars, scientists, and creative practitioners who are seldom given the chance to exchange knowledge and methodologies with one another in a non-hierarchical manner. Thus, through such reconceptualisation of rock/body interfaces, the network will address wider questions at the intersection of the sciences, the arts, and the humanities. Namely: racial, class, gender and sexual difference in relation to the role of humanity as both geologic subject and agent; the political aesthetics of mineral depletion as it is found in both rocks (mined and quarried) and human bodies exhausted by high-intensity labour and performance; and perception of time and the ways in which the aesthetic might be a privileged site from where richer experiences and knowledge of deep time might be drawn, and new human affiliations with the geologic, enacted. At the centre of the network will be a series of three research seminars taking place in 2016 involving a total of 23 participants amongst scientists, humanities scholars, and creative practitioners. The first seminar on the theme of "Flesh/Minerality" will be held at the British Geological Survey in Nottingham. The second, on "Extraction/Exhaustion," and the third, on "Time/Duration," will both take place at the University of Exeter (one at the Cornwall campus; the other at the main Exeter campus).Although limited to the participants, the seminars will also face outwards via press releases, a publicly accessible interactive website and Twitter feed where visitors will be able to comment and discuss the proceedings of each seminar, and a free public exhibition of works by participating artists, including a specially-commissioned site-specific performance piece created in response to the network. Further to that, wider academic audiences will also have access to the activities of the network through an article to be written by the PI and Co-I and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, and a conference panel to be organised and proposed to a major international academic conference. It is hoped that the network will foster the conditions for future inter- and cross-disciplinary research projects as well as new collaborations between academics and creative practitioners, thus extending beyond the duration of the grant.