AWKWoRD

on Lewis and Hyland The Alchemy of Research-Creation: On Pataphysical Experimentation, Dark Infrastructures, and Antifascist Studio Practices

AWKWoRD

Be genuinely experimental, balancing formal constraints, open procedure, and chance and fortune. The idea here is not to confirm results based on an existing hypothesis but rather see what happens when a protocol is collectively performed.

Lewis and Hyland 2022: 72]

The dark infrastructure of the studio (rules, windows, fireplaces, and so forth) incubates awkward drifts between these two. What the laboratory attempts to stabilize through the empire of algorithms, the studio intentionally sets adrift.

Lewis and Hyland 2025

Through our crypto-genealogy of studioing practices we discover three very specific modes of risk: unprofessional risk, awkward risk, and finally, at its most extreme, the risk of madness.

Lewis and Hyland 2025

The Alchemy of Research-Creation: On Pataphysical Experimentation, Dark Infrastructures, and Antifascist Studio Practices is a proposition and a pact. In its pataphysical logic, its pact is to awkwardly draw us in to the architecting of an adjacent spacetime, to drift us into alchemical act, obliquely. In the same gesture as it makes a proposition: experiment. Don’t manage what has already founded a legacy, grow it. Live its paradox and learn from the movements it emboldens. Idle quickly! Slow up! Go with it!

Going with it, obliquely, makes its own demand. Decentre your-self, and follow time’s bend. Make your coming into thought a practice of shifting the conditions of the time of learning and the space of thought. “Suspend educational processes, subject positions,” write Lewis and Hyland, in their protocol-based proposition for another kind of learning into and across the virtual realm (2022: 1). Don’t reduce it to something you know how to know. Learn it otherwise, in the study of what is made possible from the vantage of akward timespace. Be made by the pataways, by the pataprotocols it calls forth. Learn to bend into new shapes. Lean into the discomfort. Live the awkwardness of the puzzle of a direction-without-direction, of an alchemical now where “one is always already in a social situation in which one cannot fully escape. One is always dealing with others, wrapped up with others…exposed to the possibility of taking a wrong turn or making a mistake that violates certain social laws, norms and expectations” (2025).

I begin in the middle because that's where the alchemy does its most potent work, and where Lewis and Hyland take us most awkwardly. In this space of non-space (like the relation of non-relation), a particular kind of study takes shape. Because a space of non-space can only ever be the aliveness, the awkwardness of the sociality of space-ing, of studioing. Nothing is presupposed here - in the awkwardness of the sociality it calls forth, the coming into itself of studioing is in no way separable from the how of its coming into the shape it takes. This studioing, a study in the spacing, moves at the pace of a research-creation of radical awkwardness where the constraints must be crafted each time to enable the conditions for its dis-orientation.

When research-creation disorients, it has begun to do the work of crafting worlds. “The alchemical pataphysics of research-creation can act as a counter to the capitalist sorcery of control and the space-time of the studio (in all its pliable manifestations) can safeguard an undercommons full of unprofessional, awkward, and mad swerves” (2025).

It might be nice to believe that the studio is the site for this practice, and that once properly sited, a particular kind of back-and-forth that gives credo to both research and creation - separate and overlapping - might occur. Lewis and Hyland are not having it: research-creation, in its bubbling awkward sitedness, crafts only obliquely, in the pata of logic's refusal of the binary, and of the hyphen that would stabilize it.

In The Alchemy of Research-Creation, there is an abiding concern about space, a worry that the space of making may become too generalized in the whimsical accounts of all that research-creation can do. They are right to be concerned. When research-creation loses its pragmatic tether to the speculative dimension that gives it life, it is too often because it has been captured by the regime that makes the MFA the new MBA. Give it to the market and it will produce the necessary offspring - those interdisciplinary cross-appointments; the subgenres that never stop tethering research to the social sciences, art wrapped up like a perfect department store gift. All within the logic of the colonial-capitalist institution.

The alchemical transformation, the studioing, threatens to sidle research-creation out of its legibility. If it sites it, it does so at the risk of cauldrons exploding and experimenters losing their way in the distraction of all that uselessly bubbles up.

In the mix, the ingredients come from far and wide. Education is suspended in lieu of something more wild, more queer, more slanted. It's hard to enclose it, to set its parameters. The studio keeps shape-shifting, the alchemy as much about spacetime itself as what it cooks up.

As with their earlier Studious Drift, the suspension of educational processes requires the suspension of the self. Self is not where the creativity bubbles up. Learning occurs in the sociality of a fabulation that exceeds any one account where it comes from. Fabulation here, power of the false, is what grows askance in the excess-over myth, the excess-over the last word that would say it like it is. The emergent sociality that ensues studios, which is to say that it alchemically reconcocts the terms of the agreement that would otherwise claim to know.

Fabulation requires its intercessors: its stories grow from the middle thanks to all that intervenes. These are interrupted stories, not-quite-true accounts laden with exaggeration. Trickster-tales. The oblique is felt through them, and these are the paths Tyson and Hyland beckon us to follow, their accursed share the seductive force of what they leave behind.

This might be said to be the problem of The Alchemy of Research-Creation: how to be sure to refrain from claiming that accursed share; how to refrain from capture? The experimentation this requires is not unlike juggling with a cow-head, a lemon, 2 candlesticks and an idle thought. If the anarchic share is what keeps the archive from closing in on itself, if this speculative edge is what stops research-creation from mortgaging itself to the academic institition (and its affiliate, the art market), if it is what keeps it in the abeyance of the Self (which is to say whiteness, neurotypicality), if what exceeds the shape things take is vital to stay with the problem, how to study it without enclosing it? How to write it?

The book bears the scars of this question. If it is read in paper form, its pages will swell with each re-reading, having taken up the steam of the bath of thoughts unparsed. The pataphysical force will infuse the pages with the moistness of all that leaks between. The studioing has to read itself into being, has to trouble reading.

Lewis and Hyland write: " The following book offers a spatial-temporal retrieval of the vestigial potentiality of the alchemical studio as providing the hospitable conditions for experimenting with research-creation that does not fall into the trap of (a) merely submitting the arts to the reign of the sciences or (b) hybridization. This is a dark space-time that drifts in the zone of contact between art and science, studio and laboratory, head and hand, pleasure and knowledge” (2025).

The trap: that this will all come together too elegantly; that the oblique will be straightened; that its shape will reveal itself as equal to the problem.

Studioing is a topological shape-shifter which commits only to taking up the space of the time it creates. Research-creation hyphenates its discomfort with being either-or. This is not knowledge-creation in any standard sense. Knowledge de-standards here, its normopathy enlisted to other ends. That is to say, the normopathy will lurk, aiming to whiten the frayed edges so they can be recalculated, counted back in. But the awkward thickening of the pages will make it difficult to seam it all together anew.

The dance will continue until another logic emerges. This will never happen once and for all: a paraontology (which will here pronounce itself pataontology) will craft itself. But it will be fragile, as all experiments are. And it will fail, blowing up the studio, more than once.

Pataontologies are the meta of meta, the beyond-sense of alchemical reorientations. They don't only unsettle: they re-geography.

In the blowing up, it's not so much that a new site is built than that a new rhythm is called for: patarule. For Lewis and Hyland, darkness emerges here. Against the transparency of rule-bound systems, an adjacency shape-shifts into existence. I wonder here about the opacity of a poetics of relation, à la Edouard Glissant, that is not dark or shadowy so much as it is simply not any sum of any parts. Consent not to be a single being. Opacity as relation of non-relation does not so much refuse and it gathers in. More-than. This could be blinding.

Blackness, after all, per du Bois, is a problem for thought. The opacity is not the shade colonialism gives it. It is the poetics that exceeds it.

Let this “an-aesthetic supplement” take you there, into that excess. Feel into all that anarchives itself into the drift of a form of study that studios you. Let the alchemy do its work, awkwardly, in the blackness of a surround that is always more-than the shape things take. Be proliferated. Let it rip.

Just don't expect transparency.