The Arts & Design Practice Research Exchange (ADPRex) is Southeast Asia’s first annual conference dedicated to practice research. ADPRex positions the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), University of the Arts Singapore as the leading centre of arts and design practice research in this region, where artists and thinkers come together to share ideas and insights at the apex of arts and design practice and innovative thinking. Once again, ADPRex is delighted to be presented in conjunction with NAFA’s Southeast Asian Arts Forum.
The notion of ‘capturing practice’ is slippery. We can be captured (or not) by a performance, observe that a painting has captured its subject, or that a photograph captures a moment in time. To capture also means to take prisoner, ‘to catch by force, surprise, or stratagem’, which, when paired with practice suggests that we can be surprised by our own creation (Oxford English Dictionary). We try — and fail — to capture events, feelings, performances, and images in other formats, but there is an inevitable slippage between the various modes of capture — between text, image, performance, and memory. Capture has now also become a way to describe new technologies that replicate information, for example, ‘motion capture’ (mocap) that captures movement, and ‘data capture’ that collects and converts information into new structures and formats.
The way we capture and make permanent records of our practice can also shape it. Historian Yuval Noah Harari goes further, arguing that documenting creates new realities, while Diana Taylor suggests that performance can be a way of communicating and storing knowledge, held in repertoires of embodied memory (2003). Thus, performance can itself be a kind of critical communication. Therefore, this conference aims to revisit, but also to move beyond the familiar discussions of how we document practice, and the difficulties in trying to capture the ephemeral. Responding to these different threads in scholarship we invite presentations that trace the reciprocal relationship between artistic practice and the way we capture it.