#ResidencyInsights: Proximity – Art, Research and Collaboration (Emilie Choi Sin-yi)

Throughout the conversation with Albert and other teammates on the project Bugs on Fire over the past two years, one keyword has kept surfacing in my mind: proximity.

This is a tricky word. It requires a clear positioning to understand the distance between “I” and others. It does not necessarily refer to difference — our contexts may intersect, yet there remains some divergence, which may itself become a point of collaboration. We may not be aware of the proximities around us in daily life. But when the emergence of “othering” or “crisis” appears, proximity matters.

 In the collaborative process of Bugs on Fire, I found that several kinds of proximity have guided us through thinking and creating. The first is the proximity between art and research. In the essay by Jaime Cortez called “Art as Research,” published in the GIA Reader in 2013, Cortez quotes multimedia artist John Leaños, who speaks of “transmutation.” He says: “This transmutation of traditional research and knowledge — that is where the magic is.” Transmutation means a change of substance, a change of state. Research material — data, archives, scientific findings, historical documents — enters the artistic process and comes out as something else. Not illustrated. Not visualised. But transmuted.

But what if the two roles — artist and researcher — collaborate? When we talk about collaboration in art, we tend to talk about it in terms of roles. Or we talk about it in terms of outcomes. But they skip over something more fundamental: what kind of closeness does each person in the collaboration have — to the subject, to the material, to the site, to each other — and how do those different closenesses interact?

This is what makes the notion of proximity so important.

Proximity is both method and problem. It is a method because getting close — to a subject, to a place, to another person’s practice — is how knowledge is produced. We cannot research from a distance alone. 

But proximity is also a problem, because closeness is never neutral. When we get close to something, we change it. When a researcher gets close to an artist’s process, the research starts to bend toward the artist’s concerns. Proximity creates entanglement, dependency, and sometimes distortion. So, the question becomes: how close is close enough, and how close is too close?