Towards a cogScenography: Cognitive science, scenographic reception and processes

Abstract

This thesis argues that post-cognitivist frameworks that understand cognition as co-originating between brain, body, and world can contribute to both the production and the knowledge of scenography in a post-representational performance landscape. By imbricating radically embodied and enactive cognitive frameworks, and neuroscience metaphors of consciousness and perception within original participatory scenographic practice (Work Space I, II, and III) I develop further my ‘arts praxis’ (Nelson 2006), what I call the ‘scenographic contraption’. This practical, conceptual, and analytical framework generates participatory encounters between materials, space, and audiences, and is further used as a way of conceptualising scenography and participation within these shifting encounters. I assume three phases of the creative researcher’s condition in relation to the audience–participants, and the cognitive theories I am using for my research design: the ‘ignorant’, the ‘Janus-faced’ and the ‘predictive’ scenographer. I iterate between doing and thinking with contemporary cognitive frameworks towards the development of a theory of CogScenography, which helps us understand and experience scenography as a synergic way of doing-thinking-co-experiencing.