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Arts & Communication

ARTICLE
A montage of small movements

Petra Johnson*
South Road, Stourbridge DY8 3YB, UK

Abstract

In 2016, I was invited by musician/composer B6 to devise a participatory work
for the recently opened art space Reformer art in Hunan Lu, Shanghai. I had
been intrigued by a question posed by human geographer Nigel Thrift: What
happens if we look on kindness as a technology rather than an emotion; a way
of producing generosity in the body, a positive affective swirl? If we produce
maps of spaces in new sensory registers like geographies of kindness, might
these “geographies. then leak out into the wider world?”... An observation by Mark
1
Twain on the dynamics of rivers, guided my approach to distinguish three motions
while exploring kindness in the built environment: turbulences (random acts of
kindness), ripples (the effect on us when watching and relating such acts), and
finally currents (reassuring myself and my companions that acts of kindness are
part of a human undercurrent). With generous technical support from the team,
I was able to install a large, circular map that covered a 20-min walking radius of
the neighborhood. A projection of wandering ripples programmed to light up the
locations where my walking companions had identified an act of kindness slowly
changed the focus and purpose of the map toward emphasizing ephemeral
moments, moments that energize our affective landscape. As signs of ongoing
processes, these moments were not part of determinant systems; instead, they
*Corresponding author: were undeclared yet consequential actions. During Chinese New Year 2017, I
Petra Johnson
(petrajohnson02@yahoo.co.uk) revisited the locations that had hosted acts of kindness back in November 2016
and from these reflections – A reading with my feet – The following transcript for
Citation: Johnson P, 2023, A
montage of small movements. a meditative film essay on movement and how it agitates the air; on environments
Arts & Communication, 1(1): 399. and the incipient; on kindness as technology and kindness as an emotion,
https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.399 emerged. See https://vimeo.com/215920711.
Received: February 28, 2023
Accepted: April 7, 2023 Keywords: Affects; Fugitive presences; Bloom spaces; Re-distribution of information;
Published Online: April 20, 2023 Embodied experience
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s).
This is an Open Access article
distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution Transcript for a Film Essay in three parts: A Montage of Small Movements
License, permitting distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, The American writer Mark Twain noted that when he was a riverboat captain he saw
provided the original work is with very different eyes than his passengers. While they enjoyed framed pictures of the
properly cited.
passing landscape through windows, he observed the ripples on the water’s surface.
Publisher’s Note: AccScience
Publishing remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional 1. See also p. 213-219 in Nigel Thrift 2007 Non-Representational Theory, Chapter 9, “The
affiliations. politics of urban trauma: from love to kindness“ section, Routledge, Oxon.

Volume 1 Issue 1 (2023) 1 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.399