A Q U E O U S P H I L O S O P H Y

Key Concepts | Critical Positioning | New Territories

  • Aquabatics literally translates ‘walking with water’.

  • Aquabatics is proposed as a noun and verb, theorem and praxis.

  • The state and condition of/in/for Aquabatics requires liquid architectures.

  • The Aquabatic body is inclusive of the human body and a body of water.

  • Aquabatics suggests the sovereignty to the self be resigned to concentrate the body of water.

  • The notion of the corporeal schema inherently presupposes ‘disembodiment’ and is therefore a futile strategy towards approaching Aquabatic performance.

  • Heidegger on ‘releasement’ and ‘disengagement’ points to the trajectories of form and matter, inhalation and exhalation, unification and individualisation but in this discourse, it contravenes the state or condition of Aquabatics itself.

  • Schauberger’s creative formation nodal point – represented as black hole or point of creation - is used as an alternative model to describe the Aquabatic potentiality and the actualised experience.

  • The sensibility and integrity of Aquabatic performance is a conduit for pneumatoses therefore transgressing transgressive performance towards an ‘aqueous transillumination’ flouting Virilio’s dispersions of pitiless art.

  • The paradoxical subversion of the two non-worlds of body and environment are described between the art and science of saturation and bare life.

  • Aquabatics performance, limits and behaviours are compared to the poetics and biotech fission body modification operations in Freeology.

  • ‘Membering is described as a strategy towards, and a consequence of, alterity / abjection / and the chora in/of/for performance which posits the choreographies of the body in an aqueous becoming.

  • The ‘escapist’ pathology of Aquabatics is identified as a simultaneous marriage and contest of natures: decadently carnivalesque and solemnly Lenten.

  • Taunting the Freudian notion of ‘somatic compliance’, Aquabatics is defiant to the laws of logic and expectation, evidenced through a subversive strategy of ‘over compliance’, transparency, visibility and concentration.

  • In an Irigarayan mode, Aquabatics as new works of Live art articulates the elliptical positions and status of the recalcitrant ‘feminine’ performance artist.

  • The priori status of posttraumatic body technicity is described as ‘sub human’ and requiring intensive care.


So what is Aquabatics?

In 2002, I set out to critique the evolutionary technicity of human beings by developing the practice of Aquabatics underwater. Aquabatics is the term I use to describe the research between contemporary performance praxis, commercial diving operation and life support protocol. Aquabatics explores the psychological states, physical conditions and ideas that have grown out of an experimental process of inhabiting an aqueous environment – literally and metaphorically. Such a practice enables discussions of being, life and the critical climate in the way that it inspires correlations between/across various systems of our Universe. Aquabatics research is a unique, unconventional and innovative practice that draws on many histories and newly combined disciplines to propose a new aqueous philosophy. Development of the practice included trans-disciplinary documentation on the changes of my cognitive awareness, the aesthetics of care surrounding the practice, the spiritual journey and proprioceptive responses of the body underwater as a live(d) practice-as-research challenge. Commitment to this strategy enabled me to psychometrically profile and map new territories in human performance behaviours and limits in extreme environments as new works of live art. Inadvertently, Aquabatics proposed new aqueous philosophy to situate the human body in/of/as a body of water. (Pell, 2005)