Weaving Rhizomes: An Onto Epistemological Approach in Communication Research Creation

Abstract

Anchored on Deleuze's Ontology of Immanence in Transcendental Empiricism, this postqualitative inquiry puts philosophical concepts to work in the doing of inquiry to produce knowledge differently. It adheres to ontoepistemology where the act of knowing is through performativity. Guided by Deleuze and Guattari's Rhizome concept, the dissertation is a living Rhizome: a thought in motion.

Letting thought guide the work, I experimented with how materialities in photography are constituted in photographing Cambodia's Angkor temples. Together with my co-photographers, I attuned to the molecular becomings of visuals while being entangled in the knowledge-creation process: its deterritorializations/reterritorializations from virtual to actual.

The inquiry was able to surface Photography as a surface event of becomings where subjectivity only emerges from the intra-action of humans and non-humans. Such surface event is a communication phenomenon when virtual meets the actual, a rhizomatic becoming. Responding to the Ontological turn, the inquiry generated a possible discourse on the Posthuman concept of communication as a force of relation that recognizes the dynamics of humans and matters that are always imbricated in a genesis of infinite becomings.

The experimental inquiry yielded an ontoepistemological research-creation approach in studying communication phenomena as becomings. Called Weaving Rhizomes, this research-creation approach disrupts the colonial and stabilizing methods in research, by acknowledging the dynamic relations of humans and non-humans as always imbricated in the doing-making of research. As an approach to speculative inquiry, Weaving Rhizomes does not prescribe any method rather, allows experimentation.

This dissertation contributed widely to debates on photography and communication as becomings in the Ontological turn. It also added to the growing field of visual research methods foregrounding visuals as active agencies in research-creation, an entangled performativity. The inquiry experimented with mobile camera as prosthetics of the body and was able to develop Luminous entanglement, a way of sensing visual data as rhizome that disrupts anthropocentric gaze in analyzing data. Remaining consistent with the Ontology of Immanence, this dissertation was written as a rhizome, data are woven as rhizomes and maps a probable future approach in research-creation.