1In many respects, [Gregory] Bateson’s call for art and science to come together has already taken place in the twenty-first century, but in a way that neither he nor [Gilles] Deleuze, nor [Felix] Guattari, could have foreseen. (Jagodzinski 2023: 411)

2Art-making, for those people called artists, is normal practice. In the art school where I teach, art making is everything for everyone regardless of medium—we are all artists. Conversations about art-making have to do with techniques and repertoire. There is an explicit expectation that artist-faculty know how to make work and know the history of their schools, styles, and practices. They know what students need to know and their job is to teach them. There is also an implicit understanding that it is not the artist’s job to theorize their practice. As one colleague put it to me, “writing about our own practice is gauche.” In other words, it is awkward and in bad taste to write about your own work. Or to put it in another way, there is an implicit rule in conservatory training that theorizing from a standpoint inside your own creative practice is wrong. Sociologists, anthropologists, critics and historians of art—or anyone really—should do the theorizing; just not the artists. As a consequence, conservatory trained artists tend not to write about what is most normal for us, our processes of art-making.

3Conservatories may be one of the last hold-outs of a history of self-analysis spurred by cybernetics. Since the cybernetic period there has been an increasing emphasis on doing a history of history, a sociology of sociology, an anthropology of anthropology. This is characteristic of a second-order approach that Heinz Von Foerster called “understanding understanding.” It is the application of training to look at one’s own area of specialization to draw out the implicit systems at work in the production of specialized knowledge to shed light on both its productive features as well as its limits. This was evident in the Writing Cultures debates in the 1980s and is a key feature of the postdisciplinary studies areas (cultural studies, science studies, gender studies etc) which, if looked at from a certain angle, have perhaps emerged (to use a second-order cybernetics concept) from this practice of recursion.

4Art-making in the conservatory has, however, been mostly immune to this trend. One would perhaps think that art-based research (research-creation in Canada) would be oriented by this second-order approach; yet it is often led not by artists themselves but by philosophers or cultural theorists teaching and working at the peripheries of conservatories, in areas that are often under-valued by fellow faculty and students as service areas to the real work of art-making. Meanwhile, there are important calls for transforming the art conservatory, to decolonize it, to indigenize it, to radically transform the too-often masculine, white, heterosexual, cisgendered, ableist, classist culture that has shaped how power works inside the modern (read modernist) conserve-atory.

5For artists living and working in the conservatory, which since the mid-20^th century has become an important segment of the artworld, modernity is also normal and therefore rarely critically studied. Perhaps the prohibition on critically engaging with one’s own art practice is getting in the way of transforming the very thing we say we want to collectively change. After all, we have been acculturated in the standpoint of the problematic conservatory. A symptom of this acculturation is the feeling of it being normal. What is normal is ordinary. Calling it ordinary does not mean that it is without force, but that its immanent forces are disappeared by the habitual normalizing force of conservatory artists’ everyday life. Making ordinary forces present is anything but ordinary. Kathleen Stewart called these forces ordinary affects (2007). Perhaps one must dare to be awkward (gauche) if we really want to transform the conservatory.

6Ethnography is not immune to the ordinary affects of disciplinarity. In the process of becoming acculturated into ethnomusicology for instance, the “documentation paradigm” (Norton 2021: 123-125) was normal and was used to contain my cinematic work. Artist-turned-ethnographers will bump into these normalizing forces when their ethnographic work is deemed “too artistic,” perhaps “too personal,” or worse, “not scientific.” These critiques are the functioning of the normalizing power of disciplinarity, which cuts two ways. In the positive sense, disciplinarity’s ordinary affects regulate the practices of students and researchers, and ensure that ethnographers follow inherited and tested practices. However, for those of us working across art-making and ethnography, looking to understand the operation of the conservatory in order to expand and change it, and bringing experience with art-making to an expanded non-textual ethnography that might reach beyond the classroom, these normalizing powers can also be repressive.

7Writing about ordinary affects “is an experiment, not a judgement” (Steward 2007: 1), and what we are calling here speculative worldings: ethnographic storytelling beyond judgement follows from this idea. Although the articles in this collection all come from different orientations, locations and practices, they might share in an anarchist ethnography that recognizes that rules exist as ordinary affects. These ordinary affects contribute to specialized discourse-material-practice entanglements of both art-making and ethnography-making. But it is also an attempt to hold the force of those rule-affects at bay to make space for experimental ethnography-as-art-making and art-making-as-ethnography. These articles transgress the rule of (not) writing about your own art-making implicit in conservatory training just as it transgresses the implicit rule of not making art as ethnography. In this temporary open space experimentation can occur. The narratives that follow provide insightful provocations for experimental art-making as ethnography while also contributing to the naming of ordinary affects.

8Speculative Worldings can take many forms and perhaps this volume can be read as a story about speculative worldings where each article can be a chapter written in different voices. In my practice it is a spell, a non-authorized ritual, sometimes anarchic eco-spirituality. It is a continuation of a history of interventions into ethnography. At its core is the idea of storytelling: “if the world be connected, if I am at all fundamentally right in what I am saying, then thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds, whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones” (Bateson 1979: 10). Story works with a context, making connections between parts, and for Bateson is not limited to human stories but also includes the way organisms develop. Context for Bateson is essential for meaning: it is the specific location where events develop, the setting out and building up of relations which over time we call process. As Donna Haraway pointed out, the kinds of stories that we tell story other stories.

9Since context sets the story, it may be helpful for you to learn something of my story. My invitation to edit this collection comes after the publication of CineWorlding: Scenes of Cinematic Research-Creation (2023) and gave me a chance to learn about artist-researchers doing fascinating work that resonates with my concerns. CineWorlding attempted to do a number of things. It is a study of cine-ethnomusicology’s documentation paradigm, a primer on cinematic research-creation, and a decolonial engagement with neurotypical (normal) knowledge systems that values text-thinking over cinema-thinking, object-thinking over process-thinking, identities (nouns) over processes (verbs). CineWorlding uses the cinematic process as an ethnographic location. It became an ethnography of cine-ethnomusicology that began to draw out the ordinary affects of the documentation paradigm and sought to find ways to dare to be awkward. It did not however try to define cine-ethnomusicology or cinematic research-creation; instead, following Stewart, it “committed not to the demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world, but rather to speculation, curiosity, and the concrete” (2007: 1). The concrete is in the complexity of multi-leveled lived experience: “they’re things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something” (2007: 2). The form of ethnographic attunement proposed here is an anthropology of “immanent force” (Stewart 2007: 1) that kicks off new forms of ethnographic experimentation.

10Art-making recognizes unquestionably the constitutive partnership with more-than human and non-human affect in materiality—the immanent forces of materials, spaces, techniques, machines, histories, concepts, dreams, and ideas. As a filmmaker working in both digital and analog practices, I collaborate with light and sound, digital and chemical processes that include film, processing, digitizing, as well as digital sensors inside cameras and analog sensors of microphones. The editing suite’s speakers, hard drives, and timelines where the editing and worldmaking takes place; the theatres, living rooms, community halls, conference rooms, or network-enabled smart phones where the films are screened—these are not dead machines or waiting spaces, but collaborators. It is ordinary for artists to treat these materials and spaces as collaborators, and we have individually and collectively developed so many ways of relating. But the theories done by others outside of our studios and workshops do not tend to reflect the multispecies collaborations and strange assemblages where we make ourselves artists. Art-based practice allied with ethnography provides an opportunity to tell multi-species stories of our practices.

11Dealing with ordinary affects requires transdisciplinarity, and perhaps this is even more true of the ordinary affects of art-making. Kathleen Stewart engages with both Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s two volumes on Capitalism and Schizophrenia in the very first pages. This emphasizes that the study of ordinary affects happens somewhere in the overlap between living, philosophy, and cultural criticism. Following Stewart from ordinary affects to worldings, we world with these things that happen and we bring practices to them. As Stewart writes: “They work not through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds” (2007: 3). Art experiments in social life speculate on new worlds. They cultivate an attunement to the ordinary affects of living collectively and the machinic affects of art-making. They blur rather than clarify, are in motion rather than stationary, and when we become attuned to this we become ourselves affect sensors.

12Art-making and artworlds also challenge common notions of human community and social groupings. In CineWorlding the production phase takes place in spaces and with people who are not a community. As is usual in film making, a collection of people form a temporary assemblage and work together for a period of time and then move on and circulate in other networks. The temporary grouping of people and camera equipment form an assemblage that is sensitive to the normal affects of the space where we are making art. They form affective sensors. Enhancing ourselves as affective sensors is key to my practice, so my films are mostly improvised collectively and take place within an already ongoing event without marking ourselves off from the flow of the event. We do not control spaces by setting them aside like a “professional” film; instead, we make scenes with whatever happens to be going on at the moment. We often have little or no control over anyone’s bodies or the space and we are constantly responding to what is happening. In the practice I call CineWorlding, these films are scriptless and often have people playing themselves. We begin with a germinal idea and then develop the events together inside the event as it is happening. We are not interested in demystifying a festival, for example, but instead are eager to experiment with its flowing.

13How does the story of scientific ethnography lead to the organization of cultural practices that values text as the primary way of doing ethnography? Is the kind of art-making or art-based research proposed in this collection of essays a legitimate, albeit different way of doing ethnography? Perhaps we might see that an art-based approach to ethnography is going to engage with different questions and present different kinds of findings. Or perhaps we value experience and affects over findings? The goal of speculative worlding: ethnographic storytelling beyond judgment is not to legislate a case against scientific ethnography as lacking, but instead to provide a collection of art-based ethnography experiments. If I hope for any kind of outcome it is simply this: that speculative worlding will be a way of telling social and cultural stories beyond judgement.