Audiovisual Strata

Sedimentation of Bodily Experience in Collective Composition

Abstract

This pictorial presents a collaborative audiovisual composition as an inquiry into how bodily experience through hands becomes sedimented, transformed, and reactivated through compositional practice. It documents an encounter between two composers whose audiovisual works emerged through embodied engagement with voice, gesture, image, and material traces. It is structured through six interconnected strata (voice, transformation, hands, sedimentation, intimacy, and traces) which provide a conceptual framework for following the compositional process. Through stratification, juxtaposition, and temporal reconfiguration, the editing process transforms individual materials into a composition. Theoretical perspectives from Husserl’s notion of sedimentation, Barad’s concept of intra-action, Hutchins’ account of distributed cognition, and Derrida’s conception of the trace inform the reflection. These perspectives frame the audiovisual material as sedimented embodiment. It proposes sedimentation as a compositional principle, exploring how collaborative audiovisual practice allows embodied experiences to persist as traces while displacement and reconfiguration generate new relations among bodies, materials, sounds, and images.