Fraser Range Salt Lake (from Sound Map Compositions), 2014, Samuel Thulin. [21] Used with permission.

Insofar as looping is intimately bound to repetition, it shares in the interleaving of opposites. Both Robert Fink and Richard Middleton in their writing on repetition in music have highlighted the way it simultaneously plays into the psychoanalytic categories of Thanatos, the death drive, and Eros, the life drive. [22, 23] Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue contend that repetition involves a bipolarity, made up of a negative pole in which repetition is “passively suffered by the listener” and a positive pole emphasizing “the revival, the new, the beginning of something.” [24] Such apparent contradictions are also evident in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the refrain, which can variously: mark a point as center; draw a boundary around that center to create a home territory; and act as a line of flight from the established territory, effecting a de-territorialisation. [25] So while repetition and looping might superficially appear to suggest the rutted opposite of innovation, they are in fact far more supple and expansive. As Middleton puts it, “Paradoxically, it is repetition, when put to productive work, which can best open up the future, freeing difference from conformity to pre-given narrative shape.” [26]

The avoidance of pre-given narrative shape is critical, as it points to one of the reasons taking research-creation as a loopy affair can be so generative. Loops are not about linear pathways or discrete steps to reach an established endpoint. A loopy approach recognizes the importance of being open to what arises along the way, including apparent contradictions and paradoxes. David Bissell’s work on neighborhood mobilities makes this point (or loop) clear. [27] Bissell contrasts two kinds of proximity and their relationship to mobility. Pointillist proximity entails mobility that is driven by the objective of getting somewhere in particular, reaching a predefined proximity. Transversal proximity, rather than driving mobility, arises from mobility, and is about encounters with near-dwellers that are not planned as objectives in advance. Pointillist proximity for Bissell is associated with the figure of the line, while transversal mobility is associated with the figure of the loop. Bissell contends that we would do well to attend more deeply to transversal proximities as a way of broadening our understanding of mobility and complementing our typical focus on goal-oriented movement. One could say equally that we would do well to attend more deeply to transversal research methods, rather than focusing on pointillist research agendas. At the same time, this is partially a matter of discourse, as even the most seemingly rigid and pointillist approach to research requires the ability to be open to unforeseen circumstances. Indeed, Bissell notes that journeys do not conform to pure lines or pure loops. In this case, allowing a bit more loopiness to be ‘recognized’ as valuable for research is an important step.

In addition to its well-known academic meaning, ‘research’ also has a musical meaning, little known today, but fascinating in how it links research to looping possibilities. John Stainer and William Barrett’s A Dictionary of Musical Terms from 1876 defines “research” as “An extemporaneous performance on the organ or pianoforte in which the leading themes or subjects in the piece to which it serves as prelude are suggested and employed.” [28] Ephraim Chambers’ 1728 Cyclopaedia gives a similar definition: “wherein the Composer deems to Search, to look out for the Strains, and Touches of Harmony, which he is to use in the regular piece to be play’d afterwards.” [29] It is worth bearing these definitions of research in mind for two reasons. First, they point to a vital link between research and improvisation, even when everything may appear to be laid out in advance. Second, they tie research to performance, to a creative practice and a manual activity. Supplementing our understanding of research with these antiquated definitions helps close the gap between theory and practice, while opening up a space to attend to emergences or improvisations that could not be foreseen beforehand. It is not that theory and practice need to fall into identity but that they take on an appropriately paradoxical relationship. There is just enough distance between them to form a strange loop.

The Strange Loopiness of Research-Creation

Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop offer sustained examinations of recursive phenomena in a variety of fields and media. [30, 31] In the first book, the ricercar figures prominently in Hofstadter’s elaboration of strange loops. The ricercar, with its etymological link to “research,” is defined by the Harvard Dictionary of Music as an instrumental composition of the 16th and 17th centuries, a precursor to the fugue, either serving a preludial function or following a song, dance or other work: “In many such cases the term seems to refer to ‘searching out’ permutations and combinations of thematic materials drawn from the model.” [32] As a precursor to the fugue, the ricercar also has much in common with canon form, in which a leading voice is followed by successive voices repeating the same subject, round and round, loops piling one on top of the other. Fugues and ricercar may be thought of as more flexible canons in which greater transformations are permitted to occur. For Hofstadter, Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Endlessly Rising Canon” from The Musical Offering serves as an apt example of a strange loop, though even more complex sonic instantiations of strange loops make take shape in fugue or ricercar form. In the “Endlessly Rising Canon,” Bach employs successive modulations such that the key of the piece ascends continually over the course of six repetitions only to end up back in the original key. Hofstadter writes: “The ‘Strange Loop’ phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started. (Here, the system is that of musical keys).” [33] Other examples of recursive structures, strange loops, and ‘tangled hierarchies’ include M. C. Escher’s illustrations, such as Drawing Hands (in which one hand draws a second hand that draws the first hand) as well as mathematician Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, whose self-reference bears similarities to seemingly paradoxical statements such as “This sentence is false” (or, “the right way to do research-creation is to abandon the right way of doing research-creation”). [34]

Penrose stairs. Public domain (contributed by Sakurambo).

In discussions of research-creation I’ve often heard it said that the dash between the two terms is of greater significance than the two terms in themselves. Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk elaborate four modes of research-creation, emphasizing the relationship between research and creation: “In delineating four modes within the set of ‘research-creation,’ we call attention to the moment that is in between, the conjunctive moment that points to the articulation of these two terms one to the other.” [35] My suggestion is that we think of this articulation as constituting a strange loop. Research and creation are not completely separate, but neither are they identical. They fold back into each other in a tangled hierarchy. Just as we appear to be moving away from one of the terms we find ourselves simultaneously moving towards it, like Bach’s canon returning to and departing from its original key. Hierarchy is central here. Strange loops exist in hierarchical systems, but they also call hierarchies into question. The strange looping of research-creation challenges the hierarchies that attribute different values to theory and practice in different disciplines. The point is not to supplant one dominant hierarchy with another, but to recognize the way hierarchies shift depending on context and to be able to both navigate and productively question such shifts.

To give an example, anxieties around research-creation in Fine Arts may be different from anxieties around research-creation in Social Sciences. These disciplines have different priorities and different value systems hierarchizing activities and outputs. At the risk of gross generalization, artists may fear that adding research to their activities will take time away from their practice or otherwise divert its flow, compromising their artwork; social scientists may fear that engaging with creative practices will divert time and resources from more established and accepted methods, compromising the ‘rigor’ of their research. But research-creation as a strange loop can find passage between these positions, not statically overvaluing either research or creation, theory or practice, but generating potential by repeatedly shifting perspective. Strange loops happen at different velocities. Whether we are “researching” or “creating,” there are moments at which the speed of the loop attains a rate that seems to place the two activities one on top of the other, almost falling into identity. Other times, or even simultaneously on another level, the loops may slow down; there may be an extended period where we feel quite distanced from one of the two terms. It might appear as though the hierarchy has stabilized. Here it is important to understand the loop as always in play – it might decelerate but it will not stop.

Some anxieties around research-creation may be intimately connected to the idea of looping itself. Hofstadter remarks on the weariness that is often directed at feedback loops: “Feedback – making a system turn back or twist back on itself, thus forming some kind of mystically taboo loop – seems to be dangerous, seems to be tempting fate, perhaps even to be intrinsically wrong, whatever that might mean.” [36] Repetition can be equally challenging. Deleuze writes, “In every respect repetition is transgression.” [37] Earlier in the same text he notes parenthetically: “It is true that repetition also concerns the head, but precisely because it is its terror or paradox.” [38] The repetitive and the recursive seem somehow suspect, rubbing against attempts to understand the world in terms of linear, non-self-referencing systems. Whether this is an anxiety around stagnation or a fear of losing control of the looping system (like the piercing sound of runaway audio feedback) is not completely clear. Likely it is precisely these two extremes – not getting anywhere and going too far – that join together to provoke trepidation in one way or another. To tackle such anxieties we need to be simultaneously comforted and excited. And at the risk of sounding overly convenient: what better than a strange loop to tell you that just when you are farthest from home, home is right around the corner, while also assuring you that just when you are most stuck at home a line of flight is opening up?

Window Music 1 (excerpt), 2013. Samuel Thulin, live performance – feedback produced and amplified via gallery windows, contact microphones and surface transducers, Espace Projet, Montreal, part of the sound art series 24gauche. Recorded by André Éric Létourneau. Used with permission.