This thesis' focal presentable object – to swim in air – is a mythosystem comprising six iteratively malleable experiential systems of intermedial musical and visual performance works composed by myself between the years 2018 and 2023. Conceived through the lens of Jennifer Walshe's New Discipline, created within my practice cycle's nodal context, and connected by a sub/conscious structure of perceptual timbre, the mythosystem and its parts form the centerpiece of this discussion of context, process, and method. As described in this document, the creative practice of nodal context and the adaptive intermedial methods used in the conceptualization and composition of to swim in air were developed through a personal and pragmatic application of feminist writer and independent scholar Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, and composer, musicologist and trombonist George Lewis' curatorial decolonization guidelines as outlined in his "8 Difficult Steps to Decolonizing Music" towards the creation of presentable cultural objects which invite variable and continuous interaction from their participants through the exploration of the reciprocity of community, multi-practice creative strategy and malleable forms. Throughout this document I discuss how through the exploration of the reciprocity of community, multi-practice creative strategy and malleable forms I have addressed concerns of cost, access and participation in living culture with regards to my own work creating cultural objects. I also discuss phenomenological and practical issues to do with cost, access and living culture present within the creative, curatorial and institutional spaces and communities in which this work was created and is initially intended to exist, and how these concerns impact the pedagogical, practical and experiential potential of my own work. This document also reflects on how the pragmatic and personal adoption of these concepts of cultural object phenomenological ephemera and decolonized curatorial practice as presented by Ahmed and Lewis by other composers, artist, curators, educators, and other creative professionals might impact the nature of artistic institutional spaces, might encourage the engagement of new, speculative and/or more colloquial spaces, and how these spatial reorientations might encourage a more fluidic approach to creative practice, community cultivation and engagement.
