From Mediation to Method: Practice, Translation, and the Conditions of Knowledge (Part 1/2)

This upcoming two-part Read & Share series brings Susan Sontag’s “Film and Theatre” into conversation with Erin Manning’s “Against Method” through a shared concern: the transformations that occur when embodied practice enters another frame.

Although written from different intellectual and historical contexts, both texts address questions that remain central to artistic research, performance studies, and practice-as-research. How does practice change when it is translated across media, forms, or systems of representation? What becomes legible, and what exceeds legibility? Under what conditions does embodied experience become knowledge?

This first session focuses on Sontag’s examination of theatre and film as distinct yet overlapping aesthetic systems. Her reflections on presence, mediation, realism, spectatorship, and representation offer a framework for considering how performance is altered through processes of documentation, translation, and reframing. Learn more about Part Two of the series.

Placed in sequence, these texts open a broader conversation concerning mediation, embodiment, documentation, research-creation, and the production of knowledge through artistic practice. Together they invite reflection on how practices move across bodies, media, institutions, and epistemological frameworks, and on what is transformed in the process. 

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