Abstract

This work chronicles a research project at La Ruche d’Art (art hive), a third space, which functions as both an open and free community art studio and as a university storefront classroom embedded in a local neighborhood. Third spaces (Bhabha, 1994) are experiential, physical, and multi-interpretive spaces where people can let their real selves show, and where diverse identities can remake boundaries. However, most ethnographic accounts do not present these dimensions since they are constrained by text. I was moved by my work at La Ruche; I wanted to communicate this to others, and move them as well. Therefore, using a digital format, I constructed a multi-layered account of this third space, one in which viewers could immerse themselves, using multiple ways of knowing: affective, sensory, intuitive, and observational. Constructing this in a digital space also permitted me to think and respond differently to the data as a researcher by drawing upon the potential for visual, print, and aural media to inform each other in the construction of knowledge about this space and the processes it nurtured. Integrating visual, aural and textual data creates meaningful analytical dialogues between these different data forms and opens a doorway for the audience to enter this place of creation and connection. In addition, I employed the powerful processes I witnessed using arts-informed methodologies (Knowles & Cole, 2008), blending them together into a performance collage. This usually refers to the process of musically coding and writing up data culminating in a musical performance (Leavy, 2015). I riff on this term to bring it to the realm of stop motion animation of data to disseminate meaning. Beside, some of the images do dance!