Response Events Narratives: Between Research and Creation

abstract:Artworks and cultural productions affect us in various degrees. In rare occasions, their encounter can trigger a life-changing event. These rare and unexpected individual moments can be shared as narratives, some of which are found in literature. Among these literary accounts, many attribute to texts the prompting of personal events and such narratives have been studied by literary scholars interested in reader–response theory. Less attention has been paid to accounts of such reactions to other types of media, which also require additional theoretical input to study them. To examine these specific events in narratives, we consider them as "response events" and analyse their characteristics through research and artistic means. Adding to the existing contributions in literary theory, we use a methodology originating from the art field, that is research-creation. In this article, we start by presenting our research-creation approach and the interdisciplinary tool that we developed. We then present a brief overview of the results from the literary corpus analysis and of the artistic experimentations that they triggered. We also describe how our research on the response event has led Damien Beyrouthy to think this concept through his artistic practice, from which other concepts emerged.