Abstract What happens when you try to name knowledge that operates before naming? This project investigates that question through three years of cold-water swimming at Kingston Beach, Southern Tasmania (2022–2025), and its effects on compositional practice.
Systematic shifts emerged over that period — in harmonic density, formal boundary articulation, temporal organisation — that preceded conscious recognition and presented as intuitive necessities. This project proposes retrospective portfolio analysis as a method for tracing those pre-reflective transformations without claiming transparent access to them.
What analysis revealed exceeded what longitudinal portfolio comparison alone could account for. Attempts to attribute compositional innovations to any single domain — swimming, theoretical engagement, ethical commitment, expanding craft — consistently failed. The evidence pointed toward multiple domains operating convergently within compositional intuition before any could be separately identified.
Electroacoustic work Thalassic tests whether the dynamics that emerged can be operationalised as explicit methodology without displacing the embodied judgement from which they arose. What the process suggested is scalar: explicit frameworks can govern macro-structural design while embodied responsiveness continues operating at the micro-compositional level. Articulation may not need to absorb what it names.
In research cultures driven by optimisation and measurable output, long-duration embodied immersion risks minoritisation as method. This project argues such practices are not residues of pre-theoretical art making but epistemic resources — and that criteria exist for examining them without flattening them into a system.