negative-spaces AS RESEARCH-CREATION OUTPUT
As prefaced in negative-spaces/disorientation.html, my research-creation questions were open-ended and my responses, provisional configurations of the physical-conceptual field. I did not quite know where I was going when I began my master's which, while teaching me to "use my intuition by feeling my way through" (Fitzpatrick 2017, 64, emphasis in original) and allowing me the "time and space to experiment in unpredictable directions" (Loveless 2019, 70, emphasis in original), meant I wandered in many different directions and encountered many relevant texts midway through my project. I am certain there are many readings I may have found helpful which I have yet to encounter, and regret all that I could not engage for lack of time. Some of what I excluded is material I would have liked to integrate but lacked the proper time to fully grasp it, to sit with, walk with, and let it percolate, to allow connections to form. My MA thesis marks a provisional beginning to the gut feelings I am able to articulate and evince. In pursuing a PhD, I aim to deepen conversations with the physical-conceptual field begun in my master's, as well as broaden my engagement to include literatures from feminist new materialisms, affect studies, performativity theory, posthumanisms, critical GIS, critical cartography, critical disability studies, spatial humanities and postqualitative inquiry. Having gained some sense of my interests, cultivated rhythms of inhabitation and tactics of practice and neurodivergent storying that serve my creative and scholarly work, I am better equipped to begin my next research endeavor with greater intention from the start.

The trouble of open-ended research is sensing when and where to conclude; but a boundary must be drawn, if only so I can go swim in the ocean the whole day without opening my laptop. I have submitted to cIRcle, UBC's institutional repository for graduate research, a file formatted and entitled ubc_2024_november_crandalloral_lily_negative_spaces.zip. This, along with a nine page .pdf document containing metadata and instructions on how to unzip negative-spaces, constitutes my MA thesis in geography. The webbed site constituted through a visitor's intra-action with negative-spaces marks the effects of my deep mapping praxis. My thesis is the first MA thesis in the University of British Columbia's history of Electronic Thesis and Dissertation submissions to consist entirely of a website, without a significant portion of the research submission being rendered in .pdf form. Like graffiti, negative-spaces is inherently multimodal. The text and audio/visual components cannot be separated without altering the meaning their composition conveys. A research-creation output, negative-spaces employs form as a tactic for refiguring the boundaries of what counts as an intelligible thesis, as fieldwork, and as intellecting others.

SITING NEGATIVE SPACES
negative-spaces sites a provisional configuration of ideas whose articulation entails the exclusion of all other/d possible configurations. My research practice has therefore included cultivating a responsiveness to the ways in which my research-creation draws boundaries, figuring intelligibility as the effect of such exclusions. In negative-spaces/tactics.html, I drew on my creative practices to complicate who comes to matter as an interlocutor. If agential realism figures posthuman publics (see negative-spaces/interference.html#thinking-with), new ways of referencing/acknowledging thinking with intellecting others and the practice through which they are constituted are required. In negative-spaces/tactics.html and negative-spaces/rendering.html, I proposed sitation as an alternative boundary drawing practice to citation, one which recognizes encounters as phenomena wherein fieldsite and researcher (equipped with tactics of investigation) intra-actively mark one another. Whereas citation cites interaction, sitation sites intra-action. Sitations are diffraction patterns marking the effects of intra-actions. In other words, sitations site interferences.

Woven throughout my theory, practice, and praxis is the figure of negative space (see negative-spaces/rendering.html#negative-spaces). In visual art, negative space refers to that which surrounds the subject but is not the intended focus of attention. Negative space gives definition to the intelligible form by being that which the intelligible form is not. The boundary, or difference, between intelligible and unintelligible is articulated when that which the intelligible form excludes shows up within the space of the intelligible. Locating my thesis in negative-spaces brings to the fore alternate forms of knowledge production and academic reproduction. And, in doing so, negative-spaces enacts an interference which redraws the field of possibility. Negative space and intelligibility are in relation not of opposition but of complementary constitution — an entanglement I believe to be analogous to (if not the same as) Michel Foucault's (1977) rendering of limit and transgression. The boundary differentiating negative space and the intelligible form is articulated through the transgressive act of refiguring spacetimematter. Form matters because differences in form matter because differences inform matter. negative-spaces sites negative spaces from within hegemonic frameworks of intelligibility.

MANY STORIES EXIST IN THE LANDSCAPE

Many stories exist in the landscape, says a wooden frame erected at Jericho Beach Park, What do you see? Do different stories render different cities? Or is it, as so exquisitely suggested by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1974), that different framings focus a city differently, evoking a multiplicity of stories, each one rendering some aspects of a landscape intelligible to the exclusion of others?

I am a bricoleur-as-researcher, conducting transdisciplinary investigations into everyday urban geographies through both affective and technoscientific research practices. I craft multimodal artifacts which perform bricolage with the physical-conceptual fields of my encounter. Over the past three years of my research-creation, I have come to understand what is needed to produce 'situated knowledges' (Haraway 1988) of the place one inhabits is not reflexivity on the part of the geographer-cartographer-researcher, or merely an approach which counters the hegemonic one, but an account of how differences come to matter as the effects of boundary making practices. Drawing from what I have learned, I want to suggest "the city" as a phenomenon within which empirical formations (themselves phenomena) like spatial data and maps (be they mental or physical/digital) are intra-actively produced through both technoscientific and affective agencies of observation. 'Top down' and 'bottom up' mapping practices simply perform different agential cuts, the effects of which do not oppose one another but overlap in the everyday, their interference constituting the entangled viscera of urban bodies as they are rendered differentially intelligible. To study phenomena, their entangled states, and/or the apparatuses performing agential cuts from an exterior position, however, requires building a larger diffractive apparatus (Barad 2007, 345). This is what I intend to do in my PhD. I want to build a diffractive apparatus to study how the phenomenal city comes to differentially matter through the entangled effects of 'top down' and 'bottom up' boundary making practices. Reimagining referent "the city" from a fixed and bounded object to a phenomenon, dynamically figured through the posthuman performativity of 'iterative intra-activity' (Barad 2007), allows for a multiplicity of stories to be superpositioned in one place. The indeterminacy of which story comes to matter is resolved by boundary making practices which differentially frame the landscape. Accounting for boundary making practices is important in order to remain responsive to how some stories become privileged while others are "excluded from mattering" (Barad 2007, 220).

Although routinely apprehended as individuals with definite bodies whose boundaries are presumed to preexist encounter, our contours are really permeable, provisional, composed and continuously recomposed through iterative and everyday intra-actions. To practice deep mapping is to embody superposition. The wave-particle duality of matter reveals entanglements to be the "poetics of paradox and ambiguity essential to open deep mapping" (Modeen and Biggs 2020, 53). Paradox is not a closure but an opening — to possibilities — the existence of entangled states, simultaneous multiplicities, inextricable layers.