Before I gave my presentation I was definitely shaking. Anxiety washed over me as I went through phases of calm panic, and intense panic, I assure you the two are different. It’s not new, but I’m usually a confident presenter, I guess it was the content. Perhaps it was that it was too personal, perhaps I was afraid as I often am of being too out of the box. But I committed anyway because that’s kind of the entity I am.

Reflecting back on it, no matter how unsure I was, I’m proud of the work that I created, the exploration that I undertook, I’m not sure what I learnt other than how to convalesce something, though I’m also not sure what that something was. But it was something, I came out the other side with a kind of gut feeling, hard to describe. Perhaps the kind of feeling we seek to find when we create art that deals with the kinds of things that cannot be ascribed to words, yeah, I think I found that.

The presentation itself I could mention things like, I think I rambled, I don’t know that I got to all the content I wanted, and I definitely ran out of time. But I thought it was okay, in the heat of the moment you can never really tell y’know. But that doesn’t feel like the kind of reflection I am supposed to be doing.

I feel like watching everyone else’s presentations really solidified the theories for me, watching everyone’s different explorations and explanations provided more scope and context for the ways that the theories could manifest and be developed, and everything that everyone had to say was so insightful and different and I feel like I got a lot out of learning about what everyone else had done. I especially enjoyed the different angles that everyone came at the topics with and how even though there was a limited topic scope no one’s presentation was the same, everyone had their own takes.

The unfortunate matter is I’m still not sure what to reflect on. Let’s try; what have I learnt from Phenomenology? That things interact I guess? That touch is by necessity both a consensual and non- consensual experience. That while when we touch a body we consent to touch, but when a body touches us we do not always consent to the touch, or we might choose to revoke our consent if it becomes uncomfortable.

I also uncovered linking the concept of ‘life’ and the concept of ‘the body’ and I’m not finished in my exploration of the linkage because I’ve only just uncovered the thought but I feel like there’s something there, in broadening the way our body reacts to life, can explain the way our body reacts to other bodies. And is film in itself a kind of ‘life’? How does the film’s body react to the film’s life reacting too… It’s a causal change I’m on the precipice of understanding but I don’t have the words to do it right yet.

So to sum up, what did I learn? Where did I grow? There’s lots of edges and maybe’s and ledges and threads that I can’t quite grasp in that answer but there’s also something there, and I guess I’ll probably keep running towards the thing that I uncovered in this experimentation until I learn how to put to words what it is.