Autism in the Wild: Bridging the Gap Between Experiment and Experience

Abstract

Traditional accounts conceive of the autistic individual as being locked in his/her own world due to difficulties in social interaction, communication and imagination. Historically, the capacity for rich inner life and creativity in autism has been dismissed by many with imagination associated with deficit. The paradoxical association between autism and creativity is one of the reasons the condition causes such fascination and yet remains an enigma. This chapter draws upon practical research to explore new insights into the imagination and perception in autism through the multisensory multimodalities of drama and performance, which, it is speculated, offer a space for ‘encounters’ with autistic states of being. We draw upon our AHRC practice-based project ‘Imagining Autism’, which explores the phenomenology of autism through a series of immersive, multisensory installations, puppetry and interactive digital media, to facilitate communication and social interaction with 7–11-year-olds across the spectrum. These methods are developing new understanding of the richness and originality of the imagination in autism and how it may be differently inflected from neurotypicals. How can atypical experience be accessed through performance vocabularies? Does autism predispose to talents and if so, why? What is the nature of autistic creativity alongside neurotypical creativity? We reconceptualise the imagination in autism, challenging dualisms between the rational and the intuitive, the aesthetic and non-aesthetic and most crucially, imaginative creativity versus the recreative imagination. We draw upon cognitive neuroscience with particular reference to Philip Barnard’s conceptualisation of mental architecture as interacting visual, auditory and bodily subsystems. Two interactions between facilitators and children in the immersive and sensory performance environments of ‘Imagining Autism’ are analysed to evidence cognitive development via the autistic imagination at work. These examples suggest that the somatic interaction of body and the environment are as much part of cognition and the creative imagination as the brain and its functioning.