Beyond Bifurcation: Thinking the Abstractions of Art-Science after A. N. Whitehead (original) (raw)
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Much has been said about the constitutive and generative potential of matter, of its vibrancy, endless productivity and resilience. With its impersonal kind of agency, matter is both a producing force and a relationality. New Materialism, specifically, calls for a refiguration of the question of matter, bringing new approaches to debates on embodiment and interactions among bodies. Finally, the troubled divide between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’ is shaken too, as it begins to strike us as increasingly obsolete. Accordingly, the present paper examines encounters with artifactual creatures in artistic practice. In looking at kinetic sculptures of Theo Jansen and U-Ram Choe, as well as Merleau-Ponty concept of ‘the flesh’, it develops an extended notion of interaction whereby organic ‘human’ bodies are invited to participate in the terrestrial biome affirmatively by empathetically responding to that which is non-animalesque and not even biological – artifactual automata. What is foregrounded here is the relative autonomy of artifactual entities, the immersion in environments defined by the presence of artifactual agents, and the possibility of a human-artifactual participatory becoming. Here ‘living’ material bodies are defined in terms of their capacities to generate events and regimes of novelty. A body becomes a meta-stable locale composed of diffuse responsive states opening up toward the entirety of an environment. Here notions of empathetic immersion and participation intertwine to shape a new ecology of interlacing material bodies with their singular forms of interaction and response.
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This article explores how two different kinds of subjects, an architect-cum-digital media artist and an engineer, tease out and negotiate ideas from alien contexts. Brought together by a desire to explore the cybridity of physicality through artistic expressions, we recognise the need for a new language and ways of speaking that open potentials for the creation of new realities. Postcolonial discourse and the concept of vertical and horizontal discourses theorised by educational sociologist Basil Bernstein will provide the lenses by which we describe our collaboration, which is partially performed herein through language. We propose to describe our discourse of intervention as discourses in which each dialogue is a deliberative "language game" played out through the metonymy of ideas in our fields (e.g. belonging and fuzzy membership functions) to produce a subject always different to itself. By interjecting interventions between and among our respective territories of knowledge, we hope to create a new mode of practice that is neither trapped by our territories nor a duplex copy of them, but rather multidimensional transmissions reinterpreting our meaning structures.
We engage with Karen Barad's notion of diffraction (2007) to re-evaluate the relations between mainstream contemporary art (MCA) and new media art (NMA) 1 that have been discussed for many years as part of a somewhat contentious debate. Our diffractive reading highlights both large and small but consequential differences between these art practices. We do not smooth over the tensions highlighted in earlier discussions of NMA and MCA. Instead we use Barad's term 'entanglement' to suggest that there are generative 'entanglements', as well as productive differences, between these practices. We extend the debate by considering which differences matter, for whom (artists, gallerists) and how these differences emerge through material-discursive intra-actions. We argue for a new term, diffractive art practices, and suggest that such art practices move beyond the bifurcation of NMA and MCA to partially reconfigure the practices between art, computation and humanities.
Visualising the Invisible’: Arts and Science Collaboration
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This research explores, psychoanalyst/linguist/philosopher, Julia Kristeva’s concept that female subjectivity seems linked to both cyclical time (menstruation/pregnancy/repetition) and monumental time in sense of eternity (motherhood/reproduction/genetic chain). Whilst also investigating ‘psychological resonance,’ a particular part of the creative process that conjures up the idea of movement between something experienced (object) and it’s impact on the individual (subject). Heald and Liggett are developing ideas relating to a ‘space’ an ‘in-between-ness’ and ‘cyclical time’ from an art/science perspective. Heald began exploring Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic chora as a preverbal space that relates to rhythms, colours and trace, the preverbal infant, the depressive and the psychotic. She became interested in the aspect of the unconscious/subconcious, through working with the patients, exploring maternal/cyclical/monumental time, poetics and the chora. Through ‘dream films’ she cr...
Beyond Matter or Form - Invalidating Subliminal Contradictions in the Aesthetics of Matter, 2013
The Aesthetics of Matter. Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange. , 2013
It has been a widespread and persistent rumour (albeit a productive one) that the self-reflexive tendency of the Avant-gardes is to be understood either in terms of materiality or form. The narrative underlying this is structured by the traditional, but problematic, contradiction between ‘form’ and ‘material’, and, moreover, between ‘formality’ and ‘materiality’. Consequently, theories of the aesthetics of matter tend to focus on the material as an immediate objective fact and regard Avant-garde materiality as being of a certain (non-formal) quality. The realization and production of materiality is elucidated according to somewhat vague terms such as appearance, emergence and event. The techniques of the Avant-garde are thus reduced to unconscious and unintentional procedures. The dissolving of formal borders, intermediaries and hybrid forms are understood to be the result of a ‘performativization’ of the arts. However, elucidating the logic of the aesthetics of matter as a paradigmatic turn in this way is reductive. In my paper I will discuss the problems of this reduction by reconsidering some reflections of Theodor W. Adorno.