Hinterlands, How To Do Transdisciplinarity by ARIAS.amsterdam

Hinterlands How to do transdisciplinarity?

Arias

Jeroen Boomgaard Katie Clarke Nienke Scholts Eds.

Hinterlands How to do Transdisciplinarity? Arias Jeroen Boomgaard Katie Clarke Nienke Scholts (Eds.)

Hinterlands

Salomé Voegelin Preface

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Nienke Scholts Dear Reader: Editor’s Letter 14

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Sher Doruff “Utopian? Perhaps. Impossible? I would not bet against it.” 18

Jeroen Boomgaard Transdisciplinary Dreaming 34 Visual Methodologies Collective Turning to the Birds 46 Paula Albuquerque The Asset of Burnout: Transmedial as Agential Strategy 60

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Erik Rietveld Trust and Be Open to Unexpected Possibilities

Contents

Ektor Ntourakos Rhizomatic Transdisciplinarity in Contemporary Commoning Alice Smits, Raoul Frese, Špela Petrič & Miha Turšič We Need to Be More Human than We Are: Smart Hybrid Talks John Miers Two Pictures of My Brain Nienke Scholts & Sabine Niederer Monstering: On Hybridizatioan and Care in Artistic Research

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130

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Ilse van Rijn Apples, or Writing and/as Transdisciplinary Practice, in 3 Exercises 146 Katie Clarke Transposition of the Ear

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Maaike Muntinga Hallucinating Harmacies: A Spatial Reimagining of Memories in Medicine 172

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Eliza Steinbock & Imara Limon Doing Intersectional New Museology: A Conversation on “Outside” Activists, Artists, and Curators from the “Inside” of Heritage About the Authors

190 208

Colophon 218

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Salomé Voegelin

Preface

Salomé Voegelin

In 2018, Anna Barney and I travelled to Derry/ Londonderry in Northern Ireland to give a joint paper, or rather stage a conversation, on crossdisciplinary working: ‘Accessing Disciplinary Hinterlands through Listening’, in the context of the ISSTA (Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association) Conference ‘Who’s Listening? Sound and Public Space’. Anna is a Professor in Biomedical Acoustic Engineering who listens to lungs and speech patterns. I am a Professor of Sound who writes about the ‘sonic’ in relation to its invisible and relational materialisations. Together we are working on a project entitled ‘Listening across Disciplines’, which sets out to investigate whether listening could be used to work across disciplinary barriers; open a different sphere for collaboration and conversation; and reach different knowledges from the ‘in-between’. The term ‘Hinterland’ in the title of our paper was inspired by a Welsh detective-drama programmed on the BBC at the time. It set the scene for crime and its investigation at the margins, not only geographically but also politically and psychologically. Filmed both in Welsh and in English, the series kept itself deliberately troubled and remote. It performed investigative actions behind the main stage and out of view of a conventional set. It played with and on the periphery, which, measured from the centre, seems always slightly precarious and fraught, while also revealing and enabling a different view: a different way of performing conventional roles. Similarly, working in the Hinterland and in the ‘in-between’ of academic disciplines involves risks, which makes room for a different imagination, and for scholarly protagonists to play a different part.

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Derry seemed an opportune place for our conversation about accessing disciplinary ‘Hinterlands’; where science and art can meet beyond the agreed methodologies, vocabularies and processes that stand as certainties of a particular discipline, but which, in their specificity, impede trans- and interdisciplinary sharing. To instead consider the space ‘behind’ the discipline, its blind-spots and methodological wilderness, so that we might step into the unknown together and reach new ‘information variables’, which, as knowledge possibilities, make new connections and interrelations accessible, and therefore thinkable, for scientific and artistic research. What was apposite about staging this conversation in Derry was its prominent place in the ‘Troubles’, the sectarian violence between republicans and unionists, marking a contested site; as well as its fame as the last remaining completely intact medieval walled city in Ireland. It provided the perfect background to metaphorise trans- and interdisciplinarity as a site of contestation, and to think of disciplines as ‘walled cities of knowledge’, whose alliances stand in conflict and competition, but whose vested interests can be breached by listening as a form of activism and interference. Paying attention to the invisible ‘in-between’ in which we might share a common interest; to hear what might appear beyond a particular domain, but where the purpose of the discipline can stretch to attain new understandings and aims. This ‘listening’ does not have to be an actual, “ear listening”, but also works as a metaphor and invitation to embrace the invisible ‘in-between’ of disciplinary lines, sonic or otherwise, to work with their intangible relationalities. Sound, as material and as concept, transgresses walls and provides

Salomé Voegelin

access to a discipline’s ‘Hinterland’, which is not demarcated by a particular field’s concepts, methodologies, procedures, epistemology, terminology, and data, but circumscribes an unknown sphere that hovers behind and between disciplines. Thus it offers opportunities for new thinking and cross-disciplinary collaborations, and another way to see the frames given to us by conventional academic infrastructures and expectations. I have since moved to Berlin, where I live in the gap between the Wall and the Hinterlandmauer, the secondary wall that was built by consolidating barricades that were erected contingently, in a gerrymandering fashion, every time there was a breach. Disciplinary ambitions seem just like that, protecting a consolidated field, and confirming where the centre ends: what belongs legitimately inside the discipline and its esoteric knowledge, and what articulates as marginal activities, breaching its lines. Trans- and interdisciplinary working is reframed again and again, inside disciplinary boundaries. And breaches are met, at least eventually, with another barricade of disciplinary specificity, ensuring consolidation and a legitimate voice. By contrast, sounding and listening, as practice and as sensibility, enable a sustainable way to think beyond the wall, without breaching it, and thus without engaging the dichotomy of discipline and ‘not-discipline’. Instead, they invite a collaboration that accepts the distinction of disciplines, enabling a co-working and novel crossdisciplinarity through a common focus on the invisible ‘in-between’. Salomé Voegelin with Anna Barney

https://www.listeningacrossdisciplines.net/

Hinterlands

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Nienke Scholts

Dear Reader: Editor’s Letter

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Nienke Scholts

Dear reader, Welcome to Hinterlands: How to do Transdisciplinarity? As a very real imaginary that playfully points to how, at ARIAS, we try to listen to the outskirts of research parameters and look for space outside the epicentre of dominant research practices, to experiment and move slower, ‘Hinterlands’, the title of this book, grounds us in time and geography as we tune into the invisible in-between knowledge that emerges from hybrid collaborative research practices; practices which, in other words, are transdisciplinary. We asked a cross-section of artist-researchers that we have been working with in the ARIAS network over the past years to reflect on ‘transdisciplinarity’ through the lens of their research practice(s)1. Rather than posing the question ‘What is transdisciplinarity?’, we thought it more interesting to ask how practices of research come into being, how one deals with differences of many kinds in collaborations; and how the work is actually done together. The subtitle ‘How to do Transdisciplinarity?’ should therefore mainly act as a guide, a rhetorical device, to incite the authors and editors – and hopefully you as reader too - towards different corners, atmospheres, and viewpoints in the Hinterlands; towards the different ways in which research is practiced.

The book contains contributions that address a multitude of dynamics within transdisciplinary work in relation to, for example, language, listening, risk, pedagogy, world building, expectation, care, transmedia, curation, writing, intersectionality, and practicing medicine. These contents come in

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different forms: reflective and/or poetic in style, narrated by single or multiple author(s), written out conversations, interviews, and a graphic story. Sher Doruff and Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca discuss artistic research supervision and reflect on the missing yet crucial elements needed. What’s utopian is not necessarily impossible, they say. In another conversation, curator Imara Limon and Professor Eliza Steinbock approach transdisciplinarity through an intersectional lens in relation to new museology. In the contribution ‘Listening to the Birds’, the Visual Methodologies Collective move through their inspirations which form a basis for their collaborative projects with learning machines and climate fictions. Miha Turšič’s interview with physicist Raoul Frese, biologist and artist Špela Petrič, and curator Alice Smits marks the beginning of the transdisciplinary project ‘Plant Machine’. Their talk taps into seemingly basic issues, though integral to create a common ground and understanding from which to build the project further. In the middle of the book a graphic from John Miers makes visible the experiences of a patient with Multiple Sclerosis – John himself – and shows how this form of art, graphic medicine, has given doctors better understanding of their patients. While Ilse van Rijn reflects on writing as artistic research and a potential transdisciplinary practice, Maaike Muntinga does so and proposes a combination of essayistic, diary and dreamlike fragments in order to call forth her imagination of the harmful sides of care institutions as ‘Harmacies’. There is more, and we leave it to you to further roam about to see what is of interest to you – you can read the texts in any order – and dive in.

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Nienke Scholts

Published at the start of 2022, Hinterlands marks the approximate anniversary of ARIAS’ first five years as a platform for research through the arts and sciences. ARIAS is at once a small team of three people, a vast network of researchers, and a platform for art-research. Together we challenge the parameters and conditions of working across differences. This book celebrates the manifold ways in which collaborative research takes place in the ARIAS network, creating new hybrid forms for engaging with today’s most urgent issues. Enjoy the journey through the Hinterlands! 1 This approach might suggest that all authors do belong in one way or another to the ‘field’ of transdisciplinarity, which, to make things more complicated, is not how they would necessarily see it themselves. Transdisciplinarity is a collection of crossing pathways in an unmappable area, that perpetually call us to articulate and make visible how this happens.

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Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Sher Doruff

“Utopian? Perhaps. Impossible? I would not bet against it.”

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Sher Doruff

The following conversation took place over email in the early winter of 2021. Much has changed and is changing, both in the institution and in all our respective lives, since this discussion was initiated. It represents a bout of spontaneous thinking within a one-month time capsule contained in various lockdown modalities. At that time Sher Doruff was Head of the ‘DAS THIRD’ programme, while Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca was in the inaugural phase of her position as Lector of the Academy of Theatre and Dance (ATD) and Head of DAS Graduate School (DGS), Amsterdam. 4 January 2021 On the role of a-, un-, non- and transdisciplinarity in 3rd Cycle Artistic Research: how transdisciplinarity requires us to think differently about (rather than to simply abandon) notions of expertise and specialism, while simultaneously encompassing forms of ‘not knowing’; and how to navigate the risk of transdisciplinarity as some new ‘master discourse’ that thinks of itself as capable of capturing ‘the whole’. Sher Doruff First of all Laura, I want to welcome you again to the Amsterdam University of the Arts as Lector of the School for Theater and Dance. Your first five months have been anything but easy given the COVID conditions you inherited. Talk about hard landings! We’re all hoping for a break in the turbulent weather soon.

You bring with you many years of experience in the UK system of 3rd Cycle Artistic Research. It’s a nearly four decades old PhD model that’s influenced the design, both mimetically and reactionarily, of

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new programmes in the EU and elsewhere since the Bologna Accord began its slow crawl. I am also aware that your scholarship is rooted in continental process philosophies. In kicking off this discussion of the ‘transdisciplinary ethos’ in Artistic Research, through the institutional lens of the University of Surrey, your former home, how might you frame your experience of supervising the multiplicitous praxes that artists bring to research? It seems to me, though I might be off-track in this supposition, that institutional perspectives will play a pragmatic role in our discussion of the variegated empirical and discursive ‘methods’ that artists bring to the doctoral table. Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca Thanks Sher. Yes, it’s certainly been a strange time to land in my new role, but also very clearly a really challenging time for doctoral researchers. I am supervising a number of students at the moment who have been put under extraordinary new pressures by COVID through home-schooling, caring responsibilities, loss of income, impacts of increased isolation, the list goes on. It has very much brought home the importance of community, including peer-to-peer community and support, which I know is a key aspect of what the THIRD programme that you lead seeks to provide too. To come to your question, my past and present PhD students have indeed brought with them complex and varied praxes that work across conventional disciplinary categories. Interestingly, in my experience, this includes people coming from scholarly rather than artistic backgrounds; philosophers, for instance, rather than artists, who have found themselves developing a creative practice that has struggled to find a home elsewhere, often

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Sher Doruff

accompanied by a performative rather than standardly ‘academic’ approach to writing. At Surrey, PhD students still apply to disciplinespecific programmes: PhD Theatre, PhD Dance, PhD Music, and so on. However, in practice, individual projects often range across areas, and supervisory teams combine staff from different departments. For example, I just had the great pleasure to cosupervise with a colleague from Music: the composer and pianist, Steve Tromans, to the completion of his doctorate. This was a practice-as-research project investigating the notion of rhythmicity through a dialogue between solo piano improvisation and Deleuze’s philosophy of time. Methods of scoring, chance procedures, creative constraints, and experiments with the contraction and expansion of duration in Steve’s practice have a cross-disciplinary legacy in art, through figures like John Cage, which allowed for an exciting discussion around the work between us. It was interesting to be drawn back into reflection on the very deep investment, collaboration, and mutual influence of theatremakers, choreographers, composers, and visual artists on each other in the Happenings era, and how that sits in relation to our contemporary moment.

Institutional frames, per se, have not been a problem for these practices. We haven’t come up against rules that didn’t work for the richness of artistic methodologies. However, there is still a tendency for a sense of ‘proper’ methods for research to haunt the experience of artistic researchers, I think. In a number of cases, people have needed to overcome a sense of institutional or academic propriety in order to locate and inhabit their own ‘voice’ (or ‘voices’, plural) in writing from, or about, their practices, and struggle to own the legitimacy of

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these embodied voices that speak from the studio, from the piano, from the workshop space, and so on. In my experience, artistic researchers often need a lot of encouragement to let these voices speak. And this is partly to do with the tacit knowledge that they express. For example, it can be that these voices express a deeply embedded practical knowledge or training that the artist to some extent takes for granted or thinks of as ‘obvious’ in its relation to the practice. But often there are real insights to be found here, including for the artist themselves, wherein the voicing of that tacit knowledge can allow new ideas to emerge. It’s a brilliant moment when we can all hear those voices confidently speaking through the PhD, but it can take a long time to find the specific language, tone, and voice that really allows practitioner-knowledge to be articulated on its own terms, particularly if you are also trying to integrate that voice with more standardly academic voices. I know that ARIAS has been working on this question too, not only in terms of how artists voice their research, but also in how they practice research as modes of listening, specifically in the thematic of ‘The Art of Listening to the Matter’ and the question of the different ways in which interdisciplinary researchers ‘tune in’ to key social urgencies. From my side, I’ve also been really brought into this work by thinking alongside Rajni Shah, who has joined us as an associate researcher at DAS. Their practice is very much about the politics of the act of listening across difference, and of listening as a kind of ‘knowing’ beyond mastery. In terms of my background in process philosophies, which often also informs the approaches of the researchers I supervise, a particular resonance is

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Sher Doruff

brought to the question of ‘method’. In many cases, people are working both from and with the tension between conventional notions of ‘method’ and the investment in thinking as encounter. This is often unpredictable and in contact with the unconscious: less something a subject does to an object, and more something that is reciprocally determined through specific, embodied relations. As Deleuze talked about it, the point is not to have a method, but to create thinking – and approaches to knowledgemaking – anew in and as encounter with the world. And yet, at the same time, there is a methodology (or methodologies) to this notion of encounter itself. There are specific techniques and practices for a processual and relational approach to knowledge-making that artists generate. This can feel like, and perhaps indeed become, a bit of a paradox, and there is always the risk that even methods that are geared towards some kind of ‘openness’ or ‘not knowing’ themselves become sedimented or reified, and only produce their own premises. Process philosophy or process-based artistic research has to itself remain in process! They can’t get stuck in one vocabulary or set of techniques, or else you end up in a contradiction. Of course, there are points when a process arrives at a more or less stable form; points when something seems to ‘end’. But, from my perspective, this is always only relative: processes don’t end, they just change or continue at different speeds or different registers.

But what about you, how have institutional perspectives impacted on the manifestation of artistic research methods in the context of THIRD? One interesting thing, of course, is that THIRD participants are often doing their research across a range of institutional contexts, rather than a shared one,

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as can be the case for other doctoral communities. Is this very much a strength of the programme for you? Does it also have challenges? SD I agree with you on the importance of nurturing the artist’s path towards finding the “specific language, tone and voice” for the discursive and artistic elements of PhD research. Often, but not always, artists pursuing a PhD are already engaged in theoretical practices such as close reading of scholarly texts adjacent to and/or embedded in their artistic interests, and writing from practice in a variety of styles, be it descriptive, conceptual, speculative, poetic, pragmatic, fabulative, etc. The very application to a PhD programme reveals entangled cosmologies attendant to the aspiring candidate. In optimal circumstances, the artist researcher would enroll in an institution with supervision immanent to the artist’s unfolding processes. The trajectory would be malleable, open to a nuanced approach to assessment criteria relative to the artist’s praxes. Homogenised standards are rarely applicable to artistic research. It’s perhaps why artistic research’s disciplinary inclusion in ‘the academy’ is still contested. I’ve witnessed the intensity of finelyhoned, empirically-engaged supervision as deeply satisfying over the long haul of a research project. I’ve also witnessed, sadly, detached, box-ticking supervision by professors, oversaturated with doctoral candidates, that pretty much suffocates the emergence of the artist’s voice in favor of marching towards the degree in the prescribed timeframe. Perhaps this isn’t the place to emphasise supervision or mentoring, and rather take up your remarks on the exigencies of ‘method’, though the two are seemingly entwined when it comes to satisfying the

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Sher Doruff

demands of PhD assessment. You know, the question “Do your methods/methodology ascribe to institutional standards for 3rd Cycle Research? For the ‘original contribution to knowledge’?” Unpacking the slippery nuance between methods, approaches, techniques, and practices can be complex: rarely is there consensus on the efficacy of these terms. I completely agree with your emphasis on a Deleuzian consideration of ‘method as encounter’. I might add a touch of what Erin Manning calls “the minor gesture” in research-creation; the transformative potential of the non-majoritarian, the nonnormative. Will an examining committee see the results that way? Will they applaud the explication of difference as an unconventional contribution to knowledges?

You ask about institutional impacts on artistic research methods in the context of THIRD, the 3rd Cycle research programme at DAS Graduate School. Good question! It cuts straight to the heart of this point. THIRD is indubitably idiosyncratic in its structure, its goals, its raison d’etre. It’s an odd duck in the small pond that is 3rd Cycle European Artistic Research. Established in 2016 as a pre-PhD programme to facilitate performing artists in preparing for applications to research universities and universities of the arts within the EU (according to the Bologna Agreement), the project has morphed over time. The three extant, seven member cohorts include artists from choreography, theater, film, and visual arts. Some are in the middle of PhD projects, others are working towards 3rd Cycle applications, while others teach and lead masters programmes with little time to undertake full or even part-time research responsibilities. What is common among them, in my opinion, is the desire for trusted, care-full peer exchange on the concerns, tactics and ‘minor gestures’ that drive their research praxes. It’s this

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simple framework, the rigorous, committed facilitation of peer engagement, that underpins THIRD’s motivations. As to your question regarding THIRD’s researchers as unaligned with a mutual university, you ask if this is a strength or a challenge? I feel confident in saying that the diverse institutional affiliations, the disparate experiences regarding benchmarks, dissertation criteria, access to practice resources such as studios and equipment, and access to varied supervision, all enhances the experience of our regular comings-together. Currently, eight universities are represented in the cohorts, each with varying support structures. Some researchers are generously funded; others, not at all. Interestingly, the disparity between resources is acknowledged, but not central to group discourse. An organic emphasis on the sharing and intra-acting of praxes tends to concern our engagements rather than institutional critique, since formal conditions and evaluations are not imposed on them. I cannot speak for the THIRD researchers of course. For myself, I can say I have never before encountered such sustained quality of both feedback and collegial care as I have with these three groups of researchers. But perhaps we have drifted from the original conversation starter. I am really curious to hear more of your thoughts on the risks of transdisciplinarity as the emergence of a “new master discourse that thinks of itself as capable of capturing ‘the whole’.” I have not yet heard it defined as a totalising construct. More often it’s critiqued for its diffusiveness, its variegated, slippery onto-epistemological tendencies. For myself, I would term transdisciplinarity as a ‘risk’ only within the context of irritating academic faculties, eluding academic credibility. If

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Sher Doruff

artistic research is necessarily interested in expanding the fields of knowledge creation, pushing against disciplinary confines with an insistence on speculative aesthico-politico methods, then it would seem some sort of prefix – like a-, un-, non-, trans- – may suit the occasion of this fuzzy specialised field. I long ago adopted the gerund “fieldings” as a means of expressing this fluidity of praxes. It has an unsettled gathering, a permaculture sensibility of collectivising necessity in its tone and effort. As a community, THIRD has opted for the term as the title of our forthcoming book on Artistic Research. But please do say more about your ‘transdisciplinary’ doubts. LCÓM Let me return to the question of supervision briefly first. You’re a much more experienced supervisor than me I suspect. I’ve seen four people through to the end now, two of whom were doing artistic research. But along with the people I’m currently supervising, my growing sense is that much of the process of “what it is to supervise” has to be invented anew each time. There are certain things that come up again and again: this question of the (il)legitimacy of artistic research in the academy, for instance; or the fear that transdisciplinary work constitutes a kind of dilettantism. But in many other ways, it feels as though I need to learn how to be a good supervisor all over again for each new project, because the needs of the student and the research vary so widely.

In terms of methods, one of the things I continue to find most problematic is the way in which standardised frameworks for research – not just at doctoral level, but also in terms of post-doctoral research funding applications – impose the sense of methods as needing to be determined in advance, in ways that

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leave so many artistic researchers feeling insecure or fraudulent in their awareness of the emergent nature of their methodologies. I know this is obvious and well-worn territory in artistic research, but somehow the normative model of methods as that which must be decided and laid out in advance still seems to be pervasive, particularly if PhD students are required to participate in more generic, non-discipline-specific trainings that enforce this view. The same goes, perhaps, for how to even think about the notion of an “original contribution to knowledge” within a process-based perspective! In most cases, in dialogue with students, we tend to arrive at a kind of acceptance of this criterion as a kind of necessary fallacy within the PhD context, while we simultaneously critique the cumulative rather than eventual model of knowledge it seems to rest upon. Responding to your further comments on THIRD, I hope you will forgive me if I ask a rather provocative additional question, one that I trust you know comes from a deep sense of how beautiful, utopian even, the “odd duck” that is THIRD might be considered. My question is whether you have ever worried that programmes like THIRD could in fact be seen as contributing to the persistence of “bad” supervision practices in other institutions? That is, one way to see THIRD is as a clearly much-needed provision of the kinds of community and peer-topeer mentoring that universities fail to offer PhD students doing artistic research. By providing what they fail to provide, are we supporting that system to continue? In the same way, with respect to artists, especially those who are pre-PhD and whom THIRD might support in their transitioning onto a PhD programme, is there a sense that we are doing the universities’ work for them? Perhaps in

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Sher Doruff

ways that, it could be argued, allows the universities not to change how they work, to really include artists as researchers? And then yes, finally, to the topic we are meant to be discussing: transdisciplinarity! I think perhaps I just have doubts insofar as I am aware of transdisciplinarity becoming a ‘buzzword’. We are told increasingly that we need transdisciplinary solutions to solve the ‘grand challenges’ of the day: something that is easy to say, but often seems to me to be said without much acknowledgement of the radical restructuring or transformation of the academy that would need to take place to really allow this approach to flourish. But my doubt is also perhaps specific to contexts where transdisciplinarity is associated with some kind of possibility of a unity of knowledge. That is, I hope that the transdisciplinary signals a movement across disciplines, but not in a way that implies a kind of ‘transcendence’, akin to the way that philosophy has sometimes understood itself as the ‘meta-’ or ‘master’ discipline, that somehow goes beyond and coordinates the knowledge of all the others, for instance.

Certainly, like you, I support the resistance to the “disciplining of knowledge”. Rancière’s articulation of the academic discipline as a “double operation of exclusion” and call for an “a-disciplinary” stance has certainly influenced my work and practice in performance philosophy (which is not a new discipline!).1 Rancière writes compellingly, I think, against any fundamental distinction of competencies, methods, objects, and intelligences along disciplinary lines; something that is still so hard to cultivate on a terrain where knowledge-creation is still so often structured in these exclusive and exclusionary ways. As someone who likes to

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wander around and trespass into others’ fields, there is always the risk of exclusion on the grounds of competence. Interdisciplinary dialogue is okay; it’s acceptable because, in the end, each one stays in their place. But we encountered some more difficult moments in the project I did with Fevered Sleep, a UK-based arts company, at the Veterinary School in Surrey, for example, in the clash of cultures between how artists and some scientists do research, or the criteria they use to judge what even counts as research in the first place.2 There was a moment in one of the conversations we staged with the participants who came to our open sessions, where a frustrated researcher in Veterinary Science exclaimed, “Yes, but what’s your hypothesis?”. Immediately, Fevered Sleep felt compelled to answer, to defend themselves by coming up with some succinct hypotheses that would justify and explain the research process we had invited the participants into. But, in fact, what instead needed to be acknowledged was that the framework of the ‘hypothesis’, a cornerstone of scientific method, was only one model of research, and not the operative one in our project. Fevered Sleep’s work is very much about inquiry and experiment, but one that uses conversation itself as method, partly because of its concern with holding predicted outcomes at bay. SD Thank you, Laura. So much to respond to here. I think this is a testament to all the unresolved issues – and I say this positively! – in the field of artistic research. Regarding your question on the role a programme such as THIRD plays in easing the responseability of the university, are we invigorating the problem by troubling it?

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Sher Doruff

Well, it seems to me an analogue could be the relation of socially-engaged artistic work to neoliberal capitalism. Do artists that take up concerns and matters of care where governments fail communities, participate in the global, economic super-structure of late capitalism? Surely. Resistance to the capitalist paradigm is endemic to its survival. Do we all participate in the injustices of free market ideology and structural racism with every purchase we make? It’s difficult, if not impossible, to escape complicity in the system. So, what to do? Nothing? Reform from the inside? Practice non-cooperation? Opt out? Or, as Moten and Harney continue to assert in their critique of the university: “Fuck sharing governance, or the slightly more equitable distribution of extracted surplus; let’s share needs.”3 When we began THIRD, we identified a need and acted. Is this type of mini-structural ethical response to a weakness in the overall structure of artistic research in the 3rd Cycle sustainable? Probably not. Kunst Hogescholen [Art Schools] in the Netherlands and elsewhere should not be expected to buffer the university’s inability to support artistic practice without augmented ministerial financing; and here, of course, we are embedded in the neoliberal educational regime. THIRD is pointing out these conditions of ‘lack’ and testing provisional formats. It’s my belief that this is a purposeful endeavor.

All that said, even as THIRD actively encourages and enables artists who seek doctoral degrees for their research trajectories, we continue to support in tandem the viability of non-institutionally affiliated research. That is, life-long study that eschews the ‘degree’, while embracing the experience of

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rigourous peer-exchange and access to practicerelated infrastructural resources such as studios and technology, etc. You use the word “utopian”, which I want to resist as I do feel there’s very real, percolating movement underfoot. A reassessing, or reclaiming of practice, as Lucy Cotter points out;4 a thriving ‘undercommons’.5 These aspirations trouble the hegemony of ‘disciplinarity’, even as they insist on the validation of their “own” expert plurality of praxes. Utopian? Perhaps. Impossible? I would not bet against it. 1 Rancière, J., McNamara, A.E., & Ross, T. (2007) ‘On Medium Specificity And Discipline Crossovers In Modern Art’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 8, p. 85. 2 The project, ‘Sheep Pig Goat’ (2020) took place at Surrey in February 2020. For more information, see https://www.feveredsleep.co.uk/project/sheep-pig-goat. 3 Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2020) ‘the university: last words’, available at: https://www.are.na/block/7921022. 4 Cotter, L., (ed.) (2019) Reclaiming Artistic Research, Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag. 5 Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.

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Jeroen Boomgaard

Transdisciplinary Dreaming

Jeroen Boomgaard

From the moment of its conception, Art never thought of itself as the arts. By conception I mean the magical moment at the end of the 18th Century when romantic theory formulated art as a separate domain, a visionary way of understanding the world. Or, rather, as a way of being one with the world, that could only be received and hardly taught. The story of the origins of this notion of art, a notion that we still carry with us and struggle with today, need not be retold. Let it suffice that from the beginning it regarded itself as a countermovement, a resistance against and healing of the fragmentation of the world. A sensory and sensitive being in the world, leading to works of art reproducing this sensory and sensitive experience, revoking it for viewers willing and able to go along without really understanding what was happening. Art was supposed to be a counterweight to the upcoming scientific disciplines that were trying to grasp the world, exploring for the sake of exploitation, by dividing it and breaking it into pieces and particles. Although romantic theory postulated art not as a collection of disciplines but as a collective or trans- discipline, the reality of the art world at that time was still caught up in endless debates about the hierarchy of the arts, or the hierarchy of genres. In reality, the arts were, from the beginning of the 19th century, becoming more separated than before in the new locations for their production and presentation: theatres, concert halls, museums, and exhibition spaces. From the very start, the ideal of a unified and unifying art would remain a dream, an unfulfilled longing in the very heart of what has become known as the ‘autonomy of art’.

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Transdisciplinary practices As this publication shows, transdisciplinarity is regarded as an important tool for studying and dealing with the complex ecologies of human and non-human interaction. The idea of transdisciplinarity practice, however, is not new. Already in the middle of the nineties, Gibson et al. published an influential text in the social sciences in which the transdisciplinary approach was central. In this text, entitled The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, the authors described what they called the ‘Mode 2’ of knowledge production.1 According to them, ‘Mode 2’ assembles “a diverse range of specialists to work in teams on problems in a complex applications-oriented environment. […] In Mode 2 the shape of the final solution will be beyond that of any single contributing discipline.”2 This new form of knowledge production was not the result of a paradigm shift in the sciences, but was simply a consequence of new market conditions and demands starting in the 1990s in which knowledge production was no longer a more or less autonomous field of research and development, but was increasingly financially and politically dependent on the possibility of offering answers and solutions to urgent questions and needs in society. The new mode of operation required practitioners that possessed specific skills, one of the more important being creativity: a creativity that enables them to mobilise and manage perspectives and methodologies, as well as develop new theories or refine research methods. The middle of the nineties of the last century also witnessed the rise of what is being called ‘new genre public art’. A form of art in public space in

Jeroen Boomgaard

which the frame and impulse for the proposed work of art is no longer the built environment, but the social processes that play or do not play in a certain neighbourhood or belonging to a particular group of people.3 These art practices that are also known as ‘community art’ distinguish themselves by operating along guidelines that are very similar to what Gibson et al. see as the ‘Mode 2’ of knowledge production. Here too, urgent issues are at stake, and although the artworks may not pretend to offer answers or solutions, they certainly have the ambition to intervene in a given situation in such a way that change becomes a tangible prospect, a near future, and no longer an abstract ideal. And in this case too, transdisciplinarity is at the very core of the way of working. Art projects working with communities in forms of participation are transdisciplinary, not only in their use of a combination of art disciplines along the lines of a so-called ‘post-medium condition’, but also in the way they incorporate theories and strategies from other fields of knowledge, and operate them in a managerial way. The artist in these projects is no longer a ‘maker’, in the sense of a craftsman with a very specific knowledge and skill, but is instead an organiser, director, and/or manager that is specialised in bringing together contrasting and sometimes opposing agendas and ambitions as part of a communal enterprise that succeeds (more or less) in engaging people in designing a (possible) new present.

Both phenomena, the ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production and the new genre of public art, can be regarded as the result of larger changes in society. This text is not the place to elaborate that; for the moment, it is sufficient to understand that they possess a critical as well as an affirmative potential.

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Critical and even dissensual forms of community art may still be used for or function as the affirmation and consolidation of existing conditions in line with the agendas of the commissioning authorities. ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production, on the other hand, in aiming for a smoother flowing of processes and streams, without any critical intention, may still lead to enlarging and enabling networks that bring with them a redistribution of knowledge and knowledge production, undermining existing hierarchies and institutional power in doing so.4 How is it possible that art has, in a certain sense, become “entrapped” in these transdisciplinary practices? As I show in this text, the ambition to become a part of new forms of knowledge production and new ways of intervening in everyday reality has a long history. Training in transdisciplinarity The art politics of the Soviet Union in the first ten years after the Revolution can be regarded as the initial moment that art was supposed to be useful in bringing about concrete change.5 Vkhutemas, an art school comparable to but less well-known than Bauhaus, offered a study programme that focused on synthesising the arts for this purpose. During its short existence from 1920 to 1930, it set up a revolutionary training programme for young artists eventually in the form of a two-year propaedeutic course in which students were supposed to master all forms of arts and crafts, in order to be able to create a ‘synthetic’ form of art that would build a new form of collective life. The pictures show students experimenting with poor materials (the only ones available at that time), but creating amazing constructions along the lines of Rodchenko, Popova, Stepanova, and Tatlin. Constructions were built that

Jeroen Boomgaard

were intended to be a rationalistic answer to the needs of the new society but were nevertheless truly amazing, in the sense that they hardly offered any clues as to how and for what they could be used.6 During the peak of its existence, the school would be training 500 students in its basic year, all being prepared for a life in the service of the proletariat that was expected to develop a new style of life for itself, but that needed trained specialists to lead the way in this collective effort. Most of these experiments testify to a rhetoric of change, of dynamic forms spiraling out from the center in an upward movement providing a collective impulse to a collective way of life.

VKhUTEMAS Classroom

The case of Vkhutemas is interesting because it shows that the idea of art as a unified form of aesthetic education was still very much alive in that time, but that it had also become restless and impatient. Although Vkhutemas assembled study and training in the fine arts and crafts, the emphasis was on creating a total environment for a new life and production that would go together with radical

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new forms of literature, theatre, music, and cinema. It sought to dismiss the bourgeois forms of art production and reception, to dismiss ‘art’ as it had become during the 19th Century: an individual expression to be enjoyed by an elite audience in venues inaccessible to the masses. The new synthetic language of forms did not want to be seen as art, and its practitioners would rather call themselves engineers or constructivists. The bourgeois palaces of art were exchanged for the public spaces of squares and parks, the bourgeois home left behind for the factory and the workers club. As Rancière notes in relation to the films of Dziga Vertov from that period: “The choice is not between two kinds of art. It is between two sensible worlds: the old one in which art was the name by which writers, artists, sculptors or filmmakers put their practice at the service of a particular consumption, and the new one by which they make things that enter directly into production in common, which is the production of common life.”7 The production of the common-life-to-be in the ‘here and now’ of the Soviet Union, however, caused considerable problems. In spite of being called rationalistic, the constructions for daily life were hard to explain and understand. As a language of unknown forms expressed in common materials, they did not seem to elevate the taste of the common public nor convey a clear message. To the authorities they had a limited propagandistic value, and to the proletariat masses they were intended to serve they were too limited in meaning and entertainment. On the one hand, the new language of forms was ‘real’ in its honest use of material and lack of misleading narration. But on the other hand, it remained symbolic when it failed to do what it intended or promised to do: create concrete change.

Jeroen Boomgaard

The end of the school and the movement in the Soviet Union is well-known. Art had to furnish “a form that is intelligible to the millions”.8 Turning transdisciplinarity around The dilemma the constructivists encountered haunts all avant-garde attempts, and is still a major problem for the interdisciplinary art practices of today. Artists, of course, have learned, and most of them are less naïve, or less optimistic, than their revolutionary forerunners. They know that any public project can flip from being critical to affirmative. But for many artists, this risk is still to be preferred over the feeling of impotence in the sheltering and confining institutions that keep art disciplines, even in their post-medial condition, clearly separated. To step outside into the real, lived conditions of daily life, in projects and with processes that cannot easily be called ‘art’, means that the artist can be held accountable for the new social reality starting to exist or, much more frequently the case, failing to exist. By aiming to create a better future in the here and now, the artist becomes responsible for a ‘here and now’ she may not want to be part of or feel to belong to. The dilemma is well-known and is as old as art itself. The transdisciplinary way of working appears in this light to be nothing more and nothing less than a final act of disappearing, of becoming another small part in the realities- and lifestyle-producing machines of the creative industries.

This book, however, indicates that we are aiming for another kind of transdisciplinarity, one that keeps its distance from demand-driven, desiredesigning projects that many public space art practices have become part of. When the new

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approach is described in terms of ‘not-knowing’ and ‘listening to matter’, it not only becomes clear that we are far removed from any suggestion of the easy applicability of this ‘method’, but it also shows that it is exactly this notion of applicability that entrapped art practices in the ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production, and is in danger of entrapping the upcoming field of artistic research once more. To be part of the ‘team’ that builds a new environment with better living conditions, even if it is only on the small scale of a specific locality, has been the ideal of many artists working in and on the public domain of the Netherlands since the 1970s.9 And the idea still lives on that involving artists in the planning and designing process from scratch will have a beneficial effect on both the work of the artist and the final result. Neither of the two proves to be true. The negative effect is not only due to the complexity of the process, the endless delays and redesigning operations, the protracted negotiations and reformulations – those things certainly play an important role – but it is first and foremost the inscription of the artistic practice into the format of a given process, a set of rules and regulations, of interests and expectations, that leave little or no room for dissensual input. It is not that the outcomes are decided on beforehand, it is the way these outcomes are to be obtained that reduces the role of the artist to ‘out of the box’ scribbling in the margins. The transdisciplinarity that is central in this publication does not have a clear order of appearance. Its processes are undefined and are, to a certain extent, undefinable. This is perhaps similar to the somewhat mystical nature of the romantic ideals for art. Romantic art, too, took ‘not knowing’ as its point of departure and ‘listening to matter’ as its main method. The difference, however, is that the

Jeroen Boomgaard

transdisciplinary approach presented here does not see itself as opposite to science and research. On the contrary, it connects to and merges with other researchers trying to escape from empirical or hermeneutic standards. I would like to call this “Mode 3” knowledge production: that which questions the notion of knowledge beforehand. In this, the arts are not the creative element in a wellorganised, goal-oriented design process, but are central to a research that avoids being held to well-defined processes and protocols because it wants to be open to what is usually excluded. The artist-researcher of today does not fold, twist, weld or melt material in order to force it into being a tool for a new society. The artist-researcher tries to see the shimmering of matter and hear its whispers. The outcomes of this kind of research have a postponed applicability: they do not nail down a new model for society in the here and now, but they have the ambition of envisioning a new way of living together, of all human and non-human, living and non-living things, sometime in the future. To position art as a form and method of research does not mean, to me, to create a new discipline equal to or competing with existing academic disciplines. Its purpose is to open up a space and time in which art can unfold its potential, protected from the double bind of impact: to be successful in audience response, or to be effective in societal processes of innovation and change. 1 Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (2010) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: SAGE Publications Ltd. I am very grateful to Benoit Antille for this reference. Benoit is writing a dissertation on the notion of the project at the University of Amsterdam.

Hinterlands 2 Ibid., p. 4-5. 3 See Kwon, M. (2002) ‘Chapter 4: From Site to Community in New Genre Public Art: The Case of “Culture in Action”’ in One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge (Mass.)/London: MIT Press. See also Bishop, C. (2012), Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London/New York: Verso. 4 Gibbons 2010, p. 15. 5 Bishop 2012, p. 51-52, quotes Alexei Gan who writes in 1922 in Constructivism: ‘A time of social expediency has begun. An object of only utilitarian significance will be introduced in a form acceptable to all (…). Not to reflect, not to represent and not to interpret reality, but to really build and express the systematic tasks of the new class, the proletariat.’ 6 See Bokov, A. (2020) Avant-garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930, Zurich: Park Books. 7 Rancière, J. (2013) Aisthesis; Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, London/New York: Verso, p. 229. 8 Rancière 2013, p. 243. Rancière quotes here from the notes from the Party Cinema Conference Resolution, 1928, but the same resolution was taken for all other forms of art that were increasingly being condemned as ‘formalism’. Not much later, Bauhaus and experimental forms of art in Germany met the same fate. 9 See also: Boomgaard, J. (2011) Wild Park: Commissioning the Unexpected; The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, Amsterdam.

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Visual Methodologies Collective

Turning to the Birds

Visual Methodologies Collective

Episode 5: Machine learning from cli-fi, listening with Sabine Niederer, Andy Dockett & Carlo De Gaetano Co-transcribed by otter.ai & Katie Clarke, edited by the interviewees. This contribution is based on a transcript of an episode of the podcast series Voiceblind, produced by Morgane Billuart at ARIAS, during the COVID lockdown. In preparation, we – Carlo De Gaetano, Andy Dockett, and Sabine Niederer of the Visual Methodologies Collective – were provided with a list of questions and a piece of hardware (a Zoom recorder) to interview ourselves about our research practice. To meet in person and at a safe distance, we set out to Westerpark in Amsterdam, found a spot where we set up the microphone, and held our conversation, to be at times interrupted by an inquisitive duck or a train passing by. We talked for over an hour; Andy then edited the conversation down to a little under 15 minutes, to fit the format of the podcast series. We inserted a reading of a story by Janine Armin, editor and narrator of ‘Turning to the Birds’, our series of climate fiction (‘cli-fi’) stories co-authored with machines. And lastly, Morgane added her introduction before it was launched by ARIAS as the fifth episode in the Voiceblind podcast series.1

Morgane Billuart Welcome to Voiceblind, a short series of podcasts made with art researchers in Amsterdam. This project was initiated by ARIAS as an invitation to listen in on some of the most pressing issues in artistic research today. Like a cloud setting in the sky, like layers of practices and knowledge that overlap and move away, Voiceblind invites you to enter the world of artistic research.

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In this episode, Morgane Billuart prompted a dialogue between Sabine Niederer, Carlo De Gaetano, and Andy Dockett, who are all part of the Visual Methodologies Collective, at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. They give insight into their research project ‘Turning to the Birds’, a collection of stories written with A.I. and edited by humans. The stories act as postcards from the not so distant future, providing a glimpse of a life in a world that is heavily impacted by climate change. Carlo De Gaetano Hi, I’m Carlo De Gaetano. I have a background in Communication Design and am specialised in information visualisation. Over the last few years, I have focused my work on how to look at images online to study complex issues like climate change. Sabine Niederer My name is Sabine Niederer. I’m Professor of Visual Methodologies at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and, since January of 2021, also work as the programme manager for ARIAS. I have a background in Art History and New Media Studies. Andy Dockett My name is Andy Dockett, and I’m a Research Fellow with the Visual Methodologies Collective. SN The Visual Methodologies Collective is a transdisciplinary research group at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. We’re specialising in developing visual, digital, and participatory methods and tools for the study of ‘visual culture’; not just visual culture in general, but those visual cultures that arise around societal debates and social issues. Currently, our team consists of people with

Visual Methodologies Collective

backgrounds in media research, information design, product design, scenography, critical making and IT, and we have an artistic researcher in-residence who is a curator, educator and (radio) DJ.2 A past project in which we studied climate change compared the visual language of this topic across platforms. We looked at different social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, as well as search engines like Google – and explored which kinds of images resonated well on those platforms.3 Not only did we experiment with ways in which one can study the visual language of such an issue, but what we did was also develop a visualisation technique that renders visible, at a glance, what these different ‘visual vernaculars’ are. CDG These methodologies, for me, are also a critical design attitude that should always be at work when studying such complex and divisive social issues. It’s not just about coming up with new methods to collect and visualise images in groups or using data visualisation as a tool to aid social research. As a designer, researching also means taking care of what you’re studying and trying not to pollute it with your own assumptions; be transparent about what you take, from which sources, and how you transform it. It also means opening up the processes and choices behind the final visualisation and inviting people to not only look at it, but to actively respond to it.

SN The project ‘Turning to the Birds’ has its roots in 2013 when the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam organised a data sprint on mapping climate change, as part of a larger European project on climate change adaptation.4 There, we did several projects on climate narratives and climate storytelling. One

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of the projects looked at which books were doing well on Amazon and how they presented climate change. We discovered that there was this whole genre called ‘cli-fi’,5 short for climate science fiction, and so we chose to focus on bestselling cli-fi novels on Amazon.6 CDG I remember that a box full of those books was delivered to us. SN Yes, you’re right! They arrived a little bit late, but this box arrived, and we had a whole collection of these cli-fi books that we used, which we are now re-using for our current project. In one of the projects, designers Federica Bardelli and Tommaso Renzini made redesigns for the book covers based on the typology of their narratives: the settings and atmospheric factors, the actors, and the plot (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Redesigned climate fiction novels, by Federica Bardelli and Tommaso Renzini, during a Digital Methods Initiative Fall data sprint on Climate and Conflict, 21-25 October 2013, as part of EU FP-7 project EMAPS.

Visual Methodologies Collective

AD So in our project ‘Turning to the Birds’, we took these novels as a starting point to begin working with A.I. to push our own imagination about climate change. We’ve been prompting the model that we developed with GPT-2,7 a language-generation model by open A.I., with the top twenty cli-fi novels,8 prompting it with various phrases and different paragraphs of text to try and get a literary response. We stumbled quite by accident onto the diary format, because a lot of science fiction or post-apocalyptic fiction is written this way; it’s kind of a trope, or a format, I should say, that just repeats again and again. So just by chance, we started prompting the machine with random dates; you know, Tuesday 4th July, or Saturday 9th September. And then we could get the outputs and, just by magic, it started outputting in diary format. So, we were thrilled by that. Then we had to go in and quite heavily edit the outcomes of some of the earlier trials that we did. But as we trained the machine more, it got increasingly fluent. And so the editorial decisions then came down to what we leave out more than what we put in, because the output is just so huge. CDG It was an experimental process, and for us it was a way of learning how co-authoring with machines works: a way to test these machines, to know their limits, and to explore workarounds to get to more interesting results.

We followed the same approach to generate images. We started with the StyleGAN2 model,9 which was pre-trained on high quality pictures of human faces, an accessible dataset that allowed us to generate images with higher resolution. Until recently, training these types of machines was less accessible for designers or artists: you really

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had to have a lot of technical knowledge to build these machines from scratch. Now, new platforms like RunwayML make it easier for people to experiment with different models without the need of coding or collecting huge datasets. So that also goes for two visual explorations of our project. We finetuned two models: one with a small dataset of cli-fi movie posters and book covers, and another model with a larger dataset of still frames taken from cli-fi movies trailers, or movies that include extreme weather. It was surprising to see how fast the machine learned from our inputs, taking no longer than three or four hours to gain some interesting results. What I personally find interesting are the different visual discovery processes made possible by the machine. When we explore what the machine has learned from our training set, we also learn something new about the images we trained the machine with. As such, the machine invites us to see our own collections of images from new and different perspectives.

Figure 2: Two images generated by StyleGAN2 trained on 441 cli-fi movie posters and 251 cli-fi book covers.

Visual Methodologies Collective

Figure 3: Two images generated by StyleGAN2 trained on 11,981 still frames from 16 cli-fi movie trailers where extreme weather and tornadoes were a recurring theme.

SN And then what I find so interesting is that when we start reading these images again, we immediately try to interpret them with our own limited frame of mind. So still we recognise a harbour, maybe, or a fortress, or some kind of graveyard, or trees. When, of course, in fact, what we’re looking at is a fully synthetic interpretation of what was in the training set. And it is that interesting in between-ness: it’s trained on real inputs and real images, but it’s outputting something that is literally strange to our eyes. That gives it that inspirational aspect that we were looking for: to be surprised by the machine, and to learn of new perspectives, new images, both for the future, and of the future. For the next fragment, we’ve worked together with Janine Armin, and she’ll be reading one of the diary entries from ‘Turning to the Birds’.10

Janine Armin Friday, 7th September. This is it. I’m down to only three pages. The chapter where I go to sleep with the baby swells with the changing world. It’s crazy. Every page is a new chance to test my knowledge. I try to stay current, but it all feels as if there’s less than an hour left before my brain floods and fills with data.

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I lay it out: now, according to my notes, your chapter starts on page 251 and the last line is 459. I could just barely write that. It’s so hard to concentrate when everything’s suddenly moving so fast. It occurred to me as I was lying on my bed that if I wrote down everything, including the things I didn’t notice, that if I put it all down just in a zipped envelope, it would be counted as having been done. At least I’d be rid of the messy coffees.

Figure 4: Riso Print of a synthetic image generated with a textto-image model,11 prompted with the sentence: “This was the first time the ship had been put to sea as a test.” from ‘Monday 18th September’, one of the stories of ‘Turning to the Birds’.

SN So far, we have been working with a model (GPT-2) that is pre-trained on Reddit, an online platform that aggregates links, images, and text posts in a format that fosters active conversation about a wide variety of topics. We completed the training with a dataset composed by best-selling climate fiction. The current training dataset of best-sellers worked for this pilot but is too narrow moving forward. We would like to multiply the perspectives in our dataset too, and provide the machine more than merely an

Visual Methodologies Collective

anthropocentric worldview. We are currently working with choreographers, dancers, actors, a knitting lab, an art & technology lab, and students from various programmes to explore new avenues of creative collaborations that can open fertile grounds for the imagination. Which new narratives about our futures with a changing climate will emerge, and what kinds of reflections will they enable? We seem to have reached a point in which we can explore how our collaboration with these well-trained machines can be extended to create new ways to reflect on possible futures.12

1 To listen to the full podcast Voiceblind: Matters of Methodology, visit https://arias.amsterdam/voiceblind/. It can also be found on Spotify. 2 Femke Dekker is artistic researcher in-residence with the Visual Methodologies Collective in fall/winter 2021-22, working on the project ‘Tune In, Fade Out’ in partnership with ImagineIC and funded by the Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation (CoECI). 3 Niederer, S. (2018) Networked Images: Visual methodologies for the digital age, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. 4 See also: http://www.climaps.eu and Venturini et al. (2014). ‘Climaps by EMAPS in 2 Pages (A Summary for Policymakers and Busy People in General)’, SSRN. Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2532946. 5 Glass, R. (2013) ‘Global Warning: The Rise of “Cli-Fi.”’ The Guardian, 31st May. Available at: https://www.theguardian. com/books/2013/may/31/global-warning-rise-cli-fi. 6 Sanchez, N. et al., (2013) Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi): Landscapes, Issues, and Personal Narratives, Design by Federica Bardelli and Tommaso Renzini, featured on the Climaps website: http://climaps.eu/#!/map/mapping-cli-fi-scenarios-bookcovers-with-landscapes-issues-and-personal-narratives 7 GPT-2 is a language model pre-trained on a dataset of 8 million web pages. This dataset tries to emphasise diversity and quality of content by using only outbound links from Reddit with at least 3 karma (Radford, A. et al. (2019) ‘Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners’. Available at: https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf), which is the sum of all of the upvotes and downvotes on a person’s post. GPT-2 is trained to predict the next word, given all of the previous words within some text. 8 Our set of mostly Western cli-fi novels, which

Hinterlands includes works by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, Peter Heller, Michael Crichton, Ian McEwan, etc., was compiled in a single document of 1 million characters, which was used to train GPT-2 for 40,000 iterations. After the training, GPT-2 needs a prompt to generate new text. 9 StyleGAN2 is the second version of a generative adversarial network (GAN) introduced by Nvidia researchers in December 2018. Given a training set, this technique learns to generate new data with the same characteristics as the training set. 10 Our first outcome of this project is a podcast published on Spotify, composed of twelve cli-fi short stories co-authored with our trained cli-fi machine. The stories are narrated by a synthetic voice that has proved quite distracting, so we invited cli-fi author Janine Armin to record some of them with her voice, which added depth and relatability. Together, they give an impression of twelve days in a future that is seemingly no longer centred around people: instead, the stories describe daily rituals in altered landscapes that present glimpses of the inner turmoil of the narrative voice. The podcasts are available on the Visual Methodologies website: https://visualmethodologies. org/turning-to-the-birds/, https://visualmethodologies.org/ all-gone/. 11 To create illustrations to accompany the stories, we used a different machine: the Attentional Generative Adversarial Network (Xu, T. et al. (2018) ‘AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks’. Available at: https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018/papers/Xu_AttnGAN_Fine-Grained_Text_ CVPR_2018_paper.pdf), a text-to-image model that looks for relevant words in a text and tries to generate a synthetic image to describe it. We prompted the model with evocative sentences from each of the diary entries and generated multiple images, which were then lightly edited and processed for Risograph printing. We designed one printed image per story and showcased them during a workshop organised with ARIAS to start transdisciplinary conversations around the role of AI in artistic research. 12 ‘Turning to the Birds’ is a pilot project that has culminated in the longer-term programme ‘Climate Futures’. After the pilot project, we set out to develop a way to put the stories and the images to use. We wanted to further develop them into tools that could enhance our ability to (re)imagine our future with climate change. We were particularly inspired by the tarot as a tool for reflection, in which a focused and active dialogue deepens the users’ understanding of one’s personal stance towards current situations. Similarly, we cocreated with the machines a tarot deck that offers its users ways to reflect on their personal perspectives on possible climate futures. Six of the tarot images and their accompanying audio stories were exhibited at Deepcity 2021, and more details on

Visual Methodologies Collective the method we used to design the deck can be found in the upcoming publication: Deep City: Climate Crisis, Democracy and the Digital, ECPH Lausanne, forthcoming; see also http:// deepcity.ch and https://visualmethodologies.org/deep-city-climate-crisis-democracy-and-the-digital.

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Visual Methodologies Collective

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Paula Albuquerque

The Asset of Burnout: Transmediality as Agential Strategy

Paula Albuquerque

1. Surveillance, Exhaustion and Ghosts from the Future Before making a case for transmediality in artistic research, I propose a short insight into how my working methods reflect a conscious political positioning towards embedding the problematic technology of surveillance and its materials in the making of artworks. My present project takes as its main premise that surveillance is a mode of production of the attention economy, which creates assets that capitalise on exhaustion. In this situation, any body, or subject, becomes a self-extractive medium that supports a capitalist ecology of self-replication, a cinematic mode of existence that is based on maximised visibility, in which both humans and non-humans wither. This capital-oriented logic threatens the environment and its multi-species, and is biased against non-white, non-male, and non-hetero bodies, whose voices are silenced during decision-making processes. To think about the future of the current scenario, I engage with a posthumanist perspective that is anchored in a decolonial and anarchival view of the Chthulucene (as in, Donna Haraway’s speculative futurist fabulations), which harbours the hauntological promise of the arrival of ghosts from the future, ‘arrivants’, who emerge after an environmental cataclysm as a post-racial collective with an anticapitalist stance.1 These grassroots, gendered and racialised bodies introduce an affective dimension that has never matched the ‘agrologistic correlationist’ perspective described by Timothy Morton.2

In addition to this discursive framework, to think through the aforementioned contemporary lived experience it is crucial to engage in an

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intersectional and transmedial practice of artistic research, making artwork with surveillance technology that unveils and subverts negative stereotypeinducing mechanisms. In this case, employing practice-based methods that challenge Western academic disciplinary constraints provides resources for reclaiming collective agency and fairness in representation. 2. Artistic Research, Aesthetics and an Ecology of Practices As an artist and a scholar working within the field of surveillance, my hybrid approach to making and thinking has, for years now, been associated with the field of artistic research, which apparently constitutes a polemical, forever-emerging discipline, despite efforts at its academicisation (or perhaps due to these efforts). Several issues arise when we analyse the potentials and flaws of artistic research, specifically when we address its methodologies, which are still considered unorthodox. As Silvia Henke, Dieter Mersch, Nicolaj van der Meulen, Thomas Strässle, and Jörg Wiesel point out, there is a conflict emerging in the discussion about methods in the arts. These do not follow a traditional academic trajectory, but instead manifest as “leaps, digressions, and detours which continually generate new and unexpected counter-expressions, and do not set a goal for their nonlinear “experiments,” but instead trigger irritations and thus daring revelations.”3 To tackle this problem, the authors make a distinction between artistic practice and artistic research, anchored in the latter’s affinity with aesthetics. It means that, even when artistic research is not part of a process of making art, it may manifest as a form of aesthetic research by intervening and transforming scientific discourse.4 This challenges

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a traditional quantification of research methods, which consequently hinders the academic disciplining of the arts and aesthetic research.5 The philosophers further explain that aesthetic research, which manifests in parallel to artistic practice, belongs to the field of phenomenology, where its “practices map out non-scientific epistemologies.”6 As an artist, I locate experimental activity in the material and social relations my work establishes as it develops. In that sense, I agree that aesthetic thought precludes and preempts discourse, while extensively researched theory is already embedded in it. I experience the presence of theory, of aesthetic thought, on a pre-linguistic level. It is useful at this point to refer to curator Lucy Cotter’s proposition that both the process of making a work of art and its manifestation are part of a “self-initiated, rigorous and unique” research trajectory.7 Art as form of thought is thus fully anchored on the material research and format of choice.8 Cotter draws our attention to how artists create epistemological objects and therefore continually provoke reassessments of Western canonical epistemes in the arts. In line with the previously mentioned authors, Cotter also highlights the specific logics of artistic research and contrasts them to its “academic knowledge production” counterpart. Artists take the freedom to relate to different fields by association, which is a characteristic of artistic research that is not practiced in other disciplines. Their areas of thought escape categorisation, while incorporating immaterial forms of knowledge in an “artistic material enquiry.”9

However, this is not without constant resistance from academia and its methods of research, according to which incommensurable and associative

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forms of thought are dismissible. The opening of a space for new methodologies of research and knowledge production is required, rather than continuing the effort to fit artistic research into a disciplinary format with well-defined limits and strict production formulas. In this way, Cotter suggests that new words are necessary to indicate how form and content are connected, as well as an idea and its realisation, so that artistic research is anchored on material experience rather than external observation.10 Cotter’s standpoint resonates with the need, identified by artists, to open up previously nonexistent areas where thought can manifest. When researching surveillance, I acknowledge that a scholarly tradition is in place, but it is reduced to an art-historical, social or cultural analysis of pre-existing objects. This means that, as a practitioner, I need to experiment with surveillance technology and create artworks in order to research its impact on contemporary languages of audiovisual production and processes of subjectification. My ‘making process’ is thus transmedial rather than transdisciplinary, as my work develops across and in between media within the cinematic realm. It may therefore be productive to compare both methodological approaches at this point, to situate my preference for forms of material and discursive thought that are (trans)medium-determined and not discipline-bound. In her discussion of transdisciplinarity, Sue McGregor adopts a traditional academic approach, defining it as taking place across, between, beyond, and outside the disciplines.11 As the author points out, transdisciplinary research is primarily seen as interdisciplinary, involving both scientific and non-scientific practices, with academic and non-academic partners collaborating to tackle

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complex social issues. The passages in McGregor’s text, written quite some years ago, that resonate with me the most are those in which she draws attention to the importance of lived experience. Quoting Basarab Nicolescu’s writings, McGregor defends that transdisciplinarity involves a knowledge of the ‘self’ which impacts on what she considers a completely new approach to living and being.12 Even if I do not disagree, as an artist, I could argue that what was proposed here as a new and fresh perspective at the time, was already a reality in non-Western countries, carried out by dissenting impoverished social groups. As Hito Steyerl perceived in her article ‘Aesthetics of Resistance?’ from 2010, highlighting Peter Weiss’s novel of the same name from 1975, forms of artistic research (transdisciplinary, transmedial research, and bricolage) have mostly been linked to the context of social struggle and revolutionary movements throughout the whole of the twentieth century.13 It’s a phenomenon that is also transcontinental, as evidenced by Third Cinema, which shows that film doesn’t have to be a capitalist, oppressive means of representation, but can be an active tool in the revolutionary movements taking place in Latin America and on the African continent. Steyerl’s stance also displays a resistance towards terms from the sphere of the ‘disciplinary’, as they undesirably suggest that art should, or even ever could, be disciplined.

Moving beyond the apparently straightjacketed premise of the discipline, I find better footing in Isabelle Stenger’s text ‘Introductory Notes to An Ecology of Practices’, in which the philosopher points out the flaws of scientific factuality. In her own words, an ecology of practices is a (political)

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tool for thinking, which manifests differently for each person who engages with it.14 It is “a nonneutral tool”, entailing a certain sense of personal investment and responsibility that go beyond what the tool itself is supposed to represent: a single unified Truth, as in scientific methods. As such, Stengers gives attention to context of production and specific conditions of engagement with an ecology of practices as tool of thought. However, the author also defends that the practice and its outcomes do not depend on the context of emergence only. There is thus a degree of responsibility involved in the choice and in the employment of this thinking tool, or “technology of belonging”, that does not abide by one single Truth. This process comprises responsibility for future engagement with this same tool, such that the choice for any particular method is dependent on a variety of factors relating to past, present and future, a kind of ‘haunting’ of conditions and consequences that one should be aware of, including the limitations of this same knowledge.15 Art is not separated from the media it manifests in. The technology employed is already (part of) the work and, therefore, an awareness of technological implications should be embedded in this work. The choice for the tool is a responsible, informed one, and thus a political standpoint. As confronting as it may be for me that the aesthetics of war technology are the basis for the visual impact of a particular artwork, it must be acknowledged that the racist finance-based necropolitics of AI-determined drone vision is entangled with the consumption of the same imagery within a museum context. It specifically resonates with me that the intersectional transmedial practices I engage with may be considered of minor importance in relation

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to the authority of certain Eurocentric discourses. However, staying with the desire for kinship means at moments experiencing the weight of those discourses; for example, at the meeting of a transnational network built by diaspora curators and during events for BIPOC artists.16 This common ground, this mutual recognition of practices and thought tools outside of Western canons, is what I believe Stengers is hinting at when she describes a (social) technology of belonging as “the kind of active, fostering ‘milieu’ that practices need in order to be able to answer challenges and experiment changes, that is, to unfold their own force.”17 In agreement with Stengers, I look for methods that move beyond the academic realm and can be engaged with on several levels through material enquiry. This involves identifying discursive elements as very specific media in themselves: as tools with a politicallydetermined technology. 3. Transmedia, Naked Lives and Resistance

Transmedia, a term coined by Henry Jenkins, refers to storytelling and franchise solutions, such as Hollywood narratives that develop over several films, DVDs, etc. Even though I am not very concerned with mainstream narrative plots, I see transmedia as a defining notion for the expanded forms of cinema, digital art and discursive platforms that I practice in my art projects. In my 2020 solo show at the Nieuw Dakota Gallery in Amsterdam, ‘Enter the Ghost - Haunted Media Ecologies’, I opted for a site-specific curated selection of five main installations which worked together to create a cinematic experience. This transmedial exhibition created a space in which the atmosphere of uncertainty and discomfort experienced by the visitor, who was surrounded by the sound of military

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drones, surveillance footage, and deepfake misconstrued imagery, was enhanced by the presence of construction materials inside the gallery, such as a building container, vast amounts of sand, dark soil, and a long fence. Transmediality brought the discursive element of the publication accompanying the exhibition together with the visual elements of video-based works, the algorithm, and natural and artificial materials. This assemblage created a realm in which virtual spaces and the destruction and construction of materiality were integrated. After working with surveillance for several years, with an ongoing interest in researching the fictionalising aspects of so-called documentary evidence, my focus has moved away from medium-specific visual production to concentrate on the ghosts of racial and gender biases they conjure up. Because surveillance is at present still relevant to the production of scenarios of subject formation, I now study the phenomenon of the exhaustion of the body as a capital asset and the forms of resistance that potentially arise from it. I arrive at this from a decolonial and anarchival perspective that is haunted by ‘arrivants’, or potential future bodies who hold us accountable for our current anarchival mining or extraction activity, thereby making us aware of the selection of our methods, including thought tools and media. The present heightened capitalist mode of production is anchored in burning through bodies as assets and production value. To think of the contemporary, one needs to analyse forms of representation, presentation and simulation that document or evidence a particular phenomenon: in this case, states of exhaustion, burnout and physical depletion. Paul B. Preciado’s views on capitalism and its extraction

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of human desire are of relevance to the study of the exhausted body as capitalist asset.18 The author considers the isolated body, as experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, to be a stereotype of the subject who is living a “naked life”, a term Giorgio Agamben borrowed from Walter Benjamin, to describe a subject “reduced to existing only physically and stripped of all legal status or citizenship.” Preciado’s take on biopolitics proposes that, even if not fully acknowledged, the current scenario is comparable to that of the Global South’s perennial colonial reality to some degree. Like the author, I consider the possibility that a surveillance apparatus, with its modes of subject production, reinforces the systematic exhaustion of humans to produce value a posteriori. If, as Preciado claims, bodies are serving as test-subjects for the pharmaco-pornographic laboratories to experiment on with their drugs, I have to ask whether there may be a possibility that individuals are subjected to exhausting living and working conditions to create test-subjects for the burnout industry.19 I do not have an answer at this point, but evidence shows that self-regulation has intensified during the pandemic, which caused virtually everyone to work from home, increasing the demand for psychologists online, with apps monitoring everyone’s moves and sending out constant reminders to exercise, take supplements and meditate, to counteract weight gain and overcome anxiety disorders. The isolated, exhausted body was caught up in a limbo of passivity towards governmental strategies, which, if apparently protective, seamlessly evoked those with roots in colonial economic models.

To analyse how the seemingly passive condition of burnout may become an active one, I turn to Christoph Brunner, Halbe Kuipers and Toni Pape,

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who have worked on an ethology of exhaustion. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s writings,20 their introduction recalls that the increase of administrative tasks at most jobs stands in the way of “developing creative ways of encountering the various (philosophical, artistic, etc.) problems posed by existence.”21 This extends beyond our jobs, since social media and our public profiles constantly need to be fed with our self-performance. The exhaustion of the body that is subjected to an insurmountable amount of useless administrative tasks, under strict ubiquitous surveillance in order to keep producing digital content, keeps one from addressing those pressing issues related to the collapse of our living conditions and those of the planet as a whole. Brunner, Kuipers and Pape’s definition of exhaustion is Deleuzian, and extends beyond labour-based value extraction and somatic (living) energy. The authors hint at potential resistance movements created from within the exhausted realm that may emerge as productive forces. They further claim that communities living under constant exhausting conditions perceive and produce in other ways that those more privileged.22 Pursuing tools of thought requires a critical analysis of the context of production of the seminal academic discourses that are part of my transmedial practice. The increase of artworks and academic writing focusing on climate change in the past two to three decades reflects the growing awareness about the exhaustion of the environment and multispecies. The sense of a cataclysmic future hanging above Western society provokes scholarly production, including science-fiction and speculative fabulation, such as Donna Haraway’s work and the writings of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. A scary future haunts the present, with bleak visions of deserts,

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tsunamis and numerous pandemics populating the imaginary, provoking diverse attempts at postulating posthumanist worldviews that can replace the Westernised mentality of species superiority. As Morton points out, when we constantly anticipate a horrifying future, we fail to acknowledge that the cataclysmic scenarios are already here, and that entire communities have lived through them for centuries. Just think about colonialism, and, more recently, the states of exception whose exhausted citizens survive with constant PTSD induced by sonic warfare, provoked by loud hovering armed drones and their 24/7 potential to strike. It must be highlighted that the horrifying future sketched in scholarly production is not considered acceptable to Western thought in a Eurocentric living space. As Alexis Boyd, a Black female artistic researcher, explains very well in her thesis, rather than staying within the confines of Western academic tools for thought production, “we must turn to those whose lived and historical experiences have been and continue to be threatened by and shaped within the actualized and anticipated violence of collective annihilation. To those for whom catastrophe has never signaled either total rupture or smooth continuity but is, instead, defined by its repetitive, accumulative structure.”23 4. Performing Burnout/Performing Resistance

To study visual representations of the exhausted body, I am currently analysing images of people in extreme conditions of tiredness, including surveillance footage, art historical artefacts, documentation of dance marathons, and stock imagery categorised under tags like “tiredness”, “exhaustion”, and “burnout.” I am comparing these materials to form an image of the

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exhausted body that is racialised and gendered. My present project concentrates on a specific film archive where I will research formal filmic languages that represent the exhausted body. In the particular example I am looking at right now, that of American dance marathons from the 1930s, the body of the woman is portrayed as becoming exhausted, fainting and falling. That of the man is, on the contrary, represented as remaining upright, continuing to move while dragging the female body, or picking it up when women collapse on the floor. Also, all these bodies are white, voluntarily participating in these events. When looking at imagery from the same period, the exhausted nonwhite body is usually portrayed in association with servitude or slavery. In a transmedial approach, studying the behaviour of the archive itself and how it catalogues these entries is crucial to understanding the datasets training its algorithms. The next step involves working with a performer who interprets the gestures being observed as ‘movement vocables’. This performance will be filmed and reduced to an outline that does not reveal gender nor colour, intending to get closer to the somatic origin of exhaustion and burnout. In tying back to Brunner, Kuipers and Pape, I am seeking to inquire where seeds of resistance may reside in the body existing at the limit. As of yet, I have not decided on the formal aspects of the research outcomes, as these will be determined by the material enquiry I just began engaging with. It will probably result in a curated presentation of film-based artworks, including sound objects and sculptural dispositifs, to expose media-specific reality-constructing devices haunted by race and gender bias. In any case, whatever form of content I may produce, it will further my study of an

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intersectional transmediality in which discourse, audiovisual media, and surveillance are entangled to expose systemic present-day colonial structures, and create new audiovisual vocabularies for fair representation and further emancipation. 1 Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2 Morton, T. (2018) Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. In this book, Morton puts forth the notion of agrologistics as an approach to the world’s natural resources that is merely functional. 3 Henke, S., Mersch, D., van der Meulen, N., Strässe, T. & Wiesel, J. (2020) Manifesto of Artistic Research - A Defense Against its Advocates, Zurich: Diaphanes, p. 12. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Cotter, L. (2019) Reclaiming Artistic Research, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, p. 11. Here, Cotter is building on a claim by Susan Sontag. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 16. 11 McGregor, S. (2004) ‘The Nature of Transdisciplinary Research and Practice’. Available at: https://www.academia. edu/26721302/The_Nature_of_Transdisciplinary_Research_ and_Practice (accessed 1 May 2021). 12 Ibid. 13 Steyerl, H. (2010) ‘Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research as Discipline and Conflict’, MaHKUzine: Journal of Artistic Research, 8, pp. 31–37. Available at: http://eipcp.net/ transversal/0311/steyerl/en (accessed 1 May 2021). 14 Stengers, I. (2005) ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’, Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), pp. 183-196. 15 Ibid., 189. 16 BIPOC stands for: Black, Indigenous, People of Color. 17 Ibid., 195. 18 Preciado, P.B. (2013) Testo-Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, New York: Feminist Press, p. 49. 19 Ibid. Pharmacopornography is in Preciado a capitalist mode of production that extracts sexual energy from human bodies. It is a form of biopolitics/necropolitics that is at the basis of gender creation and division by means of the production of drugs such as testosterone, progesterone, and estrogen.

Hinterlands 20 Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative?, Winchester and Washington: Zero Books. 21 Brunner, C., Kuipers, H.H. & Pape, T. (2017) ‘Introduction: For an Ethology of Exhaustion’, Inflexions, 10, pp. i-ix. Available at: http://www.inflexions.org/exhaustion/main. html#n1 (accessed 1 May 2021). 22 Ibid. 23 Boyd, A. (2020) Ecologies of Impossible Belonging: A Black Speculative Engagement with Ecological Catastrophe, University of Amsterdam, Unpublished Masters Thesis.

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Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Erik Rietveld

Trust and Be Open to Unexpected Possibilities

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Erik Rietveld

In January 2021 editors Jeroen Boomgaard, and Katie Clarke interviewed philosopher Erik Rietveld in a video chat to discuss the question of this book: How to do Transdisciplinarity? All three sat somewhere in Amsterdam, yet seemingly separated as in the context of a COVID-19 lockdown. Erik Rietveld offered insight from his career as a philosopher that always puts arts and research at the forefront of his thinking. This conversation is a good introduction to unpacking transdisciplinarity, how to make such projects come to life, and of the risks and challenges that arise along the way. Erik Rietveld I had difficulties fully grasping the word or concept of Hinterlands, so perhaps you can say one or two more sentences on that? Katie Clarke Yes. I wonder if there is a Dutch translation? It has a German etymology. ARIAS has been exploring the relationship between art and knowledge for some time, and the concept cemented itself for us in a symposium which took place in 2019 called ‘Shadow of Knowledge’, where we presented a lot of “alternative knowledge” found in the margins of the ARIAS network. And in a really plain way of saying it, Hinterlands is this place for the alternative; a place for researchers that are using different methods for understanding something.

Jeroen Boomgaard I think, you know, in the Dutch translation of the notion of Achterland, you could say that it means that we usually look at the concentration of activity somewhere in the cities, and the Achterland is the condition for the functioning of the focal points that we look at. So it is this background noise, the white noise that doesn’t have a clear voice, that is really important as a condition for the things that we live in or discuss. Okay?

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ER Okay, this helps, because there’s a lot of work on this philosophy, on the notion of background. In phenomenological philosophy in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, it’s an important concept. KC We borrowed its application from one art researcher at the London College of Communications, Salomé Voegelin. Alongside others, she is building a platform for listening as a methodology to tune into other disciplines. From their perspective, it’s very much about white noise, like you said Jeroen, though in a more literal way too. ER I heard that, at the end of last year, white noise was in quite a lot of people’s ‘most played tracks’ on Spotify. It ranked very highly because people had been listening to it in order to try to calm down or to sleep in the stressful 2020 COVID year. KC I also often need noise to sleep, it’s helpful to drown out your own thoughts. What I have also been listening to, with some level of tuning out to tune in, is a sort of discouraged art research community finding faults with certain linguistics. Art researchers seem, to me, to be steering away from using words that could interpret whether their work is either interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. I think there is a worry that it’s being used incorrectly, because it’s such a desirable status people want to be associated with, it becomes overused and misinterpreted. And so at a certain point it doesn’t actually hold very much meaning. It has morphed and become a bit memetic. So I was first wondering, do you have any sort of anxieties with certain terminology

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within your fields? And maybe, what is your experience of this inter- or trans- culture? Since you’ve always seen yourself across different disciplines, how do you move within that? ER Good questions, given that “transdisciplinarity” is in the title of your publication. So I do have some shyness of using all of these words: transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and multidisciplinarity. Mainly, that is because many people use them in different ways. And then there’s also all sorts of connotations. I think the one I use most is multidisciplinarity. But, when I use it, I explain what I mean with it, or how I use it, like in philosophy. So that it means that disciplines are doing something together: several disciplines being involved. And yes, I’ve organised that in different ways but it’s more depending on the needs of a certain project.

The kind of philosophy I do at the University of Amsterdam with my entire team is very, let’s now use the word, multidisciplinary. There, it means that all of my team members have a background in my particular branch of philosophy, which is philosophy of embodied cognitive science, and then also a background in another field. So, for example, one of them also is a Psychiatrist, another is a Neuroscientist, while another is an Ecological Psychologist. If people name that either interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary or transdisciplinarity, I don’t care much. But that’s the kind of collaboration that’s going on there. What I do think is important about transdisciplinarity in my team is that the people involved all have a strong stance in their own disciplinary fields as well. I don’t think it would work if they didn’t have any particular deep form of ‘knowhow’ or ‘know-that’ that they could contribute.

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And then with RAAAF (Rietveld ArchitectureArt-Affordances), it gets even more complex, because there, when we try to make something, we know first of all that RAAAF is more than just the arts. With me being there, it already has academics inside. And then when we make something we always have these collaborations with other visual artists like Barbara Visser, for instance, or Erick de Lyon, as well as with crafts people. Every work of ours involves crafts people, like ‘Still Life’, for example, where we had to collaborate with church-bellmakers. And then for ‘Bunker 599’ we had to collaborate with concrete cutters, people who normally work in doing construction. I think working across disciplines is crucial, but how you call it is less important. JB Of course, at a certain moment, a lot of us started avoiding the word interdisciplinarity because it didn’t mean anything. There is no ‘inter-’: the disciplines involved stick to their own methods and discourses and an intermediate common ground remains absent. And the problem with the ‘multi-disciplinarity’ is, it feels like if you add more and more it becomes better, which, of course, it doesn’t. And I think the way you explain it, that you work with people from different disciplines that are all at least familiar with a certain philosophical discourse, that really turns that philosophical discourse into a form of transdisciplinarity. That is the ‘transdisciplinary layer’. Like how a project is when you work on a collaborative artist project, the project is itself a ‘transdisciplinary layer’ that, you know, has the possibility of uniting. ER Yes, and I also always think that it’s so important that, when you do these kinds of collaborations, there is a firm

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grounding in each other’s fields. If someone is only transdisciplinary without knowing each other’s disciplines, that doesn’t work. I know the sensitivities of these concepts: they shift over time. Which is why I’m always a bit aware that using the word can cause confusion. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that’s with many words”; actually, at the moment, you need to be a bit careful with how people can misunderstand them. Perhaps you could say something about why you chose the working title ‘How To Do Transdisciplinarity?’? KC We see transdisciplinarity as something that is built, rather than something that already exists. ER Yes, that’s similar to what Jeroen said, that the result of the collaboration is the transdisciplinary artwork, for instance. KC It is an ongoing contention in doing transdisciplinarity between the arts and sciences: the written word. As Jeroen knows, and you probably also recognise, a lot of the time, artist-researcher PhD candidates in the Amsterdam universities, for example, have to write a very long thesis for their research output alongside an artwork, if they choose to take that pathway. And there are many people critical about this assessment and highlighting the value of art in itself and its processes as research. You too have explored this, and have built philosophical worldviews in material forms, rather than written. Is ‘Breaking Habits’ the name of one?

ER Yes, it’s in several projects, but ‘Breaking Habits’ illustrates that, or at least makes it tangible, and the same is for ‘The

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End of Sitting’. ‘Breaking Habits’ is a new spatial installation at the crossroads of visual art, architecture, and philosophy, commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund for the Visual Arts. This experimental landscape inside a classic Dutch canal house breaks with entrenched living habits like sitting, which people tend to take for granted. RAAAF explores with ‘Breaking Habits’ how a world without chairs and couches could look like in ten years from now. This installation materialises my philosophical worldview and makes it tangible: a diagonal landscape of ‘affordances’ (action possibilities offered by the environment), supporting a more active lifestyle by inviting people to change positions and explore new diagonal standing postures. “Will diagonal living become the new norm?”, it seems to ask. I’ve written about our different philosophical worldview projects, and in what ways they materialise my philosophical worldview. Also, in our most recent artwork, ‘Still Life’, there’s something quite crucial to this way of thinking. Have you been to Het Hem, Katie? I know Jeroen has been there. KC Het Hem, yes, the old bullet factory. The space is really interesting. In the basement there is this extremely long and dark room once used to practice shooting bullets. One Sandberg Instituut design student Emirhan Akin, in his 2020 graduation piece, layered the floor with ceramic masks, and as you entered the dark space all of this cracking became beneath your feet. It was very harrowing. ER Yeah. And the four moving plates above that on the ground floor, that’s the installation ‘Still Life’ that we made. It’s a large, moving installation 70 metres long, with four plates

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Erik Rietveld

that are very heavy, which move through the space slowly. And one of the things that it does is bring danger in the space, given that they are 1500 kilogram each. You feel the force when they come close to you. When you’re in the installation, you will always be on the move. Because in the installation, these plates shift, and the heavy plates can push you away. Their details are calling your attention. But then, on the other hand, you want to get an overview of all four plates, because that’s the work. So you’re basically constantly shifting positions to get a grip on the work. And this ‘tendency to get a better grip’ on a work of art is a concept that has been described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist.1 The typical example is someone in a museum going to a painting and getting some distance to see it well. But the ‘Still Life’ installation basically always disturbs that tendency towards a grip because it’s pushing you away, if you stand still. And then there’s four plates, not only one, and they each have an interesting backside as well, so if you look at the front side, well you can’t see the backside. So for us, the art installation is also an attempt to explore this philosophical notion of the tendency towards grip on an artwork. Which is another dimension of describing what we’re up to, basically trying to make people break out of one established or taken for granted perspective, and to create openness for a multiplicity of perspectives and for exploration. JB Why is it called ‘Still Life’?

Why the title Erik?

ER It’s actually referring to the history of Het Hem. Because the bullets that were made at the bullet factory have killed lives. So they made lives still.

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Quite literal!

Yes, yes.

KC But then what does the absence of the written word, in that case, mean? ER Yes, to be honest it is something that I am still exploring: if it’s possible to do philosophy without words at all. And that’s partly because ‘Still Life’ still has a title: ‘Still Life’. It has a short description. Besides that, we often tell a lot about it to people visiting. So there’s still language involved. For me, it’s an open question, if it is possible to do philosophy without language at all, particularly because the title of a work is often so guiding in how people see it. There are of course also a lot of works untitled, which work perfectly fine as well. JB It’s not so much about, you know, the words or using text, but the way the text becomes too dominant, too amending, or too prescriptive. And in collaborations, that is often the problem: that in whatever you call it, multidisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, it’s only possible as long as there is space. If there is an opening. ER Text is super dominant in academia, and it’s good and important to try to show that different ways of knowing exist and are important, and that artists have a lot of skills in generating all sorts of knowledge. That’s also important. So I understood the question as being about the absence of a written word. So that was where my hesitation was. It would be interesting if it’s possible. Do you think it’s possible Jeroen, you have been thinking about it?

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Erik Rietveld

JB Well, we’ve been working on it, of course, with the ‘Creator Doctus’ research by Yael Davids, and I think it depends. If you also want to present something as research, and, as such, as a form of communication that is open but not completely open, as even Yael said so, we shouldn’t mystify the absence of words, and I agree with her. It is not about avoiding text at all cost; it is just avoiding the point where the text takes over completely. ER

Yes, yes.

JB is important.

I think that

ER Yes. And I think that’s a more; I’ll not say it’s more productive, but it’s at least an easier perspective in order to make progress in a collaboration with people from academia, because there are quite a lot of people who understand this. JB Yes. It depends on the direction and discipline, that’s right.

ER Yes. There’s one more thing that I find important in relation to the question that was posed. So an installation like ‘Breaking Habits’, which was commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund, allows people to experience through their body (we say “aan den lijve” in Dutch) certain kinds of things that are taken for granted. Like when you’re in a waiting room and you’re sitting. Or when you’re in a living room of a house, that there’s a couch and chairs; but what if there was not? So it confronts the visitor with their own habits, by just not collaborating with the taken for

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granted habit and by presenting different possibilities. So that’s one thing. But then, at a simpler level, for me, it also helps to explain to people what an ‘affordance’ is. What is a possibility for action actually? JB in a certain sense, right?

It’s very educational

ER Yes, there is an educational dimension there, but it’s not just that. It’s also about questioning the practices in society of doing things with chairs. And what’s very interesting is that you see that as soon as there are chairs standing nearby the ‘Breaking Habits’ installation, perhaps outside that space, then people are attracted to what they are used to. They’re attracted to these old-fashioned chairs again. So it also shows us you need to be quite radical, if you want to have people experience how things could be different. JB Control the context, you also have to consider the context. ER control the Hinterlands.

Yes, we need to

KC Erik, I also saw you and Ronald talk at a presentation about the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project at the Rietveld Academie. And there you were talking about openness to risks: ski slopes and the riskiness of different slopes, and how you wanted to implement this concept of ‘riskiness’ more into public space, which, from what I can see, exists in a lot of your previous work too. So I wonder if you could tell me about the imaginaries of risk that you have encountered during your academic artistic practices and disciplines?

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Erik Rietveld

ER When I am with RAAAF making fire installations that people can enter, we are typically worried about risks, also. The nice thing about our ‘ski-slope approach’ to risk is that we can offer a whole landscape of many different possibilities. Then people can explore based on the amount of risk they want to take. And that’s similar to what happens in the ski places: there’s different slopes, the black and other colours. And then, if someone wants to go to a black slope, then they are free to just do it. And if someone doesn’t, then they don’t. So by offering a spectrum of possibilities people get more freedom. I think in our society, the different governments often want to limit risks for people and for themselves. Questioning that risk aversion has been an important issue in our work over the course of years. After our art installation on the potential of vacancy, ‘Vacant NL’ at the Venice Biennale 2010, we were invited to make another art installation in a large vacant building in the center of Maastricht. In the past, a ceramic toilet brand called Sphinx used to bake toilets there. It’s a huge building, a beautiful building. Seven floors high, very deep, very industrial. It was empty at that time, because the local governments are always very afraid that there is a fire risk. So then we decided to join forces with the fire department of Maastricht so that we could make a large fire installation in collaboration with them. We wanted to show that the risk of fire is not a reason to leave 10,000 Dutch public and government buildings empty, it’s just a reason to collaborate better with the fire departments and see what is possible if you organise things better.

So we made the Firemen installation, though, as always in the process of making the work, there

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were still a lot of risks that we had to take. In this case, for instance, on the first night of the show, there was so much smoke coming from the fire installation that it got dangerous for people. It was getting in your throat, and the firemen said the fire was taking away all the oxygen. So then they closed down the installation. The next day we had to smash out windows from the building, so that there would be more fresh air. Now you can imagine that smashing out windows from a monument is a quite risky thing to do, because you can get into trouble with cultural heritage authorities. But it was the only way to make the installation work. So we decided to do it. And yes, later on, we were fortunate that we were saved by the Dutch National Heritage Agency: they wanted to replace the windows anyway, they said. We didn’t know that in advance. And actually, often when we make something, there’s somewhere in the process, a moment that a tricky decision has to be made, risks to be accepted that can often be very high. Also personal risk, because in the Maastricht case, for instance, there was a potential liability of, say, 100,000 euros! That’s not money that we have, of course, so there’s always a substantial amount of risk to be managed in the process of making large works. KC I’d like to pick up on something you mentioned a little earlier, in that “artists have a lot of skills in generating all sorts of knowledge”. In another conversation for Hinterlands, the Head of DAS Graduate School Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, also talks about how artists are very good at “knowing differently”2 or, more so, how artists “know how to not know”. She talks about how this “not knowing” is extremely valuable in making artistic research. I was just

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wondering then, because you exist between spaces, being an artist and being an academic, what would your response be to this? What are your contentions with needing to know something, and being okay with “not knowing”? ER About “knowing how not to know”. Yes, I think that’s important. Science is typically about describing the world as it is. What we try to do at RAAAF, by contrast, is about a different way of knowing: exploring the world as it could be, and what is possible. And I think in exploration there is already a lot of “not knowing”: you don’t know what you will enter. And often, when we embark on making something, we have no clue what the end result will be. We just start exploring the cultural history of a site and generate ideas, sketch, make models and discuss and then, step by step, you test and you get further. People in the arts are used to dealing with the uncertainty that comes with being not so clear about where we’re going.

On the other hand, we also do it on the basis of many years of experience. So when we are asked to make an installation somewhere, we trust that when we go to the site, we will find aspects of the environment that fascinate us, and we trust that we will come up with something for the particular place. In that sense, this skill set you have developed on the basis of earlier experiences helps a lot in “not knowing”, while still trusting that something will come, and in being open for unexpected possibilities showing up. I think that’s also one thing that’s very interesting, that in the process of making, you’re often on a particular track testing things out, and then suddenly something unexpected happens with a material that is better than you

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anticipated. Then, often the trick is to be able to be flexible enough to switch to that new track, as it were, and not to remain stuck in what you thought you were doing. Because the unexpected material discovery can lead to something considerably more interesting. JB Actually, the difference between art and science is not that significant because you know both sides rely on expertise, that you know what you do, on the one hand, and the excitement, or even seduction, of the not knowing on the other. The difference between the ‘screen’ that we have in front of us, in the terms of Jacques Lacan, and the way we understand the world, and the feeling of the chaos behind it, which is always like a “scary seduction” in a certain sense. The excitement from making art, or writing a scientific article, is the same. Stepping into something without knowing where you’re going. ER I think there’s more of a method in science, and I’m not speaking about philosophy, but about experimental science: it’s often more constraining in terms of reducing that complexity, or making the ‘screen’ smaller, say. JB Yes, yes. To be able to stay within the framework of the paradigm, or to be able to communicate and be understood. ER And not questioning the paradigm, whereas I think what we like most in making artworks is to question the paradigm that’s taken for granted.

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JB But of course, all the exciting scientists that you know always question the paradigm. ER Yes, indeed. And they will be looking for the key experiments, say, to make their point. 1 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002/1945) Phenomenology of Perception, Hove: Psychology Press. 2 Sher Doruff and Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca (2021) Utopian? Perhaps. Impossible? I would not bet against it. Hinterlands, ARIAS, p. 16.

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Ektor Ntourakos

Rhizomatic Transdisciplinarity in Contemporary Commoning

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Transdisciplinary research is becoming increasingly popular within both academia and research projects to approach complex problems. In this paper, I will not focus on the different interpretations and applications of transdisciplinarity, but on the principles for creating an effective transdisciplinary research project. I investigate the constitution of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project, which took off last year and runs from a cabin at the centre of the newly developed area of Zeeburgereiland in Amsterdam. The purpose of this two-year research project is to discover and apply forms of ‘commoning’ in the area through art and design. The research project is a collaboration between the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Sandberg Institute, Waag: Technology and Society, University of Amsterdam’s Center for Urban Studies, Casco Art Institute, RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture-Art Affordances) and Studio René Boer. The project is a composition of multiple discourses and research fields and as such it gives enough space to embrace transdisciplinarity and combine a plurality of research methods and practices.

In this paper I apply the concept of rhizome to the way the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project is composed, in order to sketch a fresh perspective on transdisciplinary research and the potentials that grow within it. The concept of transdisciplinarity was already used by Félix Guattari in his paper ‘Transdisciplinarity must become Transversality’, originally written in French in 1992, in which he longed for a meaningful, radical, and spontaneous transdisciplinarity.1 One of his main arguments for establishing contemporary transdisciplinary research was to escape the old-fashioned and well-maintained approach of the white, adult male, which was characteristic of the academic world.

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It is often thought in academia that transdisciplinarity is achieved by including cross-interactions between different fields, while this configuration on its own does not provide anything more than the usual research standards. Although Gilles Deleuze did not refer to the concept of transdisciplinarity in his writings, his work with Guattari has played an essential role in the application of it. In the following, I address the principles of rhizome as described by Deleuze and Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus, and I present examples of this arising from the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project.2 Why Rhizomatic Transdisciplinarity? Disciplines such as geography that deal with complex problems increasingly tend to follow a transdisciplinary approach. Transdisciplinarity differs from multi- and interdisciplinarity due to its high degree of integrated “methods, techniques, data and other knowledge” and its participation in the “design, delivery and interpretation of the research process”, according to Nicholas Clifford et al.3 However, many research projects and designs which adopt transdisciplinarity maintain the usual, rational and pragmatic way of thinking, which neglects rhizomatic structures and modes of knowledge production based on Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas.4 Complex problems require complex approaches, in which there is enough room for the different discourses involved to experiment and create new concepts and solutions. Deleuzoguattarian thought applied in a transdisciplinary research project can produce non-hierarchical relationships and tackle problems from different perspectives which do not reproduce, for instance, “the State” and the

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“governments as monolithic entities”.5 Or as Strom and Martin put it in their paper ‘Thinking with theory in an era of Trump’: “rational, linear logic and common-sense narratives are too narrow to attend to the complexity of human and social phenomena”.6 Snir also highlights this by saying that: [t]he problem for Deleuze [and Guattari] lies in the imperialism of common sense, in the way it takes over thought and action, casting them in conformist patterns… even when trying to be critical, common sense thought in fact reaffirms and reproduces the prevailing political order and the meanings it assigns to subjects and objects.7 I apply the Deleuzoguattarian concept of rhizome in order to provide new ways of approaching a research project and conducting research. That is, to avoid the usual, traditional way of thinking and working in research projects, and to think outside the box. The concept of ‘commoning’ by itself is a complex concept, and its application implies many different levels of understanding: from a simple sharing of goods between a small community in Zeeburgereiland, to a common distribution of the island’s goods in the basis of energy consuming and distribution. In this regard, a structuralist or ethnographic approach alone would have been problematic, because it would fail to take account of the many understandings at play within the project. Contemporary Commoning as a Rhizome

Before I move towards the way rhizomatic thinking is brought into play in the composition of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research team, I

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should explain here that the research project consists of five work packages, each involving different practitioners or researchers and their unique research methods and practices. Work Package 1 is supervised by Dr. Jeroen Boomgaard (Lector Art & Public Space, Gerrit Rietveld Academie) and is carried out by RAAAF. Through the creation of temporary interventions, it explores the enhancing capacities of design and art in establishing processes of commoning in the zone between private and public space. Work Package 2 is supervised by Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman (Professor of Economic Geography and Planning at the University of Amsterdam) and Dr. Claartje Rasterhoff (Assistant Professor of Cultural Policy & Management at the University of Maastricht). The research is conducted by Zsuzsanna Tomor (Postdoctoral researcher in Geographies of Globalisation at the University of Amsterdam). It highlights how the commons are dependent on broader social and institutional contexts. In addition, this work package dives into various designs through which the social act of commoning in public spaces has historically been facilitated or hampered. Work Package 3 is supervised by Dr. Jeroen Boomgaard (Lector Art & Public Space, Gerrit Rietveld Academie) and Chris Julien (research director at Waag). It is executed by Socrates Schouten (Head of Commons Lab at Waag) and Jeffrey Bolhuis (architect and co-founder of AP+E).

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It focuses on the engagement of the ‘third sector’, of citizens and collectives, to assume an active role in co-governing the smart city and co-authoring digital transformations. Work Package 4 is implemented by Casco Art Institute. Its role is to openly re-share and communicate the results and outcomes of Work Packages 1-3 for future use in similar urban contexts. This becomes possible through the creation of a ‘toolbox’ which operates beyond the scheduled timeframe of the project and makes available all the ‘recipes’ gathered from the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project for establishing commoning practices. Work Package 5 is implemented by Studio René Boer. This operates as a research facilitator, functioning as a connecting element between the various projects. It also investigates the extent to which processes of commoning in art and design can bring about changes in the ‘smoothness’ (welldesigned, controlled and monitored urban environments) of an urban area. Note that all the Work Packages are related and dependent on each other despite their own research objective and method. For example, Work Package 1 operates closely with Work Packages 3, 4 and 5, and Work Package 2 provides input for the interventions of Work Packages 1 and 2, and so on.8

In this paper I approach ‘research’ as a rhizome, in order to perceive research as an open-ended process or, to be more precise, as a ‘decentered

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multiplicity or network’.9 Using examples from the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project, I develop a rhizomatic thinking driven by transdisciplinary relations, as well as the Deleuzoguattarian anti-metaphorical attitude to describe things. When Deleuze and Guattari discuss rhizomatic thinking in A Thousand Plateaus, they give many examples originating from nature or the environment that surrounds us. However, they avoid and dislike metaphors, and define philosophy “as the creation of concepts: [it] is the creation of inexact words to designate something exactly, ‘literally’”.10 So, there is a specific reason why Deleuze and Guattari refer to the “subterranean nature of the botanical rhizome”:11 the rhizome has been chosen because it evokes “the hidden quality of interlinked forces that have adapted to resist the striating forces of the surface and air, and particularly the hierarchized State”.12 That is not say that the particles, or the components, of a rhizome are hierarchically constituted. On the contrary, the rhizome is characterised by flatness and all the constitutive parts can move in novel ways from one point to the other without having to trespass any barriers or hierarchical relations.13 Seen from this perspective, the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project as a rhizome facilitates a non-hierarchical, decentralised environment, in which different researchers, practitioners, and fields can take part and (re)establish themselves. In that sense, the research project is made: not by […] adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available — always n - 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted).14

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That is not to eliminate the uniqueness of a researcher or research, a practitioner or a discourse, but to instead eliminate the hierarchical effect that one can have on the multiple. At this point, I will describe the conditions for a rhizomatic research project such as the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project, based on the six principles of a rhizome as they were discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: 1 and 2 The rhizomatic ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project is characterised by heterogeneity and open-ended connections.15 I should mention here that the research project components, such as the urban geographer who focuses on the collective practices of Zeeburgereiland in order to explore modes of commoning, are also rhizomatic in their ontology. The urban geographer is a component entity of a rhizome which also includes, for instance, the collective initiatives of the Zeeburgertuin, or the Nautilus residential community when they are interviewed, or when they become part of the research analysis. In this regard, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other [anytime], and must be”.16 Nevertheless, in this paper I focus on the bigger scale of the whole research project and the connections between the different researchers and practitioners.

3 The Contemporary Commoning of many commons (or of many multiplicities).17 A rhizome is constructed from multiplicities (for example, the art multiplicity, the urban geography multiplicity, and the ecology multiplicity). Those multiplicities, as I said before, are essentially rhizomatic, and what makes them differ from any

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other form of unity is that they do not possess any subject or object, but “determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows)”.18 In that sense, the rhizome is not grounded in the will of the researcher – the human entity who operates in the research project – but rather in the research itself. A weave is formed between the research idea, the to-be-defined concept of ‘commoning’, and the researchers of UvA, Waag, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, and RAAAF, and these links are exactly what Deleuzoguattarian thinking describes as assemblages. 4 Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.19 A research in its rhizomatic synthesis can “be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’.20 A research project can be altered, or, as Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise it, can be ‘deterritorialised’ and ‘reterritorialised’, in the sense that a research component might quit or change perspective or a new one might be added to the original synthesis of the project, something which was discussed already in the open-ended character of the rhizome. Rhizomatic research entails a certain organic flexibility as part of the process of becoming (something I am going to elaborate on later). Deleuze and Guattari give the example of a colony of ants who form a rhizome which is easily and effectively reformed even after it is undone. Within the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project, the researchers and practitioners are heterogeneous elements in principle who operate independently. However, when one of these independent elements interacts with another in order to perform common research or on the basis of exchanging ideas,

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let’s say, for example, RAAAF with the urban geographer of the UvA, they constitute a rhizome. According to Deleuze and Guattari this rhizomatic relationship constructs a “veritable becoming”.21 Furthermore, each of these elements-researcherspractitioners (such as RAAAF and UvA, or Waag and Casco Institute) causes the “deterritorialization of one […] and the reterritorialization of the other”:22 the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further.23 As such, RAAAF deterritorialises when it forms a discussion with the urban geographer, and the urban geographer reterritorialises that discussion by becoming part of it. At the same time, the urban geographer is deterritorialised by becoming part of the research apparatus of RAAAF. It is, as the Deleuzoguattarian thought would describe it, the ‘becoming-art’ of geography and the ‘becominggeography’ of art. These rhizomatic relationships are continuous transitions of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation: each of the research fields of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project brings about the deterritorialisation and the reterritorialisation of the other.

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5 and 6 Principles of cartography and decalcomania.24 As Deleuze and Guattari describe it, the assemblages of different multiplicities create a sort of ‘map’. Not the kind of map by which you can find your way in the city, nor the genealogical map to find hierarchies and generations. Such maps are what Deleuze and Guattari call traces: “genetic axis and profound structure are above all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing”.25 A rhizomatic map, on the contrary,

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is not a tracing, affiliated with the description of an unconscious which lies in the intersubjective relations between the research and the researchers, and which reproduces a ready-made unconscious, memory, language, and structures. A rhizomatic map is embodied in the interconnection of heterogeneous multiplicities. Research as a map does not reproduce the route (tracing) of the research of the urban geographer, for instance. A rhizomatic map is flexible, easy to become detached from and to become part of again, maybe with newly established narratives, or even with the old ones. In sum, the map is: open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.26 The rhizomatic map approves of the process of deterritorialisation. The map is something which “constructs the unconscious”, embraces the connections between different research fields and professions, and opens up the way for “bodies without organs” to operate on the “plane of consistency”.27 The plane of consistency is the immanent virtual field which is available for experimentation and horizontal relationships. It is characterised by flatness and “possesses only the number of dimensions of the assemblages or multiplicities that inhabit it”.28 It is constructed by modes of deterritorialisation and embraces heterogeneity between the researchers and between research units and objectives. The plane exists abstractly, and it is opposed

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to any mode of organisation and substance: it gives space to heterogenous elements, multiplicities and unformed elements to correspond in different times and speeds. It is where all the experiences and knowledges of the researchers, research units, research objectives, ideas, and arguments sprawl. They do not form totalisations or any type of unification, but rather “consistencies or consolidations”.29 It is where the possibilities of the rhizomatic assemblages are potentialised, it is where ideas of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project are triggered. Research as a Body Without Organs

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The ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project can be seen as what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “body without organs”, immanent to experimentation. A body as such is not an actual body but a virtual one, and the virtual is the real.30 Nevertheless, the virtual should not be confused with the possible nor with the potential: the potential is “what might become or might have become real, but as yet has not”.31 In Bergsonism, Deleuze establishes the distinctions between virtual and actual, and potential and real, in which the virtual and the actual are part of the real.32 He and Guattari give the example of someone who makes love: when someone “really makes love, that person constitutes a body without organs, alone and with the other person or people”.33 A less shiny but more accurate term to describe this concept would have been: “a non-organismic body”.34 Deleuze and Guattari make clear that the problem is not the organs, but the organism: a body without organs is opposed “not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called organism” and the hierarchies entailed.35 To think of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project as a body without organs is to think of the research

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process as an entity. The virtual facilitates all the experiments and creative thinking of the researchers and the practitioners; the actualisation of those virtualities, or the “movement from the virtual to its actualization [is] the movement of becoming”.36 As has become clear, ‘becoming’ (devenir) is one of the key themes in Deleuzoguattarian thought, and is the most important element in understanding rhizomatic transdisciplinary research in the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project. To become part of ‘becoming’ is to affiliate with differences, differences which live in the process of concept creation, in this case, for example, in the attempts to define ‘commoning’. Note that ‘difference’ here does not entail any negative qualities, something which is recognised in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.37 With ‘becoming’ Deleuze and Guattari describe the “continual production (or ‘return’) of difference immanent within the constitution of events, whether physical or otherwise”.38 Here, I should clarify that ‘becoming’ does not suggest a phase between two different states which indicates a beginning and an end. ‘Becoming’ represents “the very dynamism of change, situated between heterogeneous terms and tending towards no particular goal or end-state”.39 The research of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project is formed in the process of becoming, in the procedure of changes and differences during the production of events and practices. For example, the conceptualisation of ‘commoning’ and what ‘commons’ means has passed many different phases since the beginning of the project: the concept is developing; sometimes it is abstract, sometimes more radical, or more inclusive, sometimes it returns to its first meaning. All these phases establish a procedure in which research is real, and it is

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recognised as ‘becoming-research’. In this sense, the transdisciplinary relations between the different researchers (such as RAAAF, UvA, and Waag) facilitate a procedure seen as research, which has a greater academic and societal importance than a project goal or an outcome. Thus, the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project, which is constituted by transdisciplinary principles, represents a ‘becoming-research’. This means that as a research project it is not eager to follow the usual research methods and analyses, but to become different and distant from the stereotypical ways of conducting research. The only way to get outside the dualism is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo.40 This ‘being-between’ is what ‘becoming-research’ means: a state which is always in transition, in continuity, in constant change. It exists in the preliminary constitution of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project, it is in all the constraints, the uncertainties, and the performing plans. Only in that way can transdisciplinary research create new becomings, and therefore new concepts. The ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project transforms into ‘becoming-research’ by embracing the differences which are shared between the researchers, the practitioners, and the research units.

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In the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project the researchers have to deal with the concept of ‘commoning’, a concept which has been used in political, economic, social thinking by urban theorists and urban users. It is “at once a paradigm, a discourse, an ethic, and a set of social practices”.41

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This acknowledges that ‘commons’, and its practice (‘commoning’), is a considerably complex concept, not only to apply but also to substantially define. Already from their first meetings onwards, the researchers of ‘Contemporary Commoning’ attempted to give a clear definition of ‘commoning’. However, due to the different types of knowledges and professions, it proved nearly impossible to reach one solid definition. Researchers gave their own perception of ‘commoning’ based on their knowledges and experiences. Although each of the definitions had similarities with each other, still they were not on the same line. What is ‘commoning’ then? Is each definition an independent and solid approach to commoning? Or do all the definitions of ‘commoning’, expressed in parallel in the open-ended process of the research, together establish the concept of ‘commoning’? Some researchers clarify ‘commons’ and its practice through the lens of governance, while others try to define it through processes of collectivity and shareability. Zsuzsanna Tomor conceptualises ‘commoning’ as a practice in which resources are shared (something becomes common) and a collective governance is involved.41 RAAAF hold a critical standpoint towards governance as they define ‘commoning’ as the practice of sharing “resources of nature or society that people choose to use and govern through self-organising, instead of relying on the state or market for doing so”.43 Jeroen Boomgaard adds that commons are characterised as “open process” rather than as closed-off goods.44 The concept of ‘commoning’ as a rhizome is constructed by the myriads of territorialisations and deterriotorialisations that occur in the becoming of the project, in the multiple definitions that the researchers give to it. It would be a poor choice for such a complex

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concept to be narrowed down to a simplified definition, while the plurality onthe definitions provides more insights and discoveries. Another example of a rhizomatic inquiry within the transdisciplinary structures of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project is the use of the word ‘recipes’. In daily life, the word has specific meanings attached to it: that of a) medical prescription, b) a set of instructions for cooking a dish, including a list of ingredients needed, c) a method or a procedure for doing something. However, encouraging different applications of the use of the word from those mentioned above, the ones we commonly use, enables us to open up the space “to appreciate new features of the same event”.45 Deleuze and Guattari stress that by: relinquishing the power of the ‘sign’ which crystallises the experience of reality into a given word, is the equivalent of a deterritorialization, which enables new points of conjunction to be found, as happens in dialogue, when two different ideas are compared and shared.46

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The idea of using the word ‘recipes’ came from Casco Art Institute. The role of Casco in the research project is to create an online platform, named COMMONS.ART, through which Casco will create a toolbox, emerging from the project itself, that can be applied in similar urban development contexts. However, instead of tools it provides ‘recipes’ for supporting the practice of the commons, the members and membership, the communicative facilitation. It would have been different if the word ‘tools’ was used in the same situation, for the ‘recipes’ provided by Casco remain an open-ended

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process. Although they suggest a method or a procedure for accomplishing a commoning practice, they remain open similar to a cooking recipe: when people look for a cooking recipe to create a new dish, they often find themselves, while reading the set of instructions and ingredients, in a position where they can choose and adjust the quantity or the use of some ingredients or even to alter some of the cooking steps. In the same principle, the ‘recipes’ in COMMONS.ART operate as openended tools which can be used exactly as they are or can be altered based on the needs of each future project to accomplish a commoning practice. Note that not every research project formed in transdisciplinary principles is a rhizomatic one. On the other hand, a rhizomatic project is always formed in transdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinary research projects can effectively bridge the gap between sciences and policies by including diverse stakeholders, knowledges, and experiences.47 However, that does not necessarily mean that transdisciplinarity on its own can create new and effective solutions in urban developments. By focusing on the process of ‘becoming-research’, a rhizomatic scheme such as the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project gives enough room for all participants to embrace each other’s knowledges and experiences, but also to include diverse stakeholders. This can eliminate “the lack of integration across knowledge types, organizational structures, communicative styles, or technical aspects” that is seen in many transdisciplinary research projects.48 Conclusion This paper is written in favour of transdisciplinary research that operates hand in hand with rhizomatic

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thinking for the creation of new concepts coping with complex problematics. I approach transdisciplinary research from the same point of view that Deleuze and Guattari share for philosophy: “is a constructivism, and constructivism has two qualitatively different aspects: the creation of concepts and the laying out of a plane”.49 Based on this idea, transdisciplinary research forms concepts which “are molded from already existing ones” rather than creating newly thought ones.50 This happens by the laying out of a plane, a plane which allows for virtualities to become actualised and create new ‘becomings’. Each of the researchers and practitioners of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project have their own perspectives on and definitions of ‘commoning’. These ideas interact in a virtual plane and create new ‘becomings’, new interpretations of ‘commoning’. However, challenges such as conflicting methodological standards, discontinuous participation, fear to fail, or limited case-specific solution options, can be generated in a rhizomatic transdisciplinary research, especially due to the ‘openness’ and ‘abstractness’ that entails in a rhizomatic scheme.51 I therefore want to highlight the importance of a facilitator, similar to Work Package 5, which helps the researchers and the various stakeholders involved to cope with any such challenges.

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Transdisciplinarity alone is not enough to generate concepts which reflect on complex social phenomena, and there is no real guidebook on how to constitute an effective and meaningful transdisciplinary research team. A rhizomatic thinking, however, can deepen a transdisciplinary research project by implying an organic interaction and a continuous experimentation between different disciplines.

Hinterlands 1 Guattari, F. (2015) ‘Transdisciplinarity Must Become Transversality’, Theory, Culture & Society, 32(5-6). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415597045. 2 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2013) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Bloomsbury Academic. 3 Clifford, N.J. et al. (2016) Key methods in geography, Third edition. London: SAGE, p.13. 4 Lang, D. et al. (2012) ‘Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: practice, principles, and challenges’, Sustainability Science, 7(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11625-011-0149-x, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-011-0149-x; Polk, M. (2014) ‘Achieving the promise of transdisciplinarity: a critical exploration of the relationship between transdisciplinary research and societal problem solving’, Sustainability Science, 9(4). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0247-7. 5 DeLanda, M. (2010) Deleuze: History and Science, New York: Atropos Press, p. 8. 6 Strom, K. & Martin, A. (2017) ‘Thinking with Theory in an Era of Trump’, Issues in Teacher Education, 26(3), p. 5. 7 Snir, I. (2018) ‘Making sense in education: Deleuze on thinking against common sense’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(3), p.302. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0013185 7.2017.1344537, https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1344537. 8 Based on the original application form of 2019 in Creative Industries: Smart Culture - Arts and Culture. 9 Bonta, M. & Protevi, J. (2004) Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 10 Smith, D. (2019) ‘Why There Are No Metaphors in Deleuze’s Philosophy’, in Olkowski, D. et al. (eds) Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of Freedom: Freedom’s Refrains, New York: Routledge, p. 44. 11 Bonta, M. & Protevi, J. (2004) Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary, Deleuze Connections, Paperback, p. 136. 12 Ibidem. 13 Ibidem. 14 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press, p. 5. 15 Ibidem. 16 Ibidem. 17 Ibid., 7. 18 Ibid., 5. 19 Ibid., 8. 20 Ibidem. 21 Ibid., 9. 22 Ibidem. 23 Ibidem. 24 Ibid., 11. 25 Ibidem. 26 Ibid., 12.

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Ektor Ntourakos 27 Ibidem. 28 Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 125. 29 Ibid., p. 589. 30 Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 34. 31 May, T. (2005) Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 48. 32 Deleuze, G. (1988) Bergsonism, trans. Tomlinson, H. & Habberjam, B., New York: Zone Books. 33 Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 34. 34 Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 62. 35 Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 184. 36 May, T. (2003) ‘When is a Deleuzian becoming?’, Continental Philosophy Review, 36(2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026036516963, https://doi. org/10.1023/A:1026036516963. 37 Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition trans. Patton, P., New York: Athlone. 38 Stagoll, C. (2005) ‘Becoming’ in Parr, A. (ed.) The Deleuze Dictionary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 21. 39 Ibidem. 40 Ibid., p. 322-3. 41 Bollier, D. (2020) ‘Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm’ in Speth, J.G. & Courrier, K. (eds) The New Systems Reader, New York: Routledge, p. 5. 42 Contemporary Commoning internal meeting, Jan. 2021. 43 Ibid., Feb. 2021. 44 Ibid., Feb. 2021. 45 Burnard, P., Colucci-Gray, L. & Sinha, P. (2021) ‘Transdisciplinarity: letting arts and science teach together’, Curriculum Perspectives, 41(1), p.114. Available at: https://doi. org/10.1007/s41297-020-00128-y. 46 Ibidem. 47 Polk, 2014. 48 Lang et al., 2012, p. 37. 49 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Burchill, G. & Tomlinson, H., New York: Columbia University Press, p. 35-36. 50 May, 2003, p. 141. 51 Lang et al., 2012.

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Alice Smits1, Raoul Frese2, Špela Petrič3 & Miha Turšič 4

We Need to Be More Human than We Are: Smart Hybrid Talks

Alice Smits, Raoul Frese, Špela Petrič & Miha Turšič

A conversation held on 14th April 2021 at Zone2Source in the Rietveld Pavillion Amstelpark. There is a lot said about transdisciplinarity, but for a publication subtitled “How to Do Transdisciplinarity”, we decided to stay with the active verb and contribute with a dialogue between collaborators in an art-science project in which we explore the starting positions and expectations which underlie this undertaking of collaborative doing. Applying a specific format of questions, developed explicitly to remove possible hurdles and to manage expectations within transdisciplinary collaborations, we explore each other’s specific practices and backgrounds, passions and approaches that we bring to a collaboration, realising this never simply tallies up to “1+1=2”, but at its best changes each and every one in the encounter. ‘Smart Hybrid Forms’ is an art-science project exploring plant-machine relations that brings together two educational institutions, the VU Amsterdam and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and three cultural institutions: V2, de Waag Society, and Zone2Source, while engaging two artists, Špela Petrič and Christiaan Zwanikken, to work within the Vrije Universiteit Art Science lab, ‘Hybrid Forms’, under the direction of Raoul Frese.5 Scientific and art research is carried out concomitantly by two researchers, Eda Yilmaz, a scientific postdoc at the Biophysics of Photosynthesis lab at the VU, and Alice Smits, an art theoretical researcher at the Art and Public Space research group at the Rietveld Academy under direction of Raoul Frese and Jeroen Boomgaard respectively.

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Exploring relations between plants and technology in our current scientific societies, the artists working

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together with scientists and students raise fundamental epistemological and ethical questions about how knowledge is being produced and which voices are represented, interrogating both the sciences and the arts. The conversation was facilitated by Miha Turšič according to a method for guiding transdisciplinary projects, following a series of basic questions to explore the motivations, interests, and expectations with which each researcher enters this collaboration, in order to discover common ground. Entering the space of art-science, what participants seem to be looking for in one way or another seems to align with what Isabelle Stengers calls a “Slow Science”, whereby a scientist, as a producer of knowledge, undergoes constant transformation from an ethical and public engagement with her research.6 Exploring what an eco-political understanding of research practice can be, our discussions moved between thinking about hybrid spaces where knowledge is produced, modes of power shifts, and the ethical discourse embedded in doing research. Transdisciplinarity is at the heart of calling for a shift in science to recognise itself as only one of many epistemic cultures, and brings responsibility, care, and ethics into what is usually seen as a disinterested form of doing research and producing knowledge. When we move from scientific fact to meaning, knowledge comes to matter as public engaged issues that are created in this transdisciplinary space that one could call “art-science”. The discussion below presents an extract of our first in-depth exploration of thinking and working together as artists, cultural theoreticians, and scientists. Alice Smits Welcome everybody. In order to develop a sort of ‘baseline’ as to where everybody stands, we have asked Miha to facilitate

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this talk between the three of us using a framework which he is developing as a tool for hybrid collaborative projects. Miha, can you introduce the format? Miha Turšič At the Waag, we work in what you could call “collaborative research and innovation”. It’s rather post-disciplinary, since we also work with citizens that bring in their situated knowledge. We also work with animals and plants, and take them into account as collaborators. We bring together companies and communities, artists, scientists, and engineers in different setups. We developed a discussion framework to achieve a better mutual understanding of how to get from A to B. So, my role here is for you to establish a shared understanding and agenda of what you are all doing in this process. This conversation is quite pragmatic, mainly focusing on what I call the “materiality of calibration”; so not just on ideas you have about art-science projects, but really about material collaboration. Let’s start by introducing how you have met each other? AS The first time I met Raoul was during his collaboration with Ivan Henriques on the ‘Symbiotic Machine’ project, which I presented in 2014 at Zone2Source. I am always interested in showing not just results, but also processes of research. For ‘Symbiotic Machine’, we built a large basin of water in which a ‘symbiotic robot’ swam around for two months while the artist, scientists and students were working on testing and developing the work while also involving the audience. Raoul, I believe this was the project which

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inspired you to establish together with Ivan Henriques the Hybrid Forms Lab at the VU, right? Raoul Frese Ivan Henriques was my first collaboration with an artist. What I really liked about it was that we moved the entire lab into Het Glazen Huis in the Amstelpark. We were doing experiments there not yet knowing the outcome that would lead to the artwork. It was like we actually became the artwork as we were doing the experiments while people could see us: it was almost a lab as performance art. AS I think you are right that the specific aesthetics of performing living material in bio-art is an important but somewhat overlooked topic. So what was it like for you as a scientist to be involved in this art project? RF At first, what you see is an artist that is playing with science, right? So you have scientific findings which normally happens in a lab. And now we have an artist that is basically appropriating that science, moving it into an exhibition space, almost “stealing science”, I would say. But with Spela it is different, because she is a trained scientist and I know she has a PhD. If I didn’t know, I would probably also look a little bit differently at her. Which is also performance, we are performing our beings. AS I’m curious how her being a scientist changes the relationship for you in relation to artists who only have an arts background. Do you feel more trust in the way the work will be carried forward?

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RF First of all, it is about knowing she has the skills to actually do it and to understand the science and technology behind it, whereas other artists may want to play with the scientific outcomes, but don’t have a real feeling for the science behind it. Sometimes you feel like an artist is basically appropriating your science without respect for the amount of work that went into it, which can be a decade of research not only by you, but by multiple people and students. Then they take it, put it in an exhibition space, and suddenly, it’s only their name on the poster. I think with Spela I would have that a little bit less, first of all, because she is actually doing her own research. She’s quite autonomous, more than I know of other artists that I work with. AS It is through working with Spela that I realised that crediting everybody you work with is a very generous gesture, which is common in theatre or film but not in visual arts. This made me aware of how strong art is still tied to this idea of the individual autonomous artist, which, of course, has always been a myth, but is clearly still persisting more than we think, even while we are developing these collaborative practices.

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Špela Petrič This practice of crediting everyonte that is part of the team does not only derive from the culture I brought from my background in science, but also from a practice in the Slovenian bio-arts scene with its own cultural heritage in Eastern European communism. With Alice, I also worked together at Zone2Source on developing the project ‘Ectogenesis: Plant-Human Monsters’, which was actually the first major exhibition that I did here in the Netherlands. It was a refreshing framework coming from the Slovenian

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art scene which is always hypercritical; I feel there is a particular sphere of explorative thinking, that is quite specific for the cultural context here. MT Can you describe how you understand your role in this project, personally and as part of your institution? RF This project serves as a way of finding common ground between the Rietveld Art Academy and VU Science Department. What can these two institutes from opposite disciplines offer to each other? Is there anything that connects them? Two artists are employed at the VU Amsterdam within my research group where I facilitate their research, including Spela as a postdoc researcher, as well as Alice’s presence there as an art theoretical researcher, so she can observe and reflect on the whole process between artists and scientists. I also supervise students that contribute to the work of the artists. From November, there will be a public art gallery connected to the university that is also accessible from the street; this will be interesting for the project since the VU Art-Science Lab collaborates with the VU Art-Science gallery. As a member of the VU art committee, I am leading its curator into the wondrous world of art-science! So, for the VU, I see it as my primary role to facilitate connections within the university for the artists. SP My role in this project is to bring specific knowhow on navigating these privileged spaces of “access” to the scientific institution in this hybrid field, call it “art-science”, “bio-arts” or “hybrid art”. In this opportunity the funders have provided us, all of us involved together have a huge responsibility to make this

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culturally and societally significant. Everything I do is burdened by this responsibility. So it’s figuring out not only what can be done, but what the most urgent thing is that needs to be done. I come from a background of working with plants. I’m interested in how the relationship between plants and technology reflects the general condition that we, as people, find ourselves in, being part of technological societies. I see my role as bringing in this urgency, developing the art project while also expanding the horizon of how knowledge is produced. AS If you say “bringing in these urgencies”, do you mean transforming scientific facts into public issues? Or expanding horizons of the scientists in the institution you work with? SP My primary motivation is the urgency of bringing these matters for discussion, and the way we do this is by working together. Only by working together are we able to validly address questions and urgencies. The scientific institution plays a major role, but so does the philosophical context. So it’s actually addressed from multiple perspectives throughout this process, which cross-pollinates concepts rather than keeping them separate.

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AS I see that my role is to reflect on what kinds of new practices and processes are being developed in this collaboration, and what this contributes not only to arts, but also to science. What is this space which is created? Is it artists working with scientists, or does it propose a new space: art-science, that is creating its own methodology? Working with you, Spela, I really feel your enormous commitment to pressing the

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urgencies you want to bring to the table, questioning what it is you are creating beyond the realisation of an artwork. It’s very exciting to think along with that, and to explore the philosophical ramifications of this particular kind of art-science exploration. The other hat I am wearing in this consortium is my role as curator: developing different ways of interaction between the projects and audiences. Zone2Source is collaborating with ‘Machine Wilderness’, an artist-in-residency programme at Artis, a zoo in Amsterdam, in which the artists participate in a very contested environment of humans, other animals, and plants, as well as in a final exhibition at Zone2Source in Amstelpark. For me, these are not two different things. For me, curatorial practice is also very much a way of doing research, and it’s a central focus in this consortium that, in testing art-science research, connects knowledge institutions and cultural spaces by involving audiences in specific public encounters. MT A question to Raoul: if I understand correctly, on the one hand you’re stepping in with the institution, but on the other hand you are driven by your own curiosity about these kinds of art collaborations. It is not the university who asks you to engage in this, right? RF As scientists, we are free to choose our topic of research as long as it remains within biophysics, and these kinds of art-science projects resonate with my section. Spela recently gave a presentation to my student group, the first artist to do so, since she is also the first postdoc. If it was just a hobby, the university would not have liked it, but I explained to my colleagues that it is important for the development of education

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programmes, and even for research methodology. So this methodology is not spielerei (just play), right? I’m looking for new methodologies so that students, and also PhD students, can do research in art-science. MT The next and main question is: What is the motivation for this collaboration? There’s a kind of scale from curiosity, being challenged, being concerned, seeing urgencies and questions, of why you enter into these kinds of efforts. I will start now with Spela. What drives you? SP I’ve been working with plants for quite a while, exploring why we, as people, tend to consider them as a living resource. Even when we tackle ecological adversity, we still frame them as bio-system services. This is, in one way, positive, because it offsets some of the detrimental things people have been causing. On the other hand, it follows this specific type of framing of what a living being is, a principle which is applied to people as well. So I am questioning the implications of this gaze that is facilitated by techno-science, science as a way of knowing, and the ontology that it creates. The case study that I use involves plants and technology. I’m approaching this from both a critical and hopeful perspective, by proposing that the current understanding and use of technology to create these relationships can actually be subverted or made different. In doing so, we would not only come closer to a sort of ecological justice, but, in the same vein, we would also consider what kind of justice would be possible in the relationship between people and technology. Because it’s not an isolated system: whenever you

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invoke technology, you evoke the whole history, of politics, of power, of economy. I would like to add that this is actually a very dangerous relationship. You’re playing with scientific paradigms that have immense power, relatively high societal standing, strong hierarchy, and they’re economically quite well-funded. And within this, you’re trying to coax out the mistake and make the mistake resonate. You’re always on the edge of actually adopting the principle that you’re trying to rethink. These are the insidious ways in which tools tend to tell their story over and over, regardless of what you’re trying to do with them. So it’s a risky relationship. The urgency I feel is that we have to engage; there is no possibility for us to refrain from engagement right now, even if we end up actually not liking the result. AS My motivation in both my research and curatorial work is in exploring different kinds of knowledge practices that reconnect us to a sustainable life on earth. I see a considerable concern in natural sciences, which is based on separating yourself from what you’re studying, isolating things from their relational contexts and meanings. Science has become the basis for our way of living, and we forget it is only a specific method of knowledge: there are many different epistemic cultures, but within our scientific worldview these are posited as “not knowing” or irrational. Can we imagine a world of multiple epistemologies, as different ways to create meaning without falling into relativism? The ecological crisis presents us with enormous urgency to rethink how we do science and technology, shifting ideas of how we know ourselves and the world around us. This implies finding a new basis of what rationality is,

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not as something which just happens in your brain, but as an encounter with the world as embodied, sensorial and relational beings. I believe this is something that art can bring to the sciences, and is why so many thinkers at this moment are interested in the arts as a place to experiment with sensorial knowledges. Another thing art can do is create societal meaning around scientific facts and developing an intelligent ethical discourse around it, which science urgently needs to engage with from within. So how art-science transforms not only the spaces and methodologies of art, but also that of science, which I am eager to explore within this collaboration. Like Spela, I also see a danger here. It is not just artists anymore looking for scientists to work with, but increasingly artists are invited into scientific institutions as well. Since these universities have their own agendas, and artists are working with scientificallyproduced technology and tools which embody an ideology they also criticise, this creates uneven relations. How can art be brought in as a critical methodology? I am interested to explore how these collaborations can create a third space: art-science as a different kind of knowledge creation altogether.

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RF I have been working in science for twenty-five years. So I can say I contributed to science, to the generation of knowledge, to new ways of looking at specific topics within science. There are certain aspects that are missed in science: critical reflection is one of them. I see science as a complex system that is very much designed to maintain itself, to find ways of being relevant and attracting interest from society in order to attract funding. I see it as a system that is very well adapted to capitalism, with scientists

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operating in an almost warlike competition. On the one hand, you could say it is a way of striving for excellence: only the best survive, and that’s why they get the resources and you’ll get the most interesting findings. But it also creates a selection pressure on a specific mindset of people that are willing to do that, who have that specific way of looking at society and reality. As science is producing more and more technologies, which have a greater and greater impact on society, it is time to take a very critical look at the role of that complex. As Spela mentioned in her presentation, art provides meaning to knowledge. I think science is very good in providing value to knowledge: that is the capitalistic aspect as well. I think that artists and the world in which they are embedded – now I’m talking about humanities – as citizens acting within society, can more easily bring those societal issues into the realm of science. So I think we have quite some common ground actually, if I listen to you both. AS And was this your motivation to start an art-science lab at your faculty? RF My personal motivation was to have a critical reflection on what I am doing. Working in biotechnology, I find that, in science, there’s hardly time and space for that. So I created that space for myself. But also to add this to the curriculum of students, so that they learn that there’s a different way to approach nature. Especially in the biological sciences, it is interesting that we hardly have a connection with the actual organism where your material comes from. As physicists, we talk about particles but don’t touch, see or smell a plant. I just get a file containing the particles and that’s what I investigate: how do these

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particles respond to whatever stimuli I give them? So there’s a strong disconnect both to the organism and to the place of the organism within the world. I find this to be a loss for a scientist. You’ll get alienated as what we could call a “knowledge factory worker”. And especially with the combination of artificial intelligence and biotechnology, it is time to start to reflect on that. AS Does working with artists in your lab make you also reflect on the methodologies that you use yourself? RF It is very difficult, because I have been, of course, fully trained within that system. That’s why I keep emphasising the younger students, because I think if you make it part of the curriculum, we can train scientists with a more holistic view on their topic, and not only on this very tiny “particle approach”. AS Spela, as somebody coming from the sciences who has made a deliberate choice to work within the arts, you mentioned once that you continue to struggle with the scientific framework you were trained in as well?

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SP Yes, but if you ask: what is this other type of science we aspire to? It’s still science, but one which perhaps empowers scientists to get involved in societal concerns, and the relations which are produced within scientific research. Because, instead of severing the person as a full human within society, taking that completely out of the equation when doing science is fake anyway, it’s not true. It’s a performance, right, it’s a myth. But, as long as it’s a myth, this relationship can be organised by something else, so you don’t

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take control of it, you don’t feel empowered to do so. The scientists trained through this other type of education would be empowered to take other things into account, things that concern them as people in society, which I think can only lead to better science. AS As I have stressed before, I think it is very much about an experiential contextual basis which is being excluded from this understanding of cognition and truth in modern sciences. The foundations of this assumption are shaking now we have become aware of the impact we have as humans on the Earth we are studying. But I also think the question of whether we can experience beyond our anthropocentric position is also misplaced: we need to be more human than we are, as we have so much more capacity to explore the world and experience these relations from our very human sensorial possibilities and empathy. RF The problem is that many young people decide early on “Science is not for me, I’m not going to spend two years in a lab looking at this one molecule or something”. So now you lose a lot of smart people that could actually contribute, perhaps even change the way science is operating and manifesting itself in society, relating to technology and economy. So, bringing those people and topics back in is my main motivation. MT It is great that you all have as a mutual ground a critical perspective towards how knowledge is produced in science. Because it’s not just about confrontation between arts and science. It is about how we do better research by not just looking for facts, but by also being concerned about working with them, seeing environmental urgencies.

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The next question is about the impact of this project. Who do you want to address this? RF For me, it is about breaking open the walls of the university. Artists and the art-science lab project are a way to get the general public inside the university. Artists have a different way of researching: they do research, but with much more emphasis on meaning than on knowledge production. To bring them into the building is very important for me, as it is showcasing to the people inside the building, my colleagues and students, that this is a different approach to nature and to knowledge acquisition. Just by being there, they already make the point that I want to make. AS Do you feel that artists working in your lab are taken seriously? RF People can be enthusiastic, but sometimes react with hostility towards artists because they deem it to not be “true scientific research”. I put my weight in and say, as a scientist, I find this important. Then it must be taken seriously as a scientific endeavor. That’s also the scary part for me: I cannot work with just anybody, because I have to be a bit careful on how artists are presenting themselves and the science they are using. There are more scientists who work with artists, but usually as a side project. What I try to do with the art-science lab – where scientists can also work on their own projects, by the way – is to show within the Institute that you can actually use this as a way of working, not just as a side project, but as a major research project.

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SP I found in my previous experiences that close collaborations can change the partners in a project. So I am actually working towards changing one person at a time, and changing myself as this happens. Through working together for an extended period of time, I can be taken along in this world of experts, engineers, programmers, etc., and ask questions which can be difficult, sometimes uncomfortable. But we are together in this effort and time, to work on a project which does not come from this distanced critical position, but from the materiality of practices that produce this collaboration in the first place. Another impact I want to make is that I really hope this kind of artistic investigation inspires critical thought and philosophy: to be able to take theoretical concepts, put them into practice, and then re-evaluate them is a valuable experience. To be able to share those insights, not just as a paper, but as an experience of the work, whatever shape or form it might take. AS I agree that there are different levels of impact. The consortium as the first ‘public’ is where it starts. It is a real luxury to work in a two-year programme with all these partners coming from different backgrounds. It’s as you say, you transform yourself in the process, and that is what I am also looking for: how engaging with other fields changes and shapes my ideas further, to then have an effect on others. I can read a lot about it while still staying in my comfort zone. So I would like to see more discussion amongst ourselves as well, to really use this time and space to work through this encounter. As a curator of Zone2Source, my main concern is bringing this kind of challenging project to a broad audience in public parks, such as Amstelpark and Artis. I am interested in

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not only presenting the resulting artworks, but also creating public formats that engage people with artistic research and take them along in experiencing new imaginations of nature-cultures. MT I’m glad you all said, “I want to have an impact on myself”, instead of the ambition to only change someone else. Because if it’s your main goal throughout this project to change some of your own practices or methodologies, then you control the success, and, at the same time, you share the responsibility of this change that you can achieve with others around you. (…) SP

Did you see that?

AS attacking a rabbit!

Wow, it’s a bird

It’s just a baby rabbit!

AS Raoul, you went to the bathroom for two minutes and missed out on the real stuff, nature happening right here… 1 Research Institute for Art and Public Space (Gerrit Rietveld Academy) and Zone2Source, a platform for art, nature, and technology. 2 VU Amsterdam, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Biophysics of Photosynthesis. 3 Idem. 4 Waag Society & Technology. 5 ‘Smart Hybrid Forms’ (2019) is funded by the NWO Smart Cultural Fund 6 Stengers, I. (2018) Another Science is Possible: Manifesto for a Slow Science, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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John Miers

Two Pictures of My Brain

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Nienke Scholts & Sabine Niederer

Monstering: On Hybridization and Care in Artistic Research

Nienke Scholts & Sabine Niederer

The Monsters Who Monster Artistic research practices create in-between zones where exceptions are the rule. These practices offer refuge to “monsters” that do not fit preconceived labels or categories. Such monsters might be understood as unsuited wild creatures or unruly machines about to spiral out of control. Monstrous artworks or research practices could also be regarded as exciting hybrids, undefinable and estranging sources of imagined possibility. As described by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, such possibility grasps “the terrifying as well as the smiling” and requires “thinking and doing the actual and the virtual at once”.1 Monsters of artistic research similarly invite us to dance with the unknown, to doubt, pause, feel, and re-think. Discussions on artistic research often centre around competing terminologies of multi-, inter-, trans-, or post-disciplinary research, or even propose a post-research condition.2 What if the furthering of artistic research merely leads to an academisation or institutionalisation of art? What if it ensnares artistic inquiry in the realms of academic and applied research?3 These are understandable and reasonable fears and pitfalls. However, instead of dreading the all-too-well-known, artistic research practices have the gifted ability to venture out into the unknown. This contribution looks at three such artistic research projects as “monstering” practices, exploring their hybridity and, relatedly, their practice of care.

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Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes, two experimental architecture scholars, describe artistic research as a pursuit of the specific knowledge (i.e., increased specialisation, reflection, and expertise)

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that is needed to strengthen the artistic practice.4 They argue that artistic research also “develop[s] methods that link and integrate formerly discrete knowledge areas – provoking hybridization of thought and monstering of practices – catalysing a wider shift in research towards transdisciplinary method development.”5 Recognising the speculative and generative qualities that come into being when practices monster, or ‘hybridize’, we imagine the Hinterlands of artistic research as a landscape we can explore. A landscape does not have a beginning or end, it merely transforms. In the middle of this ever-changing landscape we find ourselves “being situated in-between”, which is where, according to Isabelle Stengers, things become literally interesting: “inter-esse - not to divide, but to relate.” A relational approach helps us to become aware of the monsters in the Hinterlands we traverse, and to understand “monstering” as a practice that actually suits our unstable world. The first work we encounter quite literally explores becoming inter-esse, situated in between. In the triptych Pink Bestiaries, Brazilian choreographer Josefa Pereira explores through movement the relational space between three seemingly straightforward opposites: front and back, left and right, up and down. Throughout the piece, the viewer is drawn into the spaces in-between those opposites, where categories clearly defined at first unravel into a destabilising experience. In the first act, titled Hide Behind, Pereira reverses front and back by walking backwards in a circular movement for the entire duration of the piece (one hour). The audience is seated in a circle around her, so from their perspective the front and back sides of her body continuously change: “A female body moving against the stream, her backside goes ahead in an

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ongoing urgent gesture of unraveling a particular story of progress. Is it unraveling, or resisting? Is she undoing a story or just telling another one? Or both at the same time?”6 The back of her body is painted in a bright pink, visually drawing attention and adding to the estranging play between sides. While she walks at a steady pace, her arms and hands perform a choreography of their own, blindly feeling their way across her neck and shoulders which have now become the front of her body. As the arms create different shapes, the human figure changes into headless, pink, monstrous forms. In the new continuum that is created where there used to be opposites, her reversed movements dissolve common ideas about linearity, order, and advancement. Asked about her research method, Pereira explains: “I keep asking the same questions over and over until something ‘different’ appears.” In choreographic practice, repeatedly asking the same question is both a rational and physical activity: writing (graphy) the same movement (choreo) over and over again. Pereira opens up a space of inquiry at the heart of the performative work by posing questions through bodily gestures. By doing so, she can move through the ungraspable inter-esse of things - and share that experience with an audience simultaneously. To witness seemingly fixed opposites become fluid, spectators need to adopt a more radical form of attending the performance, in which their perceptions monster too. In choreographing a shift in seeing towards that which lives in-between dichotomies, Pereira takes care of making monsters matter.

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Matters of Care Such a relational inter-esse can also be sought in ways of working together across disciplines in artistic research. The hybridisation of disciplines raises questions of the conditions of such research practices. Especially regarding the intricate contexts of research carried out across various differences (in fields of study, methods, backgrounds, experience, lived knowledges, et cetera), we turn to the concept of care to inform and strengthen collaborative and transdisciplinary research practices. The concept of ‘care’ as it is used here builds on an intersectional feminist tradition that is very much alive, particularly in artistic and digital research. Interspecies and socio-technical feminist research practices by scholars and artists such as Catherine d’Ignazio, Lauren Klein, Maya Livio, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa have taken up Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble”, and have further developed relational research practices with an ethics of care.7 These care-driven practices are centred around values, making sure that the research is not extractive or exploitative, and that it welcomes many voices, perspectives, and ways of knowing, including the embodied and the experiential.8 Furthermore, such practices invite those who are affected by the work to participate, respond, analyse, and interpret.9 Our journey through the Hinterlands now leads us to the researcher, curator, and artist Maya Livio, who actively incorporates ethics of care into her transdisciplinary practice. In her “expanded non-fiction project about brown birds, queer ecologies, and data”, titled Salvaging Birds, she collaborates with ornithologists, a composer, and a media artist to critically examine the practice of bird conservation.10 Livio, describing her first visit

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to a collection of dead animal bodies in a natural history museum, wrote: “[t]hough it may not have looked like a typical dataset, its rows and columns made of fragile, difficult-to-contain bodies, the collection made visible the logics of environmental datafication; the stakes for those both excluded from and included in data in a time of escalating climate crisis.”11 Bird conservation is severely biased towards male species, as was established in a study of natural history museums conducted in 2019.12 Male birds’ actual bodies (often colourful) are overrepresented in natural history collections, as is male birdsong. And what therefore remains underrepresented in bird conservation datasets are the bodies and birdsong recordings of female species (often in muted shades of brown) and intersex birds. Livio states: “Brown birds evade notice and in the process they evaded inclusion in this dataset of suspended death.”13 And, on the lack of female birdsong in conservation datasets: “Many female birds produce a rich array of vocal sounds but these have largely evaded scientific attention because they have not been characterized as songs.”14 Livio turned to A.I. and machine learning, a field similarly criticised for its biases. In a speculative queering of the dataset, Livio and her collaborators used A.I. trained on intersex and female birdsong to compose new missing birdsongs with composer J.P. Merz. Similarly, A.I. was used to produce accompanying generative artworks that illustrate the compositions with new media artist Cassie McQuater. The glitches in the A.I.-rendered birdsong were retained, and the faltering machine songs illustrate the imperfections of technology and the impossible effort of completing the collection.

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Monstering, three drawings by Nienke Scholts (2021)

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Monstering with Care The further development of research with an ethics of care may expand the focus from what is done to include how it is done. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, author of Matters of Care, puts it: “Our ways of studying (…) have world making effects.” In the arts and the cultural realm more broadly, a body of scholarly and artistic work explores and critiques how precarity looms over a professional life in the arts.15 Political scientist Isabell Lorey invites us to see that precariousness is a condition of life; that all living beings need one another to survive and that, despite the vulnerability and insecurity it brings, this given might as well be used as a strength. Could we change our ways of studying and doing research and consider forms of interdependency as a starting point for alternative ways of working together? Lorey opens up this thought while being aware, however, that: “... social interdependence can express itself both as concern or care and as violence.”16 It remains crucial to invite critical questions into research processes with regards to “what we talk about when we talk about care.”17 As argued by curator and author Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, care work may produce hierarchies (for example, between caregiver and caretaker), and it is always important to question the conditionality or unconditionality of care, especially in these times of deep environmental and social crises. An interdependent care-driven practice would entail fleshing out together, in every constellation anew, what this way of working means, and how to practice ways of relating in research that are not inspiring for some while draining others, but benefit all parties involved.

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In a session of the ARIAS research group ‘Care Ecologies’18 in August 2021, Alexa Mardon, a DAS Choreography artist-in-residence, invited the interdisciplinary group of researchers into the studio. There, Mardon shared some of their practices, relating to and crossing over with movement workshops for frontline support workers in Vancouver (in healthcare, land defence and community mutual aid).20 Through dance and its potential for direct and adjacent intimacy, awareness, and transformation on an often imperceptible level, Mardon is interested in the ways in which our movements and actions touch upon and influence one another. Questions explored in her research revolve around ways of being together including choreographic and aesthetic concerns that have to do with access, cultural protocols and ethics: who is gathering, what unseen forces are summoned when we gather to dance, and who is absent? The practice session was an invitation for the Care Ecologies group to be together otherwise: to touch what is far away, to perceive what is always present, yet rarely felt. During the studio visit, Mardon led a warm-up on moving and speaking, before guiding the group into some of the underlying principles of these movements. The session explored touch, listening, speaking to imagery, moving, and witnessing one another. In a witnessing exercise, the participants were asked to couple up and focus on the other person’s body breathing. Each witnessing participant was asked to direct all their attention to the other person’s body lying before them and focus on a part of the body that was visibly moving with the breath. Then choosing a second body part to focus on, and then a third. Each time, carefully placing a hand there. After three placements, the other person was given some space while

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attention was fully kept with their breathing, living body. The entirety of our attention being directed towards the wholeness of the breathing body was an important reminder to one of the participants, a researcher from the field of medical humanities who was about to re-enter medical school. The breathing body struck them as a metaphor to be reminded of when seeing patients. It strengthened them in their belief that each person, each breathing body, deserves such holistic and careful attention as was practiced here. As small as the scale of this exchange was, a monstering of practices did take place, in which one researcher’s (medical) practice was touched, contaminated even,21 by the (artistic) practice of someone else. The particular experience of witnessing an embodied insight into a peer’s practice led the group to explore how an ethics of care could take shape and be felt through various performativities of exchange. The questions that have arisen in the research group include: What do care ecologies mean when we speak about research, and how can they be felt and performed between artists-researchers? What comes into view when we talk? What comes into view when we dance? And how do we come into view differently for each other in different settings and formats of exchange?

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The monstering practices encountered so far on this ongoing journey provide glimpses of a Hinterland of hybrid research practices in which care can be a driving force: Pereira’s bodily monstering, turning dichotomies into fluid spaces in-between, Livio‘s interspecies and transdisciplinary approach, queering archives to reveal shortcomings in datasets and technologies, and Mardon’s collective movements, conjuring holistic and care-driven approaches

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through dance. As Maria de la Bellacasa poignantly makes clear, an ethics of care is not about the application of predetermined solutions, but has to be constantly “rethought, contested and enriched.”22 The commitment lies in a situated and positioned approach to develop critical standpoints that are careful, in each context anew.23 Monstering with care deserves critical inquiry, reflection, and a willingness to learn. We might not always get it right the first time; the work of care is ever in progress. 1 De Vries, Patricia (2020). Algorithmic Anxiety in Contemporary Art: A Kierkegaardian Inquiry into the Imaginary of Possibility, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, p. 10 and p. 31. 2 See also the Postresearch Condition Conference, HKU, January 2021 and its proceedings, which were published as: Slager, H. & Balkema, A. (eds.) (2021) The Postresearch Condition’, Utrecht: Metropolis M. 3 Hito Steyerl is not the only one lost in the definitional discussion, and more interested in the practices of applied research. See also: Steyerl, H. (2021) ‘Response’, in Slager & Balkema (eds.) The Postresearch Condition, p. 13. 4 Armstrong, R. & Hughes, R, (2021) ‘Embodying Knowledge: On Trust, Recognition, Preferences’, in Slager & Balkema (eds.) The Postresearch Condition, p. 47. 5 Ibidem. 6 Scholts, Nienke (2021), personal correspondence with the artist. 7 See also: Niederer, S. & Colombo, G. (2021) ‘Feminist Data Practices: Conversations with Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren Klein, and Maya Livio’, Diseña, (19). DOI: http://ojs.uc.cl/index.php/Disena/article/view/41545. 8 For example, in their book Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein stipulate seven principles of data feminism, each explained through discussions of relevant works of art and research. D’Ignazio, C. & Klein, L. (2020) Data Feminism, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press. 9 These topics are also central to the ‘Ecologies of Care’ research theme of ARIAS. http://arias.amsterdam/ecologies-of-care/. 10 Livio, M. (2021) ‘Salvaging Birds’, Retrieved from: http://salvagingbirds.com. 11 Ibidem. 12 Cooper, N. et al. (2019) ‘Sex biases in bird and mammal natural history collections’ Proc. R. Soc., 286(1913), http:// doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2025. 13 In her work, Livio also discusses bird conservation

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as an extractive effort in which animals are killed to become part of the collections. She points out that nowadays, museums mostly collected salvage specimens. “Salvage birds are found dead, often from window strikes, estimated to kill 600 million birds per year, or from other collisions such as with vehicles, communication towers, and other infrastructures. Though less deliberate, salvage bird deaths are still largely caused by humans, pointing to another flaw in the logics of environmental data.” (www.salvagingbirds.com). 14 Livio 2021. 15 See, for example, the writings of Bojana Kunst, Anna Dezeuze, and Silvio Lorusso, as well as projects like ‘Fair Practice Code’ (https://fairpracticecode.nl/nl), developed by Kunsten 92 & Platform BK; ‘The Fantastic Institution’ symposium at Buda Kortrijk in 2017; and the current work of, among others, the Institute of Network Cultures (INC) on “Post-Precarity”. 16 Lorey, I.(2012) State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London/New York: Verso Books, p. 6. 17 Soh Bejeng Ndikung, B. (2021) The Delusions of Care, Berlin: Archive Books, p. 12. 18 In the interdisciplinary ‘Ecologies of Care’ research group, artists and scholars concerned with matters of care examine care from a variety of disciplinary positions, e.g. medical humanities, architecture, culture and media studies, and choreography. We regularly convene to discuss a wide range of topics, such as health injustice, loss and grief, and feminist finance. 19 DAS Choreography is an MA-programme of the DAS Graduate School of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. 20 These classes, hosted and led by Mardon in collaboration with Rianne Selvnis, centre around exercises on movement, play, grounding, and non-linear thinking and being. They are based on the idea that everyone has a multitude of responses available to them at any given moment, and that movement and dance can help access this responsive agility with greater ease and efficiency in one’s work. See: https:// www.alexasolveigmardon.com/ 21 The use of contamination in this context is taken from Anna Tsing: “Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaboration, we all die.” (...) Tsing thus makes contamination a necessity in precarious survival, relating it to mutual dependency as well: “We change through our collaborations both within and across species. The important stuff of life on earth happens in those transformations, not in the decision trees of self-contained individuals.” Tsing, A. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World, on Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 28-29. 22 de la Bellacasa, M.P. (2011) ‘Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things’, Social Studies of Science, 41(1), p.96. 23 Ibidem.

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Ilse van Rijn

Apples, or Writing and/as Transdisciplinary Practice, in 3 Exercises

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Excercise 1 (Eating an apple and enjoying it) “The lesson of apple: of peace. The acidulous taste of the word on the tongue. The one-hundred savours of the different peels: the tart apple of the being-sweet-on-thetongues, appelle apple apfel appeal a peal a-peel…”1

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Referring to the work of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, the French feminist novelist and philosopher Hélène Cixous insists that “we have to be transgrammatical”. This doesn’t imply “that we have to despise grammar,” Cixous adds, “but we are so used to obeying [grammar] absolutely, that some work has to be done in that direction. I find it important to work on foreign texts, precisely because they displace our relationship to grammar.”2 Cixous reads the French translation of Lispector’s Portuguese books, while collaboratively translating her own French works into English as well, most importantly Vivre L’orange – To Live the Orange, the novel-cum-theoretical reflection steeped in Lispector’s texts. In her cry for transgrammaticality and the encouragement to learn a foreign tongue, Cixous implicitly underlines both Lispector’s grammatical play, and what Cixous calls the “necessary inside of language”.3 In doing so, one learns to appreciate, thanks to Lispector’s writerly approach. Cixous is interested in Lispector’s poetical prose precisely because it showed an absolute departure from ordinary language within a language of her own. Lispector’s feminine writing turned away from a language defined by a masculine libidinal economy and patriarchal symbolic order. Her novels and stories both embodied and manifested as “encounter[s] with another – be it a body, a piece

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of writing, a social dilemma, a moment of passion”, leading to an “undoing of the hierarchies and oppositions” that delimit life.4 Ecriture féminine should not be understood as an alternative to a masculine writing, which leave intact binary distinctions between man and woman, black and white, matter and meaning. In Cixous’s proposal, the inside of language implies the materiality of language, its letters and syllables; the body is doing the writing, and, in doing so, the body is inscribing itself.5 Lispector’s prose, Agua Viva most explicitly, performs this triple task. Agua Viva confronts you with its multiple disorganisations (or “disharmonies”) of language.6 The book pivots around a central character and narrator “I”, a painter and writer like the author herself, who tries to capture the now, or, what she calls, the “instant-now”. It is a fragmented text, every new fragment an experiment, a reiteration of the narrator’s ferocious attempts to pin down the present, which, through its very form, is both a reflection on and enactment of language’s (in)capacity to grasp the “instant-now”. Agua Viva is a sensuous text: it tastes words, syllables, and sounds, thinking through relationships of language to life and death. The protagonist “I” intends to use writing to prepare for painting, but she gets swallowed up in words, handling terms like ‘bait’: “fishing for whatever is not word.”7 Explaining her process, “I” states “[w] hen this non-word – between the lines – takes the bait, something has been written”; the bait incorporates the word. “So what saves you is writing absentmindedly”, she comments. Here, writing with a distracted mind means a form of improvisation, “jazz in a fury”, pure expression, using words without a utilitarian meaning.8 It means to be free, a recurring word in Agua Viva: free from the word

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as (masculine) code and law. Writing is presented as a form of resistance in vulnerability. It is a way to withstand and combat a limiting discourse that doesn’t allow you to approach and intimately know the world. In the story, however, the actual encounter between word and world never takes place. But the narrator persists, as mentioned before, continuing her trial to merge those which modernity had turned into each other’s antagonists; not only language and so-called ‘reality’, meaning and matter, and theory and practice, but also writing and painting, or literature and visual art. The repetitious first phrases of consecutive fragments emphasise the protagonist’s perseverance: “I’m writing you …”, “New instant …”, “I’m writing to you …”, “I came back…”.9 Lispector’s stuttering, fragmentary, insisting, and urgent prose formally develops the writer/painter’s painstaking quest to write as she breathes and capture the present moment. In which she almost succeeds.

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Reading Agua Viva, it is the ‘almost’ of Lispector’s writing that causes her to gasp and catch her breath, as does the “I”. “I” participates in the ‘play’ of writing. The ‘almost’ reveals the potential of writ-ing. And it is this potential of writing Agua Viva: the endless testing of new forms of writing throughout, beginning again and again, that performs as fragmentary prose. One cannot avoid the “light discord”: the fragmentary writing both describes and puts in place.10 Its halting, processual writing allows the text to spill out and open up to the world, overflowing and reaching out to the spacetime in which it finds itself, allowing the reader to fill out its gaps. Meanwhile the “I” paradoxically names the impossibility of coming to terms with that same world in which a so-called ‘reality’ has to be named in a language that isn’t hers. The life that “I” desires to touch is rather a ‘beyond-life’: a secret, silent, and

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expectant life that is neglected by “reality”: Cixous’s inside of language. A textual face-to-face encounter with this radical ‘Other’ of life is too frightening anyway. The fragmentary form could thus be read both as a mask, a veil that defaces the intimacy of life (necessarily so), and as an embrace of an interruption and suspension of life which the prose simultaneously modulates and embodies.11 The simultaneous masking and making of life, both in and through Lispector’s prose, is what is needed to approach a world torn apart by dichotomies, according to Cixous: war and peace, man and woman, writing and painting, the old and the new, dark and light.12 For the French feminist, Lispector’s writing is like ‘spending’ and ‘joyous giving’, without wanting something in return; its libidinal relationship with the world articulates a place not reigned by a masculine economy based on possession and greed, instant profit and continuous progress.13 Accepting that the “now-instant” begins to end as soon as it starts, Lispector’s joyous prose “eats a fruit at its peak”, savouring the moment instead, while simultaneously acknowledging that it “live(s) to the side” of the event, in the words of Agua Viva’s protagonist.14 This ‘Other’ of life (or life as always other, one could add) might be “mysterious and bewitching”, but living it and simultaneously writing it is a form of insurgent writing, a writing without exclusions.15 Existing relationships are un-thought in this way.16 And, as such, writing/ living transforms a text into praxis and song.

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Exercise 2 (Play: becoming-apple) “Is it possible that I have thought no more of an apple since the beginning of the century? And that I have not seen an apple, not discovered, not observed an apple, when scarcely emerged from its element, still stirred, aerial, it changes its nature in alightening on the table? And becomes stone, or becomes egg?”17

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Describing the relationship between writing and animal play, philosopher Brian Massumi observes how writing, while not always directly representing the world it describes, nevertheless possesses a potential for limitless ‘play’ with the world. As an abstraction of the world, writing denies the world, and, in commenting on its own failure to touch it, it therefore denies what it writes.18 In an attempt to understand it, Agua Viva’s “I” stages and observes the act of writing: “Before writing to you I perfume myself all over.” Localising writing in her hand, she follows the limb wherever it goes, promising that “I won’t fiddle with whatever it writes.” There shouldn’t be a lag between the gesture of her hand and her person, she notes, since “I act in the core of the instant.”19 And although writing and “I” seem indiscernible, they remain incompatible as well: “What am I doing in writing to you? trying to photograph perfume?”20 The “reflexive capacities of language”, as Massumi terms it, allow it to operate at several textual levels at once. Agua Viva makes ample use of this potential, one could say. Thus, its protagonist is both a character and the narrator of the story in which she acts, for the reader follows both voices. Being a writer, the reader has the tendency to substitute Agua Viva’s character with the author’s name as well: the protagonist performing

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as an “I”, the reader herself easily blending the words she reads with the character. The amphibian complexity of writing consequently allows it to change shape according to your perspective. And vice versa, writing allows you to inhabit a radically different point of view. As such, writing is a ludic gesture, a playful act. Writing dramatises and unframes actions that are unseen, forgotten, or suppressed in normal life;21 it gives shape to thoughts that are “impossible and intangible” in a lived reality.22 Trying to find words for a future death she cannot express, Agua Viva’s protagonist becomes, for instance, a wounded tiger “with a deadly arrow buried in its flesh”. Even if the embedded arrow is pulled out and the animal freed from its excruciating pain, it cannot say thank you. “So I sluggishly walk back and forth … I lick one of my paws and then … I silently move off.”23 The pain remains, however, “There’s a thing inside me that hurts. Ah how it hurts and how it screams for help.” However, despite subsequently translating the pain caused by the arrow, the mechanism of the typewriter, “I”, lacks tears. She cannot obey the “demanding” object that the typewriter is, and consequently writes: “if I must be an object let it be an object that screams … What saves me is the scream. I protest in the name of whatever is inside the object beyond the thought-feeling. I am an urgent object.”24 “I” is both protagonist, writer, and narrator, once more; she is both tiger and writer; she is both object and scream. Writing allows “I” to follow their transformations throughout, acting out her becoming. What Massumi (after Deleuze and Guattari) would call her “becoming-tiger” (or “becomingtypewriter”, “becoming-scream” etc.) is absolute, opening “an escape hatch leading away from all

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known areas of activity given in nature.”25 Writing gives expression to this movement towards the supernormal, tying together the formerly disparate protagonist and tiger (or typewriter, scream etc.), that mutually include each other nevertheless. The human and nonhuman animals, the objects and animals, life and death, spill out and over each other in Lispector’s prose. They give each other something extra (or what Massumi calls “-esqueness”) that defines the other’s singularity: the tiger licking its paw, transforming “I” into a typewriter, makes “the dry keys echo in the dark and humid hours.”26 The singularities of ‘tiger’, ‘typewriter’, and ‘scream’ are expressed and exchanged in writing; in writing, different singularities unfold. In that sense, writing, and Lispector’s writing specifically, could be considered to be not merely transgrammatical, but a transindividual realm as well, in Massumi’s words.

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As a reader of Lispector’s transgrammatical and transindividual works, and writing about it in Vivre l’orange, Cixous pushes herself to become a “joy-apple”: to approach and appreciate, thinkingfeeling, thinking-doing language.27 She doesn’t “know exactly how to peel [herself] down enough,” Cixous admits; she doesn’t know how to “become as simple as an apple, just like the goodness of an apple.” But there’s a “tender light of an apple in the night to attract us towards it.”28 Walking without end “by the glow of the fruit”, writing for no one and anyone, giving forth “names, fruits, her hand, in the darkness”, and being “the world, including its memory, its ways, its voices”, Lispector’s prose guides the novice along.29 Its gestures and actions are dramatised and transduced in reading and writ-ing, instigating Cixous’s own expressive endeavors: reading and writing becomes an opportunity to learn. A writer about Lispector’s

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transgrammatical transindividual works, Cixous is indebted to the Brazilian author, it is said.30 Vivre l’orange testifies to this specifically: “I owe a live apple to a woman. … I owe a work of apple to a woman. I owe: a birth to the nature of a woman: a book of apples.”31 Explicitly translating the apple into an orange, Cixous’s prose mingles and merges with the former author’s, to the point of them becoming indiscernible.32 No “anxiety of influence” here.33 Is it indebtedness on which their relationship is based, one feeding off the other? Instead of a parasitic liaison, the encounter of another body, another language, another passion, another life has resulted in one contaminating the other, varying on the other’s works, becoming the other (‘becoming-other’), and vice versa. Reading them through each other, a linear, recursive, and hierarchical perception of history in which the notion of indebtedness is grounded, seems hardly workable to understand the athletics of writing performed by Lispector and Cixous. Cixous doesn’t cite Lispector in Vivre l’orange like she does in her so-called ‘academic articles’ on the author: no quotation marks separating Lispector’s words from her own appear. The two authorial voices rather, one could say, co-constitute each other.34 Entering into an intimate dialogue, they respond to each other, reconfiguring each other. Reading writing, reading about writing, writing about reading writing, Cixous’s work isn’t merely a one-way street. How could one understand the dynamics of reading and writing in a non-linear fashion? How to perceive such a mutually inclusive writing (writing/reading, reading/writing) rapport? How could one understand writing as mutually inclusive rapport?

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Exercise 3 (I love apples (too)) “Today, I know that I am without having. I have only my hunger to give; and an apple in the darkness. Knowing how to meet it, knowing it to be apple is all of my knowing.”35 Indebted. In her writing, Cixous is ‘indebted’ to Lispector’s prose. I continue to struggle with the word ‘debt’ included in the term. It presupposes guilt: a guilt the “Jewoman” Cixous actually feared, felt, and expressed in her writing. Debt suggests the need to balance the uneven distribution of means, including a “promise to match credit and debt again, debt and credit.”36 Credit runs “only one way”; the debtor is dependent on the creditor’s justice to recognise her rights.37 However, the relationship between the two authors surpasses the unilateral connection, as was mentioned before. Lispector’s open and instable writing allows it to be rewritten each time, time and again, depending on the reader’s position. This same openness of writing enabled “the world, including its memory, its ways, its voices” to trickle into writing’s spacious and highly sensuous realm.

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Cixous walks the path Lispector has penciled in her works. Reading Lispector’s work, describing it as a voice that reached her “on the twelfth of October 1978”, she tries to renew her own embodied textual relations with a world from which she feels expelled.38 Through Lispector’s grammatically divergent prose, Cixous perceives and repairs previously “impossible and intangible” relationships between world and word, matter and meaning, subject and object, without forgetting the traditional separation between them. She narrates her

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‘coming-to-life’ as a birth taking place through the reading of Lispector’s work, integrating the other in a fluid, non-hierarchical way. Cixous observes how, in Lispector’s prose, names are linked to all the senses, not merely to sight: terms forge liaisons with hearing and listening, with smell, taste, and touch.39 Thus, objects are conjured up with “ear-lips”, the “inner music” from thoughts is heard, while Lispector’s prose tastes like the “sweetness of limes and the tartness of passionfruits.”40 The body is written in Lispector’s prose, according to Cixous; it inscribes itself, as much as it writes. Cixous testifies to simultaneously enacting the écriture féminine she advocates. The telling flesh of the body haunting the written work(s) leaves its traces in, on, and through the writing.41 Paying close attention to the finest details of the worlds it traverses, its prose can be confusing and contradictory, perhaps; the boundaries between Lispector’s prose and Cixous’s, like between orange and apple, as well as their respective concepts and themes, are redrawn each time and again. Playing in more worlds than one is the sine qua non of play, and the reason for potential textual confusion. Massumi calls this capacity of play to extend territories, to affect and be affected by more worlds than one, the different worlds modulating each other, its transsituational link.42 Play connects ‘us,’ as does writing. In play(ing), writing crafts worlds. Transgrammatical, transindividual, transsituational writing is always already transdisciplinary, one could argue.43 Relating to writing in ever new and unexpected ways, I suggest transdisciplinary research enters the intimate, embodied dialogue with the environmental surrounds, joyously learning

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from and delving into traditionally distinct worlds. Its process following writing, transdisciplinary research allows for matter to meet meaning in this way, as much as Cixous pleaded in écriture féminine. Cixous’s writing reformulates dichotomies underpinning a traditional exclusive and exclusionary textual regime. What if transdisciplinary research followed suit? Since writing and transdisciplinary research is an occasion to study and learn from another, “be it a body, a piece of writing, a social dilemma, a moment of passion”, to share knowledge and enjoy it, to notice tiny details and their differences, thus leading to an “undoing of the hierarchies and oppositions” that delimit life.

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1 Cixous, H. (1979) Vivre l’orange = To live the Orange. Paris: Des Femmes, p. 64. 2 Cixous, H. (1991) Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva. Translated by V. Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, p. 3. 3 Cixous, H. (1976) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, 1(4), Translated by K. Cohen and P. Cohen. pp. 882. 4 Andermatt Conley, V. (1990) ‘Introduction’ in Cixous, H., Reading with Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, pp. vii. 5 See also Kaiser, B.M. (2018) ‘So Many Tongues: Cixous and the Matter of Meaning’, Comparative Literature, 70:3. 6 Lispector, C. (2014) Agua Viva. Translated by S. Todler. London: Penguin Books, p. 6. 7 Ibid 15. 8 Ibid 16. 9 Ibid 48. 10 Ibid 63. 11 Cixous 1979, 50. 12 Cixous 1976, 875, 878. 13 See also Cixous 1976, 888. 14 Lispector 2014, 63. 15 Critics have referred to Cixous’s as a ‘neotenic style’, “that is, a half-born, willfully premature writing that allows the genesis of its articulation to be part of its at once aesthetic, social, and corporeal beauty.” Andermatt 1990, xi. See also Cixous 1976, 893. 16 Cixous 1976, 882. 17 Cixous 1979, 80. 18 Massumi, B. (2014) What Animals Teach Us About Politics, Durham and London: Duke UP, pp. 6-7.

Hinterlands 19 Lispector 2014, 46. 20 Ibid 47. 21 Massumi 2014, 56 22 Lispector 2014, 77. 23 Ibid 78. 24 Ibid 79. 25 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986) Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Translated by D. Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, p. 35; Massumi 2014, 57. 26 Massumi 2014, 59; Lispector 2014, 79. 27 Cixous 1979, 64. 28 Ibid 40. 29 Ibid 42. 30 Fitz, E.E. (1990) ‘Hélène Cixous’s Debt to Clarice Lispector: The Case of Vivre L’orange and “L’écriture féminine”’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 64(1), pp. 235-249. 31 Cixous 1979, 64. 32 “In the translation of the apple (into the orange) I try to denounce myself. A way of owning. My part. Of the fruit. Of the enjoyment.” Cixous 1979, 40. The indiscernibility is part and parcel of what Cixous understands “women’s enjoyment” to be: “All that must not be forgotten in order to arrive in time at the side of a living orange before she is reveiled: the richnesses, the poverties, the good fortunes, the possibilities, the risks. The condition of life, the price, the price, of the fruit, the price of freedom of apples, of women’s enjoyment.” Cixous 1979, 74. 33 The reference is to Harold Bloom’s classic The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (1997, 1973, Oxford: Oxford University Press), in which the author sketches a history of poetry based on the intra-poetic relationships between “strong poets, major figures” and their predominantly white, male and heterosexual “strong precursors” (p. 15), resulting in a linear perception of time. 34 Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway, Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham and London: Duke University Press. On the relationships between Cixous’s and more recent materialist feminist understandings language, see Kaiser, B.M. (2018) ‘So Many Tongues: Cixous and the Matter of Writing’, Comparative Literature, 70 (3), pp. 278-294. 35 Cixous 1979, 38. 36 Harney, S. & Moten, F. (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 61. 37 Ibid 61. 38 Cixous 1979, 10. 39 “Their names of coming, their presence-names, their face-names, without which they do not appear. Their names full of presence, their living heavy, audible, names.” Ibid 72-74. 40 Ibid 62, 72.

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Ilse van Rijn 41 I’m referring to the title of Vicky Kirby’s 1997 bookTelling Flesh. The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge. 42 Massumi 2014, 27. 43 Referring to the materialist feminist perspective of Rosemary Hennessy, Karen Barad defines a transdisciplinary approach as “inquir(ing) into the histories of the organization of knowledges and their function in the formation of subjectivities … mak(ing) visible and put(ting) into crisis the structural links between the disciplining of knowledge and larger social arrangements (Hennessy, R. (1993) Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, London/New York: Routledge).” Barad 2007, 93. Similarly, media theorist Katie King describes transdisciplinarities as “work(ing) out among urgent, ranging, and competing forms of authority and assessment, under terms of current global restructuring, academic and otherwise.” (King, K. (2012) ‘A Naturalcultural Collection of Affections: Transdisciplinary Stories of Transmedia Ecologies Learning’, s&f online, 10.3. Accessed: 4 June 2021). Like Massumi, King relies on anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s work to think through the ‘double consciousness’ needed to understand and play with the “system of layered contradictions” generated by different worlds.

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Katie Clarke

Transposition of the Ear

Katie Clarke

My curiosity for deep listening began after personal correspondence with experimental flutist Dodó Kiss1… she often contemplated the meaning of a perfect sound in the context of her work…questioning whether perfect sound was something imperfect…for me her response was a metaphor for how listening practices are integral to merging disciplines…one time her producer played back a recording of her fluting…many recordings of her fluting…and as the final output she chose her imperfect sound…she told me that perfectly played notes miss feeling…they are aloof and uninvolved…notes without the discomfort of the tragic comedy in which life blows its horns… without a tenderness that makes a person cry and laugh at the same time…is not music…it is just another note in the multiplicity of vibrations…the notes with the most character are the ones able to move the listener beyond the standards of expectation and sterility…the exact moment she was also playing such a note was the moment she was able to get out of her head and listen with the most intention to the musicians and instruments that played alongside her…not playing louder than the sounds of the band…not pushing notes through the space or gaps that she was presented with…though through deep listening her ears fingers and breath played revolutionary notes…together in a collective formation.

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Welcome to this reflection on listening…listening to something which cannot technically be heard… transpose your ears2…take a moment to perceive your exterior…position your ears as though speakers ready to wrap words around sound and around matter…all matters and materials consenting to engage…often ears in complete awareness of their sound-ing environment become overwhelmed… remember these shared networks of sound only mean to surround and support…practice…start

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with positioning ears underwater as though again listening through your mother’s womb…close your eyes if it helps…the water overflows with protective measures…ears sense which direction to listen…learning through a mothers memory…practice…move your ears into a position for echoing a dark shadow…the shadow has entered into ears before and wants to resonate in another context… contemplating itself in relation to a darkness a silence…practice…position your ears as though soil pressing sinking beneath your horizontal back…inwardly and outwardly concentrate…how does the soil affiliate to your touch…practice… position your ears inside a static sequoia seed…a serotinous being waiting for a forest fire to burn its shell from the inside out…a core and exterior pulsating in angst ready to let go. you are lilting sonorous percussive sharp …you might also want to grab yourself a glass of water and rest in a near to silent space…to position ears transpositionally you must tune in…forward ways of noticing…place the glass of water in front as though it is the audience your ears extend wavelengths towards…what is it in your composition of position that is significant or familiar…deeply immerse in the place that you rest…without a need to distinguish a clarity between elements… Looking back as she gazed at the small recorder and list of questions that sat before her in a rather dull office-like room at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie ready to record an episode for the Voiceblind

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podcast…she was drawn to an early memory of a desire for hearing the inside of a tree…my ears felt like they were actually inside the tree she said… somehow entangled inside the organism…they listened to the movements of running water…to the expanding of bark…I was bonding through tone… through intuition…through sense…in her memory… artistic researcher…lecturer…philosopher…practitioner…tree listener…Christina Della Giustina stands with all intention as her ears seem to enter inside an organism who is very static and silent… asking again and again what it was that she hears… wants to hear…and to her it felt unanswerable for some time…and it was a question that needed a framework in which she could actually investigate without having to produce artistic objects…she wanted to enter into a process that was more immaterial in nature…would she ever be able to physically hear what it was she had fantasised about…after putting microphone upon microphone against trunk after trunk her curiosity only grew… she found two engineers to help her build a sort of stethoscopic setup to amplify the inside of a tree… they listened to trees for two years…and then later she hears from this scientific institute3…the experts on trees were looking for a guest artist in their team…and so she went in a residency for one year with the initial idea that they know more about how to direct and amplify the sounds within a tree…a trees voice…her stethoscope setup often caused problems as it heard too much…the water running… every little ant walking…every swoop of wind… every bird…when a bird was landing on the tree… she repeated vividly and loudly as though hearing it at that moment…it was like…like an earthquake… yes it was like an earthquake…and these layers of sound were so entangled that they were hard to separate…so with this idea that the scientists

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knew more she was thinking morphologically… what is the specific position in which she must rest her ear to hear more about the anatomy of the tree…she wanted to find answers about where the water actually runs…and then when she was working with the scientists and she found them measuring not sounds but vibration and movement and the metabolic processing of this organism… their measurements were exclusively numeric…all in very precise numbers…she entered into this sort of oscillation between matter…the tree as a material phenomenon…and then the philosophical abstraction of it into numbers…and then back again through her artistic process into something that can be sensed…she created a system for how to read these trees musically. …hydrate your ears and take a sip from the glass of water in front…transpose inwardly…the waves from your oesophagus flurry with your pulse…the droplets submerge inside…ears passing through… sip another sip slowly…embodied memories mirroring to a pitch or tone that all species recognise… a reservoir of collective ears inside her womb… underneath her beating heart…arms wrap around legs and heads tilt forward between knees… swaddled…how was it to listen whilst inside this protective bubble… you are rasping eerie undulate melodious …allow any new territories for memory growth and reflection from your ears to rise and fall in the place where you rest…we rest…space for an in-

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between slowness grows…semantics go…ears extend to the shadows…searching for a place where the air is slightly darker…move through these shaded spaces as they themselves move with the ease of the light…

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Which questions need to be asked about tuning into non-human forms of life…right…says Anton Kats4…artist…educator…musician…dancer…earth dweller…one of the first questions he says…sitting openly towards the camera wearing a brightly coloured orange hat…staring at me…or the screen… being all too aware of the time as I waffle around the questions…he says…I would love to narrow it down to…and it is kind of a crucial question in general…whether one is asking from a We or from an I perspective…I would love to narrow the question down to…Who Am I…or Who Are You…he continues…this is a crucial question because it will be very easy to find out that…just by experience… humans are not necessarily human…that very often when humans think that they need to attune to non-human forms of life it almost implies a common understanding that…humans are human…and that there is a kind of a common sense of what that is…he says it will be very difficult for anyone to pinpoint actually what this means in their own identity…because once they start extending the… I am… in the beginning of any sentence…I am human… female…male…this and that…it is very difficult to maintain…and just in the development and maintenance of that…there is a process of production of something…and if something is or has to be produced…then there is a trajectory of this something not being there to begin with…it has to be brought into existence…so this idea of being a human is actually a lot of effort…like an extraction fan sucking the air from a room…he gestures with his hands…but who is producing it…go figure…and then from this

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perspective…if human animals are not aware of these production mechanisms and are fully or habitually identified with them…this negotiation becomes an escape trajectory…a mode of attuning to non-human forms of life…so it makes sense right…that the very first question would be to check what kind of form of life are you generally…Who Are You…who is attuning here…he speaks now as though speaking to me alone…critical of my question though sensitive to where it comes from… Katie…ask this question to yourself and really dig into it…whether it is through meditation or walking or working through listening…through whatever means it is…really check yourself on how the I Am sentence can be extended and whether any extension of it has any actuality to it…where does the I Am-ness start from…what kind of powers and energy comes into that notion of I…and then just by eventually giving up this kind of form of production that is very…very unsustainable…whether it is your own identity or kind of assumed common identity with others…that are also based on a lot of assumptions of what human or humanism means…then just by giving this up…the question of attunement ceases to pose itself…there is no need for attuning to non-human forms of life…just stop tuning into human forms of life then you will be there immediately. …forget choreographed ears that dance without intention…perceive with attentive passivity…tuning in through ways yet unknown…unhuman ways… peaks dips and loops resonate…waiting for monkey minds to rest…wavelengths roam freely across the borderless territories that shadows cast…in motion with the Earth’s rotation…peaceful tensions animating through the wind…take notice of the shadows that rest and move with the day effortlessly…

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you are rasping eerie undulate melodious …drift above the soil and leave a small space between your ear and the earth…like a door pushed open just ajar by the wind…it’s impossible to hold completely still…backwards and forwards…in tiny vibrations…you move…a vague steadiness…imagine the soil to be a cup on the end of a string…listen with care and find a place to listen…in a weightlessness that the Earth’s crust only understands… earthy skin…the palms of your hands feel the soils warm touch…crumbling between your fingers until skin is soil and soil is skin…ears always guiding…

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One way of feeling the flow that a fungal mycelium has inside…said post-media artist…sound maker… researcher…forager…Saša Spačal5…as she sat peacefully in her home in a forest at the edge of Ljubljana and I on a busy street in central Amsterdam…staring at screens…is to translate the vibrations of an organism into something tangible for a human to sense…with one artwork titled Myconnect6…me and my partners Mirjan Švagelj and Anil Podgornik translated fungal responses to the electrical signal of a human heartbeat into vibrations sound and light that traveled back to the human body and changed the rhythm of the original heartbeat…it is a big step forward in understanding and perceiving others…more than words that is… other signals are far more pleasant to describe processes of other species…she told me that with vibrations sound and light it might even be possible to figure out a translation of being between species… from the timeframe of fungi to the timeframe of

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humans…then from this translation that is perceptible to a human body…there could be various plant and fungi clocks…all different…she described her imagination of a huge machine with all these speed translations from different beings on the planet…even for bacteria…of course a speculative machine at that…so for example lichens…she went on to tell me…which are the symbionts of fungi algae and cyanobacteria…a composite organism… they need a long time to grow and develop…some lichens can even digest stone and extract nutrients from air which is a very slow process...that means they grow much slower compared to human time… such facts take us to a completely different scale of imagining…this is good because such facts are humbling for the human ego and put our existence in a wider context of things…lichens live in forests… some of them live on wood…they are little structures which for a long time were confusing to scientists because they have many different beings and species in one…they look ancient greenish mint colour or sometimes yellowish…the ones living on rocks especially…they are interesting because they live under very diverse conditions…almost extreme conditions...they can survive in a very dry situation in one moment but also proliferate in extremely humid conditions in the next moment…their resilience comes from the fact that one symbiont may be better adapted to dry conditions and another to humid…in this way it is easier for the whole community that human animals have named lichens… to survive. …as you continued to listen to the soil your body gave in and pressed too down against it…you lay on your side with your ear planted as though a root looking for water…for sound…earthy red ears… footsteps wander over your body…pressing over…

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imprinting lightly across your crumbly top…a cow as she goes to feed her calf…a pig as she goes to play in mud…a chicken as she goes to lay her eggs… the weight of another sure not to cause harm or damage…a small trace left behind in the soil beneath their feet…ears trodden upon yet not violated… you are mellifluous faint gentle unvoiced …heavy vines smoulder around your shoulders…like limbless bones pushing and pulling between…in trying to swivel from one side to another a burning sensation sets in…you cannot turn left nor right forward nor backwards…blazing hot bark encroaches up the back of your neck…neither looking up nor down is possible…like a red orange shell restricting your arms and legs as you struggle and panic sets in…remember loops of sound surround and support you…find your ears and listen to the vines as they form this cracking shell around your top…

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Sitting in the Amstel park in Amsterdam chirping birds chirp as though unknowing of the places they could be residing…I tuned into a video call with Taiwanese artists…researchers…designers…thinkers… scientists…Pei-Ying Lin7 and Yi-Fei Chen…and ventured into a conversation about how to tune back in with nature…on how to distinguish nature’s voice in artistic practices…and more questions arose than answers…as is the way for most artistic re-searchers…because…well…nature…this here is a very Western concept…characterised too often and for too long within Western philosophies as separate to human…human versus nature…and it

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is not that Pei and Yi had not been influenced by the Western philosophies and did not grasp the question of tuning into nature…as to some extent Western philosophy had influence over the sciences that they studied…though they never really thought to separate nature the way the Western world does…in Taiwanese literature and culture…some might say even the philosophy…although Taiwanese philosophy is never identified that way because of its multi-cultured history…though it is a philosophy… they have some ambiguity when referring to everything that exists in nature…it is never really clear… sometimes they found themselves standing at a point that they consider nature as just other living things which they are also a part of…sometimes they refer to the nature as Mother Nature…a sort of Gaia…and then sometimes they also refer to nature in terms of resources…more similar to how the Western philosophy considers nature…capitalised for the sake of making them into a resource…right… to find a use for the natural world…though for them at least in the Taiwanese context it was always very mixed…they never have a very clear stand on what nature is…they often find themselves in their art research practices fluctuating between these ideas of nature…in their more early days of practice they were never so much aware of this…though now when they approach an art science project they always begin with consideration to each and every organism involved in their experiment… and approach with care these different systems for thinking that are constantly working in their minds in parallel… …you are a sequoia seed ready to germinate…bullets of sweat start to drip down your torso as your body retracts and expands with the pressure… time is moving hastily and the heat even more so…

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the burning gets closer…grasping for somewhere to make a crack…peace comes as the heat travels through the vines to your core…ears inside vines inside vessels looking for a place to open up a whole new direction for a tiny world to sprout…ears sit within as the fire ravages your core…a fire that only means to cultivate its own future. 1 For more info on Dodó Kiss visit ‘kidobo.wixsite. com/dodo 2With contributing speakers Yi-Fei Chen, Christina Della Giustina, Anton Kats, Pei-Ying Lin, and Saša Spačal, from personal correspondence over video chat across Amsterdam, Berlin, and Ljubljana in the year of 2021. Christina Della Giustina did an interview for the ARIAS podcast series named Voiceblind: Matters of Methodology, for with which I was an editor in the interview process. I also interviewed art researchers Yi-Fei Chen, Anton Kats, Pei-Ying Lin, and Saša Spačal following a presentation of their works for an exhibition named Re:Tune at Zone2Source in Amsterdam South, which was, among other things, a key source of inspiration for this text. 3 Christina Della Giustina worked with the LWF project and the research unit Forest Dynamics at WSL Switzerland (the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research):https://www.wsl.ch/en/index.The artistresidency lasted 9 months from March to December 2011, and was organised by Artists in Lab at ZHdK Zürich. 4 For more on Anton Kats visit www.antonkats.net 5 For more on Saša Spačal, visit www.agapea.si 6 Myconnect provides the experience of a symbiotic connection between humans, nature, and technology. The viewers become players by lying down in a capsule equipped with a headset and body sensors that measure their heartbeat. Producer : Kapelica Gallery, Slovenia (2013) / Supported by the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana – Department for Culture and ŠOU – Ljubljana. 7 For more on Pei-Ying Lin visit www.peiyinglin.net

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Maaike Muntinga

Hallucinating Harmacies: A Spatial Reimagining of Memories in Medicine

Maaike Muntinga

Never did and never will It’s just the way it’s always been I’ve made mistakes before I’ll make the same again And all this tension we ignore Surely works its ugly way inside I have known that nothing’s fair Surely what did I expect? When magic slips into the air And every day’s another test And all this tension we ignore It surely works its ugly way outside So let it build, let it explode Leaving blood and shattered bone Or bite your tongue Till you’ve forgotten what to say And take another step back Until you find you’ve walked away Silence like disease But I dare not say it hurts ‘Cause if I honestly react Nothing’s ever going to work Sebadoh Beauty of the Ride. Harmacy (1996)

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1. Silence like disease I am slouched in one of the stain-covered seats that cover the insides of a large, upward-sloped lecture hall. Around me the whispers of two hundred other medical students, below me the amplified voice of the lecturer, a physiologist. For the last ten minutes the physiologist has been sharing his grievances with animal rights activists: how they’ve tried to intervene with his important work on puppy brains, how their misguided values are undermining scientific progress and – he makes sure we all make the connection – human wellbeing. I am getting increasingly infuriated. When I cannot take it anymore, I sit up and raise my hand. All heads turn toward me. With a pounding heart and a shaky voice, I say I disagree. Countless animals are forced to spend their lives in cages while alternatives to animal testing have been available for years, I explain. Surely the pharmaceutical and medical industry can do better? After my monologue, the hall is silent. Then, without responding, the physiologist turns away and proceeds with his presentation. I am still shaking when he warns his audience: “If you’re against animal experiments, you don’t belong in medical school.” (Non-linear memory #1, 2004) In this essay, I try to come to terms with a paradox that has pulled at me for two decades: the phenomenon whereby many of us depend on formal medical care institutions for our health and wellbeing, while at the same time we collectively experience these institutions as damaging, harmful,

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and inequitable. I orient toward this tension as an insider-outsider, because biomedicine and I go way back. We first met in 2000, when I was a socialistleaning 17-year old with high hopes of changing the world. The most obvious place to start, I thought, would be medical school. I imagined myself as a good-doing doctor, attentively listening to heart beats, skillfully applying bandages, putting a gentle hand on a sad shoulder, and although I was slightly worried about what my future colleagues would think of my tattoos, these positive images persisted long after I first witnessed medical injustice. But I never became a physician. I dropped out of medical school unceremoniously several months after starting my clinical internship. The Anthropology Master I received during a much-needed time away from the hospital allowed me to do a PhD in Public Health. Soon I found myself researching health disparities, teaching ethics and humanities to reluctant medical students, and processing my frustration with the medical system by writing abstract academic papers.1 But, as hard as I tried, I could not heal. My stint in medicine had left me with a chronic bad taste and a mouth full of “why’s”.

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As long as I can remember, I have turned toward and away from clinical medicine. Toward, because clinical reasoning and patient care excite me. As a child I used to love hospitals: the quiet hallways, the smell of bleach, the robed shuffling of patients. Away, because I have heard and told too many accounts of harm done.2 Kitchen tables, birthday parties and corridor chats with students have been my excavation sites for stories that reveal how encounters with the healthcare system have left many bruised, if not broken. For years I have been trying to wrap my head around the reality that an institution whose claim to fame is “care” has such

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a consistent and sorted history of producing risk environments. Biomedical practice today is built on inherited harm: it is saturated with knowledge imperialism, toxic positivism, scientific racism, and institutionalised misogyny.3 For too many marginalised groups, the medical system is a violent system. Two decades after I started medical school, my patience has worn thin. I now long to give words to the malign, below-the-skin proliferations, whose effects appear at the surface of medicine’s societal reputation only as an insignificant scratch. Words that help me give meaning to mine and others’ experiences of ontological and epistemic injustice and of straightforward physical precariousness in the medical system. Perhaps harmacy could be one of those words. In this essay I introduce harmacies as a visual imaginative for understanding adverse experiences in medical institutions. I orient inwards to investigate the painful distortion of practices that are sold to us as care and healing. Harmacies, I propose, are spatially arranged infraconstructures of harm that occur within care institutions as active production sites of violent not-care; in a harmacy, what we would generally understand as caring or soothing is inversely and absently twisted. I construct harmacies through my own lived experience, because systemic violence affects at the level of the individual. Hence, drawing from an archive of personal memories, I will articulate how medical harm came into my view, how I have learned to perceive it, and how I came to need restoration. Although I envision harmacies through a queer theoretical lens, the distinction I make between care and not-care is hierarchical, oppositional, perhaps even divisive. I will use the word ‘violent’ more than once. I will not be nuanced when nuance perhaps would be more appropriate. However, at the end

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of it all, I promise to think with harmacies from a place of questioning. The harmacy in the lecture hall is tunnelshaped and bouncy, the color of meat. It throbs and pulses. I feel small. Sounds are muzzled: nervous swallows, arrhythmias, absorbed echoes. I know I am at an epicenter. A machine zooms and whizzes. It makes a copy, and then a copy of a copy. My throat scrapes. I warn one of the copy-makers that the image is getting blurrier with every new copy. They look at me puzzled, say the copy is crystal clear. The zooming and whizzing gets louder. I panic, shout “BLURRY!” but my voice disappears into the harmacy’s thickness. Then a sudden, devastating quiet. When my body hits the swampy floor, I pick up a new frequency. I curl up, lick my lips, listen: hushed voices, swallowed tongues, held breaths. Slowly but steadily, the harmacy is filling to the brim with silence. 0. Blood and shattered bone Anatomy of the harmacy Cranial (toward the head) The harmacy is an organ, a space-within-a-space. Harmacies are enmeshed with care institutions: they cannot exist without them, only grow as part of them. The institution is the harmacy, and the harmacy is the institution.

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Caudal (toward the tail) Harmacies emerge in a care void, where they establish as the production site of not-care.4 Not-care is not care. The harmacy is a negative space.

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Ventral (toward the belly) Harmacies are not born from individual errors or flaws. They are collectively driven: there are no harmacists. Dorsal (toward the back) Some harmacies appear suddenly, without warning. Others have always been there, tucked away or translucently hiding in sight. Proximal (closer) Each harmacy connects to others through a network of shared practices, principles and truths. Tracing back a harmacy’s roots leads you to a single tawny string.5 Anti-harmacy campaigns might stop the local production of not-care, but will never eradicate the master radix. Distal (further) When harmacies linger, they rapidly divide and multiply. 2. Dare not say it hurts I am standing next to a hospital bed at an oncology ward. The patient is the drummer in our rickety punk band, one of my best friends. We write song lyrics on napkins and fall asleep together in the tour bus, dance to ‘Push It’, and hold friend-hands under the table. She dares and laughs and beams. But these days her light is dim: her body is hijacked by an evil tumor. A morphine bandage covers the tattoo on her arm. Some days are so bad the nurse tells me it is better to leave. On good days, my friend complains about the strawberry-

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flavoured energy drinks and the cheap dairy desserts. She goes to a Reiki healer, and is outspokenly vegan and active in the animal rights movement. She hates the pale food on the recurring plastic trays, hates not knowing what enters her body through the IV in her arm. In an attempt to get our identity back, I massage her feet with Ayurveda oil, talk about my crushes, and buy her a record she likes.6 But all touch and sound hurts. I sob on my way to get watery coffee, then read to her from a children’s book. When she dies a few weeks later, I collapse on the floor of my queer share house room. (non-linear memory #2, June 2007) I had imagined the future of our intimacy differently. Our band just recorded an album. She had a ticket for a Björk concert. We would get tattooed together. If futures lie in the hands of DNA – if our mortal connection was meant to end this way – I had wanted that end to be brighter, closer, bolder. I opened yellow-striped curtains and pulled straws out of cups, but wherever I looked I lost focus of her. Visitor schedules. Lukewarm black tea. Boiled potatoes or mash. In all the white rooms I searched, everyone suffered the same. Who she was before she came in did not seem to matter. The inked skin of her back, invisible against the mattress, revealed her heart in an optimistic ‘VEGAN’. I knew most of her doctors would never read it, let alone understand what that word represented. I was tracking a collapsing body in a negative pressure room.

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Twelve years later, I understand her hospital stay as a harmacy. I understand it as violent and forceful, even though everyone involved in delivering the hospital’s products – nurses, doctors, dietitians

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– gave their best efforts to help her win her fight. And so it is not her death, or the collective incapacity to prevent it, that my harmacy contains. It is the massive loss of self in the medical system, the structural erasure of her embodied and experiential knowledge through neutralised, universalised and objectivised biomedical practices that lies at the heart of the harm done.7 Abstractions come to mind. Evidence-based medicine. Randomised controlled trials. P-values. This harmacy, like all harmacies, hates complexity. Normative roots thrive in normative soil. My friend simply was too deviant. In its bedside incarnation, biomedicine caters to a ‘norm patient’, a standardised average that is believed to represent all bodies, experiences, and preferences. But this ‘norm patient’, dutifully accepting biomedicine’s truisms – veganism is unhealthy, traditional methods of healing are ineffective, animal rights activists are misguided – is an invention of the dualist order it claims to benefit from, an idea construed from an ideology that derives reality from means, medians and modi.8 Words I heard many say un-ironically: ‘quackery’, ‘troublesome’, ‘woolly’. My friend was a victim of statistical ideology trickled down into patient care. As far as the system knew, she either was wrong, or did not exist. This harmacy is a giant. Looming large, it is spherically shaped and has thick, metal walls. First, I don’t see anything. Then, a yellowy shimmer. I breathe in deep, taste the tickling smell of formaldehyde. At the centre of the harmacy stands a long, iron table. On it lies what I presume to be organs and body parts. Dreams? Lies? Discoveries? Something corrosive drips slickly from the

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table onto the floor. It has carved a sticky hole. I alert the dissector, who shakes their head and snickers. “That is not a hole”, they gesture confidently, “it is a portal”. A flash catches my eye. In a corner, another table spins and bulges. Maybe she is on it, I think. But when I move toward it, I see the table is covered in sharp metal scraps. I look up. A crack. It starts drizzling, then raining metal splinters. Above our heads, with rapid speed, the harmacy’s arc lowers and crumples. The yellow air gets thicker and condenses; I can smell its nauseating edges. I am getting closed in. A realisation: the hole is my only escape. “Jump”, laughs the dissector, “or get crushed!” They wave their knife, keep pressing the button. I have no choice. I run, slip, and slide into a rusty green darkness. 3. Nothing’s ever going to work

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I am sitting on the porch steps of a lush New Jersey home, head between my knees. I am not supposed to be here. I should be giving a presentation to the Internal Medicine department of a small Amsterdam hospital about – I look at my watch – right now. I realise I have just dropped out of medical school. I want to cry. I lift my head from my knees. My soon-to-turn physically abusive American girlfriend comes to check on me. She has been gaslighting me since we started dating and I am in a perpetual state of stress, but, in a classic Stockholm move, I came all the way out here to save our relationship. I am not doing so well. In the weeks after, I wait for a compassionate call from

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the internship program, a check in about what is going on with me and what I need to get back on track. The call never comes. (non-linear memory #3, Summer 2009) Reading this vignette still induces in me a burning shame-nausea. It is not the gaslighting I am ashamed of, or the fact that I stayed in an abusive relationship for way too long9. The nausea is caused by my failure to succeed as a medical student. The nausea tells me this is another harmacy. A harmacy that turns into a proposition: caring for students is antithetical to the system’s functioning, because injustice is conditional to preserve the normative processes that keep medical hierarchies in place. Is saying that I was double-victimised too self-pitying?10 The white coat does not fit everyone. Systemic dropout of students and doctors is often referred to as “the leaky pipeline”.11 Tons of research money has been spent confirming what we already know: it is not the ‘traditional’ students with plenty of social, class or white capital that do the leaking here12. Inequality of opportunity drives the medical system. Gendered, racialised and classed pushout mechanisms are solidly built in to the educational and work environment, and have constructed medical professionalism as synonymous to white masculinity; medical knowledge is normative knowledge, and its continuous reproduction cements the power of those who produce it.13 ‘Outliers’ who cannot keep up – people with a disability, people of color, queers, people providing informal care, people living in abusive relationships – disturb the system’s order.14 Many are forced out of the kitchen, to choose other careers. The system works exactly how it is designed to work: if you cannot let the

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white coat erase you, you are too weak to wear it. Somehow, the idea that institutional TLC could have kept me on track is restorative. I imagine a special protocol that was consulted, someone working hard to retrieve my cell phone number, and invitation to speak to a queer-friendly counsellor; me trusting that counsellor enough to talk about the abuse; a reshuffling of placements, and a relieved second try. But reality was not so. I remember the feverish months after coming back to the Netherlands when I realised that I flushed a lucrative medical career down the drain and needed a job as soon as possible. Sticking with the familiar, I found administrative work at the hospital I had also interned at months before. My main goal each day was to avoid people I knew. I had not, however, anticipated that I had become somewhat of a dubious celebrity. Going up on the elevator armed with a stack of binders, a white-coated intern I did not know stared at me, then said: “Aren’t you the one who quit?” Put on the spot and panic-flushed, I answered “Well yes, yes but I am going to start a PhD soon anyway.” I did not add that I had emailed my application letter only a few days ago. Retching with shame, I got off at the next floor. The harmacy is an elevator. 4. It’s just the beauty of the ride

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I have taken a break from medical school to play music, organise feminist punk shows and work at a health food store. Granting myself royal discounts on vegan seitan rolls, it feels like life has finally started. My best friend G., a talented bass player, applies to study Pop at the Amsterdam

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Conservatory. For auditions, he has to perform live in front of a committee and has asked me to sing for the occasion. Together we play the melodic ‘Beauty of the Ride’ off Sebadoh’s sixth album ‘Harmacy’. G. gets in to the Conservatory, excited to pursue his musician dream. I play ‘Harmacy’ on repeat, make irresponsible long-distance phone calls to my girlfriend in the UK15, and dread the moment I have to go back to medical school. (non-linear memory #4, Summer 2006) This memory gives the feeling of harmacy because I lost hope of finding happiness in medicine. So, finally, this is where queer theory comes in. As a queer body, the fear of what was yet to come felt familiar. Why expose yourself to the violence of forced adaptation if you can be more authentically known elsewhere? “You were not securely attached, because you received inconsistent care from the institution,” a therapy-savvy loved one suggested. Maybe so. What is true is that being known by queer critique granted me the hopefulness medicine had reserved for others. In retrospect, I understand my encounter with the humanities as an intimately affective, cognitive, and intellectual intervention.16 An urgent and necessary one. Experiences, like cardiovascular circulations, are closed systems. Although queer theory outfitted me with a new methodology to take the disorderly pulse of the system, there is no restoration in the here and now: my harmacies are stable and firmly rooted in the past. It is relieving, then, to imagine ‘thinking with queer’ in biomedicine as thinking with promising futures.17 Hope, like failure, is a dramatically queer endeavor.18 So without further

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ado, here’s my instruction for a three-level ecological action model of queer potentiality for the biomedical industry: MICRO Reanimate hopeful anticipation. Imagine silence as stored energy. Get energised. Find others.

MESO Collect counter narratives to protocolled quotidian pragmatism. Reveal raptures seen and unseen. Reframe medicine as a site for queer social relations. Find others.

MACRO Resist ontological certitude. Reject systematised binaries as real and valuable. Disrupt normative knowledge production and the erasure of bodies and truths. Be radically drastically accountable. Find others. Figure 1: Queer potentiality for the biomedical industry at the miso, meso and macro level.

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I am on an endless plane, where the rain pours wetly and the sun burns hot. The harmacy is a squared opportunity, a simple

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white box I could find shelter in. For hours, I drift toward it. When I finally open the door, I recoil at the doorstep. Stale air stands guard. I hesitate, seek balance with tense, remembering muscles. I realise this place has not seen a visitor in centuries. I need directions. I pat my pockets, pull out the damp map and unfold it. On it, scribbled in red ink, are two gentle words: “almost there”. Surprised, I swing my body inside. 1 Shapiro, J., et al. (2009) ‘Medical Humanities and Their Discontents: Definitions, Critiques, and Implications’, Academic Medicine, 84(2), pp. 192-198. 2 Atkins, C. G. K. (2010) My Imaginary Illness: A Journey Into Uncertainty and Prejudice in Medical Diagnosis, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 3 Perez-Rodriguez, J. & de La Fuente, A. (2017) ‘Now is the Time for a Postracial Medicine: Biomedical Research, the National Institutes of Health, and the Perpetuation of Scientific Racism’, The American Journal of Bioethics, 17(9), pp. 36-47; Sharma, M. (2019) ‘Applying Feminist Theory to Medical Education’, The Lancet, 393(10171), pp. 570-578. 4 In the harmacy, not-care is actively produced through the absence of care. I define not-care as the opposite of care: as healthcare system output that is perceived, measured, remembered, or felt as damaging by human and nonhuman subjects. After production, not-care retracts with the harmacy into the interstitial spaces of the care system’s infrastructure, informal and unmarked. Sometimes, not-care is sold as a formal ‘care product’. 5 This weed was sown during the scientific revolution, when mechanical philosophy, sexual politics, colonial expansion, and capitalist enclosures provided fertile soil for the biomedical paradigm to thrive. 6 You Say Party! We Say Die! (2007) Lose All Time [Vinyl]. Toronto: Paper Bag Records. 7 Kuper, A. & D’eon, M. (2011) ‘Rethinking the Basis of Medical Knowledge’, Medical Education, 45(1), pp. 36-43; Kuper, A., et al. (2017) ‘Epistemology, Culture, Justice and Power: Non-Bioscientific Knowledge for Medical Training’, Medical Education, 51(2), pp. 158-173. 8 My students are slightly shocked every time I tell them that, just because we can calculate an average, it does not mean it exists. When they hear that statistical effectiveness is derived from calculating mean differences, and that, looking at the bell curve, a large number of people deviate from the (treatment) norm, it severely distorts their idea of what clinical

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evidence is. Despite an educational push for the broader definition of evidence-based medicine (EBM) as also including patient preferences and physician experiences, medical discourse still propagates the concept of ‘(in)effectiveness’ as uncomplicated and universally true. 9 The main emotions here are rage, regret, and self-love. 10 In many ways, I was born into normativity: I experience few sociostructural disadvantages that mark me as ‘Other’, and those that do I can conceal. I therefore understand my dropping out of medical school and the ensuing academic opportunities I enjoyed as ‘privileged irresponsibility’ (Zembylas, M., Bozalek, V., & Shefer, T. (2014) ‘Tronto’s Notion of Privileged Irresponsibility and the Reconceptualisation of Care: Implications for Critical Pedagogies of Emotion in Higher Education’, Gender and Education, 26(3), pp. 200-214); my class and race privilege provided a safety net which allowed me to emerge from the consequences of my circumstances and choices relatively unharmed. 11 This analogy is in itself problematic, because it visualises the dropout as a passive process instead of an active one. 12 Upshur, C. C., et al. (2018) ‘The Health Equity Scholars Program: Innovation in the Leaky Pipeline’, Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities, 5(2), pp. 342-350; Avakame, E. F., et al. (2021), ‘Antiracism in Academic Medicine: Fixing the Leaky Pipeline of Black Physicians’, ATS Scholar, 2(2), doi.10.34197/ats-scholar.2020-0133PS; ‘Diversity, Equality and Individuality’, in Dent. J., Harden, R. and Hunt, D. (eds.) A Practical Guide for Medical Teachers, E-Book, Elsevier Health Sciences, pp. 463-470. 13 Spurlin, W. J. (2019), ‘Queer Theory and Biomedical Practice: The Biomedicalization of Sexuality/the Cultural Politics of Biomedicine’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 40(1), pp. 7-20. As Philomena Essed has so eloquently described, the process of “cloning the physician” reveals the self-referential mechanisms that reify professional normativity and promote cultural homogeneity (Essed, P. (2005) ‘Gendered Preferences in Racialized Spaces: Cloning the Physician’ in Murji, K. & Solomos, J. (eds) Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 227-247). Biases show up in hiring practices, where quality is recognised especially in candidates that look and act like the ones in charge of the hiring; classed performances such as sharing about expensive holidays, then, become an unwritten and unspoken ingredient for success (Leyerzapf, H., et al. (2018) ‘“We Are All So Different that it is Just… Normal.” Normalization Practices in an Academic Hospital in the Netherlands’, Scandinavian Journal of Management, 34(2), pp. 141-150). Masculinist work ethics create unsafe work floors and educational environments for those whose bodies and everyday realities do not or cannot adapt to the expectation of working long shifts, ignoring abuse, or hiding emotions and personal lives (Choo, E. K., et al. (2019) ‘From #MeToo to #TimesUp in Health Care: Can a Culture of Account-

Hinterlands ability End Inequity and Harassment?’ The Lancet, 393(10171), pp. 499-502; Godthelpt, J., et al. (2020) ‘Self-care of Caregivers: Self-Compassion in a Population of Dutch Medical Students and Residents’, MedEdPublish, 9(1), doi. 10.15694/mep.2020.000222.1). 14 I have encountered, and sometimes informally mentored, many such ‘outliers’: students who, like me, felt they did not belong in medicine. 15 Long distance calling was very expensive in 2006! 16 The humanities provided me with new ways of knowing, but it also gave me permission to embrace what I already knew. I am profoundly shaped by biomedicine, by anthropology, sociology and philosophy, by art, music and literature, by my own experiences and those of patients and research respondents. I am an amalgamation of both positivism and constructivism. And if that is a disaster story, then at least I want to watch the movie. 17 Muñoz, J. E. (2019) Cruising Utopia, New York: New York University Press. 18 Is this reference still fashionable? Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure, Durham: Duke University Press.

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Eliza Steinbock & Imara Limon

Doing Intersectional New Museology: A Conversation on “Outside” Activists, Artists, and Curators from the “Inside” of Heritage

Eliza Steinbock & Imara Limon

This written dialogue is adapted from a public conversation between Imara Limon, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Amsterdam Museum, and Eliza Steinbock, Associate Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies in Maastricht University’s Literature and Art Department, that took place during an ARIAS network meet-up titled ‘The Shadow of Knowledge’ on October 25, 2019, at the University of Amsterdam.1

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Limon and Steinbock are both trained in the practice of cultural analysis, a research community devoted to the comparative and interdisciplinary study of culture (in different forms and expression) from a critical humanities perspective. While Limon works primarily as a curator and Steinbock as an academic researcher, in this conversation, they will be discussing the ways in which their work often meets and overlaps, particularly around new museological practices that have been born from activist and participatory forms of heritage-making. Their work engages with archival and museological practices in order to try to affirm ‘shadow’ or subaltern knowledges. With renewed force and ‘outside’ feedback from activist groups and grassroots organisations, Limon and Steinbock aim to reshape institutions and the narratives they tell. Taking the particular case of the ‘New Narratives’ programme at the Amsterdam Museum and the research programme of ‘The Critical Visitor: Intersectional Approaches for Rethinking and Retooling Accessibility and Inclusivity in Heritage Spaces’ (2020-2025) funded by the Dutch Research Council, as starting points for their conversation, they hash out the tensions between professional applied knowledge, and ‘emergent-’ or ‘community-knowledge’. How can initiatives in the Dutch cultural sector become more intersectional, in the sense of developing multi-issue approaches to inclusion and accessibility?

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Imara Limon This morning, De Volkskrant was reporting on the reopening of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York after they made changes to their permanent presentations, which it connected to similar developments in museums in the Netherlands.2 Here, many museums have started to think about their social identities while asking: “How can we become more relevant to a broader spectrum of the people in a society?” For me, there’s a first step to reflection: self-reflection. No longer accepting the explanation of museums or art spaces to be neutral places, but looking at where their tradition comes from, and how these institutions can act accordingly. For me, cultural analysis is something that helps me to reflect in that sense, and to see that ‘the things we do’ are not ‘the truth’, but operate within specific contexts and disciplines. The discussion about intersectionality has grown quite a lot. Five years ago, the debate was focused on ‘diversity’: is diversity necessary, and aren’t we diverse already? Today, it seems we are already a few steps ahead, because now we’re thinking about how to do this, what it means, and for whom. Eliza Steinbock Before we get into more detail about what the ‘New Narratives’ programme does, maybe I could ask you about the connection between working across different disciplines and, of course, your own training in different disciplines. How does the ‘New Narratives’ programme work with voices that are in disagreement, or offer different perspectives from outside the institution or museum? Do you feel that these ‘counter-voices’ are in conflict, or are competing with specific disciplines you are working in?

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IL It is so important to talk more about these ‘counter-voices’ and what they mean. They are interpreted in different ways: as the people critiquing what museums and cultural professionals do, or as the ‘other’ that needs to be explained. How relevant are museums if they are unable to attract a more diverse range of visitors? But what do voices from outside the institution or museum actually mean to articulate or achieve? What are their aims? Is the goal to be represented by the institution, or is it to rewrite history? What are the risks, or what is the impact that you want, or do not want, to achieve? For example, within my own practice inside an institution like the Amsterdam Museum, the discussion tends to be about welcoming other voices and perspectives, but not with the anticipation that it might fundamentally change the institution itself. ‘Counter-voices’ or ‘outside-voices’ add to, and, more importantly, break open and re-construct the narratives that are already present, in order to make them more visible. ES I’m reminded of an essay by Jonathan Culler on the point of cultural analysis, which provided me great relief in his advice that cultural analysis helps us realise that ‘mastery’ is not the point.3 That you can read endlessly and still feel that ambition of wanting to know more and more and more; when it comes down to your relationship to knowledge, the ideal of ‘mastery’ should be replaced by curiosity-driven research. What do you make of this problem of establishing epistemological mastery? Do you think it resonates with what the museum should be doing, or who they should be speaking for?

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IL The Amsterdam Museum collection consists of over a hundred thousand objects, ranging from textiles and paintings to furniture and contemporary art, as well as many post-war gifts to mayors of Amsterdam and pieces from councillors with relations abroad. An important part of the collection consists of heritage and artefacts from the 17th Century, when Amsterdam was at its height during the so-called “Golden Age”, as Dutch historical narratives tend to claim. Amsterdam was regarded as one of the world’s most important centres of trade, known for its achievements in the fields of art, science, and armed forces. But this is only one, albeit very dominant, perspective on this city’s history. To be able to talk about these narratives, you need to first identify them as being embedded in certain ideologies, rather than as being “truths”. As an art historian, it’s difficult to write and position yourself outside of an embedded ideology, because that’s what you’ve been studying at the University, or have been taught at school. So, how does one value other forms of knowledge, and include the experiences of people who might have been on the other side of history: for example, the perspective of former colonies of the Netherlands? I think the first step is to see where you can have a common ground, a common understanding of the relevance of other perspectives of this history. I think we’ve seen it very recently at the Amsterdam Museum, where we announced that we would no longer use the term “Golden Age” as a synonym for this period in time. Of course, the point is not to ban this as a forbidden word, but to reflect on it: what does it mean? Why do we need this narrative to be a label for this art? Is it accurate for this history? What does it mean to which people?

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ES What do you feel your ‘New Narratives’ programme does to affirm, and maybe even to excavate or recuperate, subaltern knowledges or those that are not deemed authoritative? IL Our ‘New Narratives’ programme is based on the idea of ‘de-centering’ knowledge institutions, so as to avoid being only an authoritative voice explaining artefacts, or being the final gatekeeper that decides which histories can be taught. I started working at the Museum three years ago as a guest curator for the exhibition project ‘Black Amsterdam’ (2016), a participatory programme during the very first ‘Black Achievement Month’ (a month celebrating Black history) that the Netherlands had in October 2016. The exhibition, part of the participatory programme, was about ‘Black role models’. We asked people to come to the museum and engage with with this theme. This led to a much larger discussion which I hadn’t expected, because the question of “Who are role models?”, to me, was quite straightforward, but apparently the question of “What is Black in the Netherlands?” was more complicated. We discussed whether Black role models had to be based in Amsterdam, or needed to have a connection to Amsterdam. And, what even is the concept of “Amsterdam”? Is it the borders of the city? Is it also the formerly occupied territories of the Netherlands during previous centuries.

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All of these questions needed to be considered, also beyond this temporary exhibition. They need to be continuously asked. So we started ‘New Narratives’ to think about these questions outside the museum

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as well. We wanted to avoid limiting this to being a conversation between only curators and educators, who are all trained similarly within specific institutions and have too similar an approach to art, history, and methodologies for research. So, the key element was to collaborate outside our bubble, but how do you do this? ES Was this a way for you to introduce a difference of opinion or interpretation? IL Yes, I think so. There are different steps. The first step was to hear different perspectives, and to publicly acknowledge that they exist. This acknowledgement contains a critical layer. These perspectives can be articulated inside the museum, mentioned in meetings, and we can even discuss it amongst staff. But what action do we then take further? Is there a follow-up action or directive? If you invite ten people to share their opinions about a certain way of framing a historic narrative, do you just say “Thank you for your input!” each time? When is the moment that you decide to actually act upon it? And who is allowed to do that? As a curator at a museum, you’re still this gatekeeper deciding when something is relevant information or not, so the authority is still there. So, in advance, there needs to be a structure that is based on a form of co-authorship that is able to push further into changing the working habits of a museum, externalising its authority in public space. ES It sounds very difficult to start bringing people in to challenge the museum’s authority, authorship, and ownership. Do you have an example of some sort of radical openness that you tried, in terms of opening the

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museum up to become a ‘participatory museum’? In order to make more concrete what this practice could involve, for example? IL Well, something that’s often been said about the trend of the ‘participatory museum’ is that we have been doing this for decades. At the Amsterdam Museum, we’ve always collaborated with people in the city: we have always done participatory projects, and tried to be explicitly welcoming to everyone. It’s a city museum that aims to be there for everyone. But the next question would be: “What does it mean for someone to actually feel welcome?” And when do you decide if “everyone” is actually welcome? If you want to be welcoming to a large audience, you need to ensure that you put yourself in a position where you have no choice but to take action. ES I can relate this to the rather sensitive statement of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who studied Dutch History, who publically said in Parliament that he thinks it’s “nonsense” that the “Golden Age” is not used as a title in one of the Amsterdam Museum’s exhibitions!4 The question for me here is not just about the narratives that are arbitrarily part of the Amsterdam Museum. They are a part of “common sense”, or a kind of natural attitude that is deeply embedded in white supremacy and an elitism of a certain sort that denies the reality of enslavement, poverty, and imperialist extraction that was happening during the same period. How does narratology, one of the strands of cultural analysis, a strand that seems to be related the ‘New

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Narratives’ programme, deal with the plurality of voices, or what we might call “focalisers” in the museum? IL This is a difficult question, because it almost assumes that by being an institution that is open to everyone, or by arguing that there are dominant narratives to be changed, that the ‘voice’ of the museum itself also needs to change. Next to an understanding and willingness to achieve this, you also need a strategy. The only thing is: what makes us act upon all this intersectional, polyvocal knowledge? So, I found that interdisciplinarity doesn’t just take place theoretically, between these disciplines of history, art, and narratology, but it also has a very practical side when confronted with intersectional voices. By actually making it a priority to exhibit intersectional insights among the diversity of experiences and perspectives (for example, of a particular period, such as the 17th Century), it also becomes part of a policy plan. It becomes part of what a management team also needs to agree on, not only to the argument being posed for acting, but also in relation to the question of how to act upon it, because it has financial and other practical consequences. ES So the rationale for adjusting the “focaliser”, or the affect-laden voice and perspective of the museum, needs to be formalised? IL Yes, in the long-term policy plans. But also – and that’s something very interesting – I found that social media is a pressure point. Being part of the public debate catches the attention of museum authorities such as upper management and government workers, who then put these topics on the agenda. So as much as I’d

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like to theorise more on why it would be important to become more inclusive, I found it doesn’t work that way. In my experience, it works the other way around: we have to be practical and find more pressure points to actually enact on these changes. Let me clarify this in relation to the function of the ‘New Narratives’ programme. On the outside, it consists of public programmes: it enables difficult conversations, and, because we encourage colleagues to participate in the events together with the public, the discussions and voices are immediately brought into the institutional setting. This adds to our awareness of our ways of working, our selection of texts and images: all kinds of things that are considered “problematic”, or could be improved. So it is a learning process for the institution as well, and a pressure point to generate action. Institutions don’t act upon something only when the knowledge is there; rather, they act upon it because of applied pressure on the institution from outside.

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ES During this final round of our conversation, I want to ask you about practicing solidarity with ‘counter-voices’ or ‘outsidevoices’. Do you feel yourself as a kind of “critical visitor” to your own institution? I use the word “visitor” here, and I don’t just mean people who come in to the museum, pay their tickets and go and have a tour inside the museum. The term “visitor” itself suggests a kind of passing through, maybe some nonchalance, or a lack of responsibility as to how things are being presented. But it can also suggest a kind of detachment, that could perhaps even be on purpose, like taking critical distance, or a kind of consciousness regarding the fact that “I’m not really a part of this, I’m just a visitor here.”

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IL Yes, and no. On the one hand, yes, because I find it very important to hand out a key to different people and communities to be in dialogue with the institution. But I also know, as a former student trained here at one of the centres of Western Art History, that I am not at all a critical visitor: I reproduce many of the narrative assumptions. I might have a different skin colour or parents who were born abroad, but I also realise that being born and raised within this tradition brings many blind spots. ES So your own kind of knowledge-map itself is very much in sync with the dominant “native” white Dutch norms? IL I think we should all be self-reflective in that sense. It’s much too easy to say that “I’m here (as a person of colour) now, so we can present ourselves as a super diverse institution.” We’re not at all there yet, just by virtue of my presence on the team. ES Indeed, tokenisation is no shortcut to actual transformation and change. I think this kind of “heritage work” that identifies the ideologies of collection and display practices does typically call out for the necessity for internal discussions and dialogue. But you have said that one of the biggest pressure points is through the museum’s self-representation and reputation, or how it appears to the external world. It seems to me that you have described both a kind of ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ work version of doing inclusion: light work involves hiring and building up internal awareness, while the heavy work involves setting priorities to change actual working habits and define collaborations. Do you agree with the critique that it can

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just be a discursive ploy to say, “Yes, we are open and we are inclusive”, since this rarely seems to match up with the internal mechanisms or turmoil over leadership and decision-making? IL Yes, maybe. I think it also means finding very concrete examples of histories that we don’t know. That’s why our collaboration on the consortium research project that you are leading, ‘The Critical Visitor: Intersectional Approaches for Rethinking & Retooling Accessibility and Inclusivity in Heritage Spaces’, which we are doing over the next five years, is so important. Past collaborations helped enormously to imagine how a visitor could be persuaded to look differently at a certain time period. It seems very logical, but we have to move away from the common-sense or ‘normative’ perspective of white Dutch people to do this work. It’s difficult. Maybe within academic fields, where we reflect all the time on these plural ethnic histories, it is almost obvious. But in daily practice at our museum, it’s sometimes unimaginable that somebody could feel or experience their colonial history in a different way. So how do you make that shift in perspective accessible to all of your audience, including people who are not thinking about this every day?

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ES Well, on the topic of trying to shift perspectives, I, for example, advised the Museum of World Culture’s Tropenmuseum on an exhibition called ‘What A Genderful World’ (2019-2020), which for me involved three meetings.5 The first was just with the curatorial team, no marketing members where included, which was very interesting. They kept talking about “Well marketing hasn’t come up with a title yet”, and I thought: “Wow, that seems backwards!” I think it’s really

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important to know “how the sausage gets made”, so to speak, so you realise where you can make a difference in the process of decision-making. I was impressed with the kind of stamina it took for the curators to really put their ideas on par with the expertise and embodied knowledge of the people that were invited for an advisory sounding board. This group included Mounir Samuel and Aynouk Tan, people of colour who come from queer and trans communities, and other specialists in feminism. During the two closed roundtable discussions I attended, there was a lot of feedback about the title, the conception, the selection of materials, and even the infrastructure of the building (particularly the accessibility of toilets for non-binary and trans people). I do think it’s really an interesting kind of case study of how all of these different audiences were considered to have certain interests and knowledge. We learned that the Tropenmuseum staff believes their typical visitor is very young and very old. They said something like, “Well the general [white] Dutch person coming here expects something, so how can we challenge that? How can we make it educational?” What they ended up doing is using a lot of questions to prompt reflection on gender and sexual norms for each culture represented within the exhibition, instead of providing didactic explanations in their text. This was, I think, a good decision to address people who have rarely, if ever, considered their own gender and how it intersects with cultural and racial forms of ‘commonsense’. It was less exciting and dynamic for a visitor like me though, even if I appreciated not being preached to. So I think this threshold where programming, education, and curation meet seems to be a really important “edge of knowledge” for making things both practical and reflective.

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IL And marketing is important. Because, who is this visitor? If you want to become a more inclusive institution, you cannot make exhibitions or projects just for either tourists or families anymore. ES I want to ask if you have any thoughts on one more topic, because I have used the words “stamina” and “endurance”, and they are both related to resilience. Is resilience something that you’re thinking about institutionally? For instance, in the case of responding to the harsh criticism of sucessfully changing an exhibition title, and removing the phrase the “Golden Age”? IL I think we find a lot of expectations, or hope, that becoming more inclusive is something very positive; but no, not everyone feels that way. Inclusion, I think, will be irrelevant until it hurts, until it becomes uncomfortable. So I believe resilience is required beforehand to keep searching for this place of pain, and to continue when we find it. When that happens, I’ll be happy, because although it’s exhausting work, it’s going somewhere. It’s very promising in that sense.

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ES Yes, it is. But does this mean that there’s a cost to doing this work? First, somebody must be hurt. Pressure might be meted out, perhaps unevenly administered or felt. Maybe resilience in and around cultural institutions, in the practising of intersectional new museology, is engendered in the (potential) damage not just to reputations, but to the shattering of worldviews. It could be interesting to further consider the ways in which resilience names this compromise: to articulate one’s hurt or be drained of energy, in order to place enough pressure on an institution to enact

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deconstructive programmes. Institutions can do this through appropriating the pain and converting it into a more generalised caring response. While resilience, in this case, seems to fall into the neoliberal bind of individualising struggle, I think the ways you have outlined arranging for collaborative, participatory musem practices demonstrates the need to establish solidarity to more evenly share the burden of speaking pain to power. Perhaps then we can also extend this solidarity practice to include sharing ways of expressing care towards people, which should always take precedence over managing “damage control” of an institution’s reputation. 1 The authors wish to thank Nienke Scholts, program coordinator of ARIAS, for her invitation to take part in the day and for the support and gifting of freedom for our conversation. 2 Pontzen, R. (2019) ‘Musea hebben te lang met hun rug naar de wereld gestaan en zijn bezig aan een inhaalrace’ (“Museums have been standing too long with their backs to the world and are starting to catch up to it”), De Volkskrant, 24 October. Available at: https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-media/ musea-hebben-te-lang-met-hun-rug-naar-de-wereld-gestaanen-zijn-bezig-aan-een-inhaalrace~baa9b162/. 3 Culler, J. (2014), ‘Introduction: What’s the point?’ in Bal, M. & Boer, I. (eds.) The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, New York, Continuum. 4 See the quote included in this news article by Corder, M. (2019), ‘Museum Says Not Everything Glittered in Dutch “Golden Age”’, AP News, 13 September. Available at: https://apnews.com/5cad35e819b243329906ccb92d787f64 5 See the overview of the exhibition at the Tropenmuseum’s website: https://www.tropenmuseum.nl/en/ whats-on/exhibitions/what-genderful-world

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About the Authors

Paula Albuquerque is an artist and scholar, the Head of the Master’s in Artistic Research programme at the University of Amsterdam, and a Senior Researcher at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She has shown artwork at the Nieuw Dakota Gallery, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Bradwolff Projects Gallery (Amsterdam), International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Sheffield DOC|Fest. She has published the books Enter the Ghost Haunted Media Ecologies (solo exhibition project book 2020) and The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). She also regularly presents at conferences, such as the Media in Transition, MIT, and Visible Evidence, School of Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles. She obtained a Postdoc in Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam. Jeroen Boomgaard is Professor of Art & Public Space at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. He leads the research group LAPS that focuses on notions of public domain and ‘publicness’, and the role of art and design in relation to these. He is in charge of the NWO/SIA-funded research project ‘Contemporary Commoning’, a collaboration between the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, University of Amsterdam, and Studio Rene Boer. He was Program Manager at ARIAS from 2017 until 2021. Until 2020, he was head of the Research Master’s in Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam. Boomgaard is also a member of the Stadscuratorium of the City of Amsterdam and of the City of Leiden.

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Katie Clarke is a London- and Amsterdam-based writer, vegan thinker, and caretaker, who is currently the editor for the platform ARIAS.amsterdam responsible for the presentation,

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communication, and coordination of its thematics. Next to this she works within restaurants as a vegan cook and as an advertising copywriter for various brands. Her current interest lies in exploring experimental publishing practices and refining her journalistic techniques. Katie obtained her MA in New Media and Digital Culture from the University of Amsterdam and BA in Creative Advertising from the University of the Arts London: London College of Communication. Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca is Lector and Head of DAS Graduate School at the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts in the Netherlands. Her books include: The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy (Routledge, 2020) and Encounters in Performance Philosophy (Palgrave, 2014), both co-edited with Alice Lagaay; Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance (Palgrave, 2012); Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics (Intellect, 2013), co-edited with Will Daddario; and Deleuze and Performance (Edinburgh, 2009). She is a founding core convener of the international research network, Performance Philosophy, the joint series editor of the Performance Philosophy book series with Rowman & Littlefield, and an editor of the open access Performance Philosophy journal. Carlo De Gaetano is a designer and researcher at the Visual Methodologies Collective, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS), specialising in data visualisation for social research. He is researching how climate change is represented and discussed online through digital and visual methods. He is also conducting experiments in (machine) learning from climate fiction in literature,

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cinema, and social media, exploring how people imagine the future with a changing climate through participatory practices. He collaborates as information designer with the Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam, contributing to studies on climate visual vernaculars and climate movements. At the Digital Society School (AUAS), Carlo has been coaching international and interdisciplinary teams on projects about climate change solutions, climate activism, and climate misinformation. Andy Dockett is a researcher and designer with the Visual Methodologies Collective, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS), where his current work focuses on climate imaginaries and storytelling. With his colleague Carlo De Gaetano, he has been using machine learning and language models to research climate fiction and the portrayal of climate disaster in popular culture. He also has a strong interest in data visualisation and has developed impact assessment projects and digital platforms for environmental NGOs and governmental organisations. Prior to joining the Visual Methodologies Collective, Andy has worked in the creative industries in the Latin American region, and his latest projects are based on visualising the socio-environmental impacts of nature-based solutions to the climate crisis with Climate Cleanup and dutch provincial governments.

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Sher Doruff works in the visual, digital, and performance arts in a variety of capacities. For the past twenty years her work has been situated in the expanded field of artistic research practice as an artist, writer, tutor, mentor, and supervisor. Her research practice explores fabulation and fictive approaches to writing in and through artistic research. She mentors the THIRD program

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at the DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam University of the Arts, collaborating with 3rd cycle/PhD artist researchers. Her novella Last Year at Betty and Bob’s An Actual Occasion (2021) completes the Betty and Bob trilogy, published by 3Ecologies/punctum books. She has published numerous texts in academic and artistic contexts. Raoul Frese is the initiator of the laboratory ‘Biohybrid Solar Cells’ at the VU Amsterdam where he and his team investigate the possibilities to interconnect photosynthetic materials to (semi-)conducting substrates for biosensors and solar energy harvesting. Next to this, he is Director of the VU Art Science Laboratory Hybrid Forms, where he and his team actively investigate transdisciplinary research methodologies, called artscience. Frese is also a member of the VU Art committee. Frese has previously led investigative research at Leiden University, Rutgers University, and University of Amsterdam with the NWO (Vidi) grant. He also holds a Postdoc in Nanobiophysics from the University of Twente. Imara Limon is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Amsterdam Museum. Her work includes the exhibitions Black Amsterdam (2016), Monument of Regents: Natasja Kensmil (2020-21), the biennial Refresh Amsterdam (202021) and The Amsterdam Museum and the Colonial Past (upcoming, February 2022). Limon developed the New Narratives program for advancing equity in the Amsterdam Museum. In 2017 she was awarded the National Museum Talent Prize. In the summer of 2018, she was curator-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City. She is also Creative Director at

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About the Authors

the Foundation Amsterdam 750, and a member of the Board of Trustees of Centraal Museum Utrecht. John Miers’s Miers recent comic-based work deals with his experience of living with multiple sclerosis. His first comic on this topic, So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, was produced during a Postdoctoral residency in the University of the Arts London’s Archives and Special Collections Centre at the London College of Communication, and was voted “Best One-Shot” in the 2020 Broken Frontier awards. Other recent and forthcoming publications in comic form include contributions to The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2021) and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (2021); and in prose, chapters in Seeing Comics Through Art History: Alternative Approaches to the Form (Palgrave 2022) and Representing Acts of Violence in Comics (Routledge 2019). He is Lecturer in Illustration at Kingston School of Art and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins. Maaike Muntinga works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Ethics, Law and Humanities of Amsterdam UMC. She studied Medicine, and has received a Master’s in Medical Anthropology and Epidemiology and a PhD in Medicine. Her research focuses on the investigation of gender, sex, and sexuality in the context of healthcare. Maaike gets inspired by the complex relationship between theory and (clinical) practice. She currently explores how thinking with queer theory and intersectionality can help find unexpected answers to difficult healthcare questions.

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Sabine Niederer is Professor of the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, where she specialises

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in visual, digital, and participatory methods for social research. Next to this, since January 2021, she is also the Programme Manager for ARIAS. In 2014, Sabine founded the Citizen Data Lab as a place to build collaborations between researchers from other research groups, students, issue professionals, local communities, artists, designers, and developers to work on participatory mappings of local issues. Sabine is also Coordinator of the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam. Ektor Ntourakos is an artist and urban geographer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His practice includes interventions in the urban public space, installations, and the creation of situations. His research focuses on the urban public space and the practices, actions, and chains of actions that occur in it. He approaches public space as a social phenomenon which is an emergent property of practices. Social practice theories, assemblage theories and agonistic politics are important elements of his work. Špela Petrič is a Ljubljana- and Amsterdam-based new media artist who has been trained in the natural sciences and holds a PhD in Biology, currently working as a Postdoc researcher at the Smart Hybrid Forms Lab at VU Amsterdam. Her artistic practice combines the natural sciences, wet biomedia practices, and performance, and critically examines the limits of anthropocentrism via multi-species endeavours. Petrič has received several awards, such as the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement (Slovenia), the Bioart and Design Award (Netherlands), and an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria).

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About the Authors

Prof. dr. Erik Rietveld is Socrates Professor and Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam (AMC/Department of Philosophy/ ILLC/Brain & Cognition) and is a Founding Partner of RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances]. RAAAF is a multidisciplinary and experimental studio that makes site-specific art installations at the crossroads of visual art, architecture, and philosophy. Ilse van Rijn is an Art Historian and writer. Rethinking the traditional, gendered relationships between the legible and the visible, theory and practice, words and things, her research focuses on the materiality of language in relation to feminist thought in a more-than-human world. She holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Jan van Eyck Academy (The Artists’ Text as Work of Art, 2017). Ilse has written extensively on contemporary art in general, and its relation to writing specifically, and has been contributing to books, journals, and magazines, such as De Witte Raaf and Metropolis M. She works as a tutor at Rietveld and the THIRD programme of the DAS Graduate School.

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Nienke Scholts practices dramaturgy throughout manifold collaborations with performance artists (since 2007); with Veem House for Performance (2013-2019) - where she also developed the publication series Words for the Future (2018); as ARIAS’ programme coordinator (since 2019); and through her research as a fellow of DAS Research/THIRD, Amsterdam University of the Arts. Her research focuses on dramaturgies of work in artistic practices; unpacking notions like ambition and exhaustion, developing pausing

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as a practice, and exploring her particular interest in darkness as a potential mode of thinking and doing (work) differently. In 2019 she received a Saari Residency grant. She loves to draw and to walk. Alice Smits is initiator and curator of Zone2Source, a platform for art, nature, and technology in the Amstelpark Amsterdam. A space for artists scientists to think together on new imaginaries for nature-culture relations. Smits is currently a researcher at LAPS Public Space and City, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and Hybrid Forms Lab, VU Amsterdam, unpacking contemporary land art practices and theories on the anthropocene, and more recently in relation to artificial intelligence. Often you can find her writing as an art critic for magazines such as Metropolis M, or playing guitar with her improvisation band Oorbeek. She also holds an MA in Art History from the University of Amsterdam. Eliza Steinbock is Associate Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies at Maastricht University. Eliza’s research is committed to mapping out the interconnections of social realities with cultural productions, how art-making can be socially embedded and culturally transformative. They are project leader of “The Critical Visitor” consortium, developing intersectional approaches for inclusive heritage (NWO 2020-2025). Eliza has published 40+ articles on contemporary visual culture analyzing the intersecting dimensions of gender, sexuality, race, and ability. Eliza is the author of Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke, 2019), and co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis: Aesthetic Resilience (Routledge, 2020).

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About the Authors

Miha Turšič is a concept and project developer within the Make programme of Waag, Amsterdam. He works on international collaborative research and innovation projects involving art-science, open-source hardware, digital fabrication, material research, ecology, and space culture. He is closely involved with the planet B lab’s environmental efforts, and he is the founder of Open Space Lab within Waag. Salomé Voegelin is an artist, writer, and researcher engaged in listening as a sociopolitical practice. Her work and writing deal with sound, the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social, and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view. She writes essays and text-scores for performance and publication. Her latest book The Political Possibility of Sound (Bloomsbury 2018) articulates a politics that includes creativity and invention and imagines transformation and collaboration as the basis of our living together. Voegelin’s practice engages in participatory, collective, and communal approaches and uncurates curatorial conventions through performance. She is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, and currently represents the Professorship Sound Studies at the University of Art Braunschweig. www.salomevoegelin.net

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Colophon

Editors Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke, Nienke Scholts Authors Paula Albuquerque, Otter AI, Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke, Andy Dockett, Sher Doruff, Raoul Frese, Carlo De Gaetano, Imara Limon, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, John Miers, Maaike Muntinga, Sabine Niederer, Ektor Ntourakos, Špela Petrič, Erik Rietveld, Ilse van Rijn, Nienke Scholts, Alice Smits, Miha Turšič, Eliza Steinbock, & Salomé Voegelin. Graphic design Jeanine van Berkel Copyediting Will Sharp Editorial advice Sabine Niederer Printing Drukkerij RaddraaierSSP Silkscreen cover by Darling Binding Boekbinderij Patist Paper Fedrigoni Materica Terracotta 250 grams Antalis Nautilus Classic 120 grams Typeface design Charlotte Rohde

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Typeface Keroine Doux Extreme Keroine Intense Legere

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© 2021 arias.amsterdam and authors All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission for copyrighted material that appears in this volume. If any material has been used in error, please contact ARIAS at info@arias.amsterdam. Acknowledgements With special thanks to the ARIAS core partners; University of Amsterdam (UvA), VU Amsterdam (VU), Gerrit Rietveld Academie (GRA) / Sandberg Instituut (SI), Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS) and Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK). Many thanks as well to Jesse Ahlers, Morgane Billuart, Erin la Cour, Yi-Fei Chen, Christina Della Giustina, Inte Gloerich, Anton Kats, Just Lievens, Pei-Ying Lin, NWO (the Dutch Science Foundation), Prof. Klaus Schmierer and the neurology staff in ward 11D of the Royal London Hospital at Barts NHS Trust, Saša Spačal, Mai Spring, Sara-Lot van Uum, & Patricia de Vries – for their invaluable support and inspiration towards different contributions in this book. Most grateful to all involved in creating this publication. It is without a doubt that such a publication, or platform, could not be what it is without the support of this art-research community - the ARIAS team cannot thank you enough. ISBN

9789464372939

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“The artist-researcher of today does not fold, twist, weld or melt material in order to form it into a tool for a new society. The artist-researcher tries to see the shimmering of matter and hear its whispers.” — Jeroen Boomgaard, Transdisciplinary Dreaming (2021)

Hinterlands, How To Do Transdisciplinarity

Articles inside

Hallucinating Harmacies: A Spatial Reimagining of Memories in Medicine

Transposition of the Ear

Monstering: On Hybridizatioan and Care in Artistic Research

The Asset of Burnout: Transmedial as Agential Strategy

We Need to Be More Human than We Are: Smart Hybrid Talks

“Utopian? Perhaps. Impossible? I would not bet against it.”

Preface

Transdisciplinary Dreaming

Trust and Be Open to Unexpected Possibilities

Dear Reader: Editor’s Letter

Turning to the Birds