Emerging Affinities - Possible Futures of Performative Arts 9783839449066

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Foreword
I. Performing Sciences
Introduction
The Lab Is the Space Is the Place
When Theater Director Collaborates with Computer Engineer
Renegotiating Life
II. Performing Senses
Introduction
Of Unsound Mind and Body
The Performance of Sensation
Resensing the Anthropocene
III. Performing Alterities
Introduction
Collapsing Boundaries
“This Body Is in Danger!”
Reel Nature
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

Mateusz Borowski, Mateusz Chaberski, Małgorzata Sugiera (eds.) Emerging Affinities – Possible Futures of Performative Arts

Theatre Studies  | Volume 127

Mateusz Borowski is a Professor at the Department of Performativity Studies at Jagiellonian University, Kraków. He holds a PhD from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His main areas of interest are history and sociology of science, and counterfactual narratives in historiography and memory studies. Mateusz Chaberski is a PhD student at the Department of Performativity Studies at Jagiellonian University, Kraków. In 2016, he won a scholarship of the Foundation for Polish Science for innovative research in the Humanities. His academic interests range from performance studies to affect and assemblage theories and Anthropocene studies. He is also acquisitions editor at Jagiellonian University Press. Małgorzata Sugiera is a Full Professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakw, Poland, and Head of the Department of Performativity Studies. Having taught in Germany, France, Switzerland and Brazil, she has been a Research Fellow for multiple international foundations. Her research concentrates on performative arts and memory, gender and queer studies as well as performativity and materiality, particularly in the context of the history of sciences.

Mateusz Borowski, Mateusz Chaberski, MaŁgorzata Sugiera (eds.)

Emerging Affinities – Possible Futures of Performative Arts

This publication was made possible by the research grant from the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) (UMO-2014/14/M/HS2/00564), and was published with kind support of Faculty for Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University (WP UJ).

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Typeset by Michael Rauscher, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4906-2 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4906-6 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839449066

Table of Contents Foreword Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera  � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 7

I Performing Sciences Introduction Mateusz Borowski � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 17

The Lab Is the Space Is the Place The Performance of Art and Theory Jussi Parikka  � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 31

When Theater Director Collaborates with Computer Engineer Hybridizations and Methodological Shifts in the Masque et Avatar Interdisciplinary Project Izabella Pluta � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 49

Renegotiating Life Performances of Speculative Futures Mateusz Borowski � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 71

II Performing Senses Introduction Mateusz Chaberski � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 93

Of Unsound Mind and Body Immersive Experience in Headphone Theater Rosemary Napier Klich   � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 107

The Performance of Sensation Dramaturgies, Technologies and Ethnographies in the Design and Evaluation of Performative Sensory Environments David Howes, Chris Salter � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 127

Resensing the Anthropocene Ambividual Experiences in Contemporary Performative Arts Mateusz Chaberski � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 149

III Performing Alterities Introduction Małgorzata Sugiera  � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 175

Collapsing Boundaries Ambivalence and Interference Tony D. Sampson  � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 189

“This Body Is in Danger!” On Ecology, Protest, and Artistic Activism in Benjamin Verdonck’s Bara/Ke (2000) Christel Stalpaert   � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 211

Reel Nature Speculative Gardens of Eden Małgorzata Sugiera  � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 237

Notes on Contributors  � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 257

Foreword Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera

In the last two decades, the landscape of performative art practices has radically changed. New forms at the crossroads of science and fiction, ‘pure’ and political art, and one- and multi-person projects have been rapidly emerging and developing. The new forms hybridize various media, merging live and mediated participation to offer individualized experiences on both an affective and cognitive level. As a consequence, every artifact produced in these arrangements becomes a unique example of a new idiosyncratic genre, and in many cases, the participant could hardly say she has to do with an artifact at all. Many artists try to enlarge the scope of life experiences instead of performing a traditional kind of aesthetics. As a matter of fact, ever since critics have tried to keep abreast of these radical changes, they have defined and labeled the emerging hybrid forms with a range of hyphenated terms, such as bio-art, techno-art, multimedia-art, remix-art, recycling-art, junk-art, drift-art, Net-art, post-Internet art, and several others. Many of these names disappeared as quickly as they appeared, together with the new practices they were meant to grasp. Scholars adopted and elaborated at least part of these terms and concepts, or came up with new theoretical inventions, such as Nicolas Bourriaud, who wrote on relational aesthetics and then postproduction as a creative method (cf. 2002a; 2002b). Others, like Julianne Rebentisch in Aesthetics of Installation Art (2012) or Josephine Machon in (Syn)aesthetics (2009), looked for umbrella terms to embrace the new performative phenomena. As a result, narrowly specialized research fields and idiomatic research methodologies have emerged, many of which could not be employed in the context of another performative practice. The terminology developed for bio-art becomes rather problematic when applied to forms that go by the name of techno-art, even when the problem of the new approach to spectating/reception/co-creation/interaction is taken into account. Hence, the growing need for new methodological approaches and novel analytical languages to meet the challenge is increasingly visible, and demands we connect various disciplines and discourses to investigate possible futures of performative art practices. We must look into futures to open new research vistas that will allow us to see the past from novel archaeological perspectives.

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The authors of Emerging Af finities: Possible Futures of Performative Arts address a host of contemporary hybrid (aesthetic) phenomena, crossing traditional disciplinary divisions both to provide an account of these new tendencies in performative practices and to offer new methodological approaches and definitions. It comes as no surprise that several authors explore postdisciplinary perspectives from the emerging field of Anthropocene studies, as it is exactly at this juncture that the need for both transversal methodological approaches and speculation on not-so-distant futures to better grasp today’s phenomena and challenges is demonstratively present. Significantly, one of the main aims of this emerging field is to subvert the basic dichotomies of the Western episteme by showing their historicity, and to supersede them through local and ever-shifting alterities. One of the first to be superseded is the dichotomy between Nature and Culture/Technology which has been formative for our civilization and, treated as part and parcel of capitalist industrial development, has been more often than not highlighted as the main cause of today’s ecological catastrophe. In “Love your Monsters,” Bruno Latour, one of the founders of science and technology studies and, at the same time, a severe critic of purification processes undertook by the Moderns, revisits Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He does so in order to demonstrate that, to save the Earth’s ecological heritage, we should stop laying disciplinary boundaries, to embrace human power, technology, and larger modernization processes. To steer clear of claims of exponentially approaching imminent catastrophe and the need for radically downscaling our economy on the one hand, and from Utopian plans to save the Earth by geoengineering on the other, Latour draws a new vision of both human agency and the planet through a new reading of this canonical novel. Interestingly, he does not claim that our technologies have always been perfectly natural, as do other post-environmentalists. For example, in the same volume, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus underline that even our nuclear plants are drawn “from the raw materials of the Earth” (2011: 12). Far from this, “Love your Monsters” returns to Frankenstein, as it lives on in popular imagination as both the widely known modernist myth of human mastery, and a cautionary tale against human hubris and technology that is conjured whenever we feel endangered by a new technological invention, most recently cloning and GMO. “We use the monster as an all-purpose modifier to denote technological crimes against nature,” writes Latour, and points out further that, in so doing, we “confuse the monster with its creator” (2011: 21). To his mind, Frankenstein’s real sin was not so much to imitate God’s creative act and challenge innate human limitations, but to abandon the creature and condemn it to a solitary life. As such, he reads the novel as a parable about political ecology, and is certain that we should never even dream of separating ourselves from the non-human world, technologies, and our nature; we cannot be disentangled from them. However, to do away with the myth of human mastery, we must exchange

Foreword

the notion of modernity as merely humankind’s emancipation from Nature, for what he calls a “compositionist” one. For this notion “sees the process of human development as neither liberation from nature nor as a fall from it, but rather as a process of becoming ever-more attached to, and intimate with, a panoply of nonhuman natures” (ibid: 22). Therefore, Latour sees the growing necessity of rewriting the emancipation narrative as the ever-increasing attachment between things and people. To support his new reading of Frankenstein, he directs the reader’s attention to one important fact. Almost every day our newspapers report “more entanglements of all those things that were once imagined to be separable – science, morality, religion, law, technology, finance, and politics” (ibid: 22). Yet we have not only been reading about this almost every day for the last couple of years. Significantly, we have also experienced it by immersing ourselves in these entanglements in a range of performative art projects. London-based Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) collective’s multi-person and multi-sensory immersive installation We Live in an Ocean of Air, which premièred at Saatchi Gallery in late 2018 is a case in point here. MLF’s first artistic VR project, In the Eyes of the Animals (2015), demonstrated a unique combination of technologies from untethered virtual reality, heart rate monitors, breath sensors, and body tracking devices, for a complete immersion in a world beyond human perception. This mixed reality project offered a group of viewers taking a walk in Grizedale Forest a first-hand experience of the local symbiotic system, otherwise inaccessible to the human senses. It presented a narrative, based upon a typical food chain, starting with a mosquito which sees CO₂, progressing through a dragonf ly which sees 300 frames per second and a full light spectrum, and then, combing some physiological features across the family of the same species, a frog. It ended with an owl shot by a hunter, but before that, each viewer could explore the perspective of a creature with abstract peripheral vision, as its eyeballs are almost egg-shaped. Although the artists consulted experts, including those from London’s Natural History Museum, and based their work on scientific fact, this was a speculative project, an approximation of what it could mean to view the world as another species. It should be stressed here that the installation also offered a tactile experience. For example, when looking through the eyes of the dragonf ly, the viewer felt vibrations on her back, giving her a feeling of not only seeing the world through the insect’s eyes, but of having wings as well. However, the project primarily engaged sight, and in this respect, it differed from many previous mixed reality installations of this kind. Mostly, what has been recognized as political art in the Anthropocene brings in the other human senses, trying to critically subvert the dominant oculocentric perspective. Instead, MLF’s In the Eyes of the Animals could be defined as an instructive exercise in perspectivism, which has been discussed by critical anthropologists in their studies of Amerindian cultures. For example, in Beyond Nature and Culture

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(2008), Philippe Descola quotes the cosmologies of Achuar and Chewong peoples as examples of relative vision of each living creature. Every animal is capable of imagining itself as a different species, and seeing the world through the eyes of another. Therefore, its identity is f luid, and dependent on situated relationships with others, and never freezes into a stable set of categories. The ability to take the position of the other and see from a different point of view is the ultimate condition for the well-being of all creatures and their peaceful co-existence. Similarly, Eduardo Kohn defines perspectivism as specific for Amerindians in his research project of an anthropology beyond the human. In How Forests Think (2013), perspectivism allows one to see other creatures as both alter and equal to us, made of the same primordial matter. They remain on the same footing, since they are humans for themselves, able to perceive our alterity. By no means do we want to suggest that we are able to experience what is ‘natural’ to Amerindians only through cutting-edge technology in our disenchanted world. In both cases, we are dealing with cultural apparatuses that, in a similar process of acculturation, albeit differently, teach us how to look at the world and make meaning. A more recent MLF project, We Live in an Ocean of Air, demonstrates this particularly clearly, once again with a complex VR rig. The main aim of the project is not only to make every breath exhaled by the participant visible as a cluster of small red dots, but also to show how these red dots become blue, when a tree – a central element of VR simulation – ‘converts’ it into oxygen. In other words, here the human as such and every participant in particular is intentionally presented as a part of a living world. Therefore, when asked in an interview if we can reconnect to nature through VR, Ersin Han Ersin of MLF answered as follows: “Virtual reality can open a better space to understand everything around us that wasn’t available before” (2017). He formulated his answer in a rather general way. Therefore, to make our point, we have to ask what exactly was unavailable before MLF’s latest up-to-date project helped us to understand it. Unlike In the Eyes of the Animals, this multi-sensory multi-person virtual reality installation takes place in a traditional space – downstairs in the Saatchi Gallery, in two neighboring half-open spaces. It is not only your breath and the blood f lowing through your body and the bodies of other visitors that are virtual. A giant sequoia tree from the Sequoia National Park is also projected. The smell of humid earth distributed in the installation space and the changing temperature are not virtual, but still artificial. Participants are invited to enter a realistic forest. It is virtual/artificial, and at the same time overpoweringly real to one’s senses. You remain yourself, but you see the world from a radically different perspective, and this affects your behavior here and now. You can see how powerful this immersive experience is even before entering the installation, watching a group of visitors in the installation space, equipped with VR rigs. This foreknowledge makes you more cognizant of your own body and its movements, of the situation of being

Foreword

seen when seeing a virtual world. In this respect, the MLF installation makes you feel like you are stepping onto the canvas, a metaphor which applies not just to this project. It is worth reconsidering in the context of an argument by preeminent German art historian Hans Belting. In his Florence & Baghdad (2008), Belting argues that the realistic perspective – based on the stable relationship between the subject and the world, with the human gaze as a focal point, producing images as seen through a window – remained a theoretical ideal in the painting and architecture of the Renaissance. Only in the theater of the epoch did it materialize, in part through the proscenium arch. It was proscenium arch theater, with its attendant cultural practices, which conditioned and preserved a human-centered perspective, not only as a privileged way of seeing, but also – or even primarily – as the very basis of the Western episteme, long into the twentieth century. The introduction and wide acceptance of the central perspective was a much more significant development than just a shift in the concept of artwork and in the systems of representational conventions; it was closely linked to a widespread reorganization of knowledge and social practices. At that time, a new kind of observing body was born, which gradually became a component of new social, libidinal, or technological machines, economies, and apparatuses. The paradigmatic incarnation of this body is a traditional theater-goer who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities and limitations, even though she is rarely aware of them because they have been ‘normalized.’ The fundamentally theatrical setup of the camera obscura can be easily recognized even in the forms of experimental theater that came in the wake of performance art of the 1960s and 1970s. As Belting demonstrates, the human-centered perspective in Renaissance painting, architecture, and theater for the first time allowed the act of looking to be inscribed into the represented space, in order to persuade the observer that she perceives both a represented world and reality with her own eyes. One and the other seem to be constituted, controlled, and measured by her active gaze. However, the presence of the gazing subject within represented reality, today’s virtual reality included, is only a simulation, an effect of the workings of geometrical construction that, while sundering the act of gazing from the physical body of the observer, creates a vacant place; a place for rent, so to speak. Any observer who occupies this place presumes that the gaze represented is her own. For Belting, it is mainly because of the workings of the human-centered perspective that this symbolic form and cultural practice is a privileged site of meeting with oneself as the other. In this respect, We Live in an Ocean of Air offers a viewing experience markedly different from that elicited by the central perspective. Each viewer sees not only the represented gaze, but also herself as an inherent part of the picture. She sees her body moving through the virtual space, her every breath. Moreover, the world she sees is, in a sense, a product of her body, as it is generated from the data gathered by her body’s functions in real time. In other words, it is no

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longer a place to rent. It is a world that comes into being through a performance of a human body connected with technology. Significantly, MLF is both an artistic collective and a small experiential studio that often works on commercial commissions, not only to fund their art projects, but also to build their own pipelines and toolkits, which they then use in their installations. Therefore, MLF truly works at the intersection of art and technology, and the technology they employ is the same in both commercial and artistic endeavors. As a result, it can hardly be said that they use technology to create a special kind of an aesthetic experience, understood as only specific to the realm of art. Nor do they make perfect mimetic representations of the world. Rather, they gather data in a digital library or a digital archive. As Ersin Han Ersin said in the aforementioned interview: “We often call it digital fossils because if that forest is gone, we still keep data of the forest quite accurately” (2017). Clearly, they think of themselves as involved in a scientific undertaking, even though they use their “digital fossils,” as they called it, as material for art commissions. The contributions to this volume provide ample evidence that work across disciplinary boundaries, connecting science, technology, aesthetics and politics, is becoming a new idiom of performative practices. These new participatory forms effectively undermine our received aesthetic categories, developed since the Enlightenment and throughout the nineteenth century and based on a number of dichotomies (author/work of art; work of art/recipient; truth/fiction; life experience/aesthetic experience; real/virtual; theory/practice etc.). The expanding field of performative practices calls for new and novel approaches and concepts to describe these changes and developments which we are presently facing. The task of inventing a new language of theoretical description might seem daunting, but the anticipated gain makes the risk worth taking. This volume is an attempt to meet this challenge. However, given the multiplicity and diversity of these hybrid forms, the task of developing a single concept or methodology seems futile. Instead, we propose looking at tendencies and regularities in three interrelated thematic areas. The first part of the volume is devoted to a problem which seems fundamental to the changes of performative arts under the inf luence and in productive conjunction with various sciences and technosciences. It draws on insights from a long-standing tradition of science studies, which, in recent decades demonstrated the performative characteristics of scientific endeavors from their seventeenth-century beginnings. The concept of science as a set of performative, local practices lies at the core of the contributions to this part. They all demonstrate that artistic forms do more than ref lect or propagate scientific discoveries. They provide frameworks for transdisciplinary investigation and cooperative problem-solving which respond to particular social, artistic, ecological, or political needs. The hybrid performances analyzed in the second part of the volume are

Foreword

focused on a more specific, yet related issue – the changes of human sensorium which in various ways merges with technological extensions and interfaces. What underlies these performances is the concept of the human cognitive apparatus as performative, an assemblage in a constant process of becoming, inseparable from the mediating machines. The third part of the volume is rooted in another critical concept of knowledge as an effect or product of local practices within epistemic communities. The texts gathered here demonstrate that contemporary performance undermines the very rudiments of Western episteme, problematizing its reliance on alterity – the exclusion of ‘others’ (colonial, political, disciplinary etc.) from the processes of knowledge-making. The performances discussed in this part create spaces in which the well-known and established re-connects with what has been ousted from the dominant epistemic paradigms in the modern period. All three parts of the book are therefore intended as diagnostic forums, in which the authors identify the most salient trends and tendencies in today’s landscape of performances. In this respect, we subscribe to the notion of performance as a methodological lens which allows one to see the processual, active, emergent phenomena which come into being as a result of productive clashes and fusions of disciplines and perspectives. In other words, refraining from any overarching synthesis and unified approaches (a task which seems unfeasible in a collective volume like this one), we have tried to look at some of today’s cultural developments to see potential beginnings of futures to come.

References Belting, Hans (2011 [2008]): Florence & Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002a [1998]): Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance/ Fronza Woods, Dijon: Les Presses du réel. Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002b): Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, trans. Jeanine Herman, New York: Lukas & Sternberg. Descola, Philippe (2013 [2005]): Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd, The University of Chicago Press. Ersin, Ersin Han (2017): “Interview.” https://docubase.mit.edu/lab/interviews/inter​ view-with-marshmallow-laser-feast/ Kohn, Eduardo (2013): How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Berkley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno (2011): “Love your Monsters. Why we must care for our technologies as we do our children.” In: Michael Shellenberger/Ted Nordhaus (eds.), Love your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene, The Breakthrough Institute, pp. 20–28.

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Machon, Josephine (2009): (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rebentisch, Julianne (2012 [2003]): Aesthetics of Installation Art, trans. Daniel Dendrickson/Gerrit Jackson, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Shellenberger, Michael/Nordhaus, Ted (2011): “Evolve.” In: Michael Shellenberger/ Ted Nordhaus (eds.), Love your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene, The Breakthrough Institute, pp. 11–19.

I Performing Sciences

Introduction Mateusz Borowski

Two Hundred and Two Cultures Most probably it is only today, in the midst of debates over the Anthropocene as the current geological epoch in which humans are a major geologic factor, that it has become clear what stakes are involved in bridging the gaps between the humanities, arts and sciences. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, the editors of the volume Art in the Anthropocene argue that the era of the Sixth Extinction of species and rapid climate changes calls not only for new scientific concepts and technological solutions, but most of all, for new ways of thinking “with geology and biology, with the power of imagining all that might take place” (2016: 9). The collection they edited can be seen as such a tentative attempt at bringing together discourses and practices which still remain separate in the Western culture – academic essays and interviews with renowned scholars representing various disciplines are accompanied by presentations of artistic projects addressing ecological and eco-political issues. Significantly, this book is by no means unique among the current works on the possible involvement of art in counteracting the deleterious effects of the Anthropocenic on the natural environment and in helping to forge a livable future for all earthly creatures. Similar attempts at linking scientific investigations, philosophical ref lection, and artistic practice can be found in other key publications tackling issues pertaining to the Anthropocene and its discontents. For example, the collective monograph Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017) contains essays by scientists, historians and artists, but also opens with literary pieces and poems by the celebrated science-fiction author Ursula Le Guin. Moreover, the book itself is organized in an unconventional way, with its two parts, “Monsters” and “Ghosts,” starting on either side of the volume and converging in the middle. In the introduction, the editors explain the reasons for this monstrous, hybrid book structure without beginning or end: “It juxtaposes many genres to show how varied storytelling styles might inform each other both in learning about our challenged planet and in forging strategies for living with others in the yet-to-come” (Bubandt et al. 2017: 10). According to the editors, the artistic practices and imaginative narratives should not be treated as derivative of scientific

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discoveries, but rather as creative means of meaning-making, which play a crucial role in subverting the ideologies sustaining the Anthropocenic predicament faced by humans and non-humans today. The idea of a book which includes a variety of discourses and, through its design, invites the reader to look for possible interconnections, overtly relies on the notion of “sympoietic practices for living on a damaged planet” (ibid: 9) which Donna Haraway introduces in her contribution to the volume. She developed this concept in Staying with the Trouble (2016), another hybrid work which draws on insights from the humanities and arts, merging scholarly discourse with literary fiction. Her project of connecting these various disciplines is firmly rooted in new concepts in evolutionary biology which depart from the Darwinian paradigm, premised on the modern idea of progress and competition, toward those perspectives which stress the significance of symbiosis as a critical evolutionary force. She is particularly inspired by the concept of sympoiesis, suggested by M. Beth Dempster in 1998, to describe open evolutionary systems linking various species and abiotic elements into productive relationships; systems with no spatial or temporal boundaries, controlled in a distributed manner and capable of rapid and unpredictable change (Haraway 2016: 61). According to Haraway, the theory of sympoiesis provides an alternative evolutionary narrative that puts greater emphasis on cooperativity and connectivity than on competition and specialization. As such, it replaces the idea of survival of the fittest with the notion of survival of those who are capable of forging new cross-species connections and are the most likely and willing to change. At the same time, sympoiesis is a powerful metaphor that organizes Haraway’s writing, which itself defies disciplinary boundaries and draws on insights from both arts and sciences. In Staying with the Trouble, scientific discourse is brought into contact with current ecopolitical issues and a science-fiction collection, The Camille Stories, which Haraway wrote during workshop in Cerisy in 2013. Both the shape and the argument developed in her book are intended as a hybrid discourse to supplement the Darwinian sciences, which, between 1930s and 1950s, came together in the “New Synthesis” with those approaches which emphasize the “multi-species becoming-with” that “sustain us in staying with the trouble on terra” (ibid: 63): An emerging “New New Synthesis” – an extended synthesis – in transdisciplinary biologies and arts proposes string figures tying together human and nonhuman ecologies, evolution, development, history, affects, performances, technologies, and more. (ibid) These few examples of scholarly attempts at synthesizing what used to be regarded as separate discourses and practices are symptomatic of today’s drive toward a transdisciplinary effort as a response to the sense of emergency instigated by the

Introduction

debates around the Anthropocene. The extent and significance of these developments can be described with reference to the twentieth-century debate about need to realign the two cultures, humanities and sciences, about which C. P. Snow wrote sixty years ago (1998). In his preface to the 1998 edition of Snow’s The Two Cultures, originally published in 1959, literary critic Stefan Collini stresses that the concept of two cultures was born out of a political impulse to reconnect various domains of knowledge, so that they could more effectively work out solutions for the social problems of the era, particularly that of widespread poverty. Collini argued that Snow’s idea managed to stir considerable debate and controversy in the early 1960s, but by 1998 it had fallen into oblivion, mainly because of the intellectual and social changes in the latter half of the century. Collini elaborates on the cultural developments which rendered Snow’s concept obsolete. On the one hand, he argues, there are more and more sub-disciplines which continue to specialize, as the two empires of sciences and humanities keep splitting into smaller states. On the other hand, these sub-disciplines and new fields of study evince an interdisciplinary character and form surprising alliances across the former disciplinary divisions. Therefore, Collini concludes, “[I]t is largely a matter of emphasis whether one regards these changes as indicating that, rather than two cultures, there are in fact two hundred and two cultures or that there is fundamentally only one culture” (1998: xliv). In the same paragraph Collini hastens to add that whether we are presently dealing with a multiplicity of micro-disciplines or just one general framework for all academic endeavors depends on one’s point of view. The former perspective accentuates the ways in which each professional group works out its own idiom to sustain its boundaries. The latter focuses on the largest possible common denominator that could provide common ground for bringing together the various intellectual enterprises. According to Collini, these two juxtaposed views remain in constant tension in contemporary societies, which seek to mend the gap between various domains of knowledge production. At the time Collini was writing his essay, in the era of the “science wars” between scientific realists and postmodern relativists, the problem of disciplinary divisions and borders was particularly acute. With the benefit of hindsight, we can find particular examples of these opposing perspectives on the problem of atomization of scientific and scholarly disciplines which he addressed in the above quote. On the one hand, the multiplicity of scientific practices was, for example, addressed by Karen Knorr Cetina, who came up with the concept of epistemic cultures, each driven by a different set of rules, values and types of conduct (1999). On the other hand, in 1998, E. O. Wilson introduced his idea of consilience in an attempt to work out a unifying framework for all fields of human endeavor (1998). At a time of renewed interest in disciplinary divisions, Stephen J. Gould addressed the problem in an ingenious way, not only proposing his own way of mending the

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gap between the humanities and sciences, but also critically examining the concept of the two cultures at the core of these debates. In his final work, The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox (2003), he took a closer look at the aforementioned edition of Snow’s text, a bit more favorably reading The Two Cultures: A Second Look, published in 1963 as a response to some criticism leveled at the original essay. Gould is not only suspicious of the all-too-simple, binary division into humanities and sciences which Snow propounded. He argues that Snow also falsely identified upper-class British scholarship with a much wider community of humanists (ibid: 90–91). It was only in the later essay that Snow admitted his mistake and recognized that intellectual life develops in many directions simultaneously, even positing the existence of a third culture, of social sciences. Thus, Gould concludes, Snow’s later essay suggests that there could also be a fourth or fifth culture, or more, which effectively undermines the binary model at the heart of the two-culture concept. Capitalizing on this “lesson in the fallacies and dangers of dichotomy” (ibid: 94), Gould proposes his own way of “mending the gap between science and the humanities,” as the subtitle of the book announces. Himself a versatile humanist, a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, wellversed in the canon of Western literature and art, he argues that the division into radically different domains of humanities and sciences, a product of post-war debates on the two cultures, was actually projected backwards onto the entire modern era. It consequently occluded the productive interconnections between them since the Scientific Revolution. Gould’s book uncovers them in a series of historical investigations which come together to prove that the two-culture division is actually a short-lived phenomenon which should be done away with to end the “science wars.” He speaks in favor of perspectives which enable more fruitful cooperation between scientists, historians of science, and representatives of other branches of the humanities, striving for new solutions to scientific problems and for ways of applying the knowledge produced. In performance studies Gould finds an ally in Sue-Ellen Case, who does not refer to his work directly, but works on a similar premise. In Performing Science and the Virtual (2007), she also demonstrated that in the modern era, theater, in its various historical guises, was closely connected to scientific endeavors. She returns to seventeenth-century culture to show that theater and science were both born as two apparatuses with vantage points for a careful observation of a given object, whether a natural phenomenon or human behavior. Renaissance theater represented a metonymy of the world, a fragment that stood for the whole which encapsulated the general principles operating outside theater, just as laboratories, conceived at roughly the same time, gave scientists an opportunity to observe natural occurrences and describe them from an objectifying distance. Case puts forward the thesis that theater and science are not separate discourses, but rather two intertwined practices of representing human knowledge:

Introduction

Science and theater offered an organization of knowing and managing as a viewing apparatus, a lens, through which the appearance of the object was translated, with the assumption that its translation would provide a more accurate vision of it. If science emulated theater, theater emulated science. (Case 2007: 13) Case has no doubt that, at the turn of the twentieth century, theater and performance art effectively undermined the authority of science in uncovering theatricality at the heart of scientific experiments. She draws on such examples as Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1999), in which theater becomes a quantum physics laboratory, or Caryl Churchill’s a number (2002), in which the relationship between a cloned body and its identity is likened to an actor and her role. These and many other examples quoted and analyzed by Case corroborate her claim that contemporary performative arts reveal deep affinities with scientific practices. However, from the point of view of the chapters in this section, one aspect of Case’s argument needs to be modified – the concept of theatricality as a feature of scientific experiments. This makes the latter a sphere of make-believe, simulations, and fictions, with little reference to the outside world. The authors of the chapters in this section discuss projects which draw a different analogy between the aesthetics and scientific experimentation – their ability to create realities, relationships, and worlds within collectives comprised of humans and non-humans, biotic, abiotic, and technological elements. In other words, the common denominator between the arts and sciences is the concept of performance as a structure of joint actions across disciplinary boundaries, which brings about emergent effects, merging knowledge production with affective impact.

Performance and Science The concept of performance as an artistic and scientific endeavor also dates back to the turn of the twenty-first century. It was also at that time that idea that human knowledge was produced not by two, but by “two hundred and two cultures” was propounded by the rapidly developing sociology and history of science. Scholars working in this transdiscipline introduced and elaborated the concept of scientific knowledge as a product of culturally and historically contingent sets of practices. In her landmark study Epistemic Cultures, published in 1999, Karin Knorr Cetina offers an ethnographic description of two communities of scholars working in the most significant Big Sciences of our time – high particle physics (HEP) and molecular biology. At the root of her work lies a new concept of knowledge, which departs from its understanding as scientific belief, technological use, or intellectual property. She defined it as “practiced – within structures, processes and environments that make up specific scientific settings” (ibid: 8). The notion

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of practice, present in science studies from the 1970s onward, emphasized contextual acts of knowledge-making in historically and culturally specific settings. It is from this point of view that the idea of science as a unified discourse seems even more misleading, because the two epistemic cultures investigated by Knorr Cetina, although both qualify as scientific, evince divergent and often opposing characteristics on various levels of their organization. In HEP, the investigated phenomena are always necessarily mediated by powerful laboratory machinery, which turns the experiment results into signs and inscriptions. Biologists in labs have more direct access to the living tissue which they subject to processing and scrutiny. Consequently, HEP experiments could not be handled by a single person and involve entire research groups of individuals who become a collective subject of knowledge. In molecular biology, it is still the individual scholar who remains the source of the knowledge produced, even if he or she relies on the help of other scientists. Knorr Cetina enumerates other significant differences in the structure of these two epistemic cultures, including the professional hierarchies, rules of conduct and the ways in which private relationships may inf luence the experimentation process. However, it is not only the infrastructure of research institutions and the structure of scientist communities that govern the production of physical and biological knowledge, respectively. Knorr Cetina’s study was among those written by sociologists of science who analyzed the internal workings of laboratories and the principles that regulate the relationship between a phenomenon under scrutiny and the outside world. With reference to Steven Shapin and Simon Shaeffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985), she stressed the fact that, in a laboratory, a natural phenomenon may be either staged (as in HEP experiments) or extracted from natural environment and adjusted to the needs of an experiment (as in molecular biology). These operations involve a great degree of technical manipulation and purification to assure that the phenomenon under investigation is not distorted by background interference or the accidental intervention of unpredictable factors. Knorr Cetina stresses this artifactual nature of laboratory material, she also points to its highly ambiguous, processual ontological status. Materials processed during experiments have no stable identity, they are constantly changing, decomposing, and reassembling in complex processes. Moreover, the treatment they undergo and the results obtained depend on a number of contextual factors, including the metaphorical mappings scientists use to describe the materials and equipment with which they are dealing. For example, the large and complex particle accelerators and colliders are often spoken of as animals which grow old and have particular characteristics and temperaments, and a limited life span which needs to be considered in any experiment. In a biology lab test, animals and living tissues are often treated as machines, particularly because they are mass produced (like particular lineages of mice or cancer cells) to further eliminate any accidental impact of genetic mate-

Introduction

rial on the result of a test. Knorr Cetina comes to the conclusion that, despite all the clear efforts to stabilize the material under scrutiny, in a laboratory, “natural objects are treated as processing materials and as transitory object-states corresponding to no more than a temporary pause in a series of transformations. Objects are decomposable entities from which effects can be extracted through appropriate treatment” (ibid: 37). The concept of epistemic cultures understood as regulated sets of practices which produce knowledge-effects, brings along a view of science “in the performative idiom” (ibid: 9). It emphasizes the performative character of scientific knowledge as emerging from collective interactions between human bodies, machines, biotic elements, cultural norms, and forms of social conduct. In this respect, a modern laboratory, as described by Knorr Cetina, could be counted among all those sites in which performance, as defined by Jon McKenzie, is the major organizing principle. In his seminal book Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2001) McKenzie argues that in the late twentieth century the societies of discipline described and analyzed by Foucault (which functioned on the principle of strict submission to norms regulating life even on the micro-level of biopolitics) have turned into societies in which performance reigns supreme. Within this conceptual framework, performance is understood not only as an art form providing participants with the possibility to, albeit temporarily, subvert dominant norms or try out new identities. McKenzie calls this particular kind of collective practice cultural performance, but it is not the only one existing in late-twentieth century societies. Performativity, as he argues, has become a prime value in other spheres of late capitalist societies, namely in the sphere of management (organizational performance) and technology (technological performance). In these two areas, performance is not a subversive, but a normative and regulatory force summoning both people and machines to constant creativity – effectiveness and efficiency. In view of Knorr Cetina’s ethnography of epistemic cultures, modern sciences also perform, producing knowledge out of creative interactions of human and nonhuman assemblages. This aspect of scientific inquiry was investigated by Bruno Latour the same year that Epistemic Cultures was released, in a collection of essays entitled Pandora’s Hope (1999). There he employs the concept of performance with reference to scientific experiments, although, in the glossary at the end of the book, the term “performance” figures only as a synonym for another term, “name of action.” His definition emphasizes yet another characteristic of the procedures employed by scientists during experiments and research – the f luidity and transitory nature of the objects under scrutiny and the entire laboratory apparatus. He defines “name of action” as follows:

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An expression used to describe the strange situations – such as experiments – in which an actor emerges out of its trials. The actor does not yet have an essence. It is defined as only a list of effects – or performances – in a laboratory. Only latter does one deduce from these performances a competence, that is, a substance that explains why the actor behaves as it does. The term ‘name of action’ allows one to remember the pragmatic origin of all matters of fact. (ibid: 308) By employing the term “actor,” Latour stresses the active role played by the elements of a laboratory set-up, emphasizing their agency in bringing about knowledge-effects. This perspective seems particularly pertinent in the discussion of today’s transdisciplinary performative forms, which no longer seem to be forms of interhuman encounter that re-establish communal bonds or prompt participants to take political action. Rather, they entangle humans with non-humans, often employing intricate technological dispositives, to create sympoietic collectives which generally negotiate new forms of livable co-existence. In the following, I would like to take a closer look at an example of such a performative form, which, though disguised as a traditional documentary, can in fact be read as a prototypical performance across disciplinary boundaries, facing the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Exercises in Intra-action – A Case Study The example in question is and acclaimed documentary, Chasing Ice of 2012, directed by Jeff Orlowski. Despite the semblance of a traditional form, at closer inspection it reveals a performative streak – it is a fundamentally self-ref lexive work, a documentary about another documentary project. Both these levels are significant, as they facilitate the telling of the story of wildlife photographer James Balog, who, in the early twenty-first century, began tracking glacial retreat, a phenomenon which indicates critical changes in the global environment. Balog spent several years photographing glaciers and icecaps in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and Montana, coming up with time-lapse presentations that visualized the pace at which ice melts and retreats. Subsequently, he toured his presentation around the world, campaigning for a heightened awareness of climate change. Orlowski, who accompanied him throughout his project, provides an account of the process of gathering evidence to support the claims that climate change is actually taking place. The film is an excellent example of a project which joins various scientific discoveries with digital technologies to demonstrate the performative production of knowledge about natural phenomena. Climate change seems to be especially good material for demonstrating the stakes involved in transdisciplinary research. As

Introduction

German social psychologist Harald Welzer argues in his Climate Wars (2008), climate change is a result of such a complex network of cultural, social, economic, and natural factors that it challenges the fundamental laws of causality that lie at the core of our understanding of the world. He is convinced that our steadfast reliance on causality, our belief that climate change results from a single cause or a finite set of causes, makes us incapable of taking into account the contingencies and chaos intrinsically connected with all social and natural processes. Undoubtedly, today’s environmental documentaries try to face this challenge, while a number of media, film, literature, and art scholars try to chart this vast landscape of contemporary documentary forms and techniques. For example, in her relatively recent book Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the 21st Century (2014), Helen Hughes traces the trends in environmental documentaries which f lourished in the early twenty-first century, in response to a host of ecological problems, particularly global warming, climate change, and massive changes in Earth’s geological makeup. The novelty of these documentary forms in comparison to the earlier ones came partly from the unprecedented nature of global environmental phenomena and their entanglement with political and economic issues. Yet, as Hughes stresses in the introductory chapter, the new environmental documentary is also quite preoccupied with broadening the social awareness of the complexity of these problems by channeling non-human perspectives – i. e. by introducing points of view that emphasize the active role of non-human agents (natural and geological forces, plants, and animals, but also the media recording and reporting on them) in shaping the ecological changes on Earth. These new documentaries employ innovative strategies of addressing recipients, engaging them more effectively and imparting upon them the sense of urgency of the ecological predicament which, in one way or another, we are all soon to face. In this respect, they acquire performative features. However, in the context of this introduction, Chasing Ice provides excellent material to prove that the convention of a documentary film can be employed for bringing together various disciplines and practices for interventionist purposes. The film begins with a montage of footage from a variety of media reports and interviews with experts from the early 2000s, in a period of intense weather-related disasters all around the globe. Those sudden and rapid catastrophes (f loods, hurricanes or storms), so appealing to the media for their spectacular images, were often presented as harbingers of a major future collapse of Earth’s ecological system. However, as Balog’s project demonstrates, these catastrophes are just surface phenomena, momentary manifestations of processes occurring in deep geological time, on a temporal scale which evades human perception. Therefore, Balog’s question at the beginning of the movie, “How can you photograph climate change?”, sounds like a challenge to the environmental documentary. How to register a phenomenon so vast and protracted that its causes and effects cannot be

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laid out and explained in a comprehensive way? In other words, how to show that what we commonly take to be harbingers of a future disaster are in fact past consequences of events on a geological scale which have been underway for decades or centuries, depending on ever-changing scientific estimates? From this point of view, Balog’s project draws its rhetorical power from confounding our sense of the before and after, by skilfully using photography to mediate between human and the geological temporal scales. This effect of confusing temporalities is a means of imparting viewers with a sense of urgency of the environmental problems, to demonstrate the entanglement of humans with non-human forces beyond their control. These non-human forces are not only geological and biochemical processes, but also technologies for visualizing and conceptualizing the relationships between humans and nature. Actually, Balog’s project provides a good foundation for touching upon another topic closely connected with the problem of profound ecological and geological shifts. His question of how to photograph climate change also expresses the challenge to find media to make climate change visible. In fact, Chasing Ice is essentially a documentary about documenting – a film which shows not only the melting of icecaps, but also the problem of how to record it and make it available and comprehensible to wide audiences. Orlowski’s film demonstrates that the whole project could only come to fruition through the cooperation of a large collective, of not only humans but also properly prepared machines. Having decided to embark on this project in cooperation with National Geographic, Balog realized that he needed to design and manufacture the equipment, which could autonomously produce photographs of glaciers over extended periods of time in extreme weather conditions. Therefore, an integral part of his project’s story is his struggle with technology which refuses to cooperate and perform in low temperatures. In his initial design, Balog did not take into account the fact that his equipment could be attacked by endemic animals – birds which pick at solar batteries powering the cameras, or foxes which chew on cables. It was only when he introduced changes to the custom-made computers governing the cameras and provided more durable cases for the equipment that was he able to get the visual material representing the melting of the ice. It is crucial, therefore, that Balog struggled with these adversities in order to produce technology which would have the potential to record what evades the human eye. Thus, he showed that in order to register climate change one has to see it from the manifestly non-human perspective of a self-operating camera. It is only appropriate that media scholar Joanna Zylinska opens her recent book, Nonhuman Photography (2016), with reference to Balog’s project. She quotes it as an exemplary meditation on the changing function of photography, which has ceased to be merely a medium for representing current or past events. By analyzing a host of photographic projects (including a few of her own), she argues

Introduction

for an understanding of photography as an activity which always involves creative cooperation between humans and technology. She regards photography as a process, rather than a set of objects (ibid: 4). This activity, critically shaping our understanding of the world and environment, “not only represents life but also shapes and regulates it, while also documenting or even envisioning its demise” (ibid: 2). This understanding of photography could just as well be extended onto other documentary media, facing new challenges in the age of ecological crises. Orlowski’s documentary on photography clearly shows that the process of documenting glacial retreat is such a cooperation between various agents to produce a new understanding of life forces. In this respect, Orlowski’s film which simulataneouly documents climate change and contributes to establishing it as an actual phenomenon, can be seen as yet another concept of performativity – one introduced by Karen Barad in her seminal Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). This is a lengthy account of Niels Bohr’s approach to physics, which connected experimental practices and philosophical meditation on crucial ontological questions. Faced with the problems that came with quantum physics in the early twentieth century, particularly the problem of indeterminacy, Bohr proposed a radical departure from the traditional notion of the scientist’s objectivity and detachment from the observed phenomenon. Far from epistemological skepticism, he wanted to treat science as a way of producing knowledge in the interaction of matter with the human mind and various non-human elements, including the measuring apparatus. In this respect, his work went beyond the bounds of the hard sciences, and is analyzed by Barad as a new philosophy which draws conclusions from the new scientific discoveries of its era. She reconstructs these forgotten aspects of Bohr’s work only to develop her own understanding of scientific practices, calling them performative in a strictly defined sense: “[T]hey challenge the representational belief in the power of words to represent pre-existing things  […] [A] performative account insists on understanding thinking, observing, and theorizing as practices of engagement with, and as part of, the world in which we have our being” (ibid: 133). It is this creative engagement with materiality of the world which lies at the core of scientific practices and gives rise to the investigated phenomenon as the “specific intra-action of an ‘object’ and ‘measuring agencies’” (ibid: 128). In other words, Barad tries to step over another line which has existed in Western thought since time immemorial – between ontology and epistemology. Turning to Bohr’s philosophy, she tries to approach the question of indeterminacy differently, by undermining the assumption that the measuring apparatus merely registers natural and objectively existing phenomena. As she argues with reference to a number of canonical experiments in quantum physics, this field of studies asks us to finally recognize that measuring is so entangled with the phenomenon under scrutiny that it should be regarded as constitutive of this phenomenon.

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In other words, any type of observation regarded as a local and material practice contributes to the creation of what is observed. Obviously, this subversion of the fundamental tenet of Western science leads to a reformulation of its role as a knowledge-making discourse. It should be regarded as a set of world-making procedures which performatively produce multiple experiential connections with phenomena being described.

Chapter Overview The various concepts of performance and performativity quoted above provide a conceptual framework for all three chapters in this part of our book. They are focused on examples of variously defined performances which serve as a common ground for scientific ideas, technological advancements, and aesthetics to converge. Each of these encounters has a different structure and purpose, but they all create collectives of humans and non-humans which performatively bring about the desired effects – technological solutions to practical problems, ways of producing knowledge or new concepts, points of view and affects. In all these instances, performance proves a framework for such transdisciplinary investigations. Drawing on a rich tradition of studies on laboratory life, Jussi Parikka takes a closer look at a few contemporary examples of performative projects which extend and modify the concept of the laboratory as space of experimentation and knowledge-making. In Parikka’s examples, the laboratory provides a context for transdisciplinary research outside of typical institutional structures and is therefore open to a variety of discourses and disciplines. It is instrumental in bringing them together as a systemic part of the infrastructure across art and academia. The laboratory is a particularly good structure for practice-led research in the uncharted territory of media studies, which investigates the relationships between communication technologies and human bodies, affects and cognition. In his discussion of the activities and infrastructure of ACTLab and other modern media research institutes, he concludes that they are critical sites not only for producing knowledge and technological solutions to particular problems, but also conceptual frameworks for the understanding of today’s rapid cultural changes. In a similar vein, though from a markedly different perspective, Izabella Pluta discusses the relationship between technosciences and contemporary performative practices. Her text is an extensive report on the “Masque et Avatar” project, which gathered theater practitioners and computer programmers to collaborate on technology which could combine live-action theater with virtual simulation. The consecutive stages of the project provide an excellent example of how new theater technologies and performative forms emerge from the cooperation of humans and machinery. However, an equally significant actor in this experimen-

Introduction

tal setup is the historical tradition of commedia dell’arte, which, to a large extent, affected the outcome of the designers’ and programmers’ work. This was not all the project’s practical significance. By matching a historical form of theater with cutting-edge technology, it also provided ample material for theoretical investigation into the relationship between the acting human body and its virtual doubles. Mateusz Borowski’s chapter moves into the realm of new performative forms, particularly “live art,” which draws upon concepts from biology and other life sciences. He analyzes three projects which start from scientific discoveries to create speculative, alternative worlds for the participants. In the manner of science-fiction novels, the three installations demonstrate possible distant futures of life on Earth. Borowski reads these performances as responses to current debates on the need to redefine the modern concept of life, not only in view of contemporary environmental problems, but also the emergence of technologies which imitate organic processes. These performative forms become sites in which various concepts of life materialize for the participants, inviting them to acts of collective knowledge-making. All three contributions, despite their differences in approach and the material they analyze, identify similar attempts in the expanding field of performative forms which defy the traditional division into aesthetic experimentation, political intervention, and scientific research. These three chapters support the claim that today’s performative arts go hand-in-hand with the scholarly attempts to bridge the gap between various disciplines inherited from the modern era. Today’s transdisciplinary performances provide multiple frameworks for staging sympoietic encounters between scholarly and artistic idioms, and academic experts, activists, and audiences, to work out solutions to practical problems and collectively look for possible livable futures.

References Barad, Karen (2007): Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Bubant, Niels et al. (eds.) (2017): Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Case, Sue-Ellen (2007): Performing Science and the Virtual, New York and London: Routledge. Collini, Stefan (1998): “Introduction.” In: C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. vii-lxxiii. Davis, Heather; Turpin Etienne (eds.) (2015): Art in the Anthropocene, London: Open Humanities Press.

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Gould, Stephen J. (2003): The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities, New York: Harmony Books. Haraway, Donna (2016): Staying with the Trouble, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hughes, Helen (2014): Green Documentary: Contemplation, Irony, Argument, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Knorr Cetina, Karen (1999): Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (1999): Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. McKenzie, Jon (2001): Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge. Snow, C. P. (1998): The Two Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Welzer, Harald (2008): Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed for in the 21st Century, transl. Patrick Camiller, London: Polity. Zylinska, Joanna (2016): Nonhuman Photography, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

The Lab Is the Space Is the Place The Performance of Art and Theory Jussi Parikka

Lab Stuff As one form of the modern test drive (Ronell 2005), the lab is full of promise, a project that builds a sense of the future in the present. The optimism driving current lab forms in the arts and humanities comes from a longer legacy of Cold War art and technology (Beck and Bishop 2018), as well as the transformation of art and university environments with studio spaces and transdisciplinary alignments (Parikka 2016). The lab is a reminder of the backbone of twentieth-century technological society; it carries forward the interdisciplinary team spirit that was part of the large engineering teams in the World War II effort and in subsequent years of creative enterprise (ibid). The lab holds this promise of multidisciplinary expertise, customized infrastructure, technological equipment to be used and creatively abused by the humanities, and much more. The lab also holds promise in fields such as the Digital Humanities: specialist access to data and digital tools opened up to include the broad expertise that pushes the (assumed) solitary humanists to work in teams, as they do in the sciences. Big Science has become the model for Big Humanities (Lane 2017), which is built both in new equipment and as narratives; it is made of things, and words about those things, and much more. In other words, capital investments into labs as new sorts of infrastructures are discursively supported by the writings that laud the necessity of those investments as the future of humanities in a broader academia. The lab is a project that inhabits a sense of the future, built on temporary funding structures which form the subjectivities it produces. As for some it seems emblematic of the Future of the Humanities, it may be useful to look at some of the past and present examples of labs to see what sort of a future this might pan out to be. The lab is, of course, a performance in itself: it consists of work, routines, gestures, intellectual habits and schedules that are essential to an ethnographic understanding of what sort of knowledge the lab produces (cf. Knorr Cetina 1992). It is this dual aspect that is of interest to me here; how does the lab harbor new ways of thinking about performance as an art and a disciplinary field, and how is

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the lab itself a performance, a space that forms a web of human and non-human agents, including the infrastructure? What special problems and ideas emerge in laboratory contexts, or labs, how these institutional settings build links to earlier avant-gardes, and how they are part and parcel of the past decades of discussions on technological culture and embodied forms of knowledge creation. Here I turn my attention to an inf luential example, active from the 1990s to recent times, which, despite its cult status, has received little attention. The ACTLab, or Advanced Communication Technology Lab, was founded and run by Rosanne Allucquére (Sandy) Stone, whose work in the 1990s made a significant contribution to how we perceive embodiment, alternative methodologies, theoretical developments, queer and transsexual contexts in digital culture, and identity in cyberculture. Her inf luential The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Stone 1996) stands out in discussions that have determined how the boundaries of the body reach further than the skin, while the f leshy, transforming, dynamic subject is always part of that picture (or as Donna Haraway puts it, the situation – Haraway 1988). Stone’s take on desire, identity, and subjectivity as distributed across space and performance, and as technological prosthesis, was built on intellectual structures developed over the decades, including significant work on gender, power, subjectivity, and sexuality. We can broadly call this part of the post-structuralist legacy, even if it was also transformed significantly in the USA in the 1980s, through such seminal figures as Donna Haraway. Examples of the distributed agency on which Stone focuses could be found both in new technologies and existing practices, such as prosthetic technologies. The location of body, voice and presence is problematized in a multitude of ways. Stephen Hawking’s visit to Santa Cruz served as an example for Stone’s 1990s writing. Stone mentions the impact of his voice distributed across the loud speakers into another space vis-à-vis the lecture hall where the talk was being held: Exactly where, I say to myself, is Hawking? Am I any closer to him now than I was outside? Who is it doing the talking up on the stage? In an important sense, Hawking doesn’t stop being Hawking at the edge of his visible body. There is the obvious physical Hawking, vividly outlined by the way our social conditioning teaches us to see a person as a person. But a serious part of Hawking extends into the box in his lap. In mirror image, a serious part of that silicon and plastic assemblage in his lap extends into him as well […] not to mention the invisible ways, displaced in time and space, in which discourses of medical technology and their physical accretions already permeate him and us. (Stone 1996: 5) Stone’s meditations on embodiment are quite emblematic of the cyborg discourse of the 1990s, where technologies were considered an integral part of our existence. Discourses of insides vs. outsides were seen to be permeated by the actual

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technologies to which our capacities of moving and speaking were bootstrapped. From Hawking’s technologically enabled and distributed agency, Stone moves to a variety of examples, including a discussion of MOOs and MUDs, the online environments that were the focus of many studies aiming to explore the performative elements of f luid gender identities. However, even in the realm of virtuality and f luidity, in discussing the seemingly virtual and purportedly disembodied aspects of identity, it is interesting to note that this work was also institutionally based and placed; the research space for Internet studies at that time also took place off line, or, more accurately, one might say that it took place in that on/off line zone that the ACTLab formed. In their own words, “We just call it ACTLab stuff, because it’s unique. One technical term for it might be intermodal expressive art/tech with a theoretical component. Or you might think of it as New Media Art. But those are just names, and not even very good ones” (ACTLab). Intermodality became a term that tied the theoretical “lab placed” work to forms of embodied experience, which themselves became a guideline as their pedagogy also began to form and to take physical space into account. Considering experience in the context of new technologies was crucial for ACTLab, both in its infrastructure and in feeding its theory into the pedagogy. The Internet was new and still emerging, new online practices from listservs to multiuser online platforms as well as media artistic takes (Stelarc, Char Davies, Brenda Laurel and others) that engaged with virtual identities were being widely discussed; enthusiasm for performative identities (sometimes even “immaterial”) was visible, while the dark realities of surveillance that emerged after 9/11 and especially after the Snowden leaks was still far away. Hence, to turn our attention to the historical situations in which academic institutions and the legacy of modern avant-gardes meet teaching and research structures, we might commence with questions such as: In what situations are bodies performed, do disciplines emerge, and collaborations form? How do curious examples from the early art and performance history of digital culture, such as the ACTLab, and the emergence of posthuman discourses from early work in cultural, queer, and transgender studies, provide an alternate way of looking at today’s art and technology? ACTLab and its dynamic online and studio-based aspects show another side of the story, which also feeds into other narratives of the emergence of network culture and new experimental spaces for technological work. 1990s Net art culture is one example of the parallel emergence of media labs (Bosma 2011) and, toward the 2010s, one discovers a similar push in critical work as a key form of contemporary design and technology discourse and other situated practices (see also Salter 2015). Our example in this chapter provides a brief prehistory of sorts.

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Studio Space to Lab Culture Art history’s interest in studio spaces has already unveiled important aspects of how space and designated routines form creative practices. The field of studio studies (Farias and Wilkie 2016) has recently emerged as an attempt to synthesize multiple different studio practices from design to fine art, music, and even more commercial contexts, and to engage with how they fit into a discussion with existing research, for example, in STS on laboratories. Indeed, the laboratory-centered work of scholars like Bruno Latour (1983) and Karin Knorr Cetina (1992) has been used to investigate how studios are sites of knowledge/performance that are already part of what is exported from labs/studios as thinking, art, or the various hybrid products in between. Hence, the studio is not merely part of the history of painting or other fine arts, or even the more recent history of art and technology that has emerged with the new technological materials in modern art (over roughly the past hundred years), such as technical media and signal-based systems, and modern materials, from synthetic modulation of light to materials such as plastic, etc. Following Latour, Farias and Wilkie have even suggested considering studios as performing “aesthetics-in-action, of assembling, improvising and manipulating cultural artefacts in view of producing affective attachments to future users, audiences, spectators and publics” (2016: 12), which also allows us to consider current works of experimental art, technology, and media labs as forms of aesthetics-in-action, producing less quantifiable things than a processual environment. In more recent discussions on practice-led research and research-creation (as the Canadians prefer), labs are seen as a systemic part of the infrastructure across art and academia (cf. Tanaka 2011). This is a significant part of the story, as it concerns the media arts and creative industries; but it is also present in contemporary examples that are part of the funding system to enhance the structures for interdisciplinary research, and in so doing, to ensure that artistic practices can be integrated as part of neoliberal forms of accountancy and metrics (see: Manning and Massumi 2014: 84–85). While labs have emerged to connect multiple disciplinary alignments, they can also be seen as measuring the bodies that work in academia – offering an infrastructure for playful creativity, and a platform that captures some work in those settings in an expanded set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). In many ways, the past decades have witnessed the emergence of a whole network of labs – or studio-labs (Century 1999) – that continue the work of experimental practice in university environments, across many fields of contemporary creative technology, including bioarts. While in at least several examples in European contexts, labs are associated with grassroots civic activity and democratic participation, the other pole of the lab is firmly attached to the more corporate

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uses of the term in media arts and creative industries. This, then, begs the question about the laboratory as an instrumental part of the forms of governance of the arts. As Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2014) from Senselab phrased it: “In that context, research-creation makes economic sense as a kind of a laboratory not only for knowledge-based product development but for the prototyping of new forms of collaborative activity expanding and diversifying the pool of immaterial labor” (85). This is not to be read as a dismissal of their work or other important examples of art-technology collaboration laboratories, but to be realistic about the conditions for the existence of experimental and critical practices, and to consider how methodological work in lab infrastructures are formed. Senselab is one of the most significant examples of lab-situated networks of scholars and artists focusing on the modalities of thought in practice. With the tagline “a laboratory for thought in motion,” Senselab delves into dynamic forms of thinking that are, literally, part of the movement of bodies, and as such, constantly investigate how to theorize thought milieux while performing the potentials of these spaces and their infrastructures. In such cases, the lab need not be technological, even if techniques of the body and collective bodies (as in arts such as dance) are part of the work; not all labs are about digital methods, networks, or data, but they are all part of the wider landscape of digital culture with its blend of art and technology, for which the lab becomes both an enabling and governing factor. We will brief ly touch on Senselab as one way of looking at the dynamics of the lab as an event later on. But first, the first example of ACTLab, founded in the early 1990s, is interesting in that it signifies a theoretical experiment as well as an experimental spirit of engaging with technologies new and old, some mainstream, and others somewhat beyond the usual focus, found in storage cupboards and other deposits of abandoned technology. Stone’s theoretical background and multiple earlier careers in sound and performance also constituted a lively part of ACTLab’s intellectual footing: in Stone’s (2005) words, it was always an “embodiment of Trans practices writ large” and “absolutely grounded in oppositional practices.” For Stone, writing in her transformational personal history and transsexual desire was part of theorizing the entanglement of individual bodies as part of the collective culture-space of the lab and the educational program that moved between cultural studies, arts, and new technologies. It is interesting, then, to look at the ACTLab as an experiment in technologies, bodies, disciplinary situations, and futures of performance in the 1990s and early 2000s. As Stone (2018) puts it, ACTLab was able to articulate its vision of emerging media technologies before the term itself became often inf lated, even compromised: “although we had the unexpected grace of being one of the first to get to say what New Media was, the folks who eventually wound up owning the name were the same folks who, from the earliest days, saw digital media not as

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arenas for experience and social change but as the twenty-first century’s equivalent of lathes and sewing machines – engines of mass job creation” (Stone 2018). In the context of this chapter, ACTLab is an example of how digital culture and new methodological and theoretical work found spatial settings that moved outside the usual seminar room, and indeed, outside the studio space. It became one form of aesthetics-in-action and a collective performance that spoke to both academic practices and their relation to the critical field of arts. Laboratory practices – as STS taught us – involve the scientists (or in this case, artists/theorists/students/ humanities scholars) as embodied in “collective organisms” (Knorr Cetina 1992: 121). It is this aspect of the work-of-aesthetics-in-action that speaks to the performative projects of and in the lab, not merely to performance as output. As revealed by much of their communication and examples in our interview with Stone (2018), ACTLab can be seen as a particular attitude in education and research that involves multiple forms of technology, from computers and coding to “making.” While maker culture became widely hyped much later, ACTLab’s work spoke to an engagement with studio spaces as alternative forms of thinking in terms of “making.” The processuality of this “making” has an awareness of its conceptual basis, enabled by material infrastructures. Here, ACTLab seems an apt example of what Chris Salter noted about the wider context of making in artistic settings: “The fact that making things is essentially not an altogether rational but most certainly an unpredictable activity not necessarily bound to systematic models or logical chains of decision making; saying ‘it works’ is to admit that accidents, failures, misunderstood situations […]” (2015: 13). In ACTLab’s case, the emphasis on “making” started in the space itself: to make a space that allowed the unplanned to occur. As Stone explains, to shift from a “regular classroom” to a studio, a lot had to happen. Her explanation of the insufficiency of the classroom describes how power functions in the gray in-between spaces of the educational institution’s architecture. Teaching strategies of normalized classrooms start with the interiors; this explains the lowered ceilings, f luorescent lights, and generally, either rows of chairs or a seminar table with a podium (Stone 2018). We can describe a semiotics of any space: “Room shape and furniture arrangement encode power relationships.” Furniture divides bodies and allocates a space’s possibilities in different ways; it is an instrumental part of how schedules work, and how time is arranged. This is also where the institutional situation of pedagogy (whether art or theory) begins: an arrangement of time and space as a necessary condition for relations to emerge. Indeed, Stone (2018) explains that ACTLab was well aware of the power dynamics of architecture: We started by destroying the implicit power dynamic: get rid of the seminar table, put chairs in a circle, [create a rule that the] group leader never sits in the same place in a successive meeting – since those days, almost everyone I know does that

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same basic thing when they are given the institutional default room. Getting rid of the table makes the whole body visible, not just from the chest up, so proxemics becomes more important – you’ve increased your communication bandwidth by 60 %. And you’ve removed the fortress effect, which increases mutual vulnerability, which you can turn into a way to build group spirit and group dynamics. But then without the table you’re keeping papers and books in your lap, because there really isn’t enough space on one of those fold-out surfaces that school chairs sometimes have, and seminar chairs don’t have them at all. So eventually we found a way to have our cake and eat it, too – we designed a huge seminar table that came apart into sections, so we could have open space time and also table time in the same room. The standard arrangements of tables and chairs, equipment, and infrastructure became meaningful, the administrative work of arrangement of space entered the intellectual debates, and as such, developed into an interesting perspective on the embodied forms of academic activity. The embodied situations of pedagogy, theory, and learning start in and from the space. Housed in the department of Radio, Film and Television, ACTLab functioned as a Multimedia and Interaction Lab and, as such, came to embody a sort of institutional passage in media studies from broadcast media (and their studios) to the world of networked computational and collaborative “making” spaces. As such, ACTLab is also an interesting institutional example that helps to narrate the significance of labs in the contemporary landscape of arts and humanities in ways that do not return the story to the usual examples of the MIT Media Lab or the Digital Humanities Labs, such as the Stanford Literary Lab. This is not to say that ACTLab has been neglected in the narratives and critical studies in the Digital Humanities. Patrik Svensson (2016) focuses on ACTLab in narrating some historical and present debates in the Digital Humanities, and the special strategies that make up part of lab culture in such instances. One can also see how Svensson’s attention to infrastructures and the furnishing (Shannon Mattern’s term) of intellectual spaces, such as humanities labs, is useful here: attention to the spatial and technological features becomes part and parcel of how the lab’s operations emerge. Svensson borrows terms from STS and related fields and speaks of these labs as “meeting places” and “sites of engagement” (Svensson 2016: 83). He argues that technology should be seen in broader terms, not just as a tool: “Digital tools can facilitate an experimental and predictive space that goes beyond individual instruments in suggesting an experiential and exploratory approach” (ibid: 95). In many ways, this already includes the potential to recognize space itself as part of an experiential and exploratory approach – a technology and technique in its own material right.

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Fig. 1: The ACTLab Umbrella, image courtesy of Rosanne Allucquére Stone.

The embodied nature of experimentation is central to Stone’s explanation of the lab. It cuts across the curriculum, the methods, the spatial settings and the strategy of “staying under the radar” (Stone 2005) to enable these experiments to happen. In other words, the lab functioned as one sort of a shelter for a variety of expressions which (literally) provided space and institutional resources for oddities and “weirdness” to emerge within the confines of an academic situation. A guiding thought or concept of ACTLab became the umbrella, expressed as a visual diagram for sheltering the experimental collective from institutional pressures. The umbrella is a mechanism for code-switching, where experimentation is also a trans-methodology. As such, this shelter offered the institution the public side of the lab, while allowing a multiplicity of ideas, methods, and activities to emerge (ibid). This multiplicity included the curriculum, whose clusters of topics ranged from Weird Science to Performance, Trans to Postmodern Gothic, Soundscapes to Death. Inside those clusters a wealth of topics emerged, sometimes mixing theoretical approaches with a studio-styled demo-culture (as one 1996 syllabus reveals) (Stone 1996). Some of the lab clusters’ explanations reveal more about the themes that constituted the ACTLab culture:

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Trans: Transformation and change, boundary theory, transgender, gender and sexuality in the large and its relation to positionality and flow; identity. Performance: Performance and the performative, performance as political intervention, the history and theory of theater, masks, puppetry, spectacle, ritual, street theater. Blackbox: Closure, multiplicity, theories of discourse formation, studies and practices of innovation, language. Postmodern Gothic: Theories and histories of the Gothic, modern goth, vampires, monsters and the monstrous, genetic engineering, gender and sexuality, delirium, postmodernity, cyborgs. When Cultures Collide: Language and episteme, cultural difference, subaltern discourses, Orientalism, mestiza consciousness. This topic has a multiple language component; we had a nice deal with one of the language departments by which we shared a foreign (i. e., not American English) language instructor. With visions of Gloria Anzaldua dancing in our heads we began the semester with classes in two languages: full immersion, take-no-prisoners bilinguality. (Stone 2005) Examining such activities and ideas, it becomes clearer how ACTLab’s spatial and organizational setup engendered a post-structuralist legacy that emerged in relation to transgender, post-colonial, and other critical studies. In general, we can see how it relates to what Rosi Braidotti (2016) has called the radical epistemologies that had a transformative impact across the arts and humanities since the 1970s and the 1980s. Quite unlike the innovation discourse characteristic of some studio laboratories and media labs since the 1980s (the MIT Media Lab would be one example), the courses and the philosophy of ACTLab were radically driven by concepts, but also by a cultural-studies approach to the forms of knowledge it produced, related to issues of identity, place, placement, and the embodied, performative sense of self-ref lexivity in learning situations. Hence, what Braidotti describes as the emergence of the critical posthumanities from earlier studies and formations – “Gender, feminist, queer, race, postcolonial, and subaltern studies, alongside cultural studies and film, television, and media studies” (Braidotti 2016: 382) – is a context where Stone’s work and the lab culture at UT Austin starts to appear as one part of a bigger picture. The new disciplinary arrangements work on the edges of and across established disciplines (Braidotti 2016: 382) and, in cases such as ACTLab, they are situated in special infrastructures that allow critical art and performance-based work to interact in a conceptually geared culture of “making.”

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In ACTLab usage, “making” is described as an activity which requires physical engagement. […] The basis for our class structure is that deep learning engages all the senses. We believe that theory flows from the act of making. We consider hermeneutics to be the basis of ACTLab philosophy: active, playful engagement, informed by individual effort and open to surprise. (ACTLab) While the terminology of making was gradually adapted to a wide range of academic and non-academic contexts in critical design and maker labs, and tempered by the significance it acquired in Make magazine, one should not deny its more radical implications, which link it to theoretical and political discourses. The tactility and embodied nature of conceptual and critical work are one part of what the studio environment in the lab is able to support. In other words, institutions such as ACTLab are experiments in putting concepts into social, material, and embodied situations, and continuing the work of radical cultural studies in, for example, “theater arts setup exercises, such as games, mirroring, contact improv, and so forth,” which Stone (2018) explained started their seminars. While it is easy to cite the etymological tie between “laboratory” and “labor,” it is more useful to consider how cognitive and aesthetic knowledge-work engages with the various modalities of experience in technological culture: the embodied nature of engaging and working with digital technologies.

Networked Bodies in Labs The lab occupies a special place, as the symbolic and material site where the arts studio turns into a technological lab. In artistic contexts, the centrality of activity, collectives, and the performativity of the work becomes an expression of a similar drive (Roberts 2015). The appearance of new materials in the studio have also supported this symbolic shift. Furthermore, educational inventions can coincide with artistic practices; some examples, at least, clearly show the close ties between experimental practice, radical politics, and conceptual work. Here I have in mind how the idea of a lab can be connected to the work in institutional critique, which has long sought to investigate what (art) institutions are for – and where issues in art link up with other institutions, contexts, and practices. The amount of attention the idea and terminology of the lab has received since the 1980s, and especially since the 2000s, indicates its position in the media arts, from performance to other fields. In some respects, it hearkens back to the Cold-War-era research labs and collaborations between art and industry (Shanken 2005; Tanaka 2011; Beck and Bishop 2018), and can be associated with the corporate brand of a “media

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lab” since the 1990s, when the digital arts became highly institutionalized. The MIT Media Lab, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica Futurelab and many other places like ACTLab have become major beacons of large investment into the technology-arts nexus. But apart from the high-visibility sites, there are many other interesting labs and centers that function alongside theoretical practices, technological infrastructures, and articulated visions that are related to the emerging network cultures in important ways. In general, this could be said to include both hackerspaces and citizen labs as part of the media lab wave of “structures and infrastructures that encourage curiosity-driven investigation, action research, and collaborative practice” (Tanaka 2011: 20). But one should move from the usual celebratory accounts to actual insights as to what it means to be curiosity-driven, or how collaborative action is sustained. In the UK, media labs have often been characterized as grassroots sites for learning about the Internet and digital technologies, often tied to the emerging digital arts scene with a radical edge (Frost 2012). Artec, Backspace, and other institutions could be seen as interesting networks for what later became key art projects and even theory, from Mongrel to Matthew Fuller and others. Instead of Nicolas Negroponte’s MIT Media Lab project, One ($100) Laptop Per Child, which was showcased at such places as Davos, the Furtherfield organization rolled out their Zero Dollar Laptop: Through a series of workshops, homeless participants are given the ability to use and maintain a free laptop complete with free software in self-led creative projects. It is this model of learning through self-directed creativity that arises again and again in media labs because it provides demonstrable results in helping people acquire and retain the skills they need. Without ‘bells and whistles’ new technology, Access Space emphasise the importance of ideas over technology and demystify all manner of computer-based skills. (Frost 2012) Examples of interesting, critical and community-oriented projects are plentiful; they begin to tell a story of links between off line sites and online cultures. In some ways, one might say that some of the spaces directly embody ideals of network culture: sharing and collaboration become part and parcel of some labs, including Backspace, as well as Access Space, which remains active (Sheffield). As Josephine Bosma (2011: 134–135) explains, labs such as these across Europe served as a backbone for Nettime-listserv and the emergence of net.art, and the other way round: the networked communities often found their off line practices in labs, studio spaces, and other locations that emphasized the embodied nature of their practices. In the context of Stone’s work on the performative nature of online identity, ACTLab tells a somewhat related story, as suggested above. Multiple User Envi-

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ronments were part of the infrastructure for the theoretical development found in Stone’s work, for example, and then found its way into ACTLab activities. This was of interest to a much wider audience. Discussions on online performativity, transgender identities, and sexuality in the new technological culture even made it into Wired, when Susan Stryker interviewed Stone in the mid 1990s. Stone’s formulation of the shifting of identities and the multiplicity of online performances was tied back to a transgender politics that denied set binaries. While this conversation was aimed at a popular audience, it is articulate in its appreciation of knowledge that technologically determines possibilities of identity and its multiplicity: “And it’s another way of saying that identity is always multiple. Virtual environments allow the terms self and body to mean differently. I see in the new virtual worlds created by communication technologies the opportunity for a legitimization of some forms of multiplicity as well as transgender identity and other kinds of subjectivity that are stigmatized in the ‘real’ world” (Stryker 1996). Virtual environments became also a reference point for situated practices, complexifying the clichéd notions of network cultures as disembodied, immaterial, and beyond space-imposed restrictions. While this all was part of the cyberculture discussions of the 1990s and slightly later, it is interesting to observe that the lab has a similar function in contemporary digital culture. It might not always be understood as a space, but the term itself signals collaborative, experimental, infrastructural, and institutional situations that perform what the lab is about. In many ways, one sees a similar spirit in the use of the term in recent examples, such as The Deep Lab, which, as a network of “cyberfeminist researchers, artists, writers, engineers, and cultural producers,” has no single location, but is scattered through a range of institutions. To read labs – or what I call “lab fever,” as a gentle nod to Jacques Derrida’s archive fever – through earlier examples, such as Sandy Stone’s ACTLab, alongside contemporary practices in art and activism, ensures that a radical agenda is included in discussions on digital humanities and the lab-based methodologies across the arts and theory. This radicality is the modus operandi that seeps through the lab as a collective engaged in a variety of experiments, pushing both the architectural situation of teaching and the boundaries of curricular activity. While cybercultural awareness was the background for the theoretical discussions and work in the lab, the methods and the engagement were very much situated around the idea of bodies in space. This is how Stone explained some earlier phases of ACTLab as a performative and dynamic situation: And the main thing I was after was esprit – building community – because once we had community we could discover what we were. So I designed the computer spaces as ‘pods’ about a meter and a half by two meters in size, with the computers set up around the edge facing outward. That meant that when you looked up from

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your computer, what you saw was not a wall but another person. You think with your body, consciously or unconsciously, so to nudge people out of their academic groove each class started with movement work. I spent quite a lot of time looking around for a large bouncy ball that wouldn’t damage the lighting instruments, which were hung only 20 feet overhead, if it hit them. (Stone 2018) Technology was a central part of the multimedia lab, although this did not necessarily mean limiting work to traditional forms of “innovation.” Sometimes it was literally junk – material for the “make stuff!” ethos that was central to their activities. Cybercultural online life turned into various experiments, dynamics, hoarding, and testing of whatever one could get one’s hands on: treasure troves of amazing junk, from printers that only needed a screw tightened in order to be fully functional to electronic test equipment to cameras and computers. We dragged it all off to the lab. We found a large room that seemed to exist for no other purpose but to house a massive blower for the air conditioning system. The rumble of the blower made the room uninhabitable. We invaded it, christened it The Death Star in honor of the rumbling, set up a beachhead, and filled it with junk of every imaginable kind. Students would raid it for miscellaneous parts with which to make stuff. And having a ready supply of stuff – just random artifacts – helped move us in the direction of our general exhortation to ‘Make Stuff.’ The more stuff people made, we found, the more that interesting and unexpected things, far less artifactual in nature, emerged in concert with the making. (Stone 2018) In other words, engaging with the new digital culture did not necessarily mean structuring the educational or research activities around enthusiasm for the new, but across a set of problems that emerge in relation to theoretical questions, actual institutional affordances, important questions of embodiment and identity, and a lab-based mobilization of what was called creativity: We use a lot of digital stuff, but we are not head over heels in love with the catchword ‘digital,’ except as digital equipment enables new forms of creativity. Digital is lovely and logical and highly seductive, like tulips in the 1600s. Creativity, on the other hand, is unruly by nature and unsettling while in progress. Our focus is primarily on creativity and secondarily on technology, on circuit bending rather than using prepackaged devices, on ripping up technology, reassembling it in unfamiliar forms, and making it do unexpected things. (ACTLab) The lab becomes a site of the unexpected, of experiments and tests, echoing Avital Ronell’s (2005) analysis of modern sites of experimentality: testing can function as

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an ethical situation, but as a scientific setup it is a leap forward and an uncertain stumble that can never be entirely sure where it will land. The test is uncertain; otherwise it would not qualify as a test or an experiment. Hence it also tests reality (what counts as real? What are the parameters of possibility?) and builds up a more serious case concerning ontology.1 The various epistemological situations of tests, trials, testimonials, exercises, experiments, and so on are interesting parallels to the term lab(oratory), reinforcing the sense of active embodied space for knowledge: it happens in a place and in situ, even if ultimately escaping the confines of the space. The cultural test drive is also part of the testing sites, which are, however, located in spatial architectures and in relation to intellectual discourses. Whereas the terminology of creativity has been radically inf lated since the 1990s invention of creative industries, one can still recognize certain value in how it was used in lab contexts; ACTLab, for example, was trying to find more radical uses for it. It is in this sense that one can speak of this lab culture as political; not merely engaging in political issues, but developing situations conducive to critical making and critical thinking.

The Lab Event I am tempted to link some of these educational methods and ideas to more recent discussions on research-creation, as there would be interesting details to discuss about the emergence of the media art labs in the 1980s and 90s. I would like to highlight some aspects that relate to the theoretical language of “aesthetics-in-action” and the processuality of the lab as an infrastructure and an event. As brief ly mentioned, SenseLab is one example of more recent institutional contexts built as a collective experiment from theory to movement, from embodiment to abstraction. I do not mean to suggest that this is the only way to understand early infrastructures of thought like ACTLab, but to offer a contemporary example where the lab, as a term and a collective situation, becomes one way to practice theoretical cultural abstractions and return them to modalities of movement and performance. Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s central role in the Senselab is visible in the theoretical language it employs, heavily inf luenced by Deleuze and Guattari, and other theorists, such as A. N. Whitehead. The emphasis is on the events 1 In Ronell’s extensive take, the central figure is Friedrich Nietzsche, as an experimenter whose work helps us to understand the emergence of the culture of the test (including the experiment and the lab): “Nietzsche sets up a lab in Beyond Good and Evil rather explicitly. A number of his other works pivot on the ‘experimental disposition’ and treat themselves as experimental efforts. Nietzsche’s text incorporates the history of lab culture, which is linked to political innovation. […] Democracy is itself viewed in terms of a trial, a perpetual test case, never off the hook on its purported levels of achievement” (2005: 135).

The Lab Is the Space Is the Place

that emerge in situations involving the students. The projects are introduced less as the application of a concept or an idea than are tied to the spatial, material, and embodied infrastructures, while always enacted in relations that are a dynamic part of the workshops, using different modes of expression (such as dance, movement, architecture, and the dynamic body). They are also tied to the language of research-creation, a discourse relating to artistic knowledge practices, as elaborated by Manning and Massumi: The first SenseLab event grew from a challenge arising from discussions with Isabelle Stengers, who expressed as a criterion for her participation in an academic event that it be just that: an event. In our conversations with Stengers, it became clear that for an ‘event’ to be an event, it is necessary that a collective thinking process be enacted that can give rise to new thoughts through the interaction on site. It is equally important that potential for what might occur not be pre-reduced to the delivery of already-arrived-at conclusions. The SenseLab took as its challenge to adapt this criteria to research-creation. What makes a research-creation event? (2014: 90) The methodological idea was to insert the overhyped policy term of interdisciplinarity into the process of encounters that form the nature of the events and the collaborative activity involving international artists and academics. In order to set the “initial conditions for unfolding” (Manning/Massumi 2014: 89) the collaborations, Senselab’s modus operandi was to emphasize the processuality of the techniques. Practice is not a ready-made, brought to predetermine the form of a meeting; it is characterized by technique as an immanent part of the interactions: “It can only work itself out, following the momentum of its own unrolling process” (ibid). It unfolds in time and in the spatial settings of the lab as a practice of events. The focus on processual unfolding is one way to characterize the event and perhaps even to continue to develop the idea of lab culture as an event. A picture begins to emerge of the collective ethos of labs such as ACTLab as structured, yet not predetermined, as aiming to develop methodological frameworks to allow for the unexpected. Infrastructural considerations, maker practices, technological affordances, whether of obsolete discarded materials or new media, alongside f lexible curricular guidelines are the ingredients in this setup. An interesting aspect is how the various parts of this recipe are the actual lab “product” in situ; practices and relations that emerge from the conditions and potential, and embody new approaches to academic infrastructures and their relation to other institutional frameworks. The lab starts to perform. It starts to become a living entity that transforms and sets in motion more than was initially planned. The lab is set in motion and becomes an instrumental part of a spatialized methodology.

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For all the positive attention it receives, there is no denying that the lab is inf lated as a term and, in many cases, has become a useful management unit for controlling interdisciplinarity in institutional settings. It is because of this complex relation to political and economic contexts that it deserves further attention. In other words, paying attention to the possibilities of space and infrastructure as participants in practice and theory is an interesting avenue that favors the conditions of its existence.2 Hence, an insight that can be gained from the experimental collective situation of labs relates to their self-ref lective nature, and how they turn into methods of investigating institutional situations. Building up methodological competency, theoretical ideas, and concept-led curricula is not necessarily central to what is presently seen as the concerns of the Digital Humanities, for instance, yet these are some of the more interesting insights can be carried forward from a reading of the earlier pioneers in such technological, multimedia, and interaction labs as ACTLab. While acknowledging Stone’s pioneering role as a theorist, it is also important to look at the collective situations, and hence, the sort of anonymous work that occurs in such events. For example, the aforementioned umbrella diagram could also be seen as a mechanism to enable and shelter the event-based nature of the curricular activities, guiding them toward the various sorts of demos that emerged.3 It was meant as a conceptual tool to make sense of the lab as a device that allows different forms of knowledge to exist in a university environment and to channel the energies of activists and artists in these institutional contexts. In many ways, such work acknowledged the odd experiments that are unsuited to university infrastructures, but because of this unnatural link, they become more interesting when read against the context of the neoliberalisation of the arts education, for example. Hence, while acknowledging that one form of the lab has been to manage how artistic practices – and their close relation to some conceptual practices – can capture the avant-garde in contemporary contexts of media labs (cf. Roberts 2015; Beck and Bishop 2018), this characterization of artistic and creative practices also contains a range of contemporary practices. These need to be investigated in relation to processual methodologies, their con2 This is also an issue that Senselab has been wanting to raise: “We were looking to inhabit otherwise, to practice what we call, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, an ‘immanent’ critique. An immanent critique engages with new processes than with new products, from a constructivist angle. It seeks to energize new modes of activity, already in germ, that seem to offer a potential to escape or overspill ready-made channelings into the dominant value system. The strategy of immanent critique is to inhabit one’s complicity and make it turn – in the sense in which butter ‘turns’ to curd” (Manning/Massumi 2014: 87). 3 The demo had already become the primary form of lab activity at the MIT Media Lab; “demo or die,” as Halpern (2015) notes, was where the focus moved from products to “performance and process” (59). Yet ACTLab and other examples are not based on an imitation of the 1980s Media Lab model, they emerge as part of the legacy of avant-garde arts and critical media cultures.

The Lab Is the Space Is the Place

ceptual leads, and their relation to labs that themselves emerge as an event, as an infrastructural situation-in-action, and, at times, a somewhat quirky repertoire of techniques.

References Beck, John/Bishop, Ryan (2018): “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.” In: Cultural Politics 14/2, pp. 225–243. Bosma, Josephine (2011): Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art. Rotterdam: Institute of Network Cultures and NAi Publishers, 2011. Braidotti, Rosi (2016): “The Critical Posthumanities; or, is Medianatures to Naturecultures as Zoe is to Bios?” In: Cultural Politics 12/3, pp. 380–390. Century, Michael (1999): “Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture”, July 7, 1999 (http://www.nextcentury.ca/PI/PImain.html). Deep Lab. Network web page, January 7, 2018 (http://www.deeplab.net/). Farias, Ignacio/Wilkie, Alex (2016): “Studio studies: Notes for a research programme.” In: Studio Studies. Operations, Typologies and Displacements, Ignacio Farias/Alex Wilkie (eds.), London: Routledge, pp. 1–21. Frost, Charlotte (2012) “Media Lab Culture in the UK.” 24 January 2012. (http:// www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/media-lab-culture-uk). Halpern, Orit (2015): “The Trauma Machine: Demos, Immersive Technologies and the Politics of Simulation.” In: Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas, Matteo Pasquinelli (ed.), London: Meson Press, pp. 53–67. Haraway, Donna (1984) “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In: Feminist Studies 14/3, pp. 575–599. Knorr Cetina, Karin (1992): “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory: On the Relationship Between Experiment and Laboratory in Science.” In: Science as Practice and Culture, Andrew Pickering (ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 113–138. Lane, Richard J. (2017): The Big Humanities: Digital Humanities/Digital Laboratories. London: Routledge. Latour, Bruno (1983): “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” In: Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, Karin Knorr-Cetina/ Michael Mulkay (eds.), Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp. 141–170. Manning, Erin/Massumi, Brian (2014): Thought in the Act. Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. “New Media Initiative: ACTLab programme”, January 3, 2018 (https://actlab.us/). Parikka, Jussi (2016): “The Lab Imaginary.” In: Across and Beyond: A Transmediale Reader on Postdigital Practices, Concepts and Institutions, Ryan Bishop/Kristoffer Gansing/Jussi Parikka/Elvia Wilk (eds.), Berlin: Sternberg, pp. 78–91.

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Roberts, John (2015): Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso. Ronell, Avital (2015): The Test Drive. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Salter, Chris (2015): Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Stone, Allucquére Rosanne (1996): The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Stone, Allucquére Rosanne (2005): “On Being Trans, and Under the Radar: Tales from the ACTLab.” January 4, 2018 (https://actlab.us/radar.shtml). Stone, Allucquére Rosanne (1996): “Theory and Methods of an Unnameable Discourse.” Course Syllabus, University of Texas, Austin, RTF 393P  – Spring, December 29, 2017 (https://web.archive.org/web/20030724175714/http://sandy​ stone.​com:80/393p.s96.html). Stone, Allucquére Rosanne (2018): “ACTLab, or Make Stuff! An interview with Allucquére Rosanne Stone.” August 24, 2018 (http://whatisamedialab.com/2018/​ 08/24/actlab-or-make-stuff-an-interview-with-allucquere-rosanne-stone/). Svensson, Patrik (2016): Big Digital Humanities. Imagining A Meeting Place for the Humanities and the Digital. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tanaka, Atau (2011): “Situating Within Society: Blueprints and Strategies for Media Labs.” In: A Blueprint for a Lab of the Future. Dortmund: Baltan Laboratories, pp. 12–20.

When Theater Director Collaborates with Computer Engineer Hybridizations and Methodological Shifts in the Masque et Avatar Interdisciplinary Project Izabella Pluta

Theater in the Digital Humanities Today hardly anyone is surprised when theater combines various technologies with live action. After all, this has been the case for nearly forty years, from the large-scale performances of the 1980s through the profound changes in theatrical forms in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Initially, the Italian Studio Azzurro and Giorgio Barberio Corsetti attempted to create a “new spectacularity.” This connected technology with the actors’ physicality and employed screens in a playful way, as in the La camera astratta performance (1987). The Belgian actor Marc Hollogne went the same route in his famous Marciel monte à Paris (1997). He seamlessly merged live action with mediated images and moved between the stage and the images on screen as if by magic. This ef fect was achieved by the perfect synchronization of the actor’s gestures and voice with the cinematic image, which Hollogne called an innovative form of cinematic theater (Cinéma-Théâtre). Robert Lepage’s works provide illustrative examples of theatrical experiments seminal for the stage in the 1990s. His theater is still evolving and employs astonishing forms and strategies. Lepage is well known for delving into various possibilities of fered by new media, and he involves his entire crew in quasi-scientific research, in cooperation with engineers, roboticists, and other specialists. Screens in various shapes, panoramic (La Géométrie des miracles, 1998), concave (Projet Andersen, 2005), or convex (Jeux de cartes. Coeur 2013), have required interdisciplinary collaboration for their construction, transport, and set-up, as well as proper directorial work and acting techniques (Pluta 2011: 331–342). Another example of crossing the boundaries of the traditional theater performance is the work of Japanese director Oriza Hirata, who uses humanoid robots designed in Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro’s laboratory (Pluta 2016: 65–79). Hirata faced the challenge of working with Geminoid, the most complex robot of

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our century, which, in its female form (Geminoid F), acted in two performances: Sayonara (2009, 2012) and Three Sisters: The Android Version (2012) (cf. Grimau/ Paré 2011). In recent years, an interesting hybrid of theater and video games has been created, called Game-Theater. One groundbreaking company, Germany’s machina EX, challenges audiences to solve mysteries during a performance (called a “game”). The participants, with a variety of media at their disposal, negotiate hypothetical solutions to the puzzle and sometimes even af fect the course of the narrative (as in TOXIK of 2015). The question of complex audiovisual dispositives on contemporary stages has been analyzed with a variety of theories. Suffice to recall the concept of digital performance put forward in 2007 to describe performances employing digital technology (Dixon 2007: 3), theories of intermediality (Chappel and Kattenbelt 2006; Bay-Cheng et al. 2010), or the agenda of artistic research (Nelson 2013). A relatively new discipline in this field is digital humanities, a field of education and engineering, which incorporates computing, social sciences, humanities, and art. It merges creativity and research, concentrating on the “digital object” as both a creative tool and a subject of scholarly analysis. This discipline includes theater. Nic Leonhardt, editor of the Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities in Theater and Performance, identifies four areas of theater in which digital objects have gained particular significance (2019): “DH projects” in theater studies; various teaching methodologies which employ theatrical or stage tactics; archival practices; and the digitization of higher education. These issues are tackled by a growing number of research institutions and teams, such as the IFTR “Digital Humanities in Theater Research” work group. In his “Performing Arts” (2004), published in A Companion to Digital Humanities, a volume seminal to this discipline, David Z. Saltz provides a panoramic view of projects in theater, dance, and performance art which could be classified in this field. He also points to a mutation in the performative arts which affects the basic structure of a performance, making it hybrid. Significantly, these changes, which initially called into question the paradigmatic features of the theater, such as the presence of spectator and actor in a shared time and space, are having a growing impact on the creative process. This is experiencing a profound change not only on the stage, but also in the laboratory. Salz observes that such transformations are also affecting traditional theatrical professions, such as sound engineering, video production, directing, and even acting. This point is central to my argument. Research on technological performance in the digital humanities is an interesting task, because it enables one to grasp and understand the function of the technological parts which, to a large extent, make up a performance that integrates various audiovisual technologies. These inf luence the performance’s aesthetics, without losing their strictly technological character (dispositive, programming).

When Theater Director Collaborates with Computer Engineer

From this point of view, it is possible to analyze the technological dispositive of the stage, which has been debated in contemporary theater for at least ten years. Paradoxically, however, this apparatus with its digital architecture often receives scant attention in scholarly articles and reviews (Rykner 2014: 207; Orte 2008; Kapelusz 2012). It is worth remembering that the French word dispositif has a strong connection with modern philosophy (Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben), which makes its meaning in the context of theater much broader than the English “device,” connected with stage design or an elaborate set. For my analysis of an exemplary technological performance, I primarily understand “dispositives” as the technological devices used in a performance to produce a desired visual or sonic effect: screens, monitors, cameras, sensors, tablets, cell phones, robotic prostheses, drones, or binaural headphones. Their materiality becomes part of the aesthetics of the performance, because they can be seen by the audience, and sometimes even operated by them. However, the dispositive also has an immaterial aspect, i. e. the software or the programs, such as Isadora, used by video or sound directors. This aspect of the dispositive is only visible through the ef fects it produces. As Salz argued, a digital humanities perspective focuses on the transformations of the theater profession, particularly with regard to technological devices. These changes are partly relevant in the broader context of anthropology and media theory. Such concepts as Marshall McLuhan’s “extensions of man” (McLuhan 1998) or Donna Haraway’s “cyborg” (Haraway 1999) ref lect general tendencies in digital societies in the twenty-first century. The transformation in the theater has led to a situation in which the sound engineers, video producers, and lighting technicians have gained a more significant role in the creative process, on a par with the directors, paving the way for independent work. The history of performing arts has known such situations, with the notable example of the collaboration between Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver in 1996, in the 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering project. Consisting of ten performances, this event emerged from close collaboration between ten artists and thirty engineers from Bell Telephone Laboratories (Pluta 2013: 14–17). Each performance had its own technological dispositive, created especially for a given evening. Therefore, it was the engineers as well as the artists who authored the project, which was duly mentioned in the program of each performance. Even today, 9 Evenings continues to inspire contemporary art projects, although the relationship between artists and engineers has evolved and now takes various forms. Examples abound. One of the most spectacular results of merging artistic and technological skills is the work of the French performance-maker Adrien Mondot.1 This software engineer and trained circus artist (specializing in

1 See the website of Compagnie Adrien M & Claire B: http://www.am-cb.net/a-propos

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juggling) creates his shows with fellow circus artist Claire Bardaine.2 These performances include visualizations that function according to the programs and algorithms (particularly eMotion) written by Mondot. A similar combination of skills can be observed in many people of the younger generation: Clément-Marie Mathieu of Thé-Ro (a graduate of École National Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâter), Benjamin Burger from Extralaben, and Rod Guadaram from Okubo Studio (both studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zurich), as well as Mathias Prinz from machina Ex (a graduate of the University of Hildesheim). By independent work, I mean a creative endeavor which brings about an aesthetic form (a performance, a multimedia or robotic installation), presented to the audience and signed by the engineer or programmer as his or her own. The independent creative work of sound engineers, videomakers, and programmers has been discussed for several years in various professional milieus all over the world. In my article, I will focus on France and Switzerland, because it is this environment that I know from experience, and many years of research. As an example, I will quote the debate I organized in February 2014 for the Pour un laboratoire technologique de la création scénique: Sur la collaboration entre les artistes de la scène et les ingénieurs symposium at École National Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre (Guillemot et al. 2015: 209–217). The debate was titled Régisseur, ingénieur, bricoleur, chercheur: un entrelacs de pratiques. It was a rare meeting of French videomakers and sound engineers. The young alumni of this school had a chance to speak about how their profession was changing and going beyond a purely technical dimension, toward creativity and research. One of the symptoms of this transformation is the involvement of engineers and scientists in the creative process. Some of them become members of an artistic team, as with the French group MxM, under the artistic direction of Cyril Teste. This ensemble is composed not of actors, but a tech crew: Julien Boizard (technical director), Nihil Bordures (composer and sound engineer), Nicolas Doremus (cameraman), Patrick Laffont (videomaker), and Mehdie Toutain-Lopez (video designer). The present article will focus on the collaboration between directors and programmers, and analyses of the mutual exchange of competences within an interdisciplinary research group. My main example is the Masque et Avatar (Mask and Avatar) project carried out at Paris 8 University in 2015–2017. I took part in it as a research consultant, and participated in two workshops and the final conference. I will focus on the collaboration between director Georges Gagneré, who acted as a “digital artist” (a term I will explain further on) in this project, and Cédric Plessiet, a software engineer and visual artist learning the art of theater. 2 See the issue of Ligeia. Dossier sur l’art no 137–140, 2015, which I co-edited with Mireille Losco-Lena, devoted to theater laboratories and their relationship with artistic practice as research and new technologies.

When Theater Director Collaborates with Computer Engineer

The centerpiece of my article is an analysis of their exchange of experiences and communication, which involved terminology from both theater and information technology. I will concentrate on the first phase of the project (December 2015 – May 2016), which I had the chance to closely observe, as well as the preparatory period, about which I spoke with both collaborators. The hypothesis is that, on the basis of this collaboration, we can observe the formation of a new type of artist with basic IT skills. In the digital humanities, such a person is called a digital humanities doer (DHer). He or she can code and prepare software, but is also endowed with sensitivity and creative talent.

Masque et Avatar: The Specifics of the Project To characterize the subject of study, I must characterize the institution responsible for this project, the Laboratory of Excellence Labex Arts-H2H. It works under the auspices of Paris 8 University, and focuses on the relationship between art and new technologies.3 Lab research is divided into three branches: situations, technologies, and hybridizations. In 2015, Labex Arts-H2H accepted the first version of the La Scène augmentée (The Augmented Stage) project, written and submitted by Erica Magris,4 assistant professor at the Department of Theater at the university. Subsequently, a modified version of the project was submitted with an additional final part, entitled Masque et Avatar,5 prepared by Giulia Filacanapa. The research for this project was designed to connect theater, science, and technology, and to analyze the function and skills of theater artists in digital technology. Initially, three distinct areas of interest were selected: acting, stage practice, and developing a rudimentary acting method or systematic exercises for actors. Work on these topics was carried out during Cluster Workshops (CW). The interdisciplinary project merging theater, information technology, and video games focused on a single subject: the relationship between a performer (specializing in commedia dell’arte) and a digital avatar on a screen. The aim was to investigate the form and the limits of their interactions which took place on stage before an audience composed of project participants (researchers, students, other actors, programmers, and directors). They sat on chairs facing the stage in a classical set-up and had no additional visual equipment (e. g. 3D glasses or headphones). The Masque et Avatar project was composed of two parts: the experimentation with the Kinect and Oculus Rift dispositives phase (from 2015 until mid-2016) and 3 See Labex website: http://www.labex-arts-h2h.fr (accessed 20th December 2017). 4 See the description of the La Scène augmentée project: http://sceneaugmentee.labex-arts-h2h.fr (accessed 25 December 2017). 5 See the description of the Masque et Avatar project: http://www.labex-arts-h2h.fr/IMG/pdf/ masques.pdf (accessed 25 December 2017).

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the work with the Motion Capture dispositive phase (from mid-2016 till the end of 2017). Both phases could be described as endogenous, main research lines of the project. They also included exogeneous phases: the participants took part in academic conferences and the results of the project were shown to wider audiences, as during the 2016 Conference of International Federation for Theater Research in Stockholm6 and at Conservatoire National Superieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris in autumn 2017. The project also involved two conferences. The first, Luca Ronconi, maître d’un théâtre sans limites, was organized by Erika Magris and Giulia Flacanapa in December 2016 in Paris,7 at Istituto di Cultura Italiano and Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique. The second, Masques technologiques: altérités hybrides de la scène contemporaine, was the project finale, taking place in December 2017 in Le Cube, Centre de création numérique in Paris, Issy-les-Moulineux.8 It was accompanied by a presentation of three performative forms: AGAMEMNON REDUX. Une expérience de masque et de mocap en trois scénes based on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, directed by Andy Lavender; La psychanalyse augmentée by Matthieu Milesi, directed by himself and Duccio Bellugi; and La vie en rose by Boris Dymny and Giulia Filacanapa, directed by Filacanapa. The following people took part in the Masque et Avatar project: 1. From Theater Department of Paris 8 University: Erica Magris (lecturer), Giulia Filacanapa (researcher and director), Georges Gagneré (researcher and director); 2. From the Art and Visual Technology Department of Paris 8 University: Cédric Plessiet (researcher, programmer-visual artist), Rémy Sohier (visual artist, lecturer); 3. From the Labex Arts H2H laboratory at Paris 8 University: Mehdi Bourgois (website designer, active particularly in the initial phase of the project); 4. Artists and researchers from various institutions: Duccio Bellugi (Théâtre du Soleil), Boris Dymny (artistic director of di mini teatro), Andy Lavender (lecturer and director from University of Warwick), Izabella Pluta (researcher, University of Lausanne, Les Teinureries – École supérieure de théâtre) and the (mainly second-year) students of the Theater Department, who agreed to take part in experimental workshops.

6 Presented in the “Mask and Technologies: From the Commedia dell’arte to the Digital Avatar” panel (17  June 2016). See conference programme https://www.iftr.org/media/1845/conference-​ pro​gramme-iftr-2016.pdf 7 See the conference program: http://www.scenes-monde.univ-paris8.fr/spip.php?article1371 (accessed 2 December 2017). 8 See the conference programme: http://www.labex-arts-h2h.fr/masques-technologiques-alter​ ites.html (accessed 2 December 2017).

When Theater Director Collaborates with Computer Engineer

The main assumption of the project was to work together during workshops, in pairs, or individually. The participants worked in a general framework, for example by conducting workshops for students at Paris 8 University (the workshop Idéfi-CREATIC was of fered to undergraduates), or in a specific artistic context (Guilia Filacanapa held a workshop with student actors who used the commedia dell’arte masks). The project participants wanted to analyze the possible relationships between the theatrical mask used by an actor and the technological dispositive, whose visible incarnation is the avatar on screen. The project states that theater itself is a place for augmenting reality. A mask is a stage object which “augments” the body of the actor in a metaphorical way. The aim of Cluster Workshop was to develop a series of experiments to initiate a dialogue between practice and theory through three elements: the actor, the mask and the computer-generated avatar. Giulia Filacanapa worked with actors-students from Paris 8 University, who made up the core of research team from the outset. Filacanapa used the commedia dell’arte masks, made of leather by a contemporary artisan Stefan Perocco from Meduna. During the final conference of the project, Filacanapa said that, although commedia dell’arte masks are rarely used in contemporary theater, they provide a valuable teaching tool, used in nearly every European theater school, when training performers. The avatar, generated by a technological dispositive, is rarely employed in actors’ training, but is more and more salient in hybrid performances that connect theater, dance, and video games.9 The project was interdisciplinary and transmedial. In the first draft of the Scène augmentée project (2015), Erica Magris described this method as experimental. The project involved a variety of elements: background survey, historical research, working out theoretical assumptions and practical solutions, exercises for actors and interaction with the dispositive, group discussions, perfecting the dispositive, and participation in the work of the Observatoire critique (Critical Observatory), which organized discussions with students and audiences about the workshops and exercises. Quite soon, the method took the form of artistic research, involving the formulation of hypotheses, a multi-phase work in progress, and the final outcome: three performative forms and a post-conference publication. (Fig. 1)

9 The most prominent example is ART (Avatar Repertory Theater), which operates in the virtual environment of Second Life. See http://www.avatarrepertorytheater.org/home (accessed 6 October 2018).

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Fig 1. Masque et Avatar, Cluster Workshop. An actor in a commedia dell’arte mask and an on-screen avatar in a white mask.

It is interesting to take a closer look at this project in terms of this research on the digital humanities, because of the technological dispositive and the process of perfecting the digital tools, attuned to the main premises of the project. Masque et Avatar could be seen as the smallest research unit within the digital humanities, i. e. a DH project. The authors of A Short Guide to Digital Humanities argue a project like this can involve various parties, such as research institutes, partner institutions, and students (Burdick 2012: SG4). It can include art institutions (e. g. theater or museums), research centers (e. g. libraries) or units (e. g. institutes or laboratories), as well as commercial production institutions (e. g. enterprises and technological consortia). The term “DH project” has a double meaning in this context. First, as a noun, a project is a structure with specific research aims, “a kind of scholarship that requires design, management, negotiation, and collaboration” (Burdick 2012: SG4). Secondly, as the authors of A Short Guide to Digital Humanities explain, the verb “to project” refers to a “scholarship that projects, in the sense of futurity, as something which is not yet” (Burdick 2012: SG4). A DH project is carried out by partners from different scholarly disciplines, who can form groups with various competences, but who aim at a complementarity of functions. This situation requires the coordination of work, so that the experiment produces the desired effects. The participants of Masque et Avatar had to meet the challenges posed by both meanings of “project.” On the one hand, they strove to find a common denominator for the results they achieved in theater, video games, and information technol-

When Theater Director Collaborates with Computer Engineer

ogy. On the other, they looked for points of contact and hybridisation between different sets of data, as to establish a coherent set of coordinates for various levels of the project. A significant point in the discussion was the positioning of the actor in front of the Kinect camera, because the body interacted with the avatar and was seen by the audience at the same time. The actors and the director Giulia Filacanapa used the terminology of theatrical space and body movement, for example, for the position of the head or the posture. If an actor puts on a mask, he or she has to pay closer attention to the position of the neck and arms. The programmers talked technicalities: they established the parameters of the space in which the actor’s body would be captured by Kinect, came up with the working question for the actor in the exercise (“Who am I playing for at this moment?”), and instructed the actor that the side screen showed an image of the body which helped control movement. Moreover, one of the effects of work and discussions in the initial phase of the project was the neologism “manipulactor,” which means “a numerical collaborator which uses a gamepad/joystick to work in unison with the mocaptor which moves the avatar controlled in real time by the latter by means of a combination of captured movement.”10 Therefore, the discussions and experiments were part and parcel of the process of conducting this research; they enabled spontaneous exchanges of views, which let the project evolve.

The Effects of Exchanging Experiences during Cluster Workshops The original value of the research I refer to here lies in the practical stage exercises and the experimentation with the dispositive during cluster workshops. In the first phase of the project (2015–2016), the workshops included practical work and theoretical ref lection. The discussions were systematic. Specially invited scholars presented theoretical introductions to each workshop or papers in a mini-conference, followed by an impromptu discussion with workshop participants. The space of a dialog opened up in a spontaneous way, because the discussion focused not only on the hypotheses, but also on the difficulties in verifying them and on the mistakes made in the course of working. The relationship between the speakers and the participants was non-hierarchical. The “Mask and Technology: Immersion, Expression and Interaction” (CW≠1) cluster workshop took place on 11 and 12 December 2015. I took part in it, together with the core team of the project, invited artists and researchers, and students interested in the topic. The theoretical part took one afternoon and the practical an entire day (Fig. 2, Fig. 3). The venue was Studio Théâtre of Paris 8 University,

10 A definition by Georges Gagneré, from our email exchange on 20 December 2017.

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a small theater venue with basic editing and lighting equipment. The following presentations were included in the theoretical part: 1. A lecture on experimental work involving avatars (Georges Gagneré, Cédric Plessiet) 2. A paper on acting in masks in the new commedia dell’arte, accompanied by a presentation of acting exercises (Giulia Filacanapa) 3. A presentation on observation protocols and archivization of workshops (Erica Magris, Mehdi Bougeois) 4. A presentation of the main assumptions of the project (Erica Magris) 5. A paper on the relationship between artistic practice as research and technology (Izabella Pluta) Fig. 2: Masque et Avatar, Cluster Workshop.

An interesting moment of this meeting was the presentation by The Masque Collective, demonstrating a dispositive that projects a mask and can be worn by an audience member. It was a metal construction with a screen in the form of a mask and a miniature projector. The whole device can be attached to the body with belts. The user can see a chosen mask on the screen, which is also visible on the outside

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(the screen is made of cloth). As a result, the commedia dell’arte mask confronted the concept of a technological mask. The participants could try out the device and see for themselves that, even in an immaterial form (such as an image), a mask performs its basic function, which I have already mentioned. The demonstration proved that the avatar on screen can become a technological mask for the actor, and therefore, his or her extension. Fig. 3: Masque et Avatar, Cluster Workshop.

The practical part was composed of three sets of exercises, or “experiences”: 1. Immersion: the participant entered the space of play and tried to act as an avatar, by taking a position in front of the Kinect camera, using gesture and posture. 2. Expression: the participant animated an avatar, trying to express the basic emotions through the body. 3. Interaction: the participant animating an avatar tried to interact with another participant, who entered the space of play (with or without a commedia dell’arte mask).11

11 See WC≠1 flyer: http://sceneaugmentee.labex-arts-h2h.fr/content/cw1-masque-et-technologies-​ immersion-expression-interaction.

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This stage of the research was meant to test the potential expression and interaction in various configurations, primarily between the performers (student-actors from GenteGente!! and theater students), the characters in masks, and the avatar (which could have a human face or a white theatrical mask), as well as the audience (students, researchers, and artists). The next exercises used techniques of improvisation in masks. The space was clearly divided into the performing area and the auditorium, with the audience sitting in front of the screen (an immersive dispositive, situated on the right, Fig. 4). The transitions between these areas were smooth and the discussions between actors, students, and researcher-observers were bound by no rules. For a limited time, each participant could wear a mask and try to act in it and interact with the avatar. The workshop was recorded and the participants were asked to fill a record of their observations. The aim was to reach preliminary conclusions about the results of the workshop and this phase of the project, while gathering material to be stored in the database (which has not yet been designed to be interactive). Georges Gagneré has created the Tiki platform, on which he gathered a large portion of the materials (recordings, journals written by directors and actors, photographs, and drawings), but it is accessible only to the project participants who have an access code. Fig. 4: Masque et Avatar, Cluster Workshop, space arrangement.

In these experiments blending theater (as a domain of creativity, experimentation, and intuition) and information technology (a science based on mathematics and codes), it is interesting to analyze how the participants communicated and

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what solutions they introduced to cooperate. Their aim, after all, was to work out a common denominator and coherent meaning for the project. In the digital humanities, Mark Stefik points to the function of digital sensemakers, people who work in the Internet and select meaningful information out of the constant f low of data (Stefik 2011: 38). According to Stefik, in digital sensemaking meaning emerges out of the structure of hypertext and is “mediated by a digital information infrastructure, such as today’s web and search engines” (ibid). He connects the term with the information which the user finds through various search engines, which is a futile task, because the questions the user asks are usually answered in a cursory, fragmentary and unconvincing way (ibid). Even though the participants of Masque et Avatar gather information from the Internet and other sources in various ways, they are confronted not only by the sheer amount of data, but also by the fact that much of it is organized in databases. In this case, digital sensemaking as defined by Stefik takes the form of discussions, sharing information, exchange of knowledge, and striving for a “common understanding” of many elements. The idea of an Internet platform implies an exchange of information. This platform confirms the initial hypothesis concerning an analogy between the premises of the Masque et Avatar project and the perspective of the digital humanities. The CW≠1 cluster workshop and its consecutive installments foregrounded the process of exchange and hybridization of knowledge and experiences between the participants. Also it enabled the transfer of professional competences between collaborators. The commedia dell’arte performers had a chance to be confronted with a new stage situation: they had to learn to interact with an avatar on screen. They had to modify their posture and the head position to which they were used after years of training commedia dell’arte techniques. For director Giulia Filacanapa, the context of information technology was also a challenge because of the technological dispositive which the artist intuitively used, without knowing the technical principles on which the equipment was based. It is worth stressing that mask, avatar, and the technological dispositive were the main topics of discussion from the outset. The software operating the devices was constantly developed, in accordance with the evolving experimentation. The questions which spontaneously cropped up at various junctures (such as: How to inscribe in the exercise the Chinese shadow effect, which appears in the projection as a shadow of the masked actor?) provided crucial reference points. Through openness to happenstance and f lexibility in formulating conclusions, the project evolved effectively and without the stoppages that could have resulted from a too-strict adherence to the initial mandate. The hypotheses developed too, sometimes revealing weaknesses of the project, a failure to assess the situation, or a poor solution, resulting from the lack of experience in this field which is still new for the theater.

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The Director and the IT Specialist: Creating Dialogue and Cooperation Jean-Paul Fourmentraux made a few interesting remarks concerning the changes various professions undergo in interdisciplinary projects that merge art and technology. At the interface of various environments which make use of technological innovation, this injunction to creativity occupies a central place and tends to redefine the work and professional identity of the actors engaged at the crossroads of technoscientific research and contemporary art practices. (Fourmentraux 2012: 11) Although Fourmentraux speaks from the point of view of the discipline called arts and sciences, his observation also applies to my subject, particularly to the competences of the director and IT specialist. The CW≠1 cluster workshop provided a good example of how different professional competences can cross-breed, particularly in the cooperation between director Georges Gagneré and visual artist Cédric Plessiet. While working on Masque et Avatar, Gagneré could capitalize on his experience as a director and scholar. He has worked with new technologies in live performances for years, and has taken part in many artistic and scholarly projects. He holds a PhD in theater studies and teaches at the Faculty of Theater at Paris 8 University. He often stresses that when working in theater, he performs a variety of functions: the director, “creator of intermedial dispositives” (Gagneré and Plessiet 2018), a technician operating the program which generates the avatar and the set, and an intermediary between the actor, director, and avatar (particularly in Masque et Avatar). Cédric Plessiet specializes in Precalculated visual programming (in Real Time). Also he teaches at the Department of Art and Digital Imagery at Paris 8 University. He describes himself as a visual artist rather than a “tech engineer,” a label erroneously ascribed to him and which he regards inadequate to his long-time research and artistic activities. Plessiet designs digital tools specifically for the stage, particularly those that enable the actor to work with an electronic image. He has also designed a few installations, and has experience in filmmaking (special effects and motion capture technology) and video games (work with avatars). These two participants created the technological dispositive, cooperating in 2014 during the Idefi-CREATIC workshop and subsequently within the framework of a cluster workshop, from December 2015 onward. Their initial hypothesis was formulated in close connection with the technological dispositive used to create an avatar and interact with it: “Can we say that the avatar is guided by an IT engineer in the same way as the actor is guided by the director?” (Gagneré and Plessiet 2015: 9–35). Plessiet recollects this phase as follows:

When Theater Director Collaborates with Computer Engineer

Georges Gagneré seemed to be fascinated by IT technology, but had no expertise in this domain. This somehow saved his image in my eyes. He did not regard me as a technician. Often theater directors say to us: “I am a director, and you are software engineer, so you should develop a tool for me.” Hearing that I am immediately blocked. Georges said something else: “You have your own universe, which seems very interesting to me, and I have my own, so let’s work together.” I answered: “Okay, but first you should understand the principles operating in my universe.” (Gagneré and Plessiet 2018) The cooperation was possible through the openness of both the software engineer and the director, who wanted to talk, exchange experiences, and even get acquainted with some aspects of the partner’s work. They are both confronted with the question of liveness and presence, pertinent not only in the theater but also, as Salz argues, in the digital humanities. Gagneré and Plessiet concentrated on the situation where an actor interacts with a computer animation, which led them to examine the degree of liveness of this animation (Gagneré and Plessiet 2015: 9–35). It becomes a partner for the actor, which raises the question: is it a mask or an electronic marionette – or perhaps a new form of acting? Fig. 5: Masque et Avatar, Cluster Workshop, AkeNe.

A dispositive made up of Kinect and Oculus Rift, used in the first phase of the project, was part of the platform on which both artists had worked for three years.

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Together they created a software library called AkeNe, containing a real-time engine for 3D video games, particularly Ogre, Unity, and Unreal (ibid: 13) (Fig. 5). This library allows you to program artificial intelligence for a video game in order to control virtual reality devices, such as Kinect and the Motion Capture dispositive. The library has a modular structure, which users can independently and quite efficiently expand, building interactive subsystems, just as Gagneré did. Moreover, in January 2015, in his Idefi-CREATIC atelier-lab, he offered the “From a registered gesture to a gesture of digital interactivity” postgraduate course, devoted to the functioning of avatars. Yet Gagneré needed a makeshift dispositive that would be easy to operate, so he could work on his own, without Plessiet’s help. The latter prepared a small platform that required little expertise from the director. It was a dispositive which, in time, allowed him to gain some independence in manipulating the avatar or the virtual stage design (Gagneré and Plessiet 2018). For Gagneré, this was a significant moment in the process of getting acquainted with programming, which led to his becoming gradually more independent in working with the device: It is interesting that in the initial phase of our work in 2014 I managed to convince Cédric to build me a pedagogical platform for manipulating the avatar. I promised him that I would work on it without his help. This was the main reason for his saying yes. He just equipped me with the necessary technological elements, which I was supposed to be able to operate, without bothering him with questions and taking minimum responsibility for getting to know his language. I drew him closer to the theater and he built the first prototype. (ibid) When they began the project in December 2015, Gagneré had already learned considerable IT skills.12 The next important phase of the project was the “incarnation” of the avatar. It received a virtual body, based on recorded gestures of actor Victor Cuevas, a graduate of Paris 8 University. This phase was significant for the performers, who could hone their skills within the framework of a work in progress. Also, during the experiments and rehearsals, the digital artists, software engineers, actors, and the director could make sudden and unexpected discoveries. For example, Plessiet realized how the body of an actor differs from a virtual embodiment. The actor needs to be trained and stimulated to express; he or she also needs rest, unlike an avatar, which is only an algorithm manipulated 12 In April 2015, Gagneré made a study visit to Laboratoire d’Informatique Bordelais in France. By that time, Plessiet had created the first platform using Unity3D software. That year, in the summer and fall, Gagneré individually learned to operate Unreal software. He acquired the skills needed to assist Plessiet during the cluster workshop in December 2016 and to teach a Idefi-CREATIC.

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by the programmer. It was at this crucial moment that Plessiet reached the following conclusion: What surprised me the most was the place of the body in the theater. In my line of work it is entirely different. For me the body is an avatar, a vehicle which I pilot, whereas for you it is an object of communication, an entirely different thing. I recall Victor [Cuevas], an actor participating in CREATIC in 2015, being constantly irritated, until we realized that we did not provide him with the means that he needed to express himself. For me it was a moment of shock and crisis. (ibid) An actor creating a role needs time and material: a stage situation, dramatic tension, an outline of the character. Therefore, he or she needs the pieces to build the character. Victor Cuevas had none of these during this exercise with Gagneré and Plessiet. The presence of Giulia Filacanapa as the main director in the initial phase of the project proved invaluable, because she conducted exercises with the actors, using both the technological devices and the dell’arte masks. She devoted a great deal of attention to the details of the performers’ work. With her involvement, Gagneré could focus primarily on steering the avatar, and from the CW≠3 cluster workshop in May 2016 onward, he no longer cooperated with the actors. He concentrated on manipulating the avatar and registering the actors’ movement through Motion Capture. Later on, he only worked with computers and operated the digital devices. Because of this modification, in this project, particularly after the CW≠7 cluster workshop in October 2017, he could be called a “digital artist,” a term often used in the digital humanities. Operating the dispositive, he served as an intermediary between the avatar, the actor, and the director. Sometimes, however, when speaking with the actors and other directors involved in the project, he took the role of a typical theater director.13 These shifts in the distribution of tasks in the final phase of the project turned out to be the right solution. Consecutive tasks became increasingly complex and demanded undivided attention. The directors were preoccupied by the work with the actors and preparing performances for public presentation. The programmers could only control the dispositive and design the details of the interaction between the actor and the avatar. The work-in-progress format required that the technological system used and developed in the project be constantly updated, developed, and improved. For example, Kinect was integrated into the dispositive, but sometimes replaced by 13 In the second phase of the project, the function of the director was taken by Duccio Bellugi, Boris Dymy, Andy Lavender, and Giulia Filacanapa, who was involved in the project from its very outset.

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motion capture technology, which turned out to be much more complex (it was included in the second phase of the project). The focal point was the avatar and its interaction with the actor in a real space. This work was divided into a few phases: the virtual embodiment of the avatar, generating the projected stage design, and setting the lighting in the acting space. Gagneré and Plessiet formulated questions concerning this work method on two levels: 1. The level of Kinect: a) How can the programmer measure the actor’s presence in real space? b) What is the quality of the programmer’s perception of the actor’s presence in this situation? 2. The level of Oculus Rift: a) What is felt by the audience immersed in an artificial space? b) How does the actor experience immersion when interacting with the avatar? It should be stressed that the questions concerning Kinect were more pertinent to Gagneré’s activities, because he used his previous theater experience in his work with the actors. Plessiet was more concerned with recording movement in real time (through motion-capture technology), and not with intermediary time, as is usually the case. He also emphasized that, before the start of the project in January 2014, the dispositive functioned f lawlessly, and although the avatar was visually simple, the space it could “inhabit” already looked interesting: an austere interior with gray walls and windows overlooking a black abyss or an open space with blue sky and sandy ground. Looking closely at how the project participants used Kinect and Oculus Rift, one cannot fail to notice the affinities between their work and the way design is conceived in digital humanities. The authors of the book Digital_Humanities define this method as “thinking-through-practice” and see it as essential to this domain. They define technological imagination on a cultural level and subject it to interpretation. They add: Digital Humanities is a production-based endeavor in which theoretical issues get tested in the design of implementation, and implementations are loci of theoretical reflection and elaboration. (Burdick et al. 2012: 13) Significantly, the expression “thinking-through-practice” is crucial in artistic research, as Masque et Avatar might be defined. Suffice it to recall the term “ref lection-in-action,” suggested by Donal Schön as early as 1963 (Schön 1963). Equally

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important was the concept of “action research,” fundamental to the paradigm of artistic research, and defined in 1946 by Kurt Lewin (Lewin 1946). It should be stressed that both terms were used in artistic research in conjunction with a technological component or dispositive. Masque et Avatar combined an analysis of technological problems in theater, based on assumptions typical of artistic research, with the design and “thinking-through-practice” employed in the digital humanities. The lines between these two practices are becoming increasingly blurred. Perhaps in the future it will be possible to work out a coherent format for an interdisciplinary project, focused on a technological object as the common denominator for various fields of art and science.

Toward a DH Artist of Theater Masque et Avatar, and particularly the cluster workshops, convincingly demonstrates numerous transfers of professional competences within an interdisciplinary team, which merges theatrical experiments with information technology on the one hand, and on the other, theory with practice. Gagneré and Plessiet oscillated between their professional skills and new specialist competences which they learned from each other. As a director, Gagneré acquired the rudiments of programming. Plessiet, a software engineer and visual artist, had a chance to work with the actors and try his hand at directing a live theater performance. This transformation, typical of Masque et Avatar as well as many other contemporary collaborations between artists, engineers, and programmers, can be described by notions developed in the digital humanities and intermedial studies. Both Gagneré and Plessiet could be described as “creators of dispositives,” “techs,” or “digital artists.” They could be treated as prototypical representatives of the digital humanities, not only because their project involved a technological dispositive which allowed them to experiment with new methods of acting and guiding the actors, but also because pairing their professional skills inspired them to develop new abilities and work formats. Plessiet exemplifies the tendency among contemporary visual artists to forge connections between art and technology by creating specialized software, optical devices, and innovative digital interfaces (Fourmentraux 2012: 19). Gagneré is a representative of theater artists who draw inspiration from novel technological apparatuses. As he stated: At some point together with Cédric we tried to grasp the moment of going beyond our competences. On the one hand, I realized what I cannot do and will never learn. On the other hand, I identified the skills which I could potentially acquire, to be able to understand some issues pertaining to IT engineering and enter Cédric’s world. Our competences were mutually complementary, although in many respects I had

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to rely on his knowledge and skills. I started to work with digital tools, because I had no choice, although I did not become as skilled in digital technology as Adrien Mondot, who is a trained IT engineer. I think that a director or someone who works on a theater project with actors needs to acquire competences which only a few years ago started to be officially taught, particularly how to use digital tools. Therefore I started to work with codes and became a sort of ‘power user,’ without, however, knowing C++. (Gagneré and Plessiet 2018) Gagneré admits that, as an artist, he had to depart from his research and theater work to learn new skills in an unfamiliar domain. He started to use his basic knowledge of programming in his art work. The exchange of competences leads to elision of borders between professions. As argued by Dominique Vinck, a sociologist active in the digital humanities, such collaborations make it obvious that it is necessary for artists to get to know the basics of IT technology to be able to operate digital systems (Vinck 2016: 10). Undoubtedly, Gagneré and Plessiet can be regarded as digital humanists who not only “create, process, theorize and/or evaluate digital tools and their potential,” but also know how to use the code to carry out programming tasks (ibid).

Conclusions Masque et Avatar is an example of innovative research in theater which goes beyond its framework by integrating information technology, video games, and technologies of visual imaging. Moreover, it connects theory and practice to test its initial hypotheses. The space created during cluster workshops created an opportunity to introduce innovative exercises, get to know the technical parameters of Kinect and Oculus Rift, interact with an avatar, and learn the basics of programming. The research I have described united theater and video games, showing that, perhaps, in the future, the actor will be able to perform alongside an avatar. This kind of research is still in its initial phase, and requires theater practitioners to put in a great deal of effort to learn information technology, programming the dispositive and adjusting it to the stage’s requirements. As a result, the avatar will likely gain a wider range of expression, through gesture, movement, face, and voice. Both Gagneré and Plessiet admitted that creating an effective dialogue in such a heterogeneous context is probably a Utopian task. They preferred to speak of gradual “transitions from one discipline to another” (Gagneré and Plessiet 2015: 15) to build bridges between various domains of knowledge and practice. As a result, the programmer becomes more than just an IT specialist, subservient to the demands of the director, who in turn is more than just an artist, presenting his concept in the obscure language of art. “Boundary crossing” is an interesting

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methodological proposition which will most probably bring good results in other interdisciplinary projects. The cooperation between a director and a programmer can also be regarded as a continuation of the creative explorations of the New York group led by Rauschenberg and Klüver in 1966, and provides an excellent example of fruitful collaboration between an artist and an engineer. Translated from Polish by Mateusz Borowski

References Bay-Cheng, Sarah et al. (eds.) (2010): Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Burdick, Anne, et al. (eds.) (2012): Digital_Humanities. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2012. Chapple, Freda/Kattenbelt, Chiel (eds.) (2006): Intermediality in Theater and Performance. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Dixon, Steve (2007): Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Fourmentraux, Jean-Paul (2012): “Présentation générale. Art et science. L’ère numérique.” In: Art et science, CNRS Editions, pp. 9–25. Gagneré, Georges/Plessiet, Cédric (2015): “Traversées des frontières.” In: Frontières numériques  & artéfacts, Hahour, Hakim/Saleh, Imad (eds.), Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 9–35. Gagneré, Georges/Plessiet, Cédric (2018): “Sur la collaboration d’un metteur en scène et d’un programmeur: des synergies aux hybridations des compétences professionnelles. Entretien réalisé par Izabella Pluta.” In: Critiques. Regard sur la technologie dans le spectacle vivant. Carnet en ligne de Theater in Progress (http://theaterinprogress.ch/?p=455&preview=true>). Grimau, Emmanuel/Paré Zaven (2011): Le jour où les robots mangeront des pommes, Paris: Pétra. Guillemot, Alban/Nesme, Benjamin/Pfeiffer, Oliver/Thomelin, Jean-François (2015) “Régisseur, ingénieur, bricoleur, chercheur: un entrelacs de pratiques.” In: Ligeia. Dossiers sur l’art Théâtres Laboratoires. Recherche-création et technologies dans le théâtre aujourd’hui 1/137-140, pp. 209–217. Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In: The Cultural Studies Reader, During Simon (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 271–292. Kapelusz, Anyssa (2012): Usages du dispositive au théâtre; fabrique et experience d’un art contemporain, Paris: Université de Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. Leonhardt, Nic (ed) (2019): Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities in Theater and Performance. London: Routledge.

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Magris, Erica (2017): La Scène augmentée. Jeu de l’acteur, pratiques de création et modes de transmission, (http://sceneaugmentee.labex-arts-h2h.fr/content/ pr%C3%A9sentation-du-projet). McLuhan, Marshall (1998): Understanding Media: Extensions of Man, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Nelson, Robin (written and edited by). Practice as Research in Arts. Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Orte, Philippe (ed.) (2008): Discours, images, dispositifs, Paris: L’Harmattan. Pluta, Izabella. (2011): L’Acteur et l’intermédialité. Les nouveaux enjeux pour l’interprète et la scène à l’ère technologique. Lausanne: L’Age d’homme. Pluta, Izabella (2013): “L’intermédialité et le processus créatif. L’artiste de la scène entre création et recherche.” In: Intermedia Review: An online peer-reviewed publication on art, culture and media, (http://intermediareview.com/images/ revistas/edicao2/Atas_III_art1.pdf). Pluta, Izabella (2016): “Theater and Robotics: Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Androids as Staged by Oriza Hirata.” In: Art Research Journal 3/1, pp. 65–79. Rykner, Arnaud (2014): Corps obscènes. Pantomime, tableau vivant et autres images pas sages, Paris: Orizons. Saltz, David Z (2004): “Performing Arts.” In: A Companion to Digital Humanities, Schreibman Susan/Siemens, Raymond George/Unsworth, John, Hoboken: Blackwell Publication, pp. 121–131. Stefik, Mark (2011): “We Digital Sensemakers.” In: Switching Codes. Thinking Trough Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, edited by Bartscherer, Thomas/Coover, Roderick, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 38–60. Vinck, Dominique (2016): Humanités Numériques. La culture face aux nouvelles technologies. Paris: Le Cavalier Bleu Editions.

Renegotiating Life Performances of Speculative Futures 1 Mateusz Borowski In the present chapter I will address the issue of the new developments in performative forms which seek to establish connections between various scholarly disciplines, artistic practices, and forms of knowledge production. The scope and impact of these productive exchanges between disciplines and discourses exceed the framework of a single chapter. As such, I shall confine myself to examining a handful of such transdisciplinary projects, which can be read as responses to the current ongoing redefinitions of biological life, its various connections with technological development, and the problems of contemporary biopolitics. The emergence of such transdisciplinary formats which actively engage the viewers into bodily and cognitive acts is, I argue, closely connected with the development of biosciences and biotechnologies, as well as with their reverberations, primarily the need to redefine the fundamental issues and concepts of the Western episteme. In The Politics of Life Itself (2007), following in the footsteps of the great historians of the sciences, notably Michel Foucault, the British sociologist Nikolas Rose operates on the premise that any understanding of life is historically and culturally contingent, dependent on a set of discourses, practices, and technological networks in a given period within a given community. He is particularly interested in the challenges posed by developments in this broad technoscientific field at the turn of the twenty-first century. The scope of those changes has led Rose to argue that we are “currently inhabiting an emerging form of life” (7); his book is an attempt to chart the parameters of this new definition of life and its social and political reverberations, and to investigate possible future scenarios. Rose starts his book by going back to the last major redefinition of life, which took place in light of the advancements of mid-twentieth-century genetics. For many scientists and scholars this paradigmatic shift had a momentous impact on the understanding of organic processes and heredity. For example, in 1966, a 1 This chapter was partly prepared during my research stay at Ghent University within the framework of Incoming Stay programme financed by Faculty Research Fund of Ghent University 20162017.

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French philosopher of science, Georges Canguilhem, to whom Rose refers extensively, suggested that, in the wake of the discovery of the structure of double helix by Watson and Crick, the definition of life has to change. Genetics was then a new branch of biology, concerned with life processes on a molecular level, and departed from all mechanical, physical, and chemical explanations of genetic inheritance. Instead, a vocabulary of linguistics was adopted by the biological sciences, which started to conceptualize life processes in terms of grammar, semantics, and syntax theory (44). Canguilhem posited a new definition: life is meaning, one that can and needs to be deciphered like a secret message, knowledge of which will provide the ultimate control over nature. At present, as Rose argues, quoting an abundance of works by other scholars, notably Lily Kay and Evelyn Fox Keller, that great dream of reading the “book of life” has come to an end. The great project of deciphering genome has produced results which undercut its fundamental assumption that “information is the new epistemology of biology” (47) and the geneticists more or less willingly admit that “DNA sequences alone do not comprise the master plan of organic existence” (47). They have not entirely abandoned the notion of sequential transcription and translation of information, but they place greater emphasis on complexities, non-linear interactions between DNA sequences, epigenetic factors and the interactions between the organism and its environment, leading to the synthesis of enzymes and proteins. According to this post-genomic agenda, life cannot be reduced to information, and life processes do not conform to simple linear and causal explanations. They emerge from a network of complex interactions between various organic and inorganic elements within larger technocultural formations. This, however, is only part of the problem. What further complicates the matter is the fact that, as Rose argues, any definition of life cannot be separated from the cultural and political context, especially today, at a time of particularly intense debates about what counts as life, debates taking place not only within the scientific community, but in other spheres of public life as well. Our understanding of what life is or could be in the future results from a combination of medical, legal, political, ecological, ethical, technological, and economic practices. In this respect, life is a truly emergent phenomenon – no single domain or discourse can lay claim to ultimately defining it. It is an effect of their mutual interdependencies and inf luences, clashes, conf licts, and interdisciplinary f lows. Consequently, as Rose puts it, even if, in a specified context “characteristics [of life] may be identifiable […] its productivity cannot be predicted” (2007: 81) and it remains to be seen what other social phenomena, concepts of subjectivity, social practices, and political changes will result from the current paradigmatic shifts. Therefore, Rose sets a great store by speculative imaginings of possible futures of life, accounts of potential paths of biotechnological and political developments; accounts which at least partly attempt to envisage the conse-

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quences of the changes that the major scientific and cultural paradigms are currently undergoing. It seems that for Rose this is a major task for the contemporary humanities and social sciences, though he does not pose the question of what forms those speculative accounts should take. In a similar vein, this problem was addressed by Rosi Braidotti in an article which bears nearly the same title as Rose’s book – “The Politics of ‘Life Itself ’” (2010). She is also concerned with the social and biopolitical reverberations of advancements in genetics and biotechnology, yet she enumerates those branches of academic research in interdisciplinary humanities (for example, Giorgio Agamben’s analyses of bare life, environmental humanities, ecofeminism or neo-vitalist approaches drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s studies) which in various ways respond to those momentous changes (206). She also identifies a growing need for an intensified effort to unite various disciplines to develop scenarios of possible livable “virtual futures” (216) – not necessarily the futures of humankind, but rather of cohabiting and interrelated forms of life. With this aim in view, she expresses a need for an intensified effort to forge new interdisciplinary practices of knowledge production and distribution: If it is indeed the case that all technologies have a strong ‘biopower’ effect, in that they affect bodies and immerse them in social and legal relations of power, then a higher degree of interdisciplinary effort is needed in social and political thought to come to terms with our historical predicament. This challenge requires a methodology that focuses on processes of interconnections. (206) In this chapter I would like to begin where Rose and Braidotti left off, leaving ground for further investigations of “virtual futures,” although they did not ponder means of producing them in a practical way. I argue that recent developments in performative practices, broadly conceived, can be regarded as responses to Braidotti’s call for interdisciplinary methodologies which foreground the challenges posed by rapid biotechnological changes. I have selected just a few exemplary projects which demonstrate what forms such “interdisciplinary effort” might take and what results it might yield. I have decided to take a closer look at developments in performative arts which experiment with living matter and thus have been variously referred to as bioart, transgenic art, wet art, or live art. In my reading, these projects are critical interventions into the current scientific debates and responses to today’s cultural and ecological predicaments, although their aim is not to mediate specialist discourse for the wider public. By linking scientific discoveries with artistic participatory formats they engage the viewers/recipients in physical acts, turning them into active agents in arrangements that connect various species (both real and virtual) and abiotic elements. In other words, they propose artificially constructed environments of aesthesis  – affective realms of

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“thinking and feeling through” (Davis and Turpin 2015: 3) the predicament brought about by major shifts in our understanding of life’s past, present and future. The common denominator between the three projects I analyze is how they relate these reformulations of the fundamental notions of Western scientific paradigms. All three are concerned with potential future developments that could result from the current era of both rapidly developing biotechnological advancements and the massive anthropogenic destruction of the environment. Pinar Yoldas’ An Ecosystem of Excess (2014) is an installation with imaginary life forms born of the plastic debris f loating in the oceans. Eduardo Kac’s Genesis (1999– 2001), involving visitors in a collective act of creating an artificial protein, asks them to question the long-standing myth of human control over nature promised by today’s genetic research. Pierre Huyghe’s Af ter ALife Ahead (2017), an artificially created, self-regulating environment connecting various organisms with machines, imagines a future landscape in which life is no longer the property of organic beings. All three explore the possibilities and potentials which already evince themselves at present, and offer spectators performative spaces for exploring these future scenarios. In this respect, these performative projects are related to the agenda of speculative thinking, as laid out by Isabelle Stengers and Didier Debaise in “The Insistence of Possibles” (2017). This article draws on the legacy of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, positing an alternative to the typical modern model of thought, based in fact and refusing to accept what is deemed impossible by the dominant episteme. Speculative thinking readily embraces the possible, with no regard for any measure of probability. It is an examination of the “virtualities present within this situation” (Stengers and Debaise 2017: 18), looking for future alternatives to the status quo, to find other ways of world-making from the dominant and seemingly objective doxa. In this respect, in projecting a possible future, the speculation most often found in science-fiction encourages a renewed examination of the present, making dormant potentials and possibilities visible. The three projects I discuss are deeply invested in this agenda, although they do not engage the participants in the act of philosophizing. They offer multimedial environments in which the act of speculation connects thinking with affect and corporeal action. In this respect they make the speculative futures palpable, thus increasing their potential impact on the present.

Ecosystem of the Future Pinar Yolda’s An Ecosystem of Excess (2014) seems to be a direct response to Rose’s injunction to invent possible futures of life. The artist quotes scientific sources as the starting point for her project. She draws on studies concerning the rapid growth of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on the Pacific Ocean, a vortex of plastic

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waste which, over the years, has reached fifteen million square kilometers (Yoldas 2015: 357). Preliminary studies show that this f loating island is becoming a “primordial soup of plastic” (357) that has the capacity to significantly change the circulation of matter and energy in the marine ecosystem, and inf luence all living organisms inhabiting the oceans. For example, in 2012, in the journal Biology Letters, an online peer-reviewed periodical issued by The Royal Society, Miriam C. Goldstein, Marci Rosenberg, and Lanna Cheng published an article (Goldstein et al. 2012) investigating the impact of microplastic pollution on the oceanic ecosystems. They observed a correlation between the growth of plastic pollution in North Pacific Subtropical Gyre and the population of a pelagic insect, Halobates sericeus, which lives on the surface of water, but lays eggs on a hard substrate and therefore its reproduction is conditioned by the availability of f loating materials. As a predator which is also preyed upon by larger animals it is a significant part of the marine food chains. The study, which analyzed data gathered for nearly forty years (1972–2010), confirmed that the increase in plastic debris was correlated with the abundance of juvenile and adult insects of the species. In conclusion, the authors predicted that the expanding debris vortex can lead to an increase in the population of some marine predators, which will then threaten other species, most probably zooplankton and fish. Yoldas also drew on an even more surprising discovery: the adaptive mechanism in large microbial communities which thrive in plastic debris. The findings of the team of researchers supervised by Linda Amarall-Zettler, published in 2013, pointed to the existence of new life forms which make a microbial community called the “plastisphere.” These studies on the impact of the anthropogenic changes on the marine ecosystem provided a starting point for Yoldas’s installation and were quoted in a description of the imaginary species of the future she created in this work. An Ecosystem of Excess might be classified among the SF narratives of which Donna Haraway wrote (Haraway 2016: 2) – it is both a science-fiction piece and a speculative fabulation about the possible development of contemporary naturecultures. Yoldas’s installation could be described as an exhibition from a possible future in which “a new Linnean order of post-human life forms” (Yoldas 2015: 357) has developed out of the primordial soup of plastic. The project was presented in numerous locations worldwide, during solo exhibitions and festivals, as an arrangement of museum exhibits with specimens of artificially produced animals and their organs f loating in a transparent f luid, accompanied by descriptions, simulations, and drawings on screens. All of these exhibits presented a selection of life forms which could possibly emerge from today’s polluted environment through the adaptation of the biosphere to the excess of human waste. The exhibition was composed of a plethora of organisms capable of digesting and metabolizing plastic, which Yoldas calls plastivores: a Pacific Balloon Turtle, which developed a shell with pneumatic abilities by feeding on rubber; PV

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Sea Worms with vinyl shells; a plastivorous reptile whose colorful eggs hatch in a layer of plastic on the bottom of the sea, and are themselves made of plastic; birds whose brightly-colored feathers result from the digestion of plastivorous organisms. Alongside these species, the exhibition featured anatomical preparations of organs responsible for sensing, digesting, and excreting plastic. Visitors could also see a sample of sand made of microparticles of plastic and a large cylinder filled with plastic primordial soup. This concoction was composed of dissolved plastics with which an average inhabitant of the Western world might have contact in the course of a day. These organisms were also linked through various symbiotic relationships, which facilitated their existence in a plastic-filled world. However, in this ecosystem of the future, Yoldas has not included its source  – human beings. As a matter of fact, in accordance with the findings of Goldstein and others, it is marine insects that enjoyed evolutionary success in this speculative environment and became a key ecological player on a planetary scale. A short comment accompanying the presentation of the project in Art in the Anthropocene (2015) emphasizes this aspect of the installation: “Starting from excessive anthropocentrism An Ecosystem of Excess reaches anthropo-de-centrism by offering life without humankind” (359). In fact, the only people in the exhibition were the visitors, who, from the point of view of the speculative narrative presented by Yoldas, became the last of their kind, a species soon to be dethroned from their dominant position among other life forms. Undoubtedly, Yoldas’s performative installation less raises awareness about the scope of problems connected with accumulation of plastic waste than works like other science fiction narratives about possible future worlds. As Fredric Jameson observed with reference to Philip K. Dick’s novels, although their action is set in the future, they hold remnants of twentieth-century culture. This trait of this author’s novels leads Jameson to conclude that science fiction makes its readers look at their surrounding world from a future perspective, tainted with “nostalgia for the present […] when the present is transformed into a distant past by a future perspective whose true function and reason for being is merely and precisely to be the operator of just such a shift in tense perspectives” (Jameson 2005: 381). An Ecosystem of Excess achieves a similar uncanny effect, though it does so by quoting the conventions of a typical museum exhibition, which, under the auspices of science, presents viewers with objectified and “factual” knowledge. Yoldas’s installation, like a time machine, moves the visitors to the future, thus turning them into an anachronism – remnants of a distant past. An Ecosystem of Excess is clearly a response to the ongoing ecological crises, but it does not present itself as an interventionist or educational project to raise awareness of anthropogenic destruction to the environment. It is more directed against the conviction that lies at the core of the Anthropocene as the current epoch in the history of Earth; an era when humans are assumed to have become a

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major force in shaping the natural environment. The speculative ecosystem shows visitors a future life without humans, a world which emerged from a complex network of interactions between biotic and abiotic assemblages, neither designed nor controlled by humans. However, in terms of this chapter, another aspect of this installation is worth examining  – the understanding of life processes that underlies the creation of this ecosystem of excess. After all, Yoldas’s imaginary creatures are no longer plastic-based, not carbon-based organisms. They learned to involve plastic in their various life cycles, carrying out recycling processes on a planetary scale. And An Ecosystem of Excess situates its visitors at this moment in the history of natural forms when a singularity occurs, producing life forms which are organic and synthetic at the same time. Or rather, Yoldas’s installation effectively undermines this fundamental dichotomy between the living and the synthetic, thus situating contemporary humans in a transitional zone between the old world order and a future to come, and pointing to a processual nature of the definition of life itself. Fig. 1: Pinar Yoldas, An Ecosystem of Excess, 2014.

In this respect her installation falls within the scope of these studies which locate the current redefinitions of life in the context of technoscientific and cultural developments. For example, in Junkware (2011) Thierry Bardini argues that, at the turn of the twenty-first century, late-modern humans gradually transitioned into a new form, a “posthuman to come” (25). His transdisciplinary work draws a dense network of relationships between science (particularly the theories proposed by geneticists), digital technologies, and cyberculture to posit that the world we inhabit can be best described through the metaphor of junk. He discov-

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ers this principle in the conceptualization of both the microscale of genetic processes of heredity and the macroscale of cultural processes. His diagnosis is much concerned with the historical relationships between concepts in genetics and the technological media. He argues that, even in the 1970s, in the absolute dominance of semiotics and at the dawn of the cybernetic age, a genetic code was seen as a coherent string of data in an electronic medium with no random or useless elements. A decisive turn in genome research occurred at the turn of the twenty-first century, when geneticists radically revised existing accounts of the laboratory experiments and processes of communication which had a formative impact on the conceptualisation of the gene transmission. It turned out that the non-coding part of DNA was in fact the lion’s share of our genome. According to the estimates quoted by Bardini, only 1.5 % of DNA genetic material is meaningful in terms of communication and takes active part in the synthesis of protein. The remaining 98.5 % is not just incomprehensible noise, probably remnants of old genetic material in long sequences of aminoacids. Although they do not code proteins, they have been preserved in the DNA and probably play a significant role in genetic data transmission. Perhaps they have been preserved to become part of the process of protein production. For Bardini, this scientific discovery is the best proof of the changes in principles by which life is defined as a natural phenomenon. As he argues, when DNA was seen as a kind of computer program, life was regarded as a function of software. Consequently, understanding this code should enable scientists to control organic processes and direct the process of protein synthesis. As such, geneticists are still trying to understand the function of genetic junkware, remnants of biological memory preserved for later use. Bardini privileges the creative function of genetic junkware, because it enables ongoing and undetermined changes on both a molecular and a cultural level. This leads him to propose a new definition of life: “It is only now that we can realise that life has always been junk, that is, always potentially recyclable” (2011: 25). Perhaps Yoldas’ speculative exhibition can be seen as an attempt to mediate this understanding of life to visitors. And this new definition of life applies to the whole organic world, apart from humans. According to Bardini’s diagnosis of our transition period, Yoldas’s installation can be regarded as a meditation on the possibility of life in the growing wastelands left behind by modern civilization. As the title of the installation suggests, the excessive consumption found in capitalist societies not only produces plastic waste that changes global ecology. It has also dislocated humans from the network of ecological interdependencies, excluding them from the endless recycling f low of matter and energy. Therefore, in my reading An Ecosystem of Excess reveals a Utopian streak. It proposes a vision of life as recycling junk, as an alternative to capitalist waste production. As such, it can be regarded as a “transdisciplinary effort” which makes it possible for us to begin to come to terms with our current ecological predicament.

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Making Worlds with Metaphors In the context of Yolda’s installation, the metaphor of life as junk turns out to be more than just a figure of speech to describe preexisting phenomena and processes discovered by scientists or analyzed by media scholars. It is a conceptual scheme that lies at the core of a number of cultural processes and scientific practices that make up today’s understanding of nature – a scheme that outlines the possibilities of controlling nature and provides a starting point for imagining scenarios of future development. This productive character of metaphors decisive for the dominant understanding of life processes has been extensively analyzed in the cultural representations of DNA and the biological processes it is involved in. As Judith Roof argues in her Poetics of DNA (2007), it would be a gross oversimplification to assume that the terminology and the analogies employed by scientists do not af fect the object of their study, as if language objectively and transparently revealed the truth of biological processes. Nor is it true that the popular representations of scientific discoveries  – presumably simplified accounts for the lay public – have had no impact on how these discoveries shape everyday life and inf luence political and economic decisions. On the contrary, Roof questions the binary of the real nature discovered in the laboratory, and its representation, pointing out that our understanding of DNA relies on analogies with various means of representations: “DNA’s overt connection to the processes of representation (the alphabet, the book, the map) makes the representations of DNA particularly rich sites for understanding the interrelation of science, metaphor and narrative” (24). Thus, she proposes treating the study of representations of DNA in terms of poetics, a “science of representations” (23) that traces all these mutual interdependencies between the dominant metaphors used to describe basic life processes, and the scientific practices and the cultural narratives surrounding them. It is against the backdrop of Roof’s approach that I would like to analyze my next example, Eduardo Kac’s Genesis installation, which could be interpreted as a practical exercise in the poetics of DNA. In 2001 at Julia Friedman Gallery in Chicago, Kac, a legislator and main representative of transgenic art, also known as bioart, gave a wide audience documentation providing insight into a multimedial and interactive project called Genesis, which had been ongoing for the previous two years. The exhibition was a result of the artist’s extended research and experimentation in cooperation with geneticists from leading American laboratories. The final outcome of their joint efforts, a synthetic peptide, was the main exhibit of the show in Chicago. Significantly, Kac chose to publicize the results of his research project in an artistic framework, clearly referring to pop art aesthetics. A protein in a white powder form was put in a transparent vial and placed in an ornamental case. Next to it he placed a gold-painted wooden model, representing

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the molecule that was the result of the entire project. This peculiar shiny artifact could be seen as alluding to Jeff Koons’ everyday objects painted gold or silver. Wrenched out of their everyday context and relocated into an art institution, they became fetishes of the late-twentieth-century consumer societies. Kac himself seemed to deliberately suggest this understanding of his project’s presentation. As he commented in an article on Genesis, the synthetic molecule, which for the exhibition was presented as an artifact titled Transcription Jewels, became a traditional artwork (Kac 2007: 172), with no pragmatic function. From the biological point of view, the protein had no practical purpose or biological function. It was a commodity devoid of any value. When presented in public, however, it acquired symbolic meaning, mainly because of the homophony of two English words: gene and genie. The protein, enclosed in a vial, created out of an artificial gene, like a genie from the old fairy tales, promised to make human wishes come true, to govern life processes, bring eternal youth, and keep death at bay. In practice, however, it failed these expectations, because it proved entirely useless, incapable of creating organic life. Nevertheless Kac’s project was much more than just an ironic commentary on the current debates over genetics as a science that raises exorbitant hopes and promises full control over biological process, on both an individual and collective level. The installation in Chicago at the turn of the twenty-first century perfectly captured this moment in the history of Western civilization when the fundamental life-processes began to be commodified, and even sequences of human DNA were patented, thus becoming the private property of firms and corporations (Roof 2007: 101–108). But according to the artist himself, Genesis was meant to demonstrate that “organic and natural life” is, in fact, a complicated and heterogeneous matrix of “belief systems, economic principles, legal parameters, political directives, scientific laws, and cultural constructs” (Kac 2007: 173). This, however, is visible only when Transcription Jewels are treated as one of many elements of the entire project, which also included an interactive installation involving the visitors in a collective act of directing the course of evolution of an artificial life form.

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Fig. 2: Eduardo Kac, Genesis, 1999. Transgenic work with artist-created bacteria, ultraviolet light, internet, video (detail), edition of 2 dimensions variable. Collection Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), Valencia, Spain. Photo: Otto Saxinger.

Project Genesis started in 1999 from an interactive installation during Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. The central part of this transgenic installation was the collective creation of an artificial gene based on a line from the Book of Genesis: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (1:26). This was transcribed into Morse code, and then into a sequence of DNA base pairs. The conversion was carried out by a computer program designed by Kac especially for the project. A gene was also created in a laboratory and subsequently introduced into the organism of the E. coli bacteria. The visitors of the Linz installation could see the actual microorganism under the microscope or as an image projected onto a wall. The Petri dish with living bacteria was placed under an ultraviolet lamp, which was significant from the point of view of the participatory structure of the installation designed by Kac. The visitors could either see the exhibition live or through a computer interface. The former watched the process of incessant mutation with no technological mediation and could not interfere with it. They could only observe the changes the bacteria underwent when the online viewers turned on the ultraviolet lamp with one click of a mouse. The radiation initiated the mutation process, thus modifying the artificial gene. The new DNA base pairs that emerged as a result of this mutation were transcribed back into Morse code and then into letters of the alphabet. The sentence from the Bible was constantly modified and, after the end of the exhibition, its final version (“LET AAN HAVE DOMINION OVER THE FISH OF THE SEA AND OVER THE FOWLOF THE AIR AND OVER EVERY LIVING THING THAT IOVES UA EON THE EARTH”) was published on the web site of the project

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(Kac, “Genesis”) as a visible result of the cooperation of all the participants, who jointly created a new gene. The mutation, which was an effect of all the participants’ united actions, typical of performance art (although in this case their interactions were mediated by a digital dispositive), led to creation of a fragment of DNA. This artificially created gene served Kac as a basis for producing the protein model which, in 2001, was exhibited as Transcription Jewels. The artifact was a materialization of the transcription, transmission, and modification of information using various media and a number of agents – both humans and technologies. Clearly the installation offered the visitors a chance to affect the process of the genetic mutation of bacteria, only to make them acutely aware of their limited control over the outcome of mutation. In the light of what the author himself suggested in his 2007 article summarizing his early experimentation in the nascent field of bio-art, Genesis can be interpreted as a work which demonstrates it is the understanding of life instituted by molecular genetics that sustains the myth of control of nature by means of technology. He wrote that his installation “complicates and obfuscates the extreme simplification and reduction of standard molecular biology descriptions of life processes, reinstating social and historical contextualisation at the core of the debate” (Kac 2007: 171). The introduction of the digital dispositive, which mediates between the participants and the biological material, was one element in this historical contextualization. After all, digital mediation is an inalienable element of laboratory procedures and practices of knowledge-making. Undoubtedly, Kac is referring to a fundamental assumption of genetics – the question of the degree to which life can be conceived as an ongoing transmission and transcription of information through the medium of DNA from a modern genetics point of view; and it is this fundamental assumption that his installation quotes, and then subverts. Genesis was, after all, a multi-stage process of data transmission and transcription from one sign system to another. However, the artist designed his installation to make visitors aware that the initial “information,” the line from the Book of Genesis, underwent profound transformation at every stage of transmission. And these distortions were not caused by individual participants. Rather, the entire collective of active participants was responsible for them, because their interventions caused unforeseeable mutations of the artificial genome. Therefore, within his installation, Kac created a model of distributed agency, an arrangement in which all changes to the initial material are a result of the cooperation of all human actors and non-human (f)actors, such as technologies or reacting bacterial organisms. Kac’s project, in which participants could interfere in various ways with the process of genetic mutation, has so far mainly been interpreted as a work which diagnoses the challenges to the Western concept of nature, which in turn sanctions individual identity. Christiane Paul, curator from Whitney Museum of American Art, quite perceptively grasped the problem taken up by Kac (Andrews 2007: 133).

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She argued that the basic theme of Genesis is the currently changing relationship between memory, body and identity: “Memory and identity were once understood as inextricably interconnected, and skin, face and body were imprinted with experiences and memories  […] Now plastic surgery and bioengineering have turned the body into a modifiable sculpture” (ibid). In other words, Paul emphasized the aspect of technological change which delivers the possibility of manipulating genetic material, understood as the biological memory of the organism. However, this reading does not account for the collective manipulations of genetic material which Kac enabled the project participants. Admittedly, he demonstrated the possibilities of modifying biological memory at the core of the identity of a species; yet he accentuated the collective and emergent character of work on the archive of information stored in DNA. In this context, Matthew Causey’s marginal remark to his analysis of the medial dispositive involved in Kac’s work seems more pertinent: “Genesis depicts the constructed character of the Judeo-Christian model of nature as natural and essential. Kac’s installation implies that life is a game of chance, but, in this artwork, who controls the aleatory experience?” (Causey 2006, 147). This aspect of Genesis can be linked directly to the agenda of transdisciplinary humanities which I outlined in the opening of the present chapter, because this project can be read as illustrating the processes of exchange and translation between various fields of knowledge and social practices, primarily between digital technologies and genetic concepts. However, this reading of Kac’s project prompts a question: On what principle does Genesis connect the concept of DNA as biological memory with digital systems of data storage that have been used in this project? In this context, it is crucial we take a closer look at how Kac represented the transmission of genetic information. He could transform the initial sequence only because he used the binary Morse code, which, in terms of its simplicity and functionality, resembles a digital code. The basic life processes, both the copying of genetic material and the mutations, were represented as a communication process, a translation between various semiotic systems. Thus, he identified digital methods of copying data with biological processes of transmission of genetic material, and digital technologies became a source of metaphors to conceptualize genetic processes. In this respect, Kac chose the perspective of science historians who treat metaphors as tools to define natural phenomena that come under scrutiny in various disciplines. Consequently, metaphors also determine the scope of scientific methods of study. This applies in equal measure to genetics, which, from its inception, uses various models of communication to describe processes of transmitting genetic material (cf. Fox-Keller 2003). In other words, genetics is a realm of productive metaphors, as has been convincingly demonstrated by Laurence Perbal. She argues that James Watson and Francis Crick did not discover DNA, but rather offered its very elegant and concise description. Their model was much more detailed than previous ones, and adjusted to the semiotic view

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of communication which became widespread in the 1950s (Perbal, 2011). As Watson and Crick claimed, each structural element of DNA (nucleotides) correspond functionally to letters of the alphabet, which can be connected to form meaningful sentences. No wonder that the linguistic metaphors changed slightly a decade later, inf luenced by the works by Jacques Monod and Françoise Jacob. They were concerned with “expression” of genes, the activation of certain regions of DNA by enzymes, which in turn led to the production of proteins. With reference to the vocabulary of cybernetics and information technology they introduced the notion of genetic program, understood as a set of universal principles determining the transposition of information from DNA to build proteins that form the bodies of all living organisms. At the same time the metaphor of the genetic program provided an explanation for the diversity of forms of life on earth, a mystery that had not been solved since Darwin’s theory of evolution. Monod and Jacob argued that the diversity of natural forms is a result of distortions in the process of copying genetic information. They claimed that mutations and recombinations of genes, unforeseeable and random errors in the replication of the genetic program, result in the production of new life forms. Therefore, Kac’s installation also reveals its speculative nature in the experiences it offers its participants, and in the way it quotes and subverts typical laboratory procedures. However, unlike a typical laboratory, the installation did not work to create a pragmatic result, in the form of a potentially useful and marketable chemical. In this respect, the protein created in the course of the installation was utterly useless, and in fact, it was exhibited only after, not during, the participatory part of the project. Its production was merely a pretext for demonstrating the inner workings of laboratory procedures, commonly thought to aim at controlling life processes. In other words, Genesis uses a performative format to demonstrate what Bruno Latour argued in his We Have Never Been Modern (1993). He regarded the laboratory as a paradigmatic site of purification, in which various organisms and phenomena – or, as he preferred to call them, non-humans – are extracted from the outside environment, to be more easily controlled and serve as a source of knowledge about nature. This procedure was also meant to separate scientific fact from illusion, and real beings from fictions. However, as Latour argues, this work of purification was never completed, and the laboratory has always produced hybrids of various kinds, interfering in the production of knowledge about nature. Genesis discloses this aspect of laboratory work through the structure of distributed agency – all the elements, including the humans, work as actants in this network, together producing the final protein. Significantly, it is not only living beings and technology involved in this process. An equally important part is played by the metaphorical mappings, which conceptualize the genetic processes and cultural narratives (here exemplified by the line from the Book of Genesis), which play a decisive part in the lab work. Thus, Kac’s installation, by

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establishing a net of connection between various actants, performs the task the artist set – it complicates existing accounts of life, by inscribing its understanding in a social and cultural context.

ALife without Humans This aspect of Kac’s work can be highlighted through a comparison with Pierre Huyghe’s large-scale Af ter ALife Ahead installation, produced for the 2017 Skulptur Projekte in Münster. Just as in Genesis, it was composed of a number of interconnected biotic, abiotic, and technological parts, and facilitated both live and online viewing. However, the role assigned to visitors and viewers was entirely different in terms of their impact on the development of Huyghe’s artificial ecosystem. He built it in a sprawling, defunct ice-skating rink, located on the outskirts of the city. The building was soon to be demolished, therefore the installation was temporary, and was integrated in the surrounding environment. The concrete f loor in the huge hall was cut into sections, and the ground was dug up to create small clay canyons in which the visitors could walk among ponds growing with algae. On one of the concrete platforms a venomous sea snail, a “conus textile,” inhabited an aquarium made of glass that could turn from transparent to opaque. The ecosystem included other organisms – peacocks, bees, and an incubator with cancer cells. These living creatures were not only brought together in a single location, but also connected into a self-organizing, aleatorically developing ecosystem through software designed specifically for that project. Fig. 3: Pierre Huyghe, After ALife Ahead, 2017.

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The monumental installation seemed conjured up by an imaginative cyberneticist who conceived of life in terms of ongoing feedback loops capable of linking organisms to machines into self-governing, autopoietic assemblages. As a matter of fact, the title of the work suggested that the inside the humongous hall was a landscape from the future, a world in which artificial life (AL) would no longer yield itself to human control and had started independently forging new connections. Although on the surface each of the organisms seemed autonomous, and some were even cut off from the outside by the walls of the containers in which they were stored, they all connected through a medial network and complex informational algorithms. The shell of the snail, made out of triangular shapes, was scanned, and the pattern provided a score which dictated the rhythm of the opening and closing of large panels in the ceiling of the hall. Thus the environment was opened to external inf luences, letting in rain or birds, which then became parts of the installation. The incubator contained cancer cells which did not develop entirely independently, however – the machine stimulated or slowed down their life processes. It was equipped with sensors which scanned the changing environment and the effects of the measurements inf luenced the growth rate of cells. The incubator was also monitored by a system connected to an augmented reality phone app, downloadable for the visitors, which featured an abstract arrangement of black shapes, whose movement was guided by the behavior of cancer cells. It is in this arrangement of relations connecting the elements of the installation into an autopoietic whole that the difference with Kac’s Genesis is most salient. Huyghe created a work which, in his own words, was meant to be deliberately “indifferent to the public” (Russeth 2017), as he neither invited nor made it possible for them to affect the workings of this environment. On the contrary, they could only explore this artificial landscape, without any guidelines. Even if their presence had an impact on the parameters measured by the machinery, they did not understand the algorithms that made it function. They could merely observe the effects of the machines and organisms interacting, watch the opening and closing of the panels or the darkening of the aquarium, without understanding the rules that governed this ecosystem’s dynamics. Where Kac sought to involve his spectators in performative acts to renegotiate the terms of the relationships between humans and naturecultures, Huyghe’s installation creates an experience of utter alienation from the circle of life. Humans let into this environment were endowed with the weakest agency of all the ecosystem’s biotic and abiotic inhabitants. Instead of active participation in the shaping of this ecosystem, Huyghe offered them the experience of disconnection and an inability to comprehend, let alone control the interactions within the network. However, this deliberate ousting of people from the network of living forms results from the fact, that in Af ter ALife Ahead, the machines and cybernetic systems play an entirely different role than in Genesis. In Kac’s installation, the dig-

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ital dispositive served a double function: as a technological instrument which made it possible to manipulate living material and as a source of metaphors to conceptualize the fundamental genetic processes. In Huyghe’s installation, technology does not have this instrumental function – it neither provides an analogy for the functioning of biological processes, nor serves as an instrument to manipulate organic material. It is entirely integrated into the circuits of this ecosystem, in which there are no clear borders between the organic and inorganic forms of life. The title of the installation clearly indicates that this world is born out of another great project of understanding the fundamental principles of nature through technological development – investigations into the possibilities of creating Artificial Life. In How We Became Posthuman (1999), N. Katherine Hayles explains the rudimentary assumptions and goals of this project. It was conceived in contrast to investigations into artificial intelligence, which attempted to recreate operations of the human mind in machines. AL researchers, on the other hand, treat cognition as nervous system operations, integrated with motor/sensory experiences (238). Accordingly, “in the AL paradigm, the machine becomes the model for understanding the human. Thus the human is transfigured into posthuman” (239). Essentially, researchers in this domain would like to synthesize life-like behavior in machines, which should, in turn, enable a better understanding of the biological and organic life-processes. Therefore, AL research is overtly speculative. As Christopher Langton, one of the major figures of this movement, expressed it: By extending the empirical foundation upon which biology is based beyond the carbon-chain life that has evolved on Earth, Artificial Life can contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-itcould-be. (qtd. Hayles, 232) These words come from a pioneering article written by Langton in 1989, when AL studies promised to build machines to function as models of natural processes at their most rudimentary. In this respect, AL was a truly modern project of disclosing the secret of life with the use of model-like machines. And it is precisely this assumption that Huyghe’s installation draws on and subverts. As I have mentioned, the artificially constructed ecosystem indeed demonstrates life-as-it-could-be, but it does not open itself to the curious eye of the human participant. The machines and living organisms do not imitate one another, and the technological does not function as an explanatory model of the organic. Rather, the participants’ cognitive confusion and uncertainty as to the ontological status of the beings inhabiting this speculative ecosystem should subvert belief in a radical distinction between the organic natural life and machines. Yet this

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self-organizing environment does more than question the binary nature and culture opposition. It is a materialization of what Donna Haraway calls “responseable naturecultures inhabited by accountable companion species” (2016: 125). It is a speculative Utopia for the coexistence of various beings which Western culture is used to juxtaposing and contrasting, endlessly replaying the antagonism of nature and technology. In Huyghe’s installation, the life ahead of us is so incomprehensible because it has broken free from the divisions sustained by epistemologies of modernity.

Coda Undoubtedly, the three projects I have analyzed in the present chapter do not exhaust the range of possible forms and participatory formats the artists propose. My aim was much more modest than to indicate dominant trends and tendencies. I was merely interested in how contemporary performative practices renegotiate the relationship between arts and sciences. Those exemplary readings were rather meant to prove that today’s performative practices do function as “transdisciplinary methodologies” which, as Braidotti argues, need to be worked out so that we can come to grips with the challenges and predicament of the times ahead. Particularly in the area which I have chosen, the interconnections between performative arts and life sciences, these transdisciplinary projects reveal their power to involve audiences in dialogues on complex scientific and cultural issues through a physical engagement with material environments and corporeal cognitive acts with human and non-human others. In this respect these performative practices become practical exercises in being and thinking together, blurring distinctions between material and mental acts, thinking and doing, metaphor and object. Thus, they become sites for collective grappling with the challenges posed by the new forms of life which are already budding in the interstices between various contemporary practices and discourses.

References Andrews, Lori B. (2007): “Art as a Public Policy Medium.” In: Eduardo Kac (ed.) Signs of Life, Cambridge: The MIT Press, pp. 125–149. Bardini, Thierry (2011): Junkware, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Braidotti, Rosi (2010): “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’.” In: Diana Coole/Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms, Durham & London: Duke University Press, pp. 201–218.

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Causey, Matthew (2006): Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture, London & New York: Routledge 2006. Davis, Heather/Turpin, Etienne (2015): “Art & Death.” In Heather Davis, Etienne Turpin (eds.), Art in the Anthropocene, London: Open Humanities Press, pp. 3–29. Debaise, Didier/Stengers, Isabelle (2017): “The Insistence of Possibles.” In: Parse Journal 7, pp. 12–19. Fox-Keller, Evelyn (2003): Making Sense of Life, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Goldstein, Miriam C./Rosenberg, Marci/Cheng, Lanna (2012): “Increased Oceanic Microplastic Debris Enhances Oviposition in an Endemic Pelagic Insect.” In: Biology Letters 8, pp.  817–820. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC3440973/ (accessed 3rd March 2019). Haraway, Donna (2016): Staying with the Trouble, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999): How We Became Posthuman, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Fredric (2005): Archaeologies of the Future, London & New York: Verso. Kac, Eduardo (2007): “Life Transformation – Art Mutation.” In: Eduardo Kac (ed.), Signs of Life, Cambridge: The MIT Press, pp. 163–184. Kac, Eduardo: “Genesis” http://www.ekac.org/geninfo.html (accessed 3rd March 2019). Latour, Bruno (1993): We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Perbal, Laurence (2003): Gènes et comportements à l’ère post-génomique, Paris: Vrin. Rose, Nikolas (2007): The Politics of Life Itself, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Roof, Judith (2007): The Poetics of DNA, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Russeth, Andrew (2017): “Constant Displacement.” http://www.artnews.com/2017/​ 06/26/constant-displacement-pierre-huyghe-on-his-work-at-skulptur-projekte-​ munster-2017/ (accessed 3rd March 2019). Yoldas, Pinar (2015): “Ecosystems of Excess.” In Heather Davis, Etienne Turpin (eds.), Art in the Anthropocene, London: Open Humanities Press, pp. 359–370. Zettler, Erik R./Mincer, Tracy J./Amaral-Zettler, Linda A. (2013): “Life in the ‘Plastisphere’.” In: Environmental Science & Technology 13, pp. 7, 137–7, 146. https:// pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es401288x (accessed 3rd March 2019).

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II Performing Senses

Introduction Mateusz Chaberski

Recent years have seen an upsurge in interest in human senses, sensations, and experiences through many fields in the contemporary humanities, social, and natural sciences, and technosciences. In her Performance, Diana Taylor goes so far as to claim that “[e]xperiencing […] becomes a privileged way of knowing. But experience can no longer be limited to living bodies understood as pulsing biological organisms” (2016: 138). Taylor voices a deep-felt need among performance scholars for non-anthropocentric modes of apprehending experiences at a time when performative arts are less about contemplating artifacts or participating in art performances than about designing scenarios for the emergence of specific human and nonhuman assemblages. Although Taylor clearly gestures towards contemporary new materialisms and post-humanisms as potential sources for the new theoretical models of experience, she still regards human experience as predominantly a cultural phenomenon. Her findings are firmly rooted in an understanding of experience established within cultural studies in the second half of the twentieth century. The main point of reference here is the massively inf luential volume Anthropology of Experience (1986), edited by cultural anthropologists Victor Turner and Edward Bruner. In the introduction, Turner and Bruner rightly pointed out that sensations, feelings, and experiences of indigenous people interviewed by anthropologists since the 1960s with the participant observation method prove that cultures as such have no essences, but are inherently processual, and constantly in the making. However, they limited their research to a narrowly defined area of cultural production, where they could see human individuals as sole agents experiencing their cultures and making sense of their experience. Experiences staged by hybrid phenomena such as bio-art, techno-art, and digital art alert us to the fact that human experiences often escape any form of rationality, are never confined to a single human body, and always emerge at the intersection of the cultural, technological, and natural, traditionally defined as separate domains. Thus, in order to think experience in contemporary performative arts, we have to explore such remote fields as cognitive sciences, technosciences, and economics, in order to grasp human experience as a natural, cultural, and technological phenomenon. The profound methodological changes

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of the dominant paradigms and protocols germane to those disciplines brought by post-humanist experience studies may serve as a vantage point for critically reframing experience in the context of contemporary performative arts and formulating new theoretical models that would extend the concept of experience beyond the limits of the human body.

Post-Cognitivisms, UX Design, and Experience Economy In the mid-1980s, cognitive sciences witnessed the emergence of a new methodological framework which often comes under the umbrella term “post-cognitivism”. This gathers a host of theories that question the Cartesian mind-body dualism, arguing that cognitive processes are inextricably linked to other modalities of human experience, such as the senses. Although post-cognitivisms often differ in their definition of experience, they all arise from the fierce critique of the computational paradigm prevailing in cognitive sciences since the 1960s, whereby the human brain is metaphorically conceived as a biological computer for processing data. The computational paradigm interprets cognition in terms of input-output processes and locates them predominantly in the human brain and nervous system, which restricts cognition to the limits of the human body. In contrast, post-cognitivist approaches, as Simon Penny contends in his Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment, “propose, in different ways, that cognition is embodied; integrated with non-neural bodily tissues; or extends into artefacts, the designed environment, social systems, and cultural networks” (2017: xxviii). In other words, post-cogntivisms not only posit thinking as a profoundly embodied process but, more importantly, they extend the human experience beyond the limits of a body. Post-cognitivsts of the enactivist variety, such as Alva Nöe and Kevin O’Regan (2001), claim that individuals’ cognitive processes are always integrated with their environment and that sensory stimuli cannot be separated from sensorimotor experiences. As such, the senses are no longer passive receptors of the internal world, but rather actively mediate the interaction between the body and its environment. However, the post-humanist aspects of experience as defined by post-cognitivists do not foster progressive modes of human subjectivity that could challenge dominant political and philosophical discourses. Contemporary cognitive sciences reinforce what Tony D. Sampson rightly terms “neurocapitalism” in his Assemblage Brain. Sense-Making in Neuroculture (2017: x). At the heart of this material-discursive formation lies the phenomenon of brain plasticity, which allows the human organ to adjust to ever-changing conditions. Thus, neurocapitalism performs subjects of late capitalism, capable of thriving even in extreme economic exploitation.

Introduction

Post-cognitivisms are inextricably linked to the development of technosciences, which, especially at the turn of twenty-first century, have provided neurocapitalism with efficient tools for exploitation, subsequently modifying their means of designing new technologies. The interpenetration between cognitive sciences and technosciences may be illustrated by the work of the Scottish programmer Paul Dourish. In Where the Action Is: The Foundation of Embodied Interaction (2001), he claimed that the concept of the embodied mind must entail embodied human-computer interaction. Dourish postulated extending computing beyond the confines of the desk by integrating it in everyday user experience, through what he termed “tangible” and “social” computing. The former involved developing computational environments where humans could directly interact with various devices, rather than through traditional interfaces, such as mice, keyboards and screens. The latter involved exploring such interactive systems as human-to-human interaction platforms. Dourish probably sensed two impending revolutions which profoundly changed human-computer interaction. The first broke only three years after the publication of his book. With the advent of Facebook in 2004, the Internet, hitherto experienced predominantly as a computer network, literally became a social network. The other revolution took place in 2007, when Apple released iPhone, a mobile device fusing computer, phone, and game console. More importantly, iPhone introduced a touch-sensitive screen, experienced by users as more tangible than traditional keyboard interfaces. As one can also access social networks through iPhone, it might be considered the epitome of Dourish’s embodied interaction. Apart from fulfilling Dourish’s dreams, iPhone also led to a sea-change in technoscience, as it became the cornerstone of User Experience Design (UX design). UX design is a relatively new field of research and practice, focused on designing various experiences of those using digital interactive technologies. Drawing on the findings of psychologists, neuroscientists, and marketers, UX designers write algorithms and construct prototypes of new devices. They also identify users’ emotional needs through interviews and surveys, and experiment with different software-hardware configurations to create user experiences to satisfy those needs. The transdisciplinary character of UX design entails a shift in the model of designers who work in large teams, implementing corporate project management strategies. Through their work, various linkages between humans and non-humans emerge, which may be exemplified, for example, by the Zombies Run! app (2010). Created by the independent Six to Start studio in cooperation with writer Naomi Alderman, the smartphone app gamifies physical workout, i. e. it transforms everyday jogging into a computer game in which the user completes subsequent missions in a world conquered by zombies. Similarly to the characters of The Walking Dead (2010 – ongoing), which was highly popular at the time, the jogger is chased by zombies, which is supposed to motivate her to physical activity at a

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particular rate. The motivation is even stronger as she can see the zombies closing in on the screen of her smartphone. Through GPS technology Zombies Run! layers the fictional world of the game onto the actual topography of the site where the workout takes place. This example clearly demonstrated that the user experience of new technologies is less about interactions between separate entities, in this case users, mobile devices and software than about assemblages of humans and various technological non-humans. Post-cognitivisms and UX design are deeply involved with another coterminous paradigm shift that occurred in Western economy. In 1999, American economists Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore coined the term “experience economy”. This is a neoliberal capitalist system which, they argued, emerged in 1971 with the creation of Disneyworld. Unlike a commodity and service economy, it is based less on producing saleable goods or providing high-quality services than on creating unique consumer experiences to sell. In contrast to experiences developed by artists, these experiences do not destabilize established socio-political and cultural discourses; they provide new economical tools. As such, experience economy challenges the traditional model of capitalist competition, whereby the cheapest product or service wins. According to Pine and Gilmore, economic operators should no longer lower prices to ensure the highest quality, but create most attractive experiences for their customers. Their attractiveness lies in their high affective potential, not only to trigger strong emotional responses, but also to generate intensive body sensations that engrave themselves on customers’ memory. Experience economy is evidently founded on the metaphor of economic activity as theater. In a work significantly titled The Experience Economy: Work is Theater & Every Business a Stage, Pine and Gilmore argue that “[t]he newly identified offering of experiences occurs whenever a company intentionally uses services as the stage and goods as props to engage an individual. While commodities are fungible, goods tangible, and services intangible, experiences are memorable” (1999: 11–12). In other words, in experience economy the most successful companies are those which stage the most engaging theater production, creatively combining more traditional economic forms such as quality products and services. Engaging is less about psychological investment than physical immersion. Theater here is defined not in terms of artistic event, but rather as a form of entertainment. Once the customer is entertained she is not only more likely to grow attached to a particular product or service, but also to pay more. However, as Pine and Gilmore indicate, the experience of the consumer as a spectator is not enough. The experience must be multisensory, immersive and seamless. In Disneyworld, for example, even the garbagemen dress up as Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck to avoid spoiling the visitor’s experience of being in a magical world. Moreover, in order to reach its goals, experience economy also problematizes the conventional fixed distinction between unique and everyday experiences. It

Introduction

suffices to recall the example of radar balls discussed by Gilmore and Pine. Radar balls are ordinary baseballs fitted with a special microchip which digitally display the speed of the ball after each toss. They were introduced in 1998 by Rawlings Sporting Goods Company of St. Louis, Missouri, and were targeted at American fathers and sons playing catch in their backyards. They no longer had to go to the pitch to have the physical speed of the ball measured by a third person using a radar gun. Radar balls, unlike the previous examples of experience economy, did not stage customer experience at the moment of purchase. They enabled customers to recreate a unique experience they knew from other contexts, which, as Gilmore and Pine note, allowed Rawlings to sell radar balls for thirty dollars, much more than regular baseballs. This example demonstrates that experience economy effectively makes everyday experiences unique in order to increase the financial gains of its agents. Hence, in the face of post-cognitivisms, UX design, and experience economy, what we perceive as an experience is always contingent upon various practices and discourses, but also upon different cultural, socio-political, and economic factors.

Experience as a Blind Spot From the perspective of the paradigm shifts in contemporary cognitive sciences, technosciences, and economy, the category of experience seems to be a blind spot in performative arts and performance studies. Although contemporary artists often suggest it is crucial to engage participants in an arts event, mainstream art education, for instance, still focuses on developing traditional artistic techniques, often neglecting experience as an area of creative exploration. Theater and art schools still cherish the idea that the artist is the sole creator of the work, rather than an initiator of an event who designs experiences for strategic purposes. In this context, participants are mere recipients of content inscribed by the artist. Thus, the dominant art institutions still rely on the Kantian model of the disinterested spectator. This spectator is supposed to contemplate the work of art, whereas in hybrid forms of contemporary performative arts, participants are multisensorially and affectively implicated in the event, but also contribute to the work itself. The emergence of new types of experience has not only left traditional aesthetic practices and discourses intact, it has also failed to instigate new research methods in the arts. Inspired by the theories of Jacques Rancière, among others, art scholars stress the importance of participation and participatory experiences in art. However, they still rarely use the methods of sociology, science, and technology studies, let alone autoethnographic methods which focus on a critical analysis of researcher’s own experiences. As the American performance scholar Susan Kozel explains in

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her Closer. Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, “[w]riting from lived experience often amounts to writing without a clear methodological mandate or demands the courage to assert that the methods are f luid and subjective” (2007: 9). In other words, hybrid experiential methodologies in performative arts research f launt the dominant objectivist paradigm whereby a scholar should produce knowledge about reality rather than knowledge of experiencing reality. Moreover, just like the Kantian disinterested spectator, she must be impartial and keep a cool distance from her object of study. Thus, the study of experience in performative arts had not led to a paradigm shift in art practices and research methodologies, which maintain the binary relationship between the active unified subject and the inert object of aesthetic experience. Meanwhile, contemporary performative arts are populated by phenomena which engage participants to such an extent that performance scholars find it hard to separate the subject and object of an experience. Thus, it is virtually impossible to analyze these events from a distance, as they necessitate a situated perspective. Case in point are events emerging from what the philosopher Stephen Wright terms “extraterritorial reciprocity” (2014: 29). This is where art no longer performs its traditional aesthetic function, vacating its conceptually and institutionally autonomous territory for other practices to use. Nowadays, extraterritorial reciprocity, a sort of postmortem for art, has become a generative site for a range of events at the intersection of heterogeneous practices and discourses. Whereas Wright predominantly focuses on participatory projects involving artists and activists, extraterritorial reciprocity has also generated other types of arts and science projects, such as bio-art, techno-art and speculative design. The very names suggest these are no longer autonomous genres of art, but rather couplings of biology/biotechnology and art, technology, and art or design and speculative philosophy, respectively. As such, experiencing these events does not merely involve experiencing artifacts. They initiate an experience that emerges from interactions between humans and non-humans. Bio-art, for instance, fuses traditional artistic media (painting, photography, film, sculpture etc.) and traditional scientific practices. Participating in bio-art installations, we are usually invited to familiarize ourselves with the protocol of the artistic/scientific performance, view its photographic or film documentation, and enter multiple relations with its effects, which only resemble traditional artifacts. As a result, a dynamic intellectual and multisensory experience emerges, in which traditional aesthetic experience as contemplation of “the work of art” is only one way of experiencing such events, and definitely not the dominant one. Their initiators aim less to maintain the autonomy of art than to question what Bruno Latour terms “Modern Constitution” (1991: 12), i. e. the material-discursive formation which became prominent in the seventeenth century, arbitrarily separating nature, culture, and society. Let me illustrate the potential

Introduction

effects of this experience with my own experience of participating in an installation which fused artistic media and technoscientific practices. In 2016, I took part in the Temptation of Immortality exhibition organized by the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw. The underlying theme was the social and cultural consequences of technological advancement that aimed to extend the human life span. Among different bio-art, digital art, and multimedia installations, there was Circumventive Organs (2013), an installation by an Australian designer Agi Haines. The installation was composed of three objects manufactured using bioprinting, a cutting-edge technology for combining different types of cells. In this case, the bioprints were designed to help patients with severe health conditions. Cerebrothrombal dilutus is a hybrid of human tissue and a salivary gland from a leech, which is supposed to thin the blood and prevent strokes. Tremomucosa expulsum is an organ designed to extract mucus from the breathing tract of a person suffering from cystic fibrosis using rattlesnake parts. Electrostabilis cardium is a defibrillating organ combining human and electric eel cells. The latter can discharge to release an electric current to the heart when it recognizes it is going into heart attack. The organ consists of a suction pad that attaches to the heart, and then a tube, which has walls lined with cilia cells, similar to that in the human ear. These cells can recognize vibrations, and, if the heart goes into fibrillation (a heart attack), they will cause the muscular wall at the base of the organ to contract. Although my description of Circumventive Organs is quite accurate, it is completely false. As I neared the installation I read the curatorial commentary to the installation explaining that the objects were works of speculative design. They were made of synthetic materials as life-size models of non-existent organs in order to show the gradual collapse of the traditional human/animal dichotomy in contemporary technoscientific practices. However, my experience of Agi Haynes’s installation was heavily inf luenced by the institutional context of the Copernicus Science Centre, a site predominantly concerned with popularizing the sciences. As I circled around the glass cabinet in which the organs were laid on a steel tray with captions describing their parts, I was constantly wondering whether I was viewing actual scientific exhibits or artistic artifacts. On the one hand, my uncertainty was reinforced by the mockumentary strategies the artist employed in the film on the screen accompanying the cabinet. It showed a surgical theater in which Electrostabilis cardium was being implanted in the human heart, which aimed to reinforce the effect of the object as state-of-the-art bioprint. On the other hand, the objects themselves were created using naturalist techniques which triggered a particular synesthetic experience. My visual perception of the organs induced a slimy tactile sensation. In other words, I could actually “see” the moisture which covered the bioprints, which instantly triggered a haptic sensation in my hands. Subsequently, an intense affective experience arose, I perceived Circumventive Organs

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with a mix of disgust and amazement at the medical procedure shown on the film. The description that best approximates my experience is what cultural historians Lorrain Daston and Katherine Park call “wonder.” Writing on Early Modern laboratory practices, they claim that “wonder was a cognitive passion, as much about knowing as about feeling. To register wonder was to register a breached boundary, a classification subverted” (1998: 14). The effect of my wonder-like experience was a strong conviction/feeling that contemporary sciences are finally capable of creating a symbiotic coexistence between humans and non-humans. My experience in Circumventive Organs not only testifies to the complexity and dynamics of experiences staged by the initiators of contemporary performative arts. Such experiences necessitate we forge new ways of apprehending the senses, sensation, and experience, routing around traditional understandings of human experience in the performative arts.

The Experiential Turn Revisited Three chapters gathered in the following section of Emerging Af finities problematize the question of experience in the context of hybrid phenomena emerging from extraterritorial reciprocity, aiming to dismantle traditional dichotomies, such as subject/object, nature/culture, and body/environment. However, developments in post-cognitivism, UX design, and experience economy testify to the fact that the experience cannot rely on the model of spectatorial experience which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, as a result of what German art critic Dorothea von Hantelman calls “the experiential turn” (2014). She is referring to a situation where contemporary art, through the minimalist and performance art movement, disposed of the unchanging artifact in favor of the artistic process or event. Joseph Beuys’ actions or Andy Warhol’s pop paintings, among others, aimed to draw spectators into the process of shared creation in different ways. Although they employed completely different performative strategies and achieved radically different effects, affected by their cultural and socio-political contexts, they contributed to a coherent and extremely inf luential conception of experience, based on three interrelated categories: subversiveness, liveness and, above all, subjectiveness. In this context, subversiveness denotes an opposition toward the dominant artistic and socio-political regimes. Liveness prioritizes the “here and now” of experience over mediated experiences of television or digital media, regarded as less authentic. Subjectiveness, finally, relates to the traditional model of human subjectivity, whereby the spectatorial experience is an experience of a self-same (human) subject, autonomous from other subjects and objects. Such a subversive, lived, and subjective experience is clearly regarded by artists and critics as unique among other types, including everyday experiences. In order to talk about experience

Introduction

in contemporary performative arts, each of the categories employed to theorize experience within the experiential turn requires critical ref lection. Let me go back to experience economy, UX design, and post-cognitivism, in order to problematize the subversiveness, liveness, and subjectiveness of human experience. Experience economy, entering the space hitherto reserved for the everyday, has effectively assimilated the subversive strategies of performance art of the 1960s and 1970s. A case in point might be Augusto Boal’s invisible theater used by modern companies as tool of experience economy. In the invisible productions of the Brazilian director, spectators were not supposed to know they are taking part in an artistic event. As Claire Bishop explains in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, the conception of the invisible theater is inextricably linked to the socio-political situation in the Brazil of the 1960s and 70s (2012). It allowed Boal – a fierce critic of the oppressive dictatorship which ruled the country in 1964– 1985 – to avoid police repressions. Moreover, he postulated blurring the boundary between spectator and actor to provoke the former to actively resist the authoritarian regime. In the preface to his manifesto Theatre of the Opressed he claimed that [s]pectator becoming Spect-Actor is democratically opposed to the other members of the audience, free to invade the scene and appropriate the power of the actor. With their hearts and minds the audience must rehearse battle plans – ways of freeing themselves from all oppressions. (2008 [1979]: xxi) In other words, Boal’s idea of the spect-actor entails a clearly political participation in an artistic event. Invisible theater became a political tool to provoke the oppressed Brazilian society to revolt and overthrow the authoritarian rule. To paraphrase Boal, one might say that in the invisible theater of the experience economy the consumer becomes a consumer-actor, more ready to pay for unique experiences than for traditional goods and services. Thus, a performative strategy of critical potential, used to inspire civic resistance, becomes an economic tool for engaging consumers in neo-liberal capitalism, as a natural circulation of social energy. However, formulating new understandings of experience in the contemporary performative arts must address these changes by stressing that what counts as subversive is always relational. Drawing on Michel de Certeau (1984), one can say that an experience is an effect of negotiations between strategies and tactics. On the one hand, initiators use performative strategies to elicit particular reactions of the spectators, for example, drawing their attention to one element of the event. On the other, spectators often appropriate the strategies and tweak them for their own purposes. Whereas experience economy makes us wary of treating experience in the performative arts as subversive, UX design and contemporary new media discourse verify the liveness of the experienced event. The live experience has been, for

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instance, the cornerstone of Richard Schechner’s thinking, not only about theater, but also about performance art. In his 1976 essay Ethology and Theatre, he argued that [a]s society cyberneticizes, programming the contacts people make with each other, theater gains importance as a live activity, oscillating between relatively unstructured interactions, say at a party, and totally formalized or mediated exchanges, say a job interview. Theater can be semi-formal, narrative, personal, direct, and fun. (2005 [1976]: 202) In other words, Schechner’s concept of theater and, broadly speaking, performance, is predicated on the conviction that performative events, as opposed to mediatized forms of culture, predominantly offer a direct sensory experience of a particular material place and foster physical interaction between spectators and performers. It suffices to invoke a performance of Dionysus in ’69 (1968) by Schechner’s Performance Group, in which such experiences were generated by stressing the materiality of the found space of a car garage and exposing the physicality of the naked performers who invited spectators to undress and join a ritualistic dance.1 In contrast, as Canadian performance scholar Christine Ross contends, “[s]pectators, in new media – mixed or augmented – art, are now invited to interact with the screen” (2010: 24). Ross clearly relates to a host of phenomena often termed digital art, which fuses artistic practices and various digital media (computers, tablets, holograms), generating intensive affective experiences. From this perspective, we should verify the widespread binary opposition between mediated and unmediated experience in contemporary performative arts. Experiences initiated by contemporary performative arts rather emerge from relations between human bodies and various types of media. This approach reveals a space of intricate relations between humans and digital non-humans, in which the unified selfsame human subject as the sole agent in the performative arts becomes untenable. In this respect, subjective experience inherent to von Hantelman’s experiential turn also requires critical analysis. The findings of the post-cognitivists invite us to dispense with the concept of the human experience which is formed within the confines of the human body and mind. This, for instance, was a key aspect for the minimal art of the 1960s and 70s. Minimalists abandoned works which sought to represent the objective reality of inner states of the artists in order to initiate situations where spectators could create their own meanings for art. For example, in 1971, Robert Morris, a leading artist of the movement, claimed: “I want to provide a situation where people 1 For a detailed account of the performance cf. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, Routledge 2008.

Introduction

can become more aware of themselves and their own experience rather than more aware of some version of my experience” (qtd. Bird: 97). In other words, by inviting the spectator to problematize the disinterested contemplation of art, minimal art staged human experience as introspection, whereby the subject directs attention inward. Thus, it reinforced the binary opposition between inside and outside of the human body, regardless of its surroundings, in order to posit the spectator as a co-creator of art. Seen from the perspective of post-cognitivism, the spectatorial experience staged by minimalist art is far more complex. If we accept the post-cognitivist assertion that an individual’s experiences emerge from his/her interactions with material, social, and cultural environment, experience in performative arts becomes an effect of relations between cognitive apparatus, non-human actants, and the contexts in which they are situated. This experience has been aptly defined by philosopher Timothy Morton. Situating this experience in a broader eco-philosophical context in Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People, he claims that [b]eauty is a spectral being that haunts me in my ‘inner’ space, or rather, makes me aware that I am not ‘inside’ something at all, but strangely blended with what I’m seeing ‘over there,’ so that I can’t tell whose fault the beauty experience is, mine or the painting’s. (2017: 87) According to Morton, this experience exhibits the received notions of art and its beholder. It emerges from relations between humans and non-humans staged by the initiators of artistic events. Moreover, their performative strategies stressing the agency of non-humans reinforce the relations to such an extent that the traditional binary of subject and object of the aesthetic experience becomes blurred. From this perspective, experiences are also never subjective, as they always emerge from relations between the humans and non-humans involved in the event.

Chapter Overview The authors contributing to this section share a wariness of the experiential turn and the model of experience it entails. Routing around traditional discourses of subversiveness, liveness and subjectiveness of experience, they explore different ways in which contemporary performative arts create experiential linkages between the human body and various material, cultural, and technologically mediated environments. In each case, the authors go beyond the confines of traditional performance studies by mobilizing various transdisciplinary discourses in order to ref lect on the wider implications of experiences emerging in the contemporary performative arts. In her chapter “Of Unsound Mind and Body: Immersive Expe-

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rience in Headphone Theater,” Rosemary Napier Klich draws on the findings of sound studies in order to problematize the occularcentric sensory regime of the viewing experience, which prioritizes seeing over the other senses. She analyzes the use of binaural sound technologies in British headphone theater to stage the experience of sonic immersion, which is never solely about hearing. Binaurally mediated sound engages the body in various ways, becomes a means of connecting the body to the world, and triggers intersensorial perception, or the experience of one sense through another. Her case studies clearly demonstrate that acoustic experiences highlight the binary oppositions of real/virtual, there/notthere, live/mediated, and actual/abstract. Scrutinizing her own experiences in Complicite’s The Encounter (2016), and Glen Neath and David Rosenberg’s Fiction (2015) and Séance (2017), she proves that headphone theater incites a form of selfaware immersion that draws the audience’s attention to less-prominent interoceptive experiences, forcing one to consider one’s bodily ownership, corporeal boundaries, and internal space. Whereas Klich’s interest lies predominantly in sound as a means of connecting the body to the world, David Howes and Chris Salter explore experiences in the broader context of sensory studies, which stress the mediatory function of the senses in the culturally varying relationship between self and environment. They discuss the multisensory performative environments Displace (2011–2013) and Haptic Field (2015–2017), designed by the authors in the course of their research-creation program Mediations of Sensation, at the intersection of art, technology, and anthropology. They focus on the technical, dramaturgical and conceptual strategies employed in each project and compare different theoretical contexts involved. From this perspective, drawing on the findings of contemporary ethnography, they develop a new methodological framework referred to as “participant sensation,” for registering and evaluating experience in technologically mediated environments. In contrast to the more conventional method of “participant observation,” it entails the researcher being immersed in the same artificially created environment as the ones she studies. The researcher not only conducts interviews with the subjects, but documents their perception strategies to cope with, enjoy, or enhance the experience. Finally, in his “Re-Sensing the Anthropocene: Ambividual Experiences in Contemporary Performative Arts” chapter, Mateusz Chaberski discusses human experiences staged by contemporary performative arts in the context of the Anthropocene. In this new epoch in Earth’s history, human activity becomes the dominant geological force, subverting traditional binary oppositions between active (human) subjects and inert (non-human) objects. As such, human experiences are not merely perceptions of the people themselves, they embody different ways of relating to the world, positing a new, non-anthropocentric, relational subjectivity. Relying on the findings of the new materialist sociologist Jennifer Gabrys,

Introduction

Chaberski reframes the human subject as an “ambividual,” i. e. a relational being experientially linked to its natural/cultural/technological environment. Drawing on contemporary assemblage theory, he puts forward the concept of “ambividual experience,” defined as an assemblage of multisensory, intellectual, and affective experiences which emerge from dynamic and often contingent links between humans and non-humans. By analyzing three examples of installations at the intersection of art, Earth sciences, and technosciences, the chapter scrutinizes the possible effects generated by ambividual experiences. These experiences not only challenge the boundaries between the naturalculturaltechnological environment, and instigate a sense of response-ability for climate change, they also contribute to the development of collaborative survival strategies for humans and non-humans on a damaged planet. Therefore, as a complement to the other sections of Emerging Af finities, the chapters in “Performing Senses” prove that the processes of hybridization in the contemporary performative arts not only challenge traditional disciplinary divisions and binary oppositions, but also affect how we think about the senses, sensations, and experiences. As the authors gathered here evidence, the experiential is never confined to the body of those participating in art, but always emerges through initiated performances across the natural, cultural, and technological, generating effects both expected and unexpected, and contingent upon their socio-political and cultural contexts.

References Bird, Jon (1999): “Minding the Body: Robert Morris’s 1971 Tate Gallery Retrospective.” In: Michael Newman/Jon Bird (eds.), Rewriting Conceptual Art: Reaktion Books, pp. 88–106. Bishop, Claire (2012): Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London and New York: Verso. Boal, Augusto (2008): Theatre of the Oppressed, London: Pluto Press. Daston, Lorrain/Park, Katherine (1998): Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150– 1750, New York: Zone Books. De Certeau, Michel (1984): The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dourish, Paul (2001): Where the Action Is: The Foundation of Embodied Interaction, Cambridge Massachusstts and London: The MIT Press. Gilmore, James H./Pine, Joseph (1999): The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Hantelman, Dorothea von (2014): The Experiential Turn, In: Carpenter, Elizabeth (ed.), On Performativity, Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. http://walkerart.org/ collections/publications/performativity/experiential-turn. Accessed 20.01.2019.

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Kozel, Susan (2007): Closer. Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, Cambridge Massachusstts and London: The MIT Press. Latour, Bruno (1993 [1991]): We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press. Morton, Timothy (2017): Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London and New York: Verso. Nöe, Alva/O’Regan, Kevin (2001): “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness.” In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, pp. 939–1031. Penny, Simon (2016): Making Sense. Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment, Cambridge Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press. Ross, Christine (2010): “Spatial Poetics. The (Non)Destinations of Augmented Reality Art.” In: Afterimage. The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism  2, pp. 19–24. Sampson, Tony D. (2017) The Assemblage Brain. Sense-Making in Neuroculture, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Schechner, Richard (2005 [1973]): “Ethology and Theatre.” In: Schechner, Richard (ed.) Performance Theory, Taylor and Francis, 2005, pp. 199–241. Taylor, Diana (2016): Performance, Durham and London: Duke University Press,. Turner, Victor/Bruner, Edward (eds.) (1986): The Anthropology of Experience, University of Illinois Press. Wright, Stephen, (2014): Toward a Lexicon of Usership, Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum.

Of Unsound Mind and Body Immersive Experience in Headphone Theater Rosemary Napier Klich This chapter explores the use of binaural sound technologies in headphone theater, examining the nature of immersive listening and the staging of the listener’s perceptual systems. This experience of sonic immersion implicates the body in various ways, with sound connecting the body to the world and triggering intersensorial perception. Exploring binaural sound mediation and examining the relationship of sound, space, and the listener’s “resonant body,” this chapter explores the listener’s aesthetic experience in Complicite’s The Encounter (2016), and Glen Neath and David Rosenberg’s Fiction (2015) and Séance (2017). While Simon McBurney reminds the audience at the beginning of The Encounter that the “whole thing is completely artificial,” the use of binaural sound technologies in headphone theater exposes listeners to the mediated sounds of actual environments, immersing them in sound that is both real and virtual, there and not there, live and mediated, actual and abstract. This chapter will examine the nature of immersion as experienced in these productions and suggest that headphone theater facilitates a form of self-aware immersion that draws the audience’s attention to their own perceptual processing, with particular emphasis on the often less-prominent interoceptive system. Sonic immersion, as facilitated in headphone theater such as The Encounter, provides an experience of contemplative immersion and self-ref lection from the inside-out, prompting the audience to consider bodily ownership, body boundaries, and internal space. The recent f lourish of headphone theater in the UK over the last five years is indicative of a broader field of theater that is placing the auditory experience at the heart of both its form and content. This elevation of the auditory may ref lect what other theorists in the newly formed field of Sound Studies have described as the “sonic turn” (Drobnick 2004: 10) and the “turn to listening” (Home-Cook 2015: 8), which “has done much to challenge the hegemony of the spectatorial gaze, by refocusing our attention on the phenomenon of sound and perception” (Home-Cook 2015: 8). In the chapter “Sonic Imaginations” (2012), Jonathan Sterne introduces “sound studies” as a name for interdisciplinary studies in the human sciences that takes sound as its point of departure: “By analysing both sonic prac-

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tices and the discourses and institutions that describe them, it redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world” (2). The sonic turn has manifested itself across theater practice, with a noticeable rise of theater and performance that elevates the audio, and in theoretical discourse and critical analysis, as sound studies and theater studies have come to coexist and overlap. Sound studies has, until recently, been what Patrick Finelli (2012) calls a “minor grace note in the composition of theater studies” (465), but with texts such as Ross Brown’s Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice (2009), Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner’s Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance (2011), Roesner’s Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes (2012), George Home-Cooke’s Theatre and Aural Attention (2015), and Lynne Kendrick’s Theatre and Aurality (2017), the intersection of sound studies and theater studies is a rapidly growing area. Headphone theater may be considered part of a trajectory that has embraced the “turn to listening” and that relies on audio technologies as fundamental to the form and content of the performance. This body of work explores the mediation of sound, its recording, transmission and reproduction, and draws attention to how sound is received and processed by the audience. The examples of headphone theater presented here challenge the engagement not of the spectator, but of the audience: the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the term audience was “first used abstractly to denote the individual activity of hearing” (qtd. Radway 1988: 359). Janice Radway (1988) explains “to ‘give audience’ was to ‘give ear’ or attention to what had been spoken by another” (359). While the term “spectator” suggests one who watches, an audience is one who gives their aural attention. To “give attention” is, of course, not passive; to “give ear” implies an action, it is something that requires doing. As George Home-Cook (2015) explains, “listening is, in every sense, an act: listening is not only something that we do, but is inherently theatrical. As a specialized mode of attention, listening both manipulates and is manipulated by the phenomenon of sound” (9).x The audience member is always both recipient and participant, simultaneously manipulated by and manipulating the sonic landscape in which they are immersed. The examples of headphone theater addressed here use technologies of sound production and transmission to stage sonic perception and to provide a space to contemplate the act of listening. This chapter will explore the nature of audience immersion in such works and, building on the argument that listening involves active attention, it will argue that the immersion of the audience in headphone theater involves being both awash with and inhabited by sound, while giving attention to one’s perceptual processing and a hyper-awareness of one’s interoceptive systems. Within the wider field of headphone theater, a significant number of productions are using the special capabilities of binaural audio technologies to facilitate sonic immersion in auditory space and explore the act of listening. Building on a history of binaural sound usage in audio-walks, such as those produced by Janet

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Cardiff since 1991, contemporary headphone theater creates experiences of listening to binaural sound in contexts that range from traditional theaters to everyday spaces, staged outdoor performances, or complete darkness. Binaural sound typically involves using a dummy head with a microphone in each ear to record sound, which, when played back through headphones, creates an immersive 3D experience not unlike stepping into another pair of ears. Binaural recording is a century-old technique that is experiencing a revival in audio theater and developing commercial prominence as a key feature of virtual reality (VR). Binaural sound is to hearing what VR is to seeing; binaural sound enhances the experience of presence, of “being there,” which is the basis of VR design. Early experiments in the application of stereo and binaural technologies focused on the capacity of such technologies to facilitate access to remote events, enabling audiences an experience of “being there” for physically distant sonic events. As early as 1881, Clement Ader, a French engineer, devised a broadcasting system to stream a Parisian Opera to listeners up to two kilometers away. He connected microphones across the front of the Opera stage and used telephone transmitters to broadcast the Opera to listeners, who were required to hold two separate telephone receivers to their ears. The “stereo” listening experience was the star attraction of the 1881 International Exhibition of Electricity (Collins 2008) and was later commercialized as the “Theatrophone” in 1890 by the Compagnie du Théâtrophone, who distributed live concerts via telephone from Paris theaters to pay-per-use telephones in hotels and cafes, and to private subscribers (Cook 1999:  16). As well as using mediating technologies to increase access to soundbased performance, using headphones to experience sound as if through the ears of others has been the focus of pursuits since the early twentieth century. In 1933, at the Chicago Fair, the AT&T telephone company demonstrated the first binaural transmission system, using a mechanical dummy called Oscar with microphones in front of his ears. Oscar was originally developed to explore the telephone transmission of the human voice, and was also used to examine the reproduction of sound; in 1931/32, Bell Laboratories used Oscar to record the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra and compared the binaural signals with those of the live listening experience (Stephan 2009: 770). At the Chicago Fair, Oscar offered audiences a kind of audio spectacle; he was put in a glass box and the public could listen to what Oscar heard in real time via head receivers (Ganz 2008: 78). The sector of audio theater that places the audience in headphones builds on the principles of Oscar’s transmission system, this access to another person’s sensory experience, putting on a headset and experiencing sound as if one’s material environment differed from the actual environment, and exploring the effects on one’s sense of body. While using significantly more sophisticated technological platforms, these productions rely on the same principles of recording sound using the head of a dummy.

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Binaural recording reproduces sound as it is heard by human ears, as opposed to “stereo” recording, which does not take into account the mass between the ears, the “headspace” in the middle, or the movement of sound over skin. Recording sound using the dummy head accounts for head mass and shape, and the folds of the outer ear that ref lect sound into the ear canal. The human head is an obstacle to high and middle frequency sound waves; binaural recording takes into account the head-related transfer function and captures sound in relation to its material environment. Through headphones, this provides a sense of sounds as clearly located in perceived physical space. When the binaural soundscape accessed via headphones is experienced in an environment unlike what is sonically depicted, the effects of binaural sound can make one doubt one’s sensory perception, as the sonic and visual environments clash. The works I have selected elevate auditory perception to become both the means and substance of the performance. Their use of binaural sound heard via headphones saturate the audience member’s sensorium and immerse the listener in a detailed, three-dimensional sonic environment. Complicite’s The Encounter, which was presented at the London Barbican in 2016, layers live and prerecorded sound with a single performer on a sparse and functional stage. David Rosenberg and Glen Neath’s Fiction (2015) and Séance (2017) are the second and third collaborations between writer Neath and director Rosenberg (under the company name Darkfield) using binaural sound in total darkness, following Ring (2012). The Encounter, Fiction, and Séance use the specific capabilities of binaural sound and headphone listening to draw the audience’s attention to their own perceptual processing, with special emphasis on the interoceptive system, facilitating a form of immersion that is both embodied and self-aware. The following sections look to further analyze and increase our understanding of the nature of sonic immersion in these three works.

Three Examples In Complicite’s The Encounter, Simon McBurney performs a two-hour feat of dynamic storytelling with live binaural sound created using a dummy-head on stage with microphones in both ears, as well as various other onstage microphones, foley effects, prerecorded binaural sound, and cinematic background music. He begins in stereo sound, introducing us to the various microphones and loop pedals on an otherwise near-empty stage, and explains how binaural sound works: “here I am somewhere in your head,” he says, before walking from one ear, “across the electrified pate of our brain,” to lodge behind our frontal lobe. The binaural sound engineering, designed by Gareth Fry with Pete Malkin, creates a vivid sense of

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McBurney’s voice as spatially located, as having the capacity to move around, towards, and even potentially inside the listener’s body. The story McBurney brings to life is of American photographer Loren McIntyre’s visit to the Amazon jungle in 1969 and his encounter with the Mayoruna tribe, as recorded in Petru Popescu’s book Amazon Beaming. McBurney tells us that the function of stories is to enable the listener to enter the consciousness of the protagonist; the use of binaural sound places each audience member at the center of the protagonist’s world, sonically rendering their immediate environment. McIntyre follows and engages with the tribe as they undertake a mind-altering journey, searching for the “beginning,” a time before everything that is known. McIntyre’s encounter with the Amazon and its people is vividly constructed through the sound design by Gareth Fry, and McBurney, speaking mostly as a kind of narrator but also slipping into the internal monologue of the character, skilfully uses onstage materials to create the sounds of the jungle. The sound of the river lapping is created by slowly shaking a water bottle near the microphone, and by trampling a pile of old recording tape McBurney creates the sounds of leaves crunching underfoot. The aesthetic emphasizes the performer’s physical exertions; McBurney’s labor in creating the fictional environment is made increasingly evident. The aesthetic also directly addresses the audience’s own sense of embodiment, both through their engagement with binaural sound and through the story’s content; McBurney’s description of the protagonist’s encounter with the rainforest involves cuts, labored breathing, dehydration, eating, and indigestion. McIntyre experiences illness, thirst, fear, and a hallucinatory episode. He wakes up believing the Mayoruna village to be under attack by a jaguar, and in f leeing, becomes lost in the pitch-black jungle that seems to attack him; thorns tear at his skin, their barbs dig deep, and insects f lock around his head. He scratches and f lails, coming face to face with spiders, snakes, and pitch darkness. McIntyre’s inundation with jungle fauna and immersion in the world of the Mayurona is powerfully depicted by McBurney using his rather rustic onstage toolkit and three-dimensional sound technologies, placing the audience in the middle of McIntyre’s immersive environment. At the same time, by revealing the mechanics of the sound production, the theatrical construction and the ways it immerses the audience is presented for contemplation. In Fiction (2014), which was performed at the Battersea Arts Centre, Glen Neath’s script plays with how experiences of dreaming, imagining, and remembering relate to, and overlap with, the audience experience in the theater. The audience is told that they are attending a conference in a hotel and that the keynote speaker is late; a speaker’s podium stands in front of a screen showing a hotel room interior. Messages appear on the screen; we are informed that half the audience are actually actors. An audience member is called up onto stage seemingly at

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random; she gives an introductory speech about the nature of fiction, talking into a microphone that amplifies directly into our headphones. She describes how the mind creates, characterizes and visualizes places, and she explains the power of the imagination in filling in missing pieces of storyline. As she speaks, the lights go out, and she reminds us that reality is only measured by experience. A soft, female voice whispers in my ear, comforting and familiar, a voice that remains a reference point throughout the work, a kind of personal narrator and guide that mediates between myself and the action that unfolds sonically around me. She coaxes me to sleep, and while I remain awake throughout the production, the strange events that unravel have a dream-like quality, involving common dream tropes, such as being unprepared for a public speech, being naked in public, and being conscious of the fact one is dreaming, but unable to wake up. At one point, I am inside a car and the air around me feels compressed; the sounds and air are close, and as I hear rain patter on the roof of the car, I feel physically enclosed. Someone bangs on the roof, just above my head, and I instinctively look to the side where I perceive that someone should be standing. At one point, the scent of deodorant hits my nostrils; at another, a deep base rumbles through the f loor, seeming to vibrate in my feet. I regularly find myself checking the f loor with my feet and the chair with my hands, not out of fear, but to satisfy my need to physically confirm the material existence I know to be real (of my body sitting in a chair among fellow headphone-wearing audience members at the Battersea Arts Centre). The narrative is vague and muddy, deliberately discombobulating, with all the logic and plot of a series of unrelated dreams. It throws me into the middle of already unfolding events and positions me within various roles in different locations without a realistic sense of time or causal linearity. Séance, which was performed at Summerhall at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017, also uses binaural sound and takes place in absolute darkness. However, unlike Fiction, which is nearly an hour long, Séance is only fifteen minutes. The show lacks the meditative, narrative qualities of Fiction, but offers a short, visceral, immersive experience exploring the human capacity for superstition and the contagious nature of fear. The headphone-wearing audience of twenty are seated inside a customized shipping container on velvet chairs around a long table with their backs to the wall. Hanging over the table, small metal bells are suspended with cord; the audience are asked to place their hands f lat on the table for the duration of the performance. When the doors close and a black-out ensues, I am hostage to the voices in my ears. The blackness is disorientating and I am rendered immobile and silent. We hear the sound of the door opening; a man enters the space, and as we hear his footsteps and breath, the binaural soundscape tricks the listener’s proprioceptive system into responding to the imagined presence. The audience are participants in a séance and this man is our medium; he moves through the space, whis-

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pers in our ears, walks the length of the table and conjures spirits in the darkness. The show does not only rely on special effects or on making the audience jump in surprise, it evokes an anxiety, a wariness, and an interest in the line between the real and imaginary, depicting scenes of paranormal activity and playing with the audience members’ openness to believe in such possibilities. It is an experiment in the nature of fear itself; while rationally one knows the sounds are not live, the body responds to objects and entities it senses in the space. I do not suspend my disbelief, I cling to it, as the information saturating my senses tries to convince me that my environment and situation are unlike what I rationally know to be true. The liveness and communal aspect of the performance are key: we hear breathing and murmuring from where we know other audience members are sitting, and the nervousness and fear in the whispers of the other séance participants becomes infectious.

Sonic Immersion In The Encounter, Fiction and Séance, it is easy to forget that one is wearing headphones; they fit comfortably and do not inhibit movement, producing a deep perceptual immersion. While psychological immersion involves mental commitment or absorption in fictional content, perceptual immersion addresses the physical barriers of mediation that close off the audience member to all but the mediated content.1 Headphones shut out the exterior world of the here and now and enable mediated, directed sound to enter and resonate throughout the body. They faclitate perceptual immersion, but as they also remain unobtrusive, not distracting from psychological immersion. These productions make clever use of this modality of headphones. Glen Neath explains that, in making the work, “We took a long time to come to the conclusion that we didn’t want to show the technology […] With virtual reality, you’ve got this headset on so you know you’re in this virtual world. Whereas with ours, we’re playing with the idea that we don’t know what’s real and what’s not” (qtd. Manthorpe 2017). This transparency of mediation is different to the overt theatrical construction of The Encounter; however, all three works rely on the immediacy of binaural sound and its capacity to colonize sensory perception. Headphones create perceptual immersion, but rather than involving the cognitive projection of oneself into a separate, alternate reality, they facilitate a perceptual shift, in which the listener’s immediate material reality, in which they are sitting among others wearing headphones inside a theater/shipping container, is defamiliarized and colored by auditory information. Immersion is based in the 1 For more on this distinction in relation to Virtual Reality, see McMahan (2003: 77).

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here and now, it does not involve a shift into an alternate reality, but a sense of alteration, an experience of the theatrification of the surrounding space (of events as being intentionally staged and framed). In The Encounter, the visual environment is perceived through the lens of the auditory; auditory space is superimposed on the tactile environment, filling the interior of the Barbican theater with the atmosphere of the Amazon. In Fiction and Séance, the audience continually question the relationship between the sounds they hear and their immediate physical environment, both seeking and shying away from moments of correlation. In Séance, when the bell hanging above the table seen on entering the container is heard to ring, there is correlation between what I know about my physical space and what I hear, so when I also hear through my headphones the sounds of footsteps across the table in front of me, and feel the reverberation of these steps through my palms, my belief in the reality of the sounds is inevitably enhanced. In headphone theater, sonic information fills the material environment; the listeners’ immersion does not involve projecting themselves into a fictional elsewhere, it heightens their experience of an altered here-and-now. That sound is immersive has been much discussed. Jean-Luc Nancy, whose Listening (2007) may be considered a key moment for the sonic turn in critical theory, asserts that while “visual presence” exists prior to one’s encounter with it, “sonorous presence arrives – it entails an attack, as musicians and acousticians say. And animal bodies, in general – the human body, in particular – are not constructed to interrupt at their leisure the sonorous arrival, as has often been noted” (14). Sound is pervasive, and as Murray Schafer (2003) asserts, “We have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen” (25). However, as Schafer’s mention of “condemnation” and Nancy’s mention of “attack” suggests, explanations of sonic “immersion” often portray the listener as passive to the onslaught of sound, as mindless, absorbed, overwhelmed, or held hostage by sound that is inescapable, as opposed to critically thinking, engaged, and ref lecting. In Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2003), Oliver Grau explains that “in the present as in the past, in most cases immersion is mentally absorbing and a process, a change, a passage from one mental state to another. It is characterized by diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increased emotional involvement in what is happening” (13). This understanding of immersion as mind-less echoes Theodor Adorno’s (1990) thoughts on the listener’s experience of recorded sound: By circling people, by enveloping them – as inherent in the acoustical phenomenon – and turning them as listeners into participants, it contributes ideologically to the integration which modern society never tires of achieving in reality. It leaves no room for conceptual reflection between itself and the subject, and so it creates an illusion of immediacy in a totally mediated world. (310)

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In the headphone theater productions addressed here, sound envelops the listeners, circling them “as is inherent in the acoustical phenomenon.” However, in the overt staging of recorded sound, by emphasizing the act of listening itself, by actively exploring how sound implicates and stimulates the listening body, a space is made between itself and the subject, and works such as The Encounter not only leave room for, but insist on conceptual ref lection. Audience experience of these headphone theater productions can involve both immersion and critical ref lection; audience members may oscillate between or experience both of these states, thinking and feeling, psychological and physiological. The examples of headphone theater discussed here facilitate a type of audience involvement that may best described as “contemplative immersion,” a descriptor used by Adorno and McLuhan, though it might initially sound contradictory. While immersion, in Grau’s view, would usually involve high levels of emotion and an uncritical approach, the notion of contemplation suggests rational consideration. However, while Grau (2003) explains that most cases of immersion involve diminished critical distance, he also allows that “there is not a simple relationship of ‘either-or’ between critical distance and immersion; the relations are multifaceted, closely intertwined, dialectical, in part contradictory, and certainly highly depended on the disposition of the observer” (13). The term “contemplative immersion” is used by both Benjamin and Adorno in their discussions of the importance of critical distance in aesthetic appreciation, and the term offers a potentially valuable means of conceptualizing the experience of audience immersion in headphone theater, which envelops the senses, yet not without critical ref lection. Daniel Palmer offers a comparison of Benjamin and Adorno’s understanding of immersion in his article “Contemplative Immersion: Benjamin, Adorno and Media Arts Criticism” (2007). Benjamin argues that the Dadaists’ most important contribution was the uselessness of their work for “contemplative immersion,” which he viewed as “a school of thought for asocial behavior” (Palmer 2007: 3). In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno (2013) writes that “Aesthetic experience becomes living experience only by way of its object, in that instant when artworks themselves become animate under its gaze. […] Through contemplative immersion the immanent processual quality of the work is set free” (241). While maintaining that a work’s significance lies within the object, Adorno also suggests that aesthetic experience involves embodiment and affect. Palmer explains: “Within an immanent ontology, the aesthetic becomes an event affecting sensibility itself” (Palmer, 2007). Contemplation, for Adorno (2013), would seem synonymous with the idea of critical distance; he writes that “contemplative aesthetics presupposes that taste by which the observer disposes over the works from a distance” (441). However, the term contemplation also implies spirituality and meditation; in ecclesiastical terms, contemplation suggests active devotion to prayer, we may talk of one becoming “lost” in contemplation. The term con-

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templative immersion is used here to evoke the simultaneous experience of critical awareness and immersion, and to suggest a form of immersion that involves active commitment to ref lection, that is processual and fundamentally embodied. These headphone theater productions demand a mode of involvement where the audience members are immersed to experience audio content, and yet are simultaneously cognizant of their immersion and perceptual processes. The metaphor of immersion suggests deep mental involvement or physical submersion in matter or space, while contemplative immersion involves psychological and perceptual submergence in this matter or space while simultaneously ref lecting on its otherness. It entails experiencing the texture and qualities of the matter in which one is immersed, while ref lecting on how one experiences immersion. The term “contemplative immersion” might be used to describe this experience of being both perceptually and psychologically immersed while remaining conscious of one’s engagement with the medium or interface through which the artwork or performance is accessed. In the binaural soundscape presented via headphones, one might ref lect upon the somaesthetic processing of binaural sound. Just as listening, as opposed to hearing, involves an act of attention (Home-Cooke 2007), so contemplative immersion, as opposed to absorption, requires conscious and deliberate attention to one’s own perceptual processes. In headphone theater, the audience is immersed in what Jean-Luc Nancy (2007) calls “the sonorous present,” which he suggests “is the result of space-time: it spreads through space, or rather it opens a space that is its own, the very spreading out of its resonance, its expansion and its reverberation” (13). While sound, or listening, is often considered temporal and linear, with the impact of music, for example, reliant on the listener apprehending the passage of sounds through time, the notion of immersion often involves a sense of being outside of time; video gamers, for instance, often report that a particular feature of immersion in video games is the experience of losing an awareness of time passing (cf., for example, Sanders and Cairns 2010). Immersive sound is spatial, it works to spatialize; binaural sound creates a three-dimensional, resonant, auditory space that surrounds the listener. Nancy (2007) describes the “sonorous present” as opening a space all of its own, a space that “is immediately omni-dimensional and transversate through all spaces: the expansion of sound through obstacles, its property of penetration and ubiquity, has always been noted” (13). Sound penetrates and inhabits the body and its environment, and, in the case of immersive sound, as experienced in headphone theater, it colonizes the visual, the environmental, the material. Nancy’s “sonorous present” is not dissimilar to Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of “auditory space,” which he defines as a “field of simultaneous relations without center or periphery. That is, auditory space contains nothing and is contained in nothing” (McLuhan 2005: 48). In his paper “Inside the Five Senses,” McLuhan (2005) writes, “[i]t is the act of hearing that itself creates ‘auditory space,’

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because we hear from every direction at once” (48). Auditory space is an effect of binaural hearing and engages the listener somatically, working through numerous perceptual modalities simultaneously. McLuhan and Carpenter describe auditory space in Explorations, 7: The essential feature of sound is not that it has a location but that it be, that it fill space. Sound is an envelope. No point of focus; no fixed boundaries; space made by the thing itself, not space containing. It is not pictorial space but dynamic, always in flux; creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries, is indifferent to background, the ear favors sounds from any direction, it can experience things simultaneously. (Marchessault 2005: 91) The use of binaural sound in performances creates various dimensions of auditory space that surround, and stem from, the body of the listener. In The Encounter, Fiction, and Séance, the listener is immersed in an emergent sound-space that engages the entire sensorium and blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior. In these works, sound creates its own dimensions, constructing an abundant, detailed environment around the listener’s body. Sound also creates and fills space, not just around the body, but also within. Nancy (2007) posits the body’s “sonority” and asks “What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening, listening with all his being?” (4). The following section will explore this question in relation to the audience experience of headphone theater, revealing how immersion in binaural headphone listening involves the listener contemplating his own body as it engages with, is inhabited by, and responds to sound.

The Body-in-Sound In exploring the engagement of the body immersed in sound, we must avoid reasserting the separation and hierarchical division of listening and seeing. Instead, a Gibsonian (1986) understanding of the senses allows for intersensoriality, promoting the senses as “perceptual systems.” Understanding the senses as perceptual systems accepts that the sensors usually attributed specifically to sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste, may intermingle and interact as they form our perceptions of the world. Rather than mutually exclusive, sensory systems overlap and collaborate in perceiving a world that is simultaneously seen, touched, heard, smelled etc. Accepting the senses as potentially overlapping and interacting allows us to apprehend listening as involving the entire body and sensory apparatus. In the present examples of headphone theater, immersion in auditory space showcases the listening experience as fundamentally intersensorial and draws

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the listeners’ attention to their exteroceptive and interoceptive somatosensory processing. In addition to a heightened sense of physical positioning within external space, headphone theater has the potential to generate an intimate sense of interior spaces. In different ways, all three works use binaural sound to draw attention to the listener’s interoceptive processing. The term interoception is generally understood as the process of appraising the state of one’s internal systems, including the respiratory, digestive, and cardiovascular systems. Definitions of interoception are not fixed; as Ceunen, Vlaeyen and Van Diest explain in their 2016 article “On the Origin of Interoception,” the exact definition of interoception can range from the original restrictive meaning, which holds that interoception involves only visceral sensations, to the now more commonly deployed inclusive understanding which positions interoception as “an umbrella term for the phenomenological experience of the body state, an experience which is ultimately a product of the central nervous system (CNS)” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). A concrete yet inclusive definition understands interoception as including two main forms of perception: proprioception (signals from the skin and musculoskeletal system) and visceroception (signals from the internal organs, such as heart rate, breathing, and digestion) (Pollatos et al.). As described above, headphone theater draws on the capacity for binaural recording to appeal to, perform via, and play with the audience’s proprioception. The use of binaural sound in The Encounter, Fiction, and Séance also draws attention to the audience’s own visceroception, emphasizing internal bodily functions, signals, and sensations. Sonic immersion creates a profound awareness of one’s body schema; headphone productions such as those we are discussing force the proprioceptive system, which provides our sense of equilibrium and being in space, to respond to sound as spatial and proximate. In these performances, characters whisper into the participants’ ears, and the binaural recordings create a sense of physical proximity. A voice speaks to my right and I “feel” the speaker standing beside me, moving behind me, and as she speaks intimately in my ear, I believe I feel her breath on the back of my neck, moving the hair on my head. The dialogue through the headphones clearly locates the speaker in relation to the body of the audience member, so the listener is surrounded by sound that can be located in space. These productions provide a profound sense of physical presence within virtualized space, and the authenticity of the auditory rendering of an augmented environment triggers the haptic system into responding to the presence of imagined bodies and objects. In Fiction and The Encounter, it is not just the sonically implied bodies of others that bear on my proprioception, but my sense of positioning within, and engagement with, the material environment. In Fiction, as I am listening to the rain from inside a car, I feel the closeness of the atmosphere in the confined space, and register the shift in air density as manifest through sound. In The Encounter, the

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sounds of rustling leaves and buzzing insects, of weather and moving air, all have an impact on my body; my hand reaches automatically to swat away a mosquito buzzing around my head, and as McBurney crinkles a chips package to create the effect of fire crackling and spitting, I anticipate the heat of the fire on my skin. In Séance, I not only experience my proximity to a sonically present performer (the medium) who moves around me and whispers in my ears, but also to an imagined ghostly, monstrous being that my rational brain knows cannot exist, but to which my nervous system, ready to f lee or fight, inevitably responds. With the modality of hearing entwined with those of touch and proprioception, immersion in auditory space is full-bodied and experienced on the skin. As Michel Serres (qtd. Conner 2005) argues, “the ear is no more to be located in one place than the skin.” (324) “The skin,” Serres suggests, receives all the senses together […] Our wide, long, variable envelope hears much, sees little, secretly breathes perfumes, always shudders, draws back with horror, withdraws or exults at loud sounds, bright light, foul smells. We are bathed in things from head to toe […] We are not aboard a boat ten feet above the water line, but submerged in the water itself. (70) The staging of the binaural listening experience foregrounds the body’s haptic sensitivities; it emphasizes how the haptic system responds to the sounds in which it is submerged, shuddering and drawing back, exulting and bathing in its texture. In headphone listening, the body is immersed in acoustic space and sound assails the skin. The three-dimensional sound shapes have physical bearing, and the skin responds to their imagined color, size, texture, and temperature. The haptic system both retreats from and reaches out to the bodies of those whispering nearby. Skin senses the space in between its surface and the surface of the objects off which sound rebounds and is absorbed; the car dashboard, rainforest leaves, a hotel room. In The Encounter, Simon McBurney immediately draws the listeners’ attention to the sensitivity of the skin, suggesting, as they listen to his voice whisper into their ear, that the brain may imagine that the surface of the ear feels his breath and become hot. His narrative emphasizes sensations of touch and texture; he describes the qualities of leaves brushing fingers and the thick, clammy, humid air. He describes burning feet and torn skin, and in one scene, where the protagonist suffers from a tropical illness, carnivorous maggots hatching underneath the skin. By emphasizing the body within his narrative, McBurney’s performance attunes our sensitivities in preparation for sonic immersion, forcing contemplation of the role of the skin in defending against, in the enjoyment of, and incorporation of the world. Séance, apart from the medium’s movement and whispering to trigger the listener’s physical response, targets the audience’s sensorium and

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draws attention to embodiment in various ways. At the beginning of the séance the medium tells us to focus on our own breathing, to contemplate the movement of the lungs, chest, and lips. The audience’s hands are vulnerable, and as the footsteps across the table tread near, hands grow tense in anticipation of being stepped on. I am acutely aware of the concrete texture of the table surface, and at one point, I believe I feel the table move off the f loor, but as my faith in the reliability of my auditory and haptic systems has been shaken, I am uncertain if this really happens or if I have imagined it. In both Séance and Fiction, vibrations are felt through the audience member’s chair, moving up from the f loor and in the skin, heightening the listener’s sensitivity to the interface between their body and the material environment, and of the body’s boundaries as fundamentally permeable in relation to the world. In addition to a heightened sense of physical positioning within external space, the use of binaural sound has the potential to provide an intimate sense of one’s interior space. As Jean-Luc Nancy explains, “the sound that penetrates through the ear propagates throughout the entire body something of its effects” (2007: 14). The process of hearing involves the skin, but also f lesh and bone; the body conducts the sound, the sound impregnates and inhabits its interior spaces. Serres explains, “We hear through our skin and feet. We hear through our skull, abdomen and thorax. We hear through our muscles, nerves and tendons. Our body-box, strung tight, is covered head to toe with a tympanym” (2016: 141). In triggering the body’s response to its perceived proximity to sound sources, and in speaking to the senses of touch and proprioception, headphone theater emphasizes the body’s interaction with its external sonic environment. However, these productions also strategically draw attention to the interior of the body and the passing of sound into, through, and around the chamber of the “body-box.” In all three productions, at different moments, sound seems to bounce through the body mass, and the eardrum extends across the entire body-drum. These productions draw on the capacity of binaural sound technologies to position sound both inside and outside the body, exploiting the psychoacoustics of headphones, which produce a vivid imaging of one’s “headspace.” In his analysis of human audition, James Gibson explains how telephones, earphones, and loudspeakers impinge on the auditory system’s natural tendency to navigate towards sound sources. He explains, “A person who wears a pair of earphones […] is strongly inclined to hear a mysterious invisible speaker inside his head, and it takes some practice to overcome the illusion” (1966: 86). Headphones produce an ef fect that acoustic engineers call “in-head acoustic imaging”, which involves perceiving a space inside one’s head (Stankievech 2007: 55). Gibson explains the phenomenon of headphone listeners becoming aware of the space between their ears:

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The illusion of perceiving a source within the head when it “really” comes from earphones is a necessary consequence of the perceptual ability to localise correctly the sounds of one’s own voice, of eating, breathing, and the like, which are in fact within the head. The listening system normally provides not only information about the external loci of sounds but also about the locus of “here”, to which the others are relative. It is thus capable of proprioception as well as exteroception. (1966: 86) In-head acoustic imaging is deemed a “noisy,” undesirable quality of headphone listening (Stankievech 2007: 55); however, in these examples of headphone theater, this effect is used deliberately and dramaturgically. Headphones provide an opportunity to ref lect on one’s interoception and consider the spaces within the body through which sound may move. Headphone theater can enlist headphone listening’s capacity to enable a sense of sound located within the body to prompt an investigation of interiority. In The Encounter, the protagonist believes he is receiving telepathic communications from the tribe leader; the audience hears the leader’s voice as if it were located between their ears, forcing one to contemplate where she locates her own internal voice. Séance draws on the effectiveness of the in-head acoustic imaging of binaural sound to facilitate the listener’s experience of a sonic entity (for narrative purposes, the equivalent of a paranormal spirit) entering one ear, moving through the brain tissue, bouncing around the cranial cavity, and eventually exiting the body. The listener is inhabited by a sonic entity that from the outside world, one that perseverates and resonates through his internal matter, that seems to bounce between the bones and leave the body empty behind. The binaural soundtrack includes atmospheric rumblings and the deep pulse of blood circulating, which sound as if they are coming from inside my body; I am forced to ask if these are indeed my own bodily sounds or, as rationality dictates, pre-recorded sounds that seem, through the spatialisation capacities of the binaural recording, to be sourced within my body. Either way, the audience is pushed to focus not just on the surface sensations of the body, but on their interior spaces and processes. Sound is a major element in interoception; one of key measures for testing an individual’s interoception is her ability to accurately hear her own heartbeat (Garfinkel et al. 2015: 65), and while elements of the interoceptive system such as digestion, respiration, and circulation may be ‘felt’, they are also ‘heard’ (heartbeat, stomach rumbling, breath etc.). The Encounter, Séance, and Fiction all emphasize the heartbeat through realistic sound effects, through the pace and rhythm of drumming, and through the narrator’s text, but in different ways. In Séance, the listener hears a heartbeat that seems to originate from the approximate location of the his own heart; on hearing this heartbeat I immediately assess whether I can also feel it, and consider its relation to my pulse. This focus on my heartbeat leads me to ref lect on the circulatory system and its pace as an indicator of

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emotional state; as I become anxious, my heartbeat quickens. In Fiction, the voice in the audience member’s ear tells her that she needs to urinate; my automatic response was to gauge the status of my bladder. My focus was forced inwards to assess my interior workings and interoceptive signals. In The Encounter, McBurney describes McIntyre gorging on food after a period of hunger and we hear the intimate, visceral, three-dimensional squelch of chewing and swallowing; as I hear McIntyre swallow, with sounds seeming to originate from where they would if I were swallowing, I imagine McIntyre’s food making its way down my own esophagus, satisfying imaginary pangs of hunger and triggering my digestive processes. Breathing is, of course, a fundamental physiological function and a vital element of interoceptive processing. Breath both inhabits the body and extends it into exterior space in exhalation. It transcends and challenges the boundaries of inner and outer, both inf lating interior space and escaping the confines of the body. Early in Séance, the medium instructs the audience member to breathe slowly in and out, to become calm and focused, and the room is filled with the sound of deliberate respiration. The audience members are asked to focus on their breathing, and as I breathe deeply and slowly, and feel myself physically relax, I am moved to consider the role of breath in affecting other physiological elements (for example, slowing the heartbeat) and its bearing on perceptual openness. In The Encounter, breath is regularly mentioned by McBurney, as in his description of McIntyre’s first encounter with the tribe leader, who is close enough to feel his breath, or of McIntyre holding his breath in a tribal ritual. In various scenes, McBurney’s breath is looped over other sounds, such as footsteps through leaves. McBurney’s exertions cause him to breathe heavily; sometimes this breath is the actor/narrator’s, at other times it is the breath of the McIntyre, character as McBurney slips between roles. The use of binaural sound and first-person storytelling places the audience in McIntyre’s shoes and invites them to visualize the Amazon as he describes it, to hear through his ears. Through the binaural transmission, we hear his breath as if it were located within our own body, and we can momentarily perceive the breathing as our own. In making us consider our own breath and changes in breathing as a physiological response to an environment, the work prompts a self-consciousness of one’s interoceptive system, its connection to emotion, and its role in perception.

Conclusion: The Resonant Body In staging the phenomenon of aural perception, headphone theater explores the physical encounter between the body and the world. Listening is not just about giving aural attention, but also involves (in the present works) the physical reception of, response to, and participation in auditory space. Contemplative immersion in

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auditory space as manifest in The Encounter, Fiction, and Seance reveals the listener’s body as fundamentally “resonant.” The resonant body is inhabited by sound, open to sound and opened by sound in the listening process. Frances Dyson suggests, “In listening, one is engaged in a synergy with the world and the senses, a hearing/touch that is the essence of what we mean by gut reaction – a response that is simultaneously physiological and psychological, body and mind” (2009: 4). Dyson’s “hearing/touch” speaks to the imbrication of hearing and haptics, and in these three productions, the audience responds physiologically to a sound-world that implicates the body, working across and through the skin, inhabiting the sonorous mass within, and triggering proprioception and interoceptive awareness. The storytelling of McBurney, the dreamlike text of Fiction, and the dialogue in Séance involve a dramaturgy that creates theme and meaning physiologically; a dramaturgy of “hearing/touch” that performs through and within the audience’s gut-reaction. In thinking through the listening body, one might consider what it means to apprehend the body not in terms of its image, not visually, and not just in terms of the body, but sonically, conceptualizing the body as fundamentally resonant and realized through sound. In experiencing the body as resonant, the audience experiences being in and with sound, within auditory space and containing auditory space, and part of a world of matter through which sound indiscriminately permeates. The body is both sounding board and echo-chamber, attuned to and resonating with sound, as well as generating and amplifying the internal sounds through which it makes itself known. Serres describes the body’s relationship to the “infinite repercussions and reverberations” it encounters as follows: “Resonating within us: a column of air and water and solids, three-dimensional space, tissue and skin, long and broad walls and patches, and wiring, running through them […] as though our bodies were the union of ear and orchestra, transmission and reception” (2016: 141). The use of headphone-accessed binaural sound stages the three-dimensional interiority of the listener, spatializing the body and emphasizing its viscerality. Sound resonates through the air, water, solids, and spaces of the body, across the skin and through the hollow structure of the skeleton, offering not only in-head acoustic imaging, but imaging of the whole body interior. Sound reverberates throughout the listener in binaural audio theater, interlacing and orchestrating mind, body and environment. The “embodiment” of listening is shown to be complex, involving numerous interacting perceptual systems. With the dominance of the visual undermined through powerful audio stimuli (as in The Encounter) or total the absence of visual stimuli (as in Fiction and Séance), our interoceptive sensing becomes of central importance to our awareness of the world. The listener is made aware of their body schema in relation to their environment; he is made attentive to the activities of interoception, and the potentially porous relation between interior and external space. The resonant body is

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both permeated and inhabited by sound, its own sonority made prominent, with the interior of the body communicating interoceptive awareness through sound. Far from the mindless depictions of sonic immersion, this experience can be contemplative: self-aware, mindful, committed, critical, ref lective. The audience attends to the bodily sensations of listening, and as such, to their body’s situation in its environment, not experiencing immersion passively, but as a dynamic interpreting participant, alert to the embodied performance of listening. Contemplative immersion in The Encounter, Fiction, and Séance may increase awareness of perceptual processing, of the relation between the sensory systems of sound and interoception, and of somaesthetic engagement with sonorous space. This means not simply a celebration of a subjective, introspective audience experience, but an informative exploration of how we discern, chart, and recognize our world. This sonic immersion can create a contemplative experience not only of a relationship to a prepared soundscape, but also of the known and unknown worlds beyond. It does not merely emphasize and reinforce the subjectivity of perception that is normally contingent on context; it actively exploits, undermines, and reveals our reliance on it.

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McLuhan, Marshall/Parker, Harley (1968): Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. New York: Harper and Row; London: Evanston. McMahan, Alison (2003): “Immersion, Engagement and Presence: A method for analyzing 3D video games.” In: Wolf, Mark J. P./Perron, Bernard (eds.), The Video Game Theory Reader, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 67–87. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2007 [2002]): Listening, New York: Fordham University Press. Palmer, Daniel (2007): “Contemplative Immersion: Benjamin, Adorno and Media Arts Criticism.” In: TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media and Culture 15, September 10, 2018 (http://www.transformationsjournal.org/wp-content/up​ loads/2017/01/Palmer_Transformations15.pdf). Paul, Stephan (2009): “Binaural Recording Technology: A Historical Review and Possible Future Developments.” In: Acta Acustica 95, pp. 767–788. Pollatos, Olga et al. (2016): “Changes in interoceptive processes following brain stimulation.” In: Philosophical Transactions 371, September 4, 2018 (http://dx.​ doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0016). Radway, Janice (1988): “Reception Study: Ethnography and the Problem of Dispersed Audiences and Nomadic Subjects.” In: Cultural Studies 2/3, pp. 359–376. Sanders, Timothy/Cairns, Paul (2010): “Time Perception, Immersion and Music in Videogames”, February 10, 2017 (https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~pcairns/pa​ pers/Sanders_HCI2010.pdf). Schafer, Murray (2003): “Open Ears.” In: Bull, Michael/Back, Les (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader, BERG, 2003, pp. 25–42. Serres, Michel (2016 [1985]): The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Stankievech, Charles (2008): “From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialisation of Subjectivity.” In: Leonardo Music Journal 17/1, pp. 55–59. Sterne, Jonathan (ed.) (2012): The Sound Studies Reader, New York: Routledge.

The Performance of Sensation Dramaturgies, Technologies and Ethnographies in the Design and Evaluation of Performative Sensory Environments David Howes, Chris Salter “I was really in another world. I was gone. I was in a trance and then I thought, this is really how I’m moving through the stages of my life. I can’t see … I’m not sure where I’m going … I sense someone else … what is the next step … and then I thought, this is how I move through my life.” “I felt like connected to everyone  … not caring about who he or she is  … beyond gender, beyond everything … just connected with everything because we have the same lights and are feeling the same vibrations at the moment … like insect species in the night … like fireflies …” “… It’s like in Alice in Wonderland. Drink this and you’ll get inside the ballroom …” The above quotations represent a cross-section of the sensations reported by visitors to a series of artistic works that the authors, in collaboration with other artists and researchers, have designed and exhibited internationally over the past six years. The contexts ranged from professional exhibitions and festivals to academic conferences. In addition to functioning as stand-alone artistic works, these “performative sensory environments,” have also been the subject of academic presentations and publications.1 In this sense, they work in multiple contexts (and multiple senses) as research objects, artistic experiences, and theoretical models or experiments designed to alter, thwart or rework ingrained socio-cultural habits of perception. These works also seek to disrupt traditional humanist understandings of what constitutes a sensing body by creating contexts where the boundaries between bodies and technological environments are increasingly blurred. This chapter discusses these works of art within the broader context of a research-creation program exploring the “infra-technological intertwining” of art,

1 See for example Howes/Salter 2015; Salter 2015; Classen 2017.

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technology and sensory studies, developed by the authors.2 Here, we first align the research and the resulting works with the tenets of sensory studies. Then we articulate how the “sensory turn” has been picked up in the performance studies literature. We then brief ly discuss Displace (2011–2013) and Haptic Field (2015–2017), two core works of art in our research-creation program, focusing on the dramaturgical framework for each and comparing the different theoretical and methodological contexts. Finally, in section four, we consider the development of one particular methodological approach – “sensory ethnography,” which depends on “participant sensation” (Howes 2018). Throughout this chapter, our central focus is on ethnography’s role within our research-creation program as a core generative element in the (sensorial and technological) design process and in the registration and evaluation of end-users’ experiences. In these discussions, we submit fruitful future directions for exploring the linkages between mediated environments and bodily techniques at the intersection of art, performance, and sensory studies.

The Sensory Turn Sensory studies involves a cultural approach to the study of the senses and a sensory approach to the study of culture. It emerged out of the sensory turn in history and anthropology that started in the early 1990s (Howes 1991; 2003) and has spread across the humanities and social sciences, much like the roughly coterminous “material” and “affective” turns. It was first named as such in the “Introducing Sensory Studies” manifesto, authored by Michael Bull, Paul Gilroy, David Howes and Douglas Kahn, which appeared in the inaugural issue of The Senses and Society. Its key tenets include: The sensorium (meaning: ‘the entire perceptual apparatus as an operational complex’) is an ever-shifting social and historical construct. The perceptual is cultural and political. The senses mediate the relationship between self and environment, mind and body, idea and object. The senses are everywhere. (Bull, Gilroy, Howes and Kahn 2006: 5, emphasis in original) Through its insistence on the sociality of sensation and cultural contingency of sense perception, sensory studies has mounted a rigorous critique of the privatization of the senses within psychology, and put an end to the monopoly which 2 The term “research-creation” has been used in Québec since the 1990s, and later, Canada-wide, to articulate research activities or approaches that foster the creation or interpretation of literary or artistic works of any type.

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that discipline long exercised over the study of the senses and sensation. There are two aspects to the “privatized” understanding of the senses in psychology questioned by sensory studies: one is the idea that each of the five senses has its proper sphere or object (e. g. vision has color, hearing has sound, etc.). The second is the idea that the senses are passive receptors and the brain is the actual seat of perception. In lieu of this modular (or “five-sense”) conception of the sensorium, sensory studies foregrounds the modulation of the senses by culture and technology, and the exteriority – or better, interstitiality – of perception.3 To illustrate this idea of interstitiality, take the example of speech. Both historically in Western culture and in many non-Western cultures, speech has been or is considered a sense. This seems odd to us moderns, because we normally conceive of the senses as “passive recipients of data, whereas speech is an active externalization of data […] [and] also because we think of the senses as natural faculties and speech as a learned acquirement” (Classen 1993: 2). However, as Constance Classen observes in Worlds of Sense, in the premodern West, as in many non-Western cultures, the senses were/are seen “more as media of communication than as passive recipients of data.” In other words, perception is a two-way street that extends between subjects (just as speech does) or between subject and object. It is not confined to a singular subject or bounded by the head or brain. We encounter the same stress on interstitiality in the widespread (in history and across cultures) notion that the eyes perceive by issuing rays which touch and mingle with the objects at which they are directed (Classen 1993: 2). The point is, as Walter Benjamin once put it, that “sentience takes us outside of ourselves” (quoted and discussed in Taussig 1993: 38). Another illuminating aspect of speech is the widely attested fact that, in noisy surroundings, speakers can be understood more readily if they can be seen (i. e. the movements of their lips are visible) as well as heard (Howes 2011: 162). This observation highlights the interactivity or interrelationship of the senses, and underscores the importance of studying how the senses are conjoined in social practice, rather than treating them individually, as so many discrete channels. This focus on practices, which are processual, goes along with the idea of perception as sensori-motor action (or “enaction”) rather than representation, in which one acts based on a pre-established world encoded in symbols in the brain. These tenets derive support from the well-known arguments of Alva Noë in Action in Perception (2006), and other literature on embodied cognition (Varela, et al. 1991; Chemero 2009). 3 Cf. Fodor, The Modularity of the Mind (1983). This is the idea that the mind consists of a series of modules. We introduce the term modulation to get away from the idea of the senses (and the areas of the brain in which they are supposedly processed) as being discrete. As we go on to show, the senses interact with each other.

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The sensory turn has not only spread across the humanities and social sciences, but also spilled over into “fine arts” disciplines: art history and art criticism, visual, performing, and media arts, and design. Of course, artists have been mixing the senses since time immemorial. What is new is the level of intensity with which artists (new media artists, in particular) have been experimenting with crossing and extending the senses through technology, and the degree to which scholars have sloughed off the ideology of “medium specificity” (as exemplified most forcefully by New York art critic Clement Greenberg’s stress on “genre purity”) and begun writing art history and criticism that concentrates on the mixity – work that is seriously multisensory and intersensory in focus and in theory (Classen 1998; Shaw-Miller 2013). Of particular note in this regard is a 2006 exhibition and catalogue curated by Caroline A. Jones, entitled “Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art.” In her curatorial statement/introduction, “The Mediated Sensorium,” Jones argues that many new media artists, driven by a “desire to escape sense for sensation,” and attracted by the idea of “sensory miscegenation” (in place of purity), have used digital technology to create intersensory art. This convergence/disruption is nicely encapsulated by Sensorium artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s installation, which channeled sound through a microscope – a “singing microscope,” in effect. In this way, she subverts the normal understanding of a microscope as an instrument of visual representation (Jones 2006: 11). According to Jones, twenty-first-century art viewers increasingly encounter “dramatically synaesthetic” scenarios; it has come to pass that “our experience of mediation itself is where art happens” (the mediation of the senses by technology and society, and the mediation of one sense by another). In other words: there are no more objets d’art, only experiences. Art has come off the wall, and the (ideally) sensorially neutral space of the white cube – the paragon space of modernist art – has come to be suffused with a plethora of technologically-mediated sensations.

Performance and Sensation The performative environments we have been designing and theorizing are shaped by the philosophy of the sensory turn. This is evident both in their indebtedness to recent findings in the anthropology of the senses (discussed in the next section) and in their focus on the interaction between sensing subjects and increasing technological mediation of “sensory aware” environments as both the sites and actors in a new dramaturgy of sensation. This dramaturgy is affected by considerations stemming from a host of different sources, such as Antonin Artaud’s articulations of a theater of cruelty, Bertolt Brecht’s aesthetic defamiliarization strategies, the phenomenological-technical experiments of California Light-Space visual artists

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Robert Irwin and James Turrell, as well as a host of other inf luences from contemporary artists, such as the corridor works of Bruce Nauman, the fog sculptures of Fujiko Nakaya, and the olfactory works of Sissel Tolaas. There are two reasons why we consciously frame our technoscientific art collaboration that explores the reconfiguration of space and perception and anthropological/social science research in performative terms. The first is to challenge theater director and theorist Richard Schechner’s assertion that an understanding of performance practices is best served through the methods of the social sciences, particularly anthropology and sociology. In “Performance and the Social Sciences” (1973) Schechner envisioned a “movement” away from artistic-bound, “theatrical” understandings of performance (i. e. performance as artificially-constructed, avant-garde event) and toward the kind of events studied by anthropologists and sociologists such as festivals, games, “interaction rituals” (Goffman) and everyday life – or, in Schechner’s particular case, Indian drama. Interestingly, Schechner’s anthropological counterpart (and later collaborator) Victor Turner (1974) proposed the opposite movement, introducing the concept of “social drama” to anthropology. In any event, the “movement” Schechner envisioned was supposed to be “more based on sheer observation and analysis than intuition and feeling” (1973: 4), with observation and analysis being the hallmark of the social scientific approach to performance, and “intuitive” methods being the (implicitly outmoded) preserve of the arts. But why posit observation and analysis as magic panacea available to the social scientist alone? Ironically, for the generation of researchers that has come after Schechner, performance became the conceptual and methodological antidote for what they saw as the positivistic tendencies of “objective” methods. Beginning in the mid-1970s, with the birth of performance theory, performance became a conduit for research that challenged traditional understandings of knowledge “from above.” As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (an inf luential figure in performance theory) famously wrote in Outline of a Theory of Practice, knowledge not only depends on the position assumed toward an object in order to study it. In fact, the “knowing subject” or analyst inflicts on practice a much more fundamental and pernicious alteration which, being a constituent condition of the cognitive operation, is bound to pass unnoticed […] [for] by withdrawing [from action] in order to observe it from above and from a distance, [the analyst] constitutes practical activity as an object of observation and analysis, a representation. (Bourdieu 1977: 2) Such “grasping of practices from the outside,” as Bourdieu puts it, is highly problematic from a methodological standpoint, precisely on account of the distanciation involved. The concomitant focus on representation is equally problematic,

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because it can trap the analyst in an endless cycle of representations and interpretations (see Howes 2003 on the “crisis in representation” in anthropology). Our solution, in keeping with Bourdieu’s critique, is to shift focus from distanciation to creating contexts for immersion, and to abjure representation in favor of the technologization of sensation. To elaborate, in contrast to Schechner’s fetishization of the quotidian as the site where the social sciences links up with the arts, our work deliberately involves the creation of artificial, technologized performative environments, as described at the start of this chapter. There are two senses to “technology” as it is used here. The first is the more common understanding of the term as referring to tools derived from scientific research and development that are used in artistic performance contexts. In our case, these tools include techniques and machines such as sensors, actuators, computer hardware and software for the control of actions of light, sound, vibration, images, fog, heat, motors, and other elements. The second sense of “technology” as used here is more in line with Michel Foucault’s deployment of the term: that is, technology as a strategy, a “practical rationality governed by a conscious goal,” which functions as a means to govern and shape bodies and behavior, both externally (what Foucault called technology as a “discipline”) and internally (“technologies of the self”) (Foucault 1998). We readily admit that, within our performative sensory environments, the senses are continually being governed and shaped by different apparatuses and machines. Such technologies disrupt the manner in which the senses ordinarily function, and thereby defamiliarize ingrained or routine patterns of sense-making. In this way, potentially different sensory practices, and indeed, different senses of self can emerge. This brings us to the redefinition of the concept of “performance” that is central to our research program. There has been a growing body of work in performance studies centering on the senses in recent years, most notably Sally Banes and Andrei Lepecki’s The Senses in Performance, and Stephen Di Benedetto’s cognitive-science-inf luenced The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre (see further Bull and Mitchell 2016). While each of these works focuses on different aspects of the sensory relationship to performance, they all share a similar phenomenological position: that the human body is the site and locus of sensation. There is, in other words, a clear demarcation between sensory stimuli used intentionally in an artistic (performance) context and the resulting bodily “experience” of such stimuli. For example, as Banes and Lepecki write, performance practices focused on the five senses “become privileged means to investigate processes where history and body create unsuspected sensorial-perceptual realms, alternative modes for life to be lived” (2007: 35). Their “performance theory of the senses” addresses the non-visual senses; it understands them as psycho-physical-somatic vehicles

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rather than as semiotic ploys. As they rightfully point out, theater theorists and historians have rarely focused on the senses outside of costumes or music/speech, usually anchored in linguistic references. Indeed, “a whole plethora of sensorial information in performance has been discarded, unnoticed and poorly documented” (2007: 43), such as performance projects that involve smell or taste – sensory modalities that are notoriously difficult to represent in writing or notation (like music), due to their temporal nature. Similarly, while Di Benedetto in the same volume and in his Provocation puts forward the notion of a “performance sensorium” (which he does not precisely define), he follows the classic psychology textbook sequence of stimulus-response and sender-receiver; everything hinges on the (supposedly) unilineal trajectory of sensation-perception-cognition. His idea, which is the same as Banes and Lepecki’s, is that: “The perception of taste, smell, sound, touch, and vision will serve as a framework with which to understand the ways in which artistically mediated environments inf luence a spectator’s perception of an event” (Banes and Lepecki 2007: 493). But what remains missing from these standard performance studies accounts is any recognition of the role that techné plays in artistic practices, as Di Bene­detto and others describe them. If, as Latour argues, technologies “are not only means but mediators, means and ends at the same time; and that is why they bear on the social fabric” (Latour 1994: 53), then technologies are part of a network of forces, affects, and practices, and not simply mere inanimate tools or “dumb” objects that artists deploy for aesthetic effect to “inf luence” a spectator’s perception. In examining the relationship between body, senses, and technology, the body is seen as the locus of cultural techniques or practices, but such practices are rarely discussed as being shaped by or, indeed, as integral parts of the technological environment. Questioning the localization of the senses in an individual body in an age of sensory techniques, German media theorist Marie-Luise Angerer addressed this fundamental anthropological problem of sense and sensation in her treatment of what she calls the conditions of the contemporary, adapting Paul Rabinow’s “umbrella term for the radical transformations that have eroded the definition of the human” (Angerer 2016: 18). “How do we know something, who perceives, who or what senses and how or where does that sensation come into being?” she asks (ibid). Once we approach the question of technology and perception from this angle, Angerer avers, our perspective is no longer (if it ever was) on bodies and senses alone but rather on sensation and sense-making as “interrelationships between media technologies, environment and body, between technology and culture” (24). This is all the more relevant given the momentous shifts currently taking place in social media, wearable technologies, gamification, and continual surveillance.

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Media technologies are the driving forces behind these social, political and theoretical shifts. Too often, however, they are studied only implicitly or without an adequate understanding of their complexities […] their active role in promoting a comprehensive relationality by setting and correlating the rhythms of large and small units and inward and outward sensations. (ibid) The key here is the idea of comprehensive relationality – the stress on interaction of the senses and the world. Bodies or minds and nature, then, are “no longer regarded as pre-existent but are instead understood to be engendered and shaped by these interactions: they are emergent phenomena” (25). “Sensing, in other words, is the catchword for an interrogation of the technological relationship between body and environment” (43). This returns us to Constance Classen’s observation that the senses are understood as “media of communication.” The senses are not only receptors – they are also “emitters” and hence, sense and sense-making is already out in the environment, and not simply located and anchored in individual bodies or subjects.

Dramaturgies of Sensation: Displace and Haptic Field (CS) By way of example, we now turn to discuss several of the core artistic projects that emerged from our research program, Mediations of Sensation, which yielded a suite of works. In what follows, we focus mainly on the Displace (2011–2014) and Haptic Field (2014–2017) installations. While both works attempted to find links between the anthropology of the senses and techno-scientifically conditioned art practice using the senses as a “boundary object” (Starr and Griesemer 1989) to cross over and connect what are considered normally separate sets of practices – academic research and art production  – their dramaturgies, aims, contexts, mechanics, histories and methods differ, as we will subsequently discuss.4 The research program began in a rather unconventional manner: not with an artistic concept or a theoretical model, but through group discussions informed by close readings of a range of ethnographic accounts of non-Western sensory orders, or “sensuous cosmologies.” We studied the “olfactory cosmology” of the 4 The term boundary object comes from the sociology of scientific knowledge, and denotes “objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds” (Star and Griesemer 1989).

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Ongee of the Andaman Islands, where the conceptualization and experience of time, space, and personhood are all mediated by smell. (Classen 1993) Another account was the “thermal cosmology” of the Tzotzil of Mexico, where gradation of heat serves to differentiate between directions (East is referred to as the direction of “Rising Heat,” West as “Waning Heat”), distinguish categories of personhood (men are hot, and grow hotter with age, women are cool), and structure virtually every aspect of ritual life. (ibid) We examined the correspondence of the senses according to the ancient Chinese “Theory of the Five Elements” (Jütte 2005) and the sequencing of sensations in the Japanese tea ceremony. (Kondo 2005) We were particularly drawn to Lévi-Strauss’ discussion of “the fugue of the five senses” in the first volume of the Mythologiques series, and how such a model appeared to be actualized in the “synaesthetic cosmology” of the Desana Indians of the Colombian rainforest. The Desana cosmos is meant to be animated by a range of color energies that emanate from the sun, and consists of an intricate tapestry of cross-modal associations that are expressive of social values. For example, the sound of a certain f lute is experienced as “yellow in color, hot in temperature, and masculine in odor. The vibrations it produces are said to remind people of correct child-rearing practices” (Howes 2011: 176). These manifestations of what we call “intersensoriality” (referring to the cross-sensory associations) may seem random, but are in fact instilled in people in carefully staged rituals centering on the collective ingestion of the hallucinogenic Banisteriopsis capi plant (yagé) under the direction of a shaman. The readings started us thinking: How might these cosmologies, or some of their aspects, be rendered sensible to a Western subject, deploying various contemporary technologies? How might we compose a symphony not just for one sense (i. e. hearing) but across the senses the way the Desana do, but using technologies in place of yagé? Anyone who has worked in theatrical dramaturgy knows the concept of staging sensations through the deployment of media is quite commonplace. In his “First Manifesto for a Theater of Cruelty,” French actor and theorist Antonin Artaud described his vision of a new total theater that would go beyond the textbased, literalist theater of late-nineteenth-century European naturalism. This theater would be “cruel,” meaning it would operate in and on the bodies of the spectators, through what Susan Sontag called “sensory violence” in her discussion of Artaud (Sontag 1976: xxxiii). Artaud’s theater of cruelty sought to construct an environment suffused with sensations; one “called upon to address not only the mind but the senses, and through the senses to attain still richer and more fecund regions of the sensibility at full tide” (1958: 119). Central to the theater of cruelty, Artaud sought to reimagine the performance space as one where media in the form of light, sound, music, objects and spatial arrangements would buffet and lash the spectators through its sheer intensity and variety. Indeed, through

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the physical design of the performance space in which the audience would sit on rotating chairs in the middle and be surrounded by mediated effects of all kinds, Artaud envisioned that spectators would become active participants to the performance event. “We are eliminating the stage and the auditorium and replacing them with a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will itself become the theater of action” (Artaud 1976: 248). From studying the ethnographic accounts of alternative sensory orders and dramaturgical ideas like Artaud’s, we developed various technical models, material tests, and somewhat impossible concepts. Our approach clearly drew upon Artaud’s framework, to develop a dramaturgy that would place viewers into a sequenced maelstrom of shifting light, sound, color, scents and vibratory spaces, as a means of invoking intersensorial experience. These included: vibrating the walls, physically spinning the visitors into states of vertigo, blindness through fog and stroboscopes, colored light walls made of artificial haze, sensors monitoring the length of time a person sat in the dark, tastes that change over time, phosphorescent rain, sculptures made of honey into which visitors could stick their heads, vibrating color fields, and the like. At the same time, a principal question that arose was: What kind of culturally shaped practices of sensing would emerge or be activated by such a disorienting environment? Would sense modalities overlap, creating new sensations? Would one sense (sound) overwhelm or conf lict with another (sight), leading to what researchers in psychology have called “intersensory bias”? If two sensory modalities conf lict with one another, each sense will inf luence the other to a greater or lesser extent in order to resolve the conf lict between the modalities in question (Welch/Warren 1980). Could such a concept be explored qualitatively (first person accounts, ethnographic interviews), from participants’ direct experience, versus quantitatively, through psychophysical analyses? The research, development, and production cycle of Displace consumed one and a half years before the first public showing of the work, veering between experiments, failed concepts, tensions between description and enaction, symbolic/cultural accounts, and the material impact of an attention-saturating sensory onslaught. In fact, the first “showing” of the resulting installation did not occur within an art context – a gallery, theater, or museum – but at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which serendipitously occurred in Montréal in 2011. During the five-day showing of the work held in November 2011, a mixed audience of anthropologists (almost one-third of the audience), curators, students, and the general public experienced the installation: a multi-room installation-event whose aim was to “rearrange” the visitors’ processes of making sense. Described in the press release as an “intermingling of multiple sensory phenomena in order to heighten and transform our habitual modes of sensing and sense-making,” the event took place in a twenty-two-min-

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ute period, in which groups of six visitors (by appointment) progressed through a sequence of synaesthetic environments combining gustatory and haptic stimuli, gradually convoking all the senses inside an intense, almost hallucinatory space where f lickering color, sound, and tactile vibrations and f leeting tastes and scents merged to the point of saturation. One of the driving research questions was what kind of new anthropological knowledge (if any) might emerge in direct encounters with such contemporary machines of sensation. Just as Bertolt Brecht argued that one would have to utilize complex technological machinery on the theater stage in order to depict social-political processes (Salter 2010: 36), we architected what Howes refers to as a “f light simulator” for anthropologists, to prepare them for field work in other cultures, where the conventional Western hierarchy of the senses might be upended or otherwise arranged. At the same time, anthropologically speaking, Displace was not a staging of historical ethnographic accounts (“mimetic realism”). Many of the anthropologically minded visitors entered and left the experience with no frame of reference – this work was not an inf luenced by ethnography (in the sense of art historian Hal Foster’s notorious 1995 critique on “the artist as ethnographer”), nor was it a realistic representation of impressions of fieldwork appropriated from another culture (what we call “ethnographic verisimilitude”). Hence, the first-person accounts elicited in interviews with participants directly following their experience oscillated between descriptions of pure auditory/visual/tactile/gustatory sensations and more “fieldwork”-tinged accounts from the anthropologists, who tried to map previous experiences in other cultures on the event itself in order to make sense of it. After Montreal, Displace was further developed into a larger installation that was exhibited in the annual art and performance festival TodaysArt in the Hague, and in a third version, at the annual Glow Next lighting festival in Eindhoven, Netherlands. These events functioned outside of the anthropological context of Montreal’s AAA event. In other words, we sought to transform the symbols and meanings that are the focus of conventional anthropological research into materially experienced effects, transporting them from their original cultural contexts into new ones, and thereby constructing a test bed for potentially new sensory practices for visitors. If Displace was informed by the “fugue of the five senses” model and centered on foregrounding the experience of intersensoriality, work on another artistic installation, Haptic Fields, sought a different strategy: to forge links between new media art, engineering, music technology, and sensory anthropology, to examine an overlooked but increasingly important sensory modality in today’s audio-visual driven society  – the sense of touch. While Displace investigated questions of intersensoriality, then, Haptic Fields took on the question of intrasensoriality; whether or not sensation could be shared among groups of people, or, put simply,

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could a sense of “collective effervescence” (Durkheim) be forged through artificial touch? In preparation for this exercise, we read around in Constance’ Classen’s The Deepest Sense (2012), which presents a cultural history of touch from the Middle Ages to Modernity. We also explored the anthropological literature, and were drawn to two scenarios in particular. One was the example of a kind of skin telegraphy among the San of South Africa. According to San notions, a person is supposed to be able to foretell the approach of a relative from the feeling of “tappings” on their skin. These twitches correspond to known points on the relative’s body, such as an old wound, or the pressure from a strap. As one informant observed: “When a woman who had gone away is returning to the house, the man who is sitting there feels on his shoulders the thong with which the woman’s child is slung over her shoulders; he feels the sensation there,” and knows she will soon appear (quoted and discussed in Howes/Salter 2015). Evidently, among the San, touch is not a proximate sense. It can operate at a distance. The other scenario had to do with pulse diagnosis in Siddha medicine, a humoral medical tradition stemming from South India. In this tradition, when examining a patient, the physician begins by determining the patient’s pulse, moves on to the contrapuntal stage of sensing his own pulse in contradistinction to that of the patient, and then attempts to synchronize his pulse to the patient’s, thus arriving at first-hand knowledge of the latter’s symptoms (ibid). As in the case of the San, this practice defies common sense (as constituted in the West). Our first response to these stories and practices was to think about how we might translate them into a social ritual or game scenario – for example, passing a vibration in a circle of people. We thus aimed at “exploring different kinds of game-like configurations using the vibrational possibilities of the current generation of smart phones to enable groups of people to share patterns of rhythmic pulses between one another” (Salter et al. 2014). In essence, the technical possibilities of networked smart phones and control over the actuators within such phones could, in theory, provide the technical infrastructure for a game-like event in which we could pass touch as a vibration quickly between devices, and hence, between groups of people in specific spatial and temporal sequences. Joined by two PhD students, Ida Toft, a researcher working on social games involving touch, and Ivan Franco, a researcher in interactive music systems, we began to conceive of games in which touch could be “transferred” in a playful manner between people and, in particular, how different intensities of sensation might inf luence the movement, gait, and rhythm of participants. Given that we initially imagined this taking place with a large group of people, the issue of scalability immediately came into play. Development thus ensued from a technical standpoint to control the actuators (vibration motors) on both Android and Apple

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iOS devices, and to use software to generate different patterns and intensities of vibration. Four months of work came to naught. Early on, we discovered that Apple’s iPhone actuators were off-limits for developers, at least during the period of Spring 2014. There was no way to access the motors using hacked software. This effectively eliminated any potential players who used Apple phones as their main platform. Franco did, however, discover a software application that allowed us to gain access and control the amplitude and pulse speed of the motors of any Android-based smart phone. With this tool, we began to conceive of games one could play with touch, for example, one called “Mixed Signals:” Mixed Signals. A game for eight players x 2 different signals. ‘Test the boundaries of your skin.’ Try to find the person with the same vibration in a crowd. The aim to heighten sensory awareness. An alternative: 8 players  – four signals, there is a clock, a number of rounds (each round has a certain duration). The goal of the game is to cooperate by listening through touch. Could be collaborative or competitive. Optional ideas: Headphones, everyone gets instructions, each of which is slightly different. E. g.: standing closest to someone you care about causes momentary alliances. The Mechanics: A role-playing game. Performative aspect to the game through the movements of the players. External constraint: Touch somebody quickly to avoid losing. Play with time in an interesting way. Time could be affected by players and the external timer. (Unpublished field notes from work sessions on Haptic Field) Alas, our control of the Android motors left much to be desired. Aesthetically underwhelming (zero expressive possibility for generating variations and intensities of different senses of touch), technically demanding (in that it was near impossible to synchronize the motors across more than two phones so they could vibrate at the same time), difficult to scale up, and too loud (in terms of the motor amplitudes), we abandoned the idea of using the existing motors in Android phones and, in effect, the whole notion of touch games for large groups as a driving force in the research. Such a process of trial and error, testing, failure, grappling in the dark, and re-iterating is quite common in both art and science. As science historian Hans Joerg Rheinberger reminds us, research always lives on the threshold between the known and the unknown (1997). That is, creative processes are unpredictable – they are not altogether rational nor necessarily bound to systematic models or logical chains of decision-making. When we say finally that something “works,” we are also admitting that accidents, failures, misunderstandings, resource limitations, and misused techniques are essential to the process (Salter 2015: 14).

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We then began to explore the possibility of dramatically extending a previous work, Ilinx, which was exhibited between 2014–2016 in Europe (The Hague and Berlin) and Japan. Like Displace, Ilinx examined cross-modal interferences, “blurring” and “confusion” the visitors’ acoustic, visual, and haptic senses. The audience donned four custom-made garments with embedded vibrotactile actuators, enabling different intensities of touch to move across the body in complex patterns. Ilinx consisted of a twenty-minute performance-installation, in which four visitors at a time navigated a dark environment, undergoing various acoustic, haptic, and visual experiences. Given the parallel project of Ilinx and because the limited number of costumes made it difficult to exhibit the work for longer periods of time (we developed only four, due to the cost and technical complexity of having thirty eccentric rotating motors controlled by a network of microcontrollers, all embedded and sewn into the clothing), Franco proposed a new idea: small, easily replaceable actuators (which we termed “Vibropixels”) that could be worn on the skin and clothing, and could be easily replaced if they failed during a performance. From this concept, and a commission to develop Ilinx into a two-month exhibition in Shanghai in 2016, the Haptic Field (HF) installation emerged. The dramaturgy of HF involves an audience of up to eighteen at a time, each of whom wear seven Vibropixels. These devices allow the production of various levels of tactile intensity across the body – from the arms to the chest and the legs. The Vibropixels also emit light through four powerful LEDs. After donning a pair of frosted goggles, which essentially blur the entire visual field and remove any sense of depth, the visitors navigate individually through a series of rooms with extremely minimal light and sound. The light sources consist of small LEDs within acrylic tubes, suspended in space at varying heights and changing in intensity, brightness and color. As staged in a 2017 presentation at the Martin Gropius Bau museum in Berlin for the Immersion program of the Berliner Festspiele, the spatial layout of HF consisted of four rooms (plus a dressing area) of varying dimensions. In addition to different combinations of light within each space, each room had a specific acoustic design. In the first and fourth rooms, two- and four-channel speaker set-ups diffuse sinusoidal waves of similar frequency; their slow, pulsing frequencies are synchronized with changing colors. In the second room, a series of sound and light “states” occurs, ranging from pure color (R G B) and disjointed rhythms to low frequency pulses with rhythmically organized stroboscopic bursts of white Xenon light. The overall sensory effect thus involves moving through a series of rooms with different spatial-temporal-acoustic-affective qualities. These qualities are both an effect of the pre-composed audio-visual structures (the sound and light “states”) and emerge from the interaction between the visitors’ sensory-motor

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perception (vision, hearing, touch, proprioception, equilibrioception, kinesthetic senses) and the environments themselves. Furthermore, each audio-visual state is also synchronized to a haptic track that produces specific luminous-vibrational patterns from the Vibropixels on the visitors’ bodies. These different patterns can be individually felt and seen, both close up and at a distance. In other words, when the patterns occur, each visitor is aware that the patterns are being emitted from their own bodies (they can feel and also faintly “see” them), but also from bodies around them, despite the fact that these bodies are perceived (through the goggles) at low definition and resolution only as shadows or even “voids” within the space. In one sequence, for example, every visitor feels a pulse like a heartbeat on his or her chest. Visitors see and identify with these pulsing forms of light in the surrounding ambient environment at the same time as they feel their own pulse. As one visitor remarked during an interview session, it was if “my own heartbeat was being broadcast onto others and as if I felt those others’.” HF began by asking whether touch, that most intimate of senses, could be shared or diffused between bodies. Could we go beyond the understanding of touch as a proximate sense, and instead, using modern technology, begin to imagine it as distributed in space and time across multiple bodies? These questions suggest that touch, or indeed, any other form of collectively felt “sensation” (vision, audition, olfaction, gustation, proprioception, and others) might not necessarily be only experienced in/through a single body, but are diffused, more akin to an atmosphere: non-locatable, in-between, not the property of a single body or single sensation. In contrast to Displace, HF thus sought to take cross-cultural concepts of touch and dif fuse them throughout a technological environment in which the boundaries between individual bodies, space, and sensation might slowly merge.

Participant Sensation The methodology we use to elicit and analyze audience responses to the immersive environments we have constructed is called “sensory ethnography”; it depends on “participant sensation” (Howes 2003; Laplantiine 2015). This approach differs from the conventional anthropological method of “participant observation” in that it emphasizes sensing along with the visitor or research subject. The externality of the observer’s status is relinquished; the researcher becomes immersed in the same artificially-created experiential reality as the subject. The researcher concentrates specifically on documenting the techniques of perception, or ways of sensing, that the subject uses to cope with, enjoy, or enhance the experience.

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These techniques supplement the stimuli generated by the technology. In this sense, thresholds of perception can vary widely. The researchers also studied the mood shifts precipitated in themselves and (insofar as this was possible) the research subjects, by feeling along with them, and the social relations in which they engaged. Following this experience, visitors were interviewed in groups for up to thirty minutes. Carefully honed questions elicited the meaning of the ways of sensing the subjects exhibited, the emotions they underwent, and the sense they made of the experience. Sensing and sense-making, sensation and signification are treated as one, or, as Phillip Vanini et al. put it: “as we sense we also make sense” (2012). In many ways, our use of these methods was not just for reporting, but also to inf luence the design choices in subsequent iterations of the installations. For example, one difference between Displace and Haptic Field was the use of goggles in place of haze to create disorientation effects – something that was much less infrastructurally/technical complex than running multiple haze machines, as we did in Displace. The effect of the frosted goggles, however, was more profound: they served to reconfigure each individual’s process of seeing, as opposed to in the general environment, as with the haze. This device served to upend the conventional Western hierarchy of seeing as the way to gain knowledge of the world, replacing vision’s modality with other senses. As one visitor remarked, “you couldn’t see the other people, but you felt them” (at a distance). Another device was the use of ropes stretched throughout the space to guide the visitors; this device was changed throughout the development of Ilinx and then Haptic Field, due to different responses from audiences and local safety requirements. For example, in the group interviews, one cross section of the audience revealed that the safety ropes affected the experience too much, providing too much of a safe fall-back if a person felt too spatially disoriented. Other visitors, however, felt the ropes were necessary if panic set in. Many visitors used the rope along one wall to help navigate the different rooms. Others plodded foward, zombie-like, their arms outstretched. One woman had her palms upturned – the pose one sees in a Pentacostal church when a person is desirous of being visited by the Spirit (see de Witte 2013). Visitors also toured or tried to tour the exhibition as couples or, in a more recent version of the installation in Bandung, Indonesia, held onto other visitors out of fear of the dark and the sense of spirits present. Some strolled arm-in-arm, chatting, with the goggles pushed up onto their foreheads, to catch a glimpse of what they thought would be dazzlingly complex audio-visual machinery (this was hardly the case, as the scenography consisted of LED lights in small acrylic tubes hanging in various height configurations from the ceiling and a standard multi-channel speaker array). Others kept the glasses on, not wanting to “break the spell,” and observed silence. They abjured language and concentrated on the

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“signals” they and the others were emitting (i. e., the pulses of the actuators), fascinated by the experience of “communicating in ways you don’t control.” One visitor, quoted at the outset, proceeded to jump not just to another culture but to a different kingdom, likening his fellow visitors to firef lies. He and his partner were separated, but continued their solitary journeys. The expression of relief when they were subsequently rejoined was palpable. Another response to Haptic Field was a loosening of social mores, sometimes through ecstatic dancing, kissing, public embracing and similar behavior. For instance, one couple danced wildly, starting by shadowboxing with the suspended (and now swinging) LEDs, and eventually swooping from end to end of a room. Why dance? The darkness suited them, they explained afterwards, there was no censorious gaze (“eyes are always judging”). Their inhibitions were down, and so were their thresholds: instead of simply listening to the sinusoidal waves in the audio design, they felt them: “the room made you dance.” Some feelings toward the installation resembled descriptions of a transcendental experience: it was like “a religion we do not know,” “an opportunity to get lost” (in the age of Google maps). Some were ambivalent: alternately energized and nauseated by the maelstrom of sensations, or wanting a “fictional frame” or story to follow (this we purposefully did not supply, to keep from layering on an additional narrative “crutch” that might pre-digest the experience and restrict the imagination). What, then, does Haptic Field reveal about the interstitiality of perception with which we opened this chapter? We had comments to the effect that experiencing the installation was “like diving into murky water,” or “there is no boundary between my body and the space.” Other comments like “Oh, yeah, I have a body” (in retrospect) suggest that at least some visitors grasped the rudiments of our sensory perception and communication model as resisting conceptualization in terms of the (unidirectional sequence) of stimulus-response, or sender-receiver, proposing something more akin to a sensory atmosphere. Did we succeed in attuning people to the possibility of redistributing the tangible or the tactile (not to be confused with Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible”) – that is, of shared touch?5 We definitely opened a crack in the Western sensorium, but there are too 5 The phrase “distribution of the sensible” comes from the French philosopher Jacques Rancière and refers to the ways in which roles and modes of participation in a common social world are determined by establishing possible modes of perception or what can be apprehended by the senses. The distribution of the sensible thus focuses on the manner in which forms of sensory representation determine what can be seen versus not seen, heard versus not heard, etc. While the concept is important for discussing the manner in which the politics of representation function, Rancière is not specifically interested in discussing the affective, embodied side of sensation, which is why we distinguish between the metaphoric distribution of the sensible versus the phenomenological experience of senses not being directly situated in individual bodies (i. e. “distributed”) (cf. Rancière 2004).

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many barriers  – social, political, ethical  – for any visitor to suppose they have moved closer to the San, much less put on their skin (see Binter 2014). Finally, what sense did people make of the barrage of f luctuating sensations? Did they catch a glimpse of “the becoming environmental of computation” (Gabrys 2016)? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Yet one woman, quoted at the outset, got a grasp of her life. This was very precious to us. It redeemed all the hours spent laboring over the construction of the performative sensory environment that is Haptic Field.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have advanced an understanding of sensation  – or, better, “sensing” – as performance, an active, not a passive process (as it was framed by John Locke, and has appeared in empirical psychology ever since), and an understanding of perception as a two-way street, or transactive, not transitive. We have highlighted the mediatory role of the senses in configuring the relationship between self and environment, which is constituted differently in different cultures, and the integral role of technologies (as “extensions of the senses”) in modulating sense experience. The performative sensory environments (Displace, Ilinx, Haptic Field) we have created and built over the course of the Mediations of Sensation research program have laid the groundwork for expanding the sensorium (that is, the totality of percipience) in several new directions. This has been accomplished through an iterative process that draws selectively from the anthropological record of the varieties of sensory experience across cultures, models those experiences through developing new enabling technologies, and uses sensory ethnography to study their effects within professional artistic contexts – “research in the wild.” These techno-scientific artistic experiments into the technologization of the senses have the potential to enhance cross-cultural understanding by creating intercultural, multi- and intermodal dramaturgies of sensation that disrupt habitual patterns of perception. By occluding vision and refusing to supply a narrative (as video games do, for example), we have attempted to provide a platform for visitors to rethink their very sense of self, as seen in the female visitor quoted at the outset of this essay. Her epiphany was at once post-human, due to the socially-shaping role of other-than-human actants (i. e. technologies) in its production, and all-too-human. It was, in short, sensational.

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References Angerer, Marie-Luise (2016): Ecology of Affect, Lüneburg: Meson Press. Artaud, Antonin (1958 [1938]): Theater and Its Double, New York: Grove Press. Artaud, Antonin (1976) Selected Writings, edited and with an Introduction by Susan Sontag, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Banes, Sally/Lepcki, Andrei (eds.) (2007): The Senses in Performance. New York: Routledge. Binter, Julia (2014): “Unruly Voices in the Museum: Multisensory Engagement with Disquieting Histories.” In: The Senses and Society 9/3, pp. 342–360. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977): Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Bull, Michael/Gilroy, Paul/Howes, David/Kahn, Douglas (2006): “Introducing Sensory Studies.” In: The Senses and Society 1/1, pp. 5–7. Bull, Michael/Mitchell, Jon (eds.) (2015): Ritual, Performance and the Senses, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Chemero, Anthony (2009): Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press. Classen, Constance (1993): Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures, New York: Routledge. Classen, Constance (1998): The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination, New York: Routledge. Classen, Constance (2012): The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Classen, Constance (2017): The Museum of the Senses; Experiencing Art and Collections, New York: Bloomsbury. de Witte, Marlene (2013): “The Electric Touch Machine Miracle Scam: Body, Technology and the (Dis)authentication of the Pentecostal Supernatural.” In: Stolow, Jeremy (ed.), Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology and the Things in Between, New York: Fordham University Press. Di Benedetto, Stephen (2007): “Guiding Somatic Responses Structures Within Performative Structures: Contemporary Live Art and Sensorial Perception.” In: Sally Banes/Lepecki, Andrei (eds.), The Senses in Performance, New York: Routledge. Di Benedetto, Stephen (2010): The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre, New York: Routledge. Fodor, Jerry (1983): The Modularity of Mind, Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press. Foster, Hal (1995): “The artist as ethnographer?” In: Marcus, George/Myers, Fred (eds.), The Traffic in Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 302– 309.

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Foucault, Michel (1988): Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Gabrys, Jennifer (2016): Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Howes, David (ed.) (2018): Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources, vols. I–IV, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Howes, David (2003): Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Howes, David (ed.) (1991): The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Howes, David (2011): “Hearing Scents, Tasting Sights: Toward a Cross-Cultural Multimodal Theory of Aesthetics.” In: Bacci, Francesca/Mellon, David (eds.), Art and the Senses, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Howes, David/Salter, Chris (2015): “Mediations of Sensation: Designing Performative Sensory Environments.” In: Journal of the New Media Caucus ISSN (1942): 017X, 2015. Jones, Caroline A. (2006): Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art, Cambridge (Mass.): The List Visual Art Center and MIT Press. Jütte, Robert (2005): A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Kondo, Dorrine (2005): “The Tea Ceremony: A Symbolic Analysis.” In: David Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses, Oxford and New York: Berg. Laplantine, François (2015): “The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology,” trans. Jamie Furniss, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Latour, Bruno (1994): “On Technical Mediation.” In: Common Knowledge 3/2, pp. 29–64. Noë, Alva (2006): Action in Perception, Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press. Rancière, Jacques (2004 [2000]): The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. and introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York: Continuum. Rheinberger, H. J. (1997): Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Salter, Chris (2010): Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance, Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press. Salter, Chris (2015): Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making, Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press. Schechner, Richard (1973): “Performance and the Social Sciences: Introduction.” In: TDR 17/3, pp. 3–4. Shaw-Miller, Simon (2013): Eye hEar: The Visual in Music, New York: Routledge.

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Sontag, Susan (1976): “Artaud.” In: Sontag, Susan (ed.), Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press. Star, S. L./Griesemer, J. R. (1989): “Institutional ecology, translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology: 1907–39.” In: Social Studies of Science 19/3, pp. 387–420. Taussig, Michael (1993): Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York: Routledge. Turner, Victor W. (1974): Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vanini, Phillip et al. (2012): The Sociology of the Senses, New York: Routledge. Varela, Francisco (1991): The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press. Welch, Robert B./Warren, David H. (1980): “Immediate perceptual response to intersensory discrepancy.” In: Psychological Bulletin 88/3, p. 638.

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Resensing the Anthropocene Ambividual Experiences in Contemporary Performative Arts Mateusz Chaberski The complicated and dynamic environmental processes we are presently experiencing prove that the idea of an inert and predictable natural world has collapsed, and objectivist narratives in the sciences are incapable of explaining the current ecological situation. Anthropogenic changes to the environment not only undermine modern discourses and practices separating nature, culture, and technology, but effectively dismantle the binary oppositions, such as subject/object and fact/fiction, that gave the Moderns a sense of epistemological security and control over the natural environment. Instead, we find ourselves desperately navigating an unpredictable world where traditional epistemologies of modernity turn out to be useless in the face of such phenomena as climate change, rising sea levels, or mass extinction, among others. The possible effects of the current epistemological crisis may be illustrated by what happened on a sunny Sunday, August 27, 2017, on the South-Eastern coast of England. At about 1:00 pm a mysterious haze suddenly came ashore the English channel. The beachgoers spending their time in Birling Gap, close to the dramatic 530-feet high cliffs of Beachy Head, were the first to notice the noxious smell of chlorine in the air. A couple of hours after the airborne event, over 200 people were hospitalized for burning eyes, vomiting, sore throats, and other severe poisoning symptoms. When the police began evacuating the whole coast in Sussex, the situation became serious. Some people f led the beach in panic, others, on the contrary, illegally climbed the cliffs with their smart phones and cameras to capture the extraordinary phenomenon. Soon apocalyptic clips and photographs started to circulate on social media, showing the veil of fog hanging above the coast. As the events unfolded, coughing beachgoers with swollen eyes also posted the accounts they recorded. The authorities could neither identify the toxic substance in the air nor point to its source, which caused various explanations to appear on the Internet. The online issue of The Mirror scrupulously recorded the four most plausible explanations (The Mirror 2017). According to the first one, it was another chemical attack by Muslim terrorists. This, of course, only fueled the panic among the beachgoers rushing inland. Another explanation had it that the toxic haze was a result of air pollution produced by French factories

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across the Channel. Yet, the wind blowing from the continent that day was too weak to carry any such substances. Thus, some speculated that the chlorine came from gas canisters on the sea bed. Supposedly, they had been there since the Second or even the First World War, when warplanes were shot down. The canisters could have easily come unsealed owing to high pressure, and then bobbed to the surface, carried by convection currents. However, the most plausible explanation, supported by scientists from National Oceanography Center, posits that algae were responsible for the noxious haze. The unusually hot two-month summer of 2017, clearly an effect of climate change, with intermittent yet plentiful rainfall, provided perfect conditions for it to grow. As the algae bloomed, their symbionts dinof lagellates bred rampantly, producing strong toxins. On this unfortunate day, the evaporating sea water picked them up and into the atmosphere, forming a billowing toxic cloud, which was carried by the wind. This explanation may have concluded our story, were it not for the fact that the toxins are completely odorless. Why did the witnesses unanimously report the chlorine smell? What actually happened that day on the English coast still remains unexplained. The Birling Gap haze is a phenomenon of the Anthropocene, the new epoch in Earth’s history in which the dominant geological force is no longer tectonic movement, the tides, or volcanic processes; it is human activity. Its effects are manifest, for instance, in the greenhouse gases generated by the industry, which have already interfered with the million-year-long cycle of climate coolings and warmings, causing unpredictable meteorological events all over the world. When the term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000 by the Dutch Nobel-Prize-winning chemist and meteorologist Paul Crutzen and American paleoecologist Eugene Stroemer, as a new epoch in which humans have become a major geological factor, it instantly was widely debated. As the term aimed to encompass a plethora of different types of human effects on the planet, it turned out that, unlike the Holocene, scientists could neither define the geochemical parameters of the Anthropocene nor select an event to mark its beginning. Depending on pragmatic decisions of particular scientists and dominant methods used in their fields, different, yet interrelated epochs emerge. By some of them, the Anthropocene began in approximately 10000 B. C., with the Neolithic revolution (Ruddiman 2003); others trace it back to 1610, when the colonization of the Americas started, or even to 1964, which marks international agreements on the reduction of CO₂ (Lewis/Maslin 2015). However, the Anthropocene is not merely about anthropogenic changes to the environment and their histories. In a recent work, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Bruno Latour contends that the Anthropocene marks “a profound mutation in our relation to the world” (2017: loc. 249). According to Latour, humans’ becoming the dominant geological force not only subverts the traditional Nature/Culture binary, it also challenges received notions of (human) active subject and (non-human) inert object. However, Latour is preoccupied with

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forging new ways of doing geopolitics for the new era, and merely glances at a more fundamental challenge posed by the Anthropocene, which only becomes evident on a micro scale. The mutated relation to the world he describes effectively effaces the very line between the body and its environment. This puts a spotlight on human experience, which may be regarded as a gray area, whose boundary is constantly being renegotiated. Yet, Birling Gap events prove that the Anthropocene not only challenges the traditional ways of thinking about the human experience, for instance, as a source of knowledge about the world with varying degrees of reliability. It also requires a new model of subjectivity where experience is less a mode of relating to the world than a way of becoming with it. The chlorine smell beachgoers reported is a case in point. It not only eludes all possible explanation, it also defies the traditional categories used to talk about the human senses. The analysis of such olfactory experiences, for instance in sensory studies (cf. Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994), has usually served to dismantle the hierarchy of the senses, with vision as the crown of the human sensorium. In my view, the chlorine smell in Birling Gap gestures toward what might be called a multimodality of human experience, whereby the senses are implicated in cognitive, semiotic, and affective processes. This understanding of experience allows me to take a more processual approach to experiences as complicated as the chlorine smell. Unlike conventional olfactory experiences discussed by neuroscientists, it had no preexisting odorant source. In fact, different sources emerged, depending on the explanation provided by particular beachgoers. Yet, the smell caused severe bodily harm, diagnosed by the doctors as poisoning. Moreover, unlike sensory experiences analyzed by psychologists, it did not have an object, but was an effect of a dynamic fusion of the senses, emotions, and intellectual experiences. Smell is a synesthetic experience – it is both olfactory and tactile. Thus, on the molecular level, the mysterious substance, if it ever existed, would touch the receptors in the beachgoers’ noses and on their skin. The moment they interpreted the smell as chlorine, “the substance” would already be “inside” their bodies, interacting with the tissue. The chlorine smell blurred the boundary between body and environment. Consequently, the smell also defied the traditional Kantian dualism of subjective/objective experience, as the chlorine smell was reported by virtually all the beachgoers. One of them, posting her thoughts on social media, could have easily said “I can smell chlorine.” The post might have gone viral, reaching not only those physically present on the beach, but also other social media users. In turn, the viral post was likely to reach the beachgoers, especially those using their smartphones, confirming their conviction that the haze smelled of chlorine. The lack of information about the source of the mist caused further distress which, reinforced by the escalating symptoms of poisoning in other beachgoers and apocalyptic news from the media, fueled panic among the beachgoers. Thus, the chlorine smell performed different effects – natural, cultural, and technological.

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From this perspective, in terms of the body-environment interface, neglected by Latour in Facing Gaia, there is no one profound mutation in our relation to the world, but rather a trajectory of mutations generating ever-new, tangible effects. Taking the experience of the beachgoers in Birling Gap as my vantage point, in this chapter I will critically analyze human experiences staged by naturalculturaltechnological performances of contemporary performative arts in the Anthropocene. However, I am neither interested in performance as an art genre, as described, for instance, by art historian RoseLee Goldberg (2011), nor in analyzing socio-cultural events as performances, as Richard Schechner advocated in his seminal article “Performance and the Social Sciences” (1973). Routing around traditional discourses in performance studies, I draw on the concept of performance put forward by Latour in his Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (1999), which he recently repurposed for the Anthropocene. In Pandora’s Hope, performance pertained to actions of humans and nonhumans predominantly in laboratory experiments and served as a critical tool against the essentialism in science studies. Latour argued that actants whose agency is registered in the course of laboratory experiments have no essences. They are only defined by a list of performances and their effects registered by the experimenter. Only retroactively does she ascribe them materiality, through a series of laboratory practices. As such, performance is not a mere outcome of what happens in the laboratory, but always depends upon the actions of the experimenter who, drawing on her sensory experiences and previous knowledge, registers only certain performances of an actant and names him accordingly. Thus, attributes of an actant may change dramatically, depending on particular experimental strategies an experimenter employs. However, the laboratory as a performance site, as described by Latour, is artificially purified, so that the experimenter can create objective matters of fact through various trials, obscuring the multimodality explored in this chapter. This makes looking into art performances seem more instructive. In his article Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene (2015), Latour extends his concept of performance outside the laboratory. By analyzing examples from literature, he convincingly argues that artists can also register and account for performances of human and non-human actants. Unlike scientists, however, they aim less to establish objective matters of fact than to explore “contradictory morphisms” (2015: 13), whereby humans and non-humans constantly exchange shapes. Thus, performances of the arts are crucial for capturing dynamic environmental processes of the Anthropocene and their multiple effects which often escape scientific discourses and practices. Latour argues that such literary strategies as anthropomorphising, for instance, not only bring action and suspense to a world de-animated by modern sciences, but also contribute to the emergence of new actants. However, by focusing predominantly on literature, Latour fails to notice constant f low between nature, culture, and technology, which occurs,

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for instance, when contemporary performative arts fuse artistic strategies and technoscientific practices. Thus, I will define naturalculturaltechnological performances as actions initiated by humans and non-humans which, intentionally or not, lead to the emergence of dynamic and often contingent assemblages of heterogeneous elements, in which boundaries between natural, cultural, and technological become blurred. Initiating such performances in the context of the arts stages multimodal experiences, similar to those emerging during Birling Gap events. Whereas the experts easily dismissed the chlorine smell as another tabloid sensation, experiences arranged in the performative arts are not only taken seriously, but artists often experiment with cultural and sociopolitical potentialities of these experiences in order to forge new ways of thinking and being in the world. In the following, I am particularly interested in naturalculturaltechnological performances rather unsatisfactorily gathered under the umbrella term of “installation art.” Yet the installations discussed here do not belong to the distinct art genre defined by historians as separate, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and developed its autopoietic system of solely aesthetic expression (cf. Reiss 1999). These works are usually initiated by collectives of artists, scientists, engineers, and programmers, who fuse traditional art media, scientific practices, activism, and technology design for a common strategic purpose. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the proliferation of such phenomena has been coterminous with the development of the study of the Anthropocene. Due to its hybridity, installation art has not only become a particularly useful strategy for registering and naming various human and non-human agencies as well as naturalculturaltechnological assemblages germane to the new epoch. As Turkish ecocritic Serpil Oppermann has recently suggested, installations generate hope for a more emotional relationship with the planet, creating strong sensory and affective experiences. They engage our empathy to “invest” in the disanthropocentric meanings of the Anthropocene so that we can perhaps eliminate some of its anthropogenic manifestations. (2018: 341) In other words, initiators of naturalculturaltechnological installation art performances stage intensive multisensory, intellectual, and affective experiences, in order to foster non-anthropocentric ways of relating to the world in the Anthropocene. However, these are often so intense that they surpass traditional viewing experiences, in that they posit a radically relational subjectivity. This subjectivity emerges from heterogeneous and often contingent relations between humans and non-humans that precede the emergence of subjects and objects as effects of the naturalculturaltechnological performances. Drawing on the findings of the new materialist sociologist Jennifer Gabrys, this chapter argues that naturalculturaltechnological performances of contem-

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porary installation art posit a non-anthropocentric subjectivity which might be termed “ambividual,” i. e. a relational being experientially linked to its naturalculturaltechnological environment, whose attributes emerge from its dynamic and ever-shifting relations with other actants. From this perspective, I will put forward a concept of ambividual experience defined as an assemblage of different multisensory, intellectual, and affective modalities which emerge from dynamic and often contingent “intra-actions”, as Karen Barad puts it (2006), between humans and non-humans. By non-humans, I do not merely refer to plants, animals and other biota, but also to inorganic forms of matter such as synthetic materials, rocks, and radiation, which often escape the attention of performance scholars. However, ambividual experience is not a universal category, as it materializes differently in different cultural and socio-political contexts. By mobilizing different experiential assemblages contemporary installation art performs momentary couplings between bodies and their naturalculturaltechnological environments for radically different strategic purposes. In order to point to possible effects performed by ambividual experiences staged by performative arts at the intersection of art, Earth sciences, and technosciences, the chapter scrutinizes three artistic installations. In Post-Apocalypsis (2015) by the Polish collective Daed Baitz, ambividual experiences are initiated in order to challenge the boundaries between natural, cultural, and technological environment. Eco-installation Ice Watch (2015) by Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and Danish geologist Minik Rosing stages such experiences to instigate a sense of response-ability for the climate change, whereas speculative design installation Fungi Mutarium (2014) by Julia Kaisinger and Katharina Unger, implicates ambividual experiences in strategies of collaborative survival between humans and non-humans living on a damaged planet.

Ambividuals after the End of Man The potential of the performative arts to stage human experience as a new mode of relating to the world at the time of the Anthropocene has recently been accentuated by media scholar Joanna Zylinska. In her essay The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (2018), she argues that projects such as Tomás Saraceno’s Museo Aero Solar (2007)  – an installation comprised of giant f loating sculptures made from melted plastic bags – or DJ Spooky’s “acoustic portrait” of melting ice in his Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica (2009), make us “rethink and resense the Anthropocene – and also ourselves as humans in and with the Anthropocene” (2018: 67). In other words, performative arts, especially hybrid phenomena fusing arts and sciences, offer new ways of experiencing the environmental processes we are facing today through hitherto neglected auditory, tactile, kinaesthetic, and olfac-

Resensing the Anthropocene

tory experiences. However, Zylinska does not seek an unmediated “pure” sensory experience to give humans “authentic” contact with the world they live in. She rather points to multimodal embedded and embodied experiences of non-visual media. Following Nicholas Mirzoeff (2014), she claims that the dominant theories of the Anthropocene are deeply occularcentric in that they are based on visualizations of the new epoch, such as the post-industrial landscapes or polluted cities we know from the visual arts and popular culture. Thus, they perform particular ideological functions. Zylinska claims that the visualizations of the Anthropocene only reinforce the apocalyptic narratives of the end of Man. She refers to pop scenarios of the imminent ecological catastrophe leading to human extinction, but also to transhumanist projects of technologically-enhanced Man 2.0 expressed, for instance, in Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus (2017) or Utopian plans of escaping the Earth recently articulated by Elon Musk. All of these are not only deeply anthropocentric, but also uphold the conservative discourse of the Anthropocene as an epoch where it is not a Human but a white Man, usually Christian, who must defend himself against what he finds alien and hostile: terrorists, women, transsexuals or refugees. Such narratives mobilize a secularized religious imaginary whereby Humanity is personified as Adam, created in God’s image and likeness. It is his God-given ingenuity that makes him capable of defending his species, either by developing new technologies or searching for the New Jerusalem in outer space. In this context, the multimodal experiences staged by the performative arts which Zylinska references perform a clear strategic and even political task implicated in her feminist counter-apocalypse: cut the Anthropocene down to size, reminding humans that only by developing relations with other humans and non-humans can they exist. Paradoxically, Zylinska’s feminist counter-apocalypse does not oppose the apocalyptic narratives which have dominated the Anthropocene discourse. She does not negate the irreversible anthropogenic environmental changes that are leading to the destruction of the Earth. What she rejects is rather the portentous tone of the Anthropocene scholars who resurrect universalist and essentialist concepts such as Humanity or Man, which seem to have been deconstructed by post-structuralisms of the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, Zylinska suggests that her theory is merely a micro-perspective which offers an alternative view of the apocalypse as an opportunity to rethink relations between humans and their environment. Her modesty, however, is clearly tactical, as the human and non-human relations she examines allow her to suggest a radical model of relational subjectivity. She writes: Relationality, I suggest, offers a more compelling model of subjectivity. Instead of positing a human subject that is separate from the world he (sic) inhabits and in

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which he can make interventions, it acknowledges the prior existence of relations between clusters of matter and energy that temporarily stabilize for us humans into entities – on a molecular, cellular, and social level. (53) Zylinska clearly echoes the theoretical findings of such feminist scholars as Karen Barad, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Not only do they critique the Anthropocene as a concept proposed by male scientists, they also challenge the masculinist subject that looks at the world as his possession and playground. They put forward various models of relational subjectivity based on human entanglements in the world and responsibility for the environment. According to Zylinska, the multimodal experiences staged by contemporary performative arts are yet another materialization of human and non-human relationality. From this perspective, the contemporary performative arts less perform a single experiencing subject than an ever-shifting assemblages of humans and non-humans across the domains of nature, culture, and technology. Although Zylinska aptly foregrounds the link between human experience and relationality staged by contemporary performative arts in the Anthropocene, she does not really say what type of relational subjectivity could come after the end of Man. Taking a cue from her essay, I venture into contemporary smart cities where environmental strategies posit a distinct model of subjectivity contingent upon relations between humans and non-humans in nature, culture, and technology. In her book Program Earth. Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016), Jennifer Gabrys scrutinizes the socio-political consequences of the use of sensors in a host of technoscientific projects aiming to implement sustainable development in dif ferent areas of life. She focuses predominantly on designing environments which ensure the highest quality of life at the lowest environmental cost. One of the projects she analyzes is smart cities. These are not actual cities, but urban plans encompassing technological solutions that enable monitoring the environment through a network of urban sensors, optimizing the use of energy and reducing the rate of pollution. For instance, she invokes Connected Sustainable Cities (CSC), a project run jointly in Madrid by city planners, engineers, and designers from MIT and Cisco, an international IT corporation. It experiments with connecting city dwellers’ smartphones with the thermostats at their homes so that the central heating activates automatically right before they come home from work. This would not only significantly save energy, but also curb the amount of industrial pollution produced by the energy sector, which is mainly oil-based in Spain. Analyzing such solutions, Gabrys convincingly argues that smart cities posit a new model of subjectivity she calls ambividual.

Resensing the Anthropocene

The term ambividual, coined by Gabrys, is a blend of ambiance, here referring to a particular environment or surrounding inf luence and dividual, a concept from Gilles Deleuze’s famous article “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1992). It denotes a specific model of subjectivity inextricably linked to the material-discursive formation Deleuze called the society of control. In contrast to Foucauldian disciplinary societies, societies of control bodies are not governed through the processes of subjection and enclosures of the commons. Societies of control were made possible by the development of digital technologies after the Second World War, which allowed for governing bodies outside traditional institutions such as schools, hospitals, or prisons. Deleuze invoked, for instance, the system of electronic monitoring of prisoners which significantly reduced the need to keep criminals in actual prisons. Electronic collars not only enabled the institution to pinpoint their whereabouts, but also to force them to stay at home at certain hours. A prisoner wearing such collar is a dividual, a subject of control which has no distinct properties, but is defined by various machines of control to which it is constantly connected to by controlling institutions. Whereas the dividual enabled Deleuze to grasp institutional mechanisms of control through narrowly defined digital technologies, Gabrys’s ambividual reveals dynamic relations between bodies and their sensoria, i. e. sensorially perceivable and technologically mediated environments. In Program Earth, Gabrys claims that ambividuals are “ambient and malleable urban operators that are expressions of computer environments” (201). In other words, an ambividual is an actant whose attributes are defined by its acting and being acted upon in a naturalculturaltechnological environment. Ambividuals are also prone to the mechanisms of control described by Deleuze. The institutions governing smart cities not only incessantly monitor their behavior in the urban space, but also control their activity on social media. They are subsequently transformed into streams of data visualized as graphs and interactive maps, which enable urban planners to inf luence their lifeways in order to, for example, reduce the amount of garbage they produce. This is manifest in contemporary citizen sensing projects, discussed by Gabrys, in which city dwellers are invited to engage with modes of environmental observation and data collection through their use of smart phones and other networked devices. However, according to Gabrys, ambividuals are not necessarily human beings. Stationary and mobile environmental sensors distributed across smart cities may also provide data which cannot be sourced by humans. Moreover, the sensors are usually interconnected by the technology of the Internet of Things, which enables them to relate to one another without needing human intervention. They not only monitor the environment and analyze the gathered data, they also modify their own parameters and activities depending on the feedback they receive from other sensors. From this perspective, the ambividual has nothing to do with the tradi-

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tional human subject experiencing an external reality. It is rather a figuration of dynamic and ever-shifting assemblages of different elements, both human and non-human, in the domains of nature, culture, and technology. Gabrys, however, deploys the concept of ambividual in order to problematize the question of governmentality in smart cities, leaving the traditional concept of experience intact. In order to analyze what I call ambividual experience, let me borrow from contemporary assemblage theory, whose attention to heterogeneous elements contingently converging may elucidate the multimodality of experience.

Ambividual Experience as an Assemblage The concept of “assemblage” is usually attributed to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who are said to have introduced it to contemporary humanities. However, the genealogy of the term is more complicated, as it appears in no work by Deleuze and Guattari. It only pops up in the English translation of their Mille Plateaux by Canadian philosopher Brian Massumi. In this context, “assemblage” is the English equivalent of the French agencement, which denotes an arrangement of elements of different types that can easily be reconfigured. This definition of assemblage triggers yet another set of associations. Moreover, the complicated genealogy of the term suggests that instead of treating Deleuze and Guattari as the fathers of assemblage theory, we should rather identify how elements of their philosophy inf luenced new materialist understanding of assemblage. Although Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, mainly due to its radical idiosyncrasy, developed independent of assemblage theory, it nevertheless resonated with new materialism. We can see this in another of their works, What is Philosophy?, where they write: We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero. (1994 [1991]: 169) Written over twenty years earlier, this fragment demonstrates a way of thinking about the world not unlike that of Zylinska and Gabrys. Humans are not a stable beings with predetermined qualities, they are dependent on changes in their environment. However, Deleuze and Guattari do not conjure a new subject to oppose the earlier individualist subjects. In their theories, subjectivity virtually vanishes, replaced by various material arrangements which new materialists called assemblages. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari, in A New Philosophy of Society Manuel DeLanda explains that assemblages are “wholes characterized by relations of exteriority” (2006: 10). In other words, contemporary assemblage theory dis-

Resensing the Anthropocene

mantles the fundamental subject/object binary, replacing it with different relational beings. Assemblage may not only be read as a materialization of Zylinska’s relationality, it also offers a compelling way of apprehending relations between humans and non-humans on different scales. The relationality of assemblages is not tantamount to the Aristotelian relationality, whereby each being is always related to other beings and its own substance. An assemblage is a relational being which emerges from interactions between its elements, both human and non-human. Crucially in terms of contemporary installation art, assemblages emerge transversally, fusing elements belonging to different micro and macro levels of reality or even to dif ferent natural, cultural, and technological discourses. In Assemblage Theory, DeLanda shows this aspect of assemblages by invoking the rather straightforward example of the cavalryman. The whole composed of a human being, a fast riding horse, and a missile-throwing weapon like the bow is the best-known example of an assemblage of heterogeneous elements, cutting as it does across entirely different realms of reality: the personal, the biological, and the technological. (2016: 68) In Delanda’s interpretation, however, a cavalryman as an assemblage is not merely an aggregate of beings. It is emergent in the sense that it is always more than the sum of its parts. Although we can easily distinguish its constituent parts, as the cavalryman enters the battlefield it becomes a mobile weapon of war, more efficient than infantry, with only their brawn to help them, and the archers, immobilized in one place. Yet, the cavalryman as an assemblage is not stable; it may dissolve into another assemblage with completely different properties, as interactions between the warrior, horse, and weapon change, or they enter larger military formations. Analyzing such examples, DeLanda suggests that reality is “an assemblage of assemblages, that is, an entity produced by the recursive application of the part-to-whole relation” (2016: 70). Depending on the level on which the part-to-whole relations occur, assemblages’ properties change. From an assemblage theory perspective, ambividual experience in naturalculturaltechnological performances may be understood as an assemblage of different experiential modalities. To indicate its dynamic and complex character, it suf fices to list the four types of assemblages upon which ambividual experiences depend. The order does not suggest a hierarchy; it rather indicates areas between which recursive relations constitutive of ambividual experiences occur. First of all, ambividual experiences emerge from assemblages of human and non-human actants staged by naturalculturaltechnological performances. Thus, they are always contingent upon the strategic aims of their initiators, who direct ambividual experiences towards particular ef fects. Secondly, ambividual experiences

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are assemblages of sensory, intellectual, and af fective experiences, which are virtually impossible to disentangle. They combine only momentarily, depending on the socio-political and cultural context, as well as the dominant discourses about the senses, cognition, and af fects. Thirdly, every element of the ambividual experience is also an assemblage of dif ferent modalities. For instance, sensory experiences are not simply visual, auditory, or olfactory. Contemporary neurosciences have convincingly argued that human sensation is deeply synesthetic and the senses are interrelated (cf. Cytowic 2002). Finally, ambividual experience as assemblage also includes those who analyze them, be it through autoethnographic research or the analysis of various records of experiences. Introducing her perspective, putting the ambividual experience in a specific historical, cultural, and socio-political context, or even describing its elements in a particular sequence, the researcher actively co-creates the object of her study. Thus, ambividual experiences are not universal, as they are in a constant state of becoming. Let us ambividual experiences staged by contemporary artistic installations in order to see how they might contribute scrutinize to forging new non-anthropocentric ways of thinking and being in and with the world at the time of the Anthropocene.

Ambividual Experiences and Naturalculturaltechnological Environment Fig. 1: Post-Apocalypsis, 2015. Photo: Marketa Bendova.

At the 2015 Prague Quadrennial, Poland was represented by an interactive installation, Post-Apocalypsis, a collaborative work by performance scholar Agnieszka

Resensing the Anthropocene

Jelewska, scholar and experience designer Michał Krawczak, sound designer Rafał Zapała, interaction designer Paweł Janicki, and interactive system engineer Michał Cichy, now known as Daed Baitz. The collective worked together with scenographer Jerzy Gurawski, who designed the space for Jerzy Grotowski’s Apocalypsis cum Figuris (1968), to which the installation clearly alludes. Whereas Grotowski’s aim was to leave the stage virtually empty, in order to instigate physical and spiritual relations between human performers and spectators, Post-Apocalypsis stages various assemblages of humans and non-humans. The installation resembles the aftermath of an unspecified ecological catastrophe in a forest. Trees have become technonatural assemblages  – logs transfixed by contorted reinforcing steel bars attached to the ceiling and the f loor of a traditional white cube space. In this post-apocalyptic landscape, Daed Baitz initiates ambividual experiences to challenge the received notion of a natural environment. As ambividuals experientially intra-act with the installation, the dynamic naturalculturaltechnological environment gradually becomes evident. However, it produces different effects, depending on the mode of engaging the installation. As ambividuals enter the installation, they are instantly immersed in sonified weather-data streams gathered in real time from environmental sensors located at the sites of various ecological disasters all around the world, such as Chernobyl, Los Alamos, and Fukushima. A special algorithm designed by Janicki transposes weather parameters such as temperature, humidity, and pressure into an electronic soundscape. By relating acoustically to the sound, ambividuals can experience what Gabrys terms “becoming environmental of computation” (2016: 9) in Program Earth. She is referring to the profound change in what the Moderns used to call the “natural” environment, wreaked by the development of a now-ubiquitous network of environmental sensors in the second half of the twentieth century. Technologies designed to measure, monitor, and study the planet as a set of preexisting environmental relations not only transformed environments into data, but also began actively co-creating them. Gabrys proves this by analyzing sensor deployments in the James Reserve experimental site in California’s San Bernardino National Forest. Following networked devices ranging from soil moisture monitors to weather stations for gauging microclimatic conditions, she analyzes clusters of data processed in situ and at a distance, which only make particular environmental relations more evident and tangible for scientists. Whereas James Reserve aims to capture intricate relations between biological, geological, and meteorological processes, Post-Apocalypsis focuses on human relations with the weather experienced today predominantly as and through various streams of data used, for instance, in weather modeling. In this context, ambividuals both experience and co-constitute the naturaltechnological environment designed by Daed Baitz. They not only choose the meteorological locale in which they would like to immerse themselves, but the chosen soundscapes also change depending on their

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movement. Thus, Post-Apocalypsis foregrounds the role of technological aspects of environment as actively co-shaping relations between humans and non-humans in the Anthropocene, which also affects how we think about the cultural aspects of the environment. Apart from the auditory experiences triggered by the generative soundscape, Post-Apocalypsis also invites ambividuals to intra-act with the installation through their sense of touch. Purpose-built actuators have been inserted in the logs fitted with the interfaces of bone conduction constructed by Cichy. Whereas Zapała’s algorithm transposed weather-data into music, bone conduction technology converts electrical signals into mechanical vibrations, so that sound is sent not through air, but through human bones. Eerily enough, when ambividuals touched the actuators with their forehead, chin, or hand, they could hear sounds in their head. Unlike the soundscapes, this was not music, but excerpts from Polish Romantic poetry celebrating nature, such as Adam Mickiewicz’s Crimean Sonnets, which praised the beauty of the serene Ukrainian landscape. However, Daed Baitz’s aim was not to perpetuate the Romantic ideal of sublime Nature, put on a pedestal and admired from afar, which, as eco-philosopher Timothy Morton explains in his Ecology Without Nature (2011), was the foundation for modern environmental thinking. Heard through bone conduction, the passages from the Romantics were virtually unrecognizable, as they were read in English by people with aphasia. Thus, the synaesthetic tactile/acoustic ambividual experiences in Post-Apocalypsis of fer an experiential criticism of the romantic naturalcultural view of the environment as a reality pre-existing “out there.” Instead, Daed Baitz performs an environment as a deeply naturalculturaltechnological phenomenon, contingent upon human and non-human assemblages. Although the ambividual experiences staged by Post-Apocalypsis ef fectively complicate the received notion of the “natural” environment by mobilizing f low between nature, culture, and technology, they generate relatively minor potential for engaging with the environmental changes alluded to by the scenes of ecological disasters. In order to see how and to what ef fect this engagement might be initiated by contemporary installation art, let us move from naturalculturaltechnological trees to ice.

Resensing the Anthropocene

Ambividual Experiences and Response-Ability Fig. 2: Ice Watch, 2014, Place du Panthéon, Paris, 2015, Photo: Martin Argyroglo.

In December 2015, twelve enormous blocks of ice of a total weight of eighty tons appeared on the square outside Panthéon in Paris (Fig.  2). The Stonehenge-like circle was not, however, just another of the city’s winter decorations. It was the Ice Watch installation, initiated by Icelandic eco-artist Olafur Eliasson and Danish geologist Minik Rosing. As the title suggests, the installation was in fact a ticking clock, measuring the time left until the glaciers melt and the sea levels rise. This issue was discussed at the COP21 UN climate summit simultaneously held in nearby Le Bourget. Eliasson and Rosing mobilized a huge network of people to transport the ice to Paris, which was extremely complicated logistically. They hired special cargo ships from a Danish ice-cube company, which enabled them to fish from the Arctic Sea 112 tons of ice which had fallen from the icebergs of Greenland as result of the global increase in temperatures. The first blocks of ice arrived in Denmark, where they had to be cut into smaller chunks that would melt completely during the twelve days of the climate summit. The problem was that the special cold storage trucks hired to transport the ice from Denmark to France were too warm to maintain the temperature of the iceberg. It was uncertain if the installation would take place at all until the very last moment. When the ice arrived in Paris intact, the installation became a space for humans to encounter the melting ice. Like Post-Apocalypsis, the installation also staged ambividual experiences, predominantly through touch and hearing. Eliasson and Rosing’s aim, however, was less to perform a naturalculturaltechnological environment than to instigate response-ability towards the issue of climate

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change. In Donna Haraway’s lexicon, response-ability means “that cultivation through which we render each other capable, that cultivation of the capacity to respond.” (Haraway and Kenney 2015: 257) In other words, response-ability is neither about adopting an ethical position nor committing to a particular form of politics; it is rather about acting together with and for others. However, Haraway does not limit these “others” merely to human or biotic life, as they also include abiota, which, as melting icebergs or acidifying oceans clearly evidence, are no less endangered than coral reefs and giant pandas. In this context, cultivating response-ability is one way to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016: 2), that is, to be constantly alert to the ongoing processes of multispecies extinction and f lourishing on Earth. This offers a life-making alternative to apocalyptic scenarios of the future in the Anthropocene and Utopian hopes to return to unspoiled nature. Let us see how ambividual experiences staged by Ice Watch may instigate such response-ability. During the press conference which launched the installation, Eliasson contended: One of the reasons why it was worth taking the ice all the way from Greenland to Paris is that it shows us that what they talk about at the COP21 is actually real. It’s not something abstract, it’s not scientific data, it’s not something politicians or heads of state are talking about. It’s just something you can touch. (Arctic Ice Displayed in Paris) Eliasson clearly states that by exhibiting the iceberg ice in public, the installation designs tactile experiences in order to transform abstract knowledge about climate change into what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa calls “matters of care.” Unlike Latour’s matters of fact and matters of concern those are more than human relational arrangements which aim to “re-affect an objectified world” (2017: 64). In other words, matters of care are not merely about provoking a human emotional response to seemingly objective knowledge, but rather about instigating a sense of response-ability by staging bodily capacities to affect and be affected. Ice Watch performs such matters of care as ambividuals touch the extremely cold ice blocks, thus warming them up. The ensuing thermal exchange between bodies not only makes the problem of climate change tangible, but literally implicates ambividuals in the drama of melting icebergs, as they are forced to contribute to the disappearance of the ice. However, the ambividual experience initiated by Eliasson and Rosing is not confined to the “here and now” of the actual physical contact between bodies, as it is involved in various technological mediations intensify the installation’s potential to cultivate response-ability. This becomes evident as we follow ambividuals lending their ear to the ice.

Resensing the Anthropocene

During the aforementioned press conference, Rosing also commented on the installation. In a similarly straightforward way he gave ambividuals instructions: Go and put your ear towards the ice and you can hear that it can tell a story from the ancient times. These icebergs fell as snow ten thousand years ago and they still remember a time before humans added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. (ibid) The geologist refers to a sound resembling crackling wood fire produced by the air escaping from the ice as it melts. This acoustic phenomenon, however, occurred only under the right material conditions. Ambividiuals could only “hear the ice” when they placed an ear close to the cold blocks and the city noise did not interfere with the crackling. In fact, the sound only becomes audible through amplifying sound technologies. We can see this, for instance, in numerous films posted on YouTube, showing tactile and acoustic encounters with Ice Watch at night. Among numerous audiovisual materials on the Internet documenting the installation, both professional and amateur, only these register the sound Rosing mentions. Only then could the ice become the witness of history whispering the story of the Earth to ambividuals, partially produced by those who listen. Thus, the close and intimate experiential encounter with the blocks of ice was only made possible when mediated by technology, which potentially instigated response-ability, also in those not physically present in Paris. In Haraway’s terms such ambividual experience may be referred to as “intimacy without proximity.” (2016: 79) This is the capacity of response-ability to emerge with no necessity of direct contact, which was linked with the human colonizing drive to reach out to nature in order to tame it, and thus, to protect it. By prompting technologically mediated encounters with the ice, the installation generated enormous potential for response-ability as numerous reactions to Ice Watch circulated in social networks. Some of these, prompted by the installation’s affective impact, called for radical measures to be introduced at COP21 in order to limit CO₂ emissions, others criticized the project for its considerable carbon footprint, which worked against its environmental aims. Although Ice Watch proves the potential of contemporary performative arts to instigate a strong sense of response-ability for the disastrous environmental changes, it hardly offers ways out of the Anthropocene predicament. How might ambividual experiences staged by installation art be implicated in the game of survival humans and non-humans are currently playing? In order to answer this question, let us move into the realm of speculation.

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Ambividual Experiences and Collaborative Survival Fig. 3: Fungi Mutarium, 2015, Julia Kaisinger and Katharina Unger. © Livinstudio.com.

The Fungi Mutarium installation (2015) emerged through collaboration between design engineers Julia Kaisinger and Katharina Unger and mycologists Han Wösten and Kasia Lukasiewicz, working within the Vienna-based LIVIN collective, gathering artists, designers, technoscientists, and culinary artists. Fusing elements of speculative design, laboratory practices, and food art, they designed a prototype for a technology which aims to solve two burning problems of the Anthropocene: the dramatic increase in food demand for a growing world population, and the huge f low of plastic waste, which will eventually form another stratigraphic layer. In order to face those challenges LIVIN used Pleurotus Ostreatus and Schizophyllum Commune edible fungi, due to their ability to break down plastics. After six months of research and experiments conducted in the laboratory at the University of Utrecht, they created a special incubator for growing plastic-degrading mushrooms at home (Fig.  4). It comprises three glass containers fitted within a white desk, where three stages of bio-recycling take place. First, one puts plastic pressed into thin leaves into an Activation Cylinder on the bottom of the mutarium, where the material is treated with UV light. The light removes bacteria which might be harmful to the fungi, and also initiates plastic degradation process. Next, the sterilized plastic leaves go into the Growth Sphere, a spherical,

Resensing the Anthropocene

sterile cabinet where they are put in custom-built agar bowls the designers called “FU.” Agar is a seaweed-based gelatin substitute that, when mixed with starch and sugar, acts as a nutrient base for the fungi. Finally, “macerate,” i. e. fungi sprouts in liquid nutrient solution, are extracted with a pipette from a decanter called the Fungi Nursery and applied to plastic-filled FUs. It takes several months for the fungi to digest the plastic and overgrow the whole agar shapes. The prototype was part of an installation which included audiovisual documentation, as well as special dining ceremonies organized by LIVIN, during which guests could taste dishes made with the FUs. Unlike Post-Apocalypsis and Ice Watch, LIVIN’s installation not only stages assemblages of humans and non-humans, it performs entanglements of their lifeways and ways of being. In particular, it involves human eating habits, the biodegrading properties of fungi, and the sterilizing work of the UV lighting, which catalyzes the process of breaking down plastics. Drawing on the findings of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, we can say that LIVIN perform such assemblages in order to seek for the possibility of “collaborative survival” (2016: 4). In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, Lowenhaupt Tsing explains that collaborative survival materializes in human and non-human encounters, which create opportunities for life on a damaged planet. Near prototypical in this respect are the collaborations involving matsutake mushrooms she traces in her book. Tricholoma matsutake is an extremely valuable species of edible fungi which populates today’s forests in North America, Finland, China, and Japan where it forms mycorrhizal relations with different kinds of tree, most often red pines. As Lowenhaupt Tsing proves, they grow mostly in areas heavily disrupted by human activity: in the intensely deforested woodlands of Oregon state and radioactive ruins of Hiroshima, where they are said to have been the first beings to f lourish after the atomic bomb. Matsutake secrete strong acids which break down rocks and transform them into nutrients for themselves and their symbiotic companions. Thus, they embody the possibility of life in capitalist ruins, suggested in the subtitle of Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book. This example shows that collaborative survival has nothing to do with Darwin’s survival of the fittest, as it allows the survival of whole dynamic ecosystems of co-existing beings, whose lifeways and ways of being come together only contingently. How does LIVIN’s project contribute to developing such strategies? Unlike the matsutake, Fungi Mutarium materializes the possibility to live in and on capitalist waste. However, the strategy is not tantamount to biorecycling, which capitalism has appropriated to reanimate organic materials for future benefit. Due to the fragility of the lifeways of fungi mobilized in the project, Fungi Mutarium would be extremely expensive to produce on a mass scale, as it requires a new, non-scalable economic model that would be attuned to particular local sites where the fungi grow. As such, ambividual experiences clearly serve an educa-

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tional purpose. The installation provides ambividuals with detailed instructions on how to grow the mushrooms properly, so that no plastic is left in the FUs. They also learn which subspecies of Pleurotus Ostreatus and Schizophyllum Commune they might find in their local areas, depending on where the installation is shown. Thus, the installation teaches ambividuals how to implement strategies of collaborative survival in their everyday life. Fungi Mutarium proves, however, that this process demands that people significantly modify their daily habits. This becomes most evident in the aforementioned dining ceremonies, where ambividuals are forced to learn a new etiquette for the new food. LIVIN provides them with custom cutlery which hardly resembles traditional knives, forks, and spoons as its design ref lects the structure of the food. It takes some time to master the drip dropper (Fig. 5), for instance, which fits perfectly into the FUs, and lets you scratch the fungi from the inner walls of the agar shapes. Fig. 4: Drip dropper for Fungi Mutarium, © Livinstudio.com.

Later, LIVIN stages gustatory experiences to let ambividuals confront their expectations as to the taste. Sweet and savory dishes made of FUs are supposed to convince them that food made from plastic is not only edible, but tasty. Thus, Fungi Mutarium proves that strategies of collaborative survival are not merely about noticing or staging the right human and non-human encounters. Initiating ambividual experiences is not only crucial for integrating these strategies into everyday lives, but also must involve significant reformulations to our ways of thinking and being in the world.

Resensing the Anthropocene

Conclusion: Foggy Anthropocene By way of conclusion, we should state that the future of the contemporary performative arts is inextricably linked with the future of the Anthropocene. The naturalculturaltechnological performances discussed here not only perform relational subjectivity and stage ambividual experiences in order to challenge traditional ways of thinking about the environment, instigate a sense of response-ability for climate change, and contribute to collaborative survival on a damaged planet. They also prove that the Anthropocene, although termed the age of man, is far from anthropocentric. Thus, resensing the Anthropocene in installation art not only performs multimodal experiences as a mode of relating to the world, but also invites us to herald a new epoch: one of ambividuals. In recent years, we have seen a proliferation of critical, often post-humanist theories of fering new names with the -cene suf fix, in order to foreground dif ferent extra-human aspects of the current ecological situation and suggest alternative timelines for environmental changes. Although such epochs as the Capitalocene (Moore 2015), the Agnotocene (Bonneuil/Fressoz 2016) and the Plantationocene (Tsing 2015) aptly emphasize the importance of capitalism, ignorance, and plantation as sets of practices, discourses, and af fects that have been transforming the planet at various speeds, they all fail to notice the experiential aspects of environmental changes. As such, I would like to finish this chapter by brief ly returning to the fog where I began, in order to suggest the possibility of a new epoch: the foggy Anthropocene. Unlike Capitalocene, Agnotocene, and Plantationocene, this does not emphasize environmental processes of longue durée, but focuses on momentary and dynamic naturalculturaltechnological performances which stage ambividual experiences that challenge hitherto received classifications and binaries. Metaphorically speaking, the fog gestures towards an experience which emerges when vision has been blurred. It effectively erases all coordinates and narrows down the optic field, forcing humans to use all their senses. To avoid losing your balance and getting lost in the fog, it does not suffice to look hard; one has to tread carefully – often blindly – lending an ear to potential danger. However, as the victims of the Birling Gap haze demonstrate, in the foggy Anthropocene one cannot be sure if any noxious substances, odorous or odorless, have not already entered the body and begun wreaking havoc. Thus, the foggy Anthropocene makes uncertainty the very condition of life in naturalculturaltechnological environments. Ambividual experiences are not only the effects of how we navigate the world; by paying close attention to them, may actually save our lives.

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References “Arctic Ice Displayed in Paris”, January 10, 2019 (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Tpe4o9_n8AM&t=27s). Bonneuil, Christophe/Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste (2016 [2013]): The Shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, History and Us, London and New York: Verso. “Chemical attack, WW1 gas canister and an algal bloom: The theories surrounding Beachy Head toxic cloud that sparked mass illness”, November 22, 2018 (https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/chemical-attack-ww1-gas-canister-​ 11070604). Crutzen, Paul/Stroemer, Eugene (2000): “The Anthropocene.” In: IGBP Newsletter 41, pp. 17–18. DeLanda, Manuel (2006): A New Philosophy of Society. Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, London and New York: Continuum. DeLanda, Manuel (2016): The Assemblage Theory, Edinburgh University Press: 2016. Deleuze, Gilles (1992): “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” In: October 59, pp. 3–7. Gabrys, Jennifer (2016): Program Earth. Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Goldberg, RoseLee (2011): Performance Art, London and New York: Thames and Hudson. Haraway, Donna (2016): Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna/Kenney Martha (2015): “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene.” In: Davis, Heather/Turpin, Etienne (eds.) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, London: Open Humanities Press. Latour, Bruno (2017 [2015]): Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures of the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge and Medford: Polity Press, Ebook edition. Latour, Bruno (2014): “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” In: New Literary History 45, pp. 1–18. Lewis, Simon L./Maslin, Mark A. (2015): “Defining the Anthropocene.” In: Nature 519, pp. 171–180. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2014): “Visualizing the Anthropocene.” In: Public Culture 26/2, pp. 213–232. Moore, Jason (2015): Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, London and New York: Verso. Morton, Timothy (2007): Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press.

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Oppermann, Serpil (2018): “Installation.” In: Environmental Humanities 10/1, pp. 338–342. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria (2017): Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Ruddiman, William F. (2003): “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago.” In: Climatic Change 61/3, pp. 261–293. Schechner, Richard (1973): “Performance & the Social Sciences: Introduction.” In: The Drama Review: TDR 17/3, pp. 3–4. Tsing-Lowenhaupt, Anna (2015): The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin, Princeton and Oxford: The University of Chicago Press. Tsing, Anna (2016): “Earth Stalked by Man.” In: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 34/2, pp. 2–16. Zylinska, Joanna (2018): The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

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III Performing Alterities

Introduction Małgorzata Sugiera

Table, Tabula, and Modes of Existence Arguably, Michel Foucault was one of the first philosophers to take interest in well-defined regularities which – at a given time and in a given culture – could characterize not only such hard sciences as mathematics, physics, or cosmology, but also empirical knowledges such as biology, linguistics, or economics. Back in the mid-1960s, he urged a merging of the great divisions between the “humanist sciences” to reveal a lateral network of analogies, an epistemological space specific to a particular epoch. Importantly, Foucault intended not only to analyze the rules governing a certain code of science, but also to go further, to define the conditions of possibility of any knowledge in a given culture, to make manifest a space of order within which knowledge was constituted. He called the space and modes of being of this order an episteme. It is significant that Foucault opened his Order of Things (2005) with a reference to Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Analytic Language of John Wilkins,” published in the early 1950s. In critically recalling Wilkins’ idea of the representational capacity of language, Borges quotes a peculiar passage on animal taxonomy from a certain Chinese encyclopedia. It is from this passage, Foucault admits, that his book arose; more precisely, out of his laughter at the oddity of how animals were defined and grouped. According to the quote, animals are put into alphabetical groups, such as those “belonging to the Emperor,” “tame,” “sucking pigs,” “included in the present classification,” and “having just broken the water pitcher” (qtd. Foucault 2005: xvi). Foucault is quite sure of the source of his amusement. Despite the alphabetical order, the classification is visibly distorted – the categories lack the common ground which makes categorization possible in the first place. No similarities and differences between so peculiarly divided animals are visible; their classes only represent a multiplicity of fragmented and disconnected domains. This is why Foucault writes: “We shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container between each of these categories and that which includes them all” because Borges “does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed” (ibid: xvii, author’s emphasis). Undoubtedly, the strangeness of the allegedly Chinese clas-

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sification system allows us to perceive the structure and limitations of our own system, to see the site on which our knowledge has been constituted. In The Order of Things, Foucault gives the site an exact shape and name, writing about a table in two overlapping senses: a more or less ordinary table, and a tabula that enables things to be grouped according to their apparent similarities and differences. In contrast to Borges’ mock-taxonomy, which gives precedence to function or appearance, Western classification links groups with their names, and then operates only on the latter. This is clearly visible in the original title of Foucault’s book Les mots et les choses, changed, with the author’s consent, to The Order of Things, to avoid confusion with two other books titled Words and Things that came out around that time. Yet Foucault is not solely interested in the order of things as the English title suggests. He more focuses on the specific relationship between things and words, which is why the table, in both senses, plays such a vital role in his argument. Thus, in the “Preface,” he formulates a major question which, when answered, should help him define the Classical episteme at the threshold of the nineteenth century: “On what ‘table,’ according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become accustomed to sort out so many different and similar things?” (ibid: xxi) Foucault is referring to a metaphorical table, a kind of a mental checkerboard of distinct identities that should provide security from the confused, undefined backdrop of differences. Bruno Latour points to a more specific table in his “Circulating Reference,” a “photophilosophical montage” (1999) which he prepared after a pedologic expedition into the Amazon Forest, in which he was an observer armed with a camera. It is significant in my context that he focused on how the table operates in producing knowledge through linking words and the world, a “thing” with its name, in order to put it in its proper taxonomic category. In “Circulating Reference,” Latour describes the progression from samples of soil to various diagrams and maps, meticulously tracing the transition between forest and savanna in the Boa Vista region. Shaping the progression as a chain of consecutive transformations of verified references that circulate through constant substitutions, forfeiting resemblances that never existed, he explains: “Constructing a phenomenon in successive layers renders it more and more real within a network traced by the displacements (in both senses) of researchers, samples, graphics, specimens, maps, reports, and funding requests” (ibid: 76). To corroborate this statement, he demonstrates the network of substitution, his example being a native Brazilian biologist and member of the expedition. Mindful that the word ‘reference’ comes from the Latin referre, which means ‘bringing back,’ Latour starts by showing the biologist gathering plants on the site, carefully choosing those specimens she wants to keep as her reference. Then, he rhetorically asks what happens to the pieces of evidence, only to tackle a more important epistemological issue of scientific reference. It is at this moment that his attention focuses

Introduction

on a table in a room where the botanist holds her collection. This table displays specimens retrieved from different expeditions and locations. As Latour emphasizes, looking at this table, we can see how reference circulates between living plants in the forest, the collection of dried and classified specimens, taxonomic charts and, as he says, the tree of knowledge. A plant on the table becomes easier to inspect. Moreover, “specimens from different locations and times become contemporaries of one another on the f lat table, all visible under the same unifying gaze” (ibid: 38). The biologist can also conveniently shift her specimens around, recombining and reshuff ling them, according to invisible lines of division which will subsequently separate different groups on a page of a taxonomic treatise. Nowhere, as Latour rightly reminds us, is the crucial contradiction between two meanings of the English word ‘oversight’ more striking. It means both looking at something from above and ignoring it. It is also the basic mechanism that makes the circulation of reference possible. Thus, both Foucault and Latour independently demonstrate that the table in its double meaning  – that of an ordinary table and a taxonomic tabula  – plays an important role, not only in producing knowledge, but also in sustaining the pretense of objectivity and the universality of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, both consider the regularities in the production of this knowledge to be an example of a larger tabula of relationships of things and the order within which they must be considered. Great divisions between different spheres of life are upheld through hiding a network of analogies in the mechanisms of apparently incomparable circulating reference. It is, therefore, the same effect of purification in action that constitutes the mechanism of compartmentalization of knowledge into fields and the modes of existence which Bruno Latour analyzed later in his Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013). He convincingly demonstrates how, since the 1660s, such varied modes of existences as, for example, science, politics, technology, and what he calls “beings of fiction,” have been established, and in the modernization process, became increasingly separated from each other on the conditions of felicity specific to each of them. Latour explains: “Conditions of felicity and infelicity do not refer simply to manners of speaking, as in speech act theory, but also to modes of being that involve decisively, but differently in each case, one of the identifiable differences between what is true and what is false” (ibid: 21). The modes of being he defines and his inquiries are the best examples of the fundamental codes of culture whose existence Foucault admitted in The Order of Things, while focusing on the modes of being adopted by order in the humanities. The effects of those modes of being are felt not only in the narrowly defined areas where scientific knowledge is produced, but also on human bodies, various life practices, and our understanding of nature. Since the early 1970s, feminist theories, gender and queer studies, postcolonial and decoloniality studies, critical anthropology, and new materialism have striven to excavate these hidden mechanisms and trans-

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form how we understand the legacies of the ‘Enlightenment’s’ prioritization of the sense of sight, the production of knowledge, and the effects of power through what is visible by, for example, modifying the established relationships between the sciences and arts. No wonder that the issues which both Foucault and Latour address in their philosophical works were also picked up by contemporary artists. A case in point is Chris Marker’s short film Theory of Sets (Théorie des ensembles, 1990), less known than his famous La Jetée (1962) and often dismissively classified as a fairy-tale for children who have trouble learning mathematics. Chris Marker is the pseudonym of a French writer and multimedia artist who pioneered a hybrid form of film essay. In the late 1950s and 1960s, he collaborated with filmmakers of the Left Bank Cinema movement. It was supposedly Alain Resnais who called him the prototype of the twenty-first-century man, primarily because Marker had been interested in digital technologies since the mid-1980s. Theory of Sets demonstrated that Resnais’ description was very accurate. Although Marker places the action of the film on board Noah’s Ark, the character, with reference to animals on the ark, tries to answer a question like the one posed by Foucault “of grouping and isolating, of analyzing, of matching and pigeon-holing concrete content” (2005: xxi). Moreover, Noah’s first attempts at putting all the animals into an order are reminiscent of the strange taxonomy in the Chinese encyclopedia. He tries to distinguish, for example, the animals that shed skin from those that lay eggs, the ones that have two legs from those that are feathered; he also tries to figure out when a donkey may look like a rabbit or a small tiger like a big cat. It is in this way that the viewer recognizes that each grouping and matching of this kind is arbitrary. Indeed, the neat rows of cages with paired animals on the ark look like pigeon-holes. Today, three decades later, in the context of the exponential development of digital technologies, another theme of Marker’s film has gained significance. Theory of Sets was produced on Roger Wagner’s HyperStudio software, then a cutting-edge technology. Nonetheless, when seen today, the film oddly resembles early video games; the images are completely f lat and two-dimensional. Thus, today Noah’s animals stand for the f latness of data, figures, and graphs to which animal and vegetal lives are reduced on the pages of taxonomic treatises or under the microscope. As a result, the film invites us to see Marker’s Noah not as the Biblical savior of antediluvian nature, but rather as Man, who incarnates the unifying gaze scrutinizing different specimens on a f lat table, carrying out the taxonomic procedure described by Latour (1999: 38). It is particularly significant in Theory of Sets that Noah would have never grouped animals on his ark had it not been for the intervention of two owls. They look like two peas in a pod, and they always act and speak together – a perfect set, a true icon of the Same. However, if we consider that the Biblical Noah had to take a pair of each kind of animals on his ark to ensure their reproduction, our interpretation changes significantly. The owl is not only a symbol of wisdom, as Marker

Introduction

points out. In this group of birds, as in many others, it is no easy task to establish the sex of a bird at a distance. Thus, the identical owls in Theory of Sets could be two females or two males. This could, consequently, subvert both the law of the heterosexual reproduction, assumed to be a fundamental and immutable order of nature. Read as such, Marker’s short film not only retells the Biblical story, it also undermines it, showing the naturalized order as a by-product of the patriarchal system. Furthermore, it demonstrates that we do not necessarily need another system of thought to demonstrate the limitations of our own, as Foucault seemed to believe. As Theory of Sets shows, the Western episteme is far more porous and fragmented than Foucault thought, and non-normative discourse is not so easily disentangled from its patriarchal legacy in the founding mechanisms of knowledge production. Many contemporary artists proceed the way Marker did – they reproduce the aesthetic and imaginary practices of the Western episteme in order to contest them, to reveal their latent non-normative parts and the counter-knowledge they produce.

Measuring the World The ending of Marker’s Theory of Sets suggests that the natural order established by Noah with the two owls is no different than mathematics, because when counting, one similarly looks for a precise number in a multitude, as Noah did when looking for a given animal. Therefore, the film shows Noah to be a figure who initiated two f loods – the Biblical deluge which, as everybody knows, lasted forty days, and a f lood of mathematics, which continues to this day. In “Circulating Reference,” Latour confirms that Marker was right to undermine the distance between the production of certainty in the artificial universe of the laboratory and the apparent chaos of multiplicity of beings in the virgin forest of the Amazon. He arrived there to assist knowledge which creates itself from nothing in direct confrontation with the world. However, what he witnessed in the field was the numbers put on trees and the dense grid of Cartesian coordinates which they form. He realized that he was again in a kind of a laboratory, albeit a minimalist one. “The forest, divided into squares, has already lent itself to the collection of information on paper that likewise takes a quadrilateral form. I rediscovered a tautology that I believed I was escaping by coming into the field” (1999: 32) – a tautology between the known world and the knowing world, which refer to one another, with new phenomena and information adjusted to the well-known ordering rules and grids. There can be no direct confrontation with the world which engenders new knowledge; there can only be a continuous repetition of pre-established patterns. American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing does not refer to Latour’s findings in “On Nonscalability” (2012), an article on the widespread and, in many

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cases, lateral use of scale, which has turned out to be quite detrimental in various spheres of our lives and domains of world-making. Like Latour, she unveils a mechanism upon which all traditional scientific paradigms are premised. The mechanism of scalability is closely tied to the capitalist idea of progress and colonial expansion, both founded on a paternal gesture of taking possession of land and bodies. As Tsing explains, the most pertinent characteristic of scale is its “ability to expand – and expand, and expand – without rethinking basic elements.” (ibid: 505) One can effortlessly change scale by zooming up and down, without the slightest need for verifying the research method. Furthermore, a research project could be extended without transforming the principle of scalability. It is in this respect that Tsing’s definition of scalability is reminiscent of Latour’s circulating reference and chain of substitution. Both effectively block our ability to notice the heterogeneity of the world – all we perceive is “uniform blocks, ready for further expansion.” (ibid: 505) Scalability, writes Tsing, not only allows us to ‘conquer’ nature. It also helps to naturalize worlds already produced by concealing their biological or cultural alterity and/or heterogeneity. Significantly, the endlessly advancing scaling technologies also prey on all that is chaotic, diverse, and nonscalable, even as they marginalize or obliterate it. Tsing has no doubt that, at the very moment when emergency and alterity have become more crucial than expansion (colonial, economic, technological, etc.), it is time for profound changes in how we produce and transmit knowledge. Until now, self-contained sciences have only gathered data that could easily fit well-established standards in the field of knowledge that has inseparably linked accumulation of knowledge with its scalability. A theory of nonscalability which Tsing offers as an alternative to hegemonic ideas of the scalable world should start with denaturalizing scalability, revealing its historicity. As she posits, all experimental sciences developed during the ‘long sixteenth century,’ together with the conquest of the New World and the establishment of European sugar cane plantations – all three were premised on the same model of colonial expansion (cf. Casid 2005). As such, in her Feral Biologies lecture at the University College of London in 2015, Tsing argued that the recently identified epoch in Earth’s history should not be called the Anthropocene, but rather the Plantatiocene (cf. Haraway 2015). As she insisted, only then should it be possible to bring out the connection omitted intentionally or unintentionally, between the exponentially growing danger of a global ecological disaster and the foundations of how knowledge is produced. Earlier, in Friction (2005), Tsing went even further than Latour in his “Circulating Reference,” positing that the botanical taxonomic system, which, since its inception, has aspired to unify and universalize global knowledge, should be recognized as the model of all sciences. If the creation of the system was at all possible, it was primarily due to the fact that European natural philosophers did

Introduction

not take into account local non-European knowledges. All data acquired through native informers was adapted and included in the European system of plants classification under one condition: if it confirmed the basic rules of the established system. Therefore, it was the system that became knowledge, and not its component parts. To demonstrate this, Tsing quotes Linnaeus: “The system is for botany the thread of Ariadne, without which there is chaos. Let us take, for example, an unknown plant of the Indies, and let a botanophile leaf through descriptions, figures, every index; he will not find it unless by chance. But a systematist will determine it straight away, be it old or new. […] The system indicates the plants, even those it does not mention; this, the enumeration of a catalog can never do” (ibid: 93–94). This citation perfectly encapsulates the principle that the system as a unified, homogeneous whole takes precedence over the plant. Therefore, the plant could not be recognized as a specimen unless it loses its native name and place in a local system of knowledge. Then it gets a new name and place under an imperial unifying gaze, as Latour writes. The same gaze appropriates the world by measuring it; this is the topic of a widely-read and oft-reprinted novel Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, a German-speaking writer living in Vienna. As in Marker’s Theory of Sets, the gaze is here, at once, presented in action and subverted. In a counterfactual manner, the novel retells the biographies of two Enlightenment geniuses obsessed with the idea of measuring the world to better understand it. Although the author openly admitted his intention to create a fictional double mock-biography, he was accused of twisting historical facts, representing historical events in an incorrect and biased way, and misrepresenting the main characters. One of them is Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian aristocrat, naturalist, and explorer known as the Second Columbus. Armed with an arsenal of all the measuring instruments available in his epoch, he travels to every corner of South and Central America, f loats down the Orinoco, climbs high mountains, and lowers himself into volcanoes, always wanting to know the precise height of every mountain or the number of lice on a native girl’s head. It seems, however, that each act of measurement is luring him further and further away from the real world. Unlike Humboldt, Carl Friedrich Gauss, a mathematician, astronomer, and geodesist finds prime numbers in his head, and hates leaving his home in Gottingen. The novel starts with their first meeting in September 1828, when Gauss comes to Berlin for the German Scientific Congress. Then, the narrative f lashes back to their independent lives, told chronologically in alternating chapters, and concludes in 1828 Berlin again. In his mock-biographic narrative, Kehlmann obviously juxtaposes the inductive and the deductive, the experimental and the imaginative, as two contrasting, yet equally important forces of the Enlightenment, although not always recognized as such. Yet, as I argue, he wants to do something more than just put these two life stories side by side.

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It is for another reason that, in Measuring the World, Humboldt, renowned as the inventor of the modern concept of nature (cf. Wulf 2015), meets Gauss, less known today. Significantly, Kehlmann presents not only Gauss’ thoughts and ideas as found in his works. The reader also becomes acquainted with his daily labors, dreams, and strange visions of a world to come which is quite similar to our own. Suffice to quote two short passages to see how Kehlmann reinvented this character. As I have mentioned, to earn his living, Gauss was forced to work as geodesist. On one occasion, the narrator remarks: “Sometimes it was as if he [Gauss] hadn’t just measured the region, but invented it, as if it had only achieved its reality through him. […] Nothing someone had ever measured was now or ever could be the same as before” (2006: 227). At another juncture: “The old Kantian nonsense. Gauss shook his head. Reason shaped absolutely nothing and understood very little. Space curved and time was malleable. If one drew a straight line and kept drawing it further and further, eventually one would re-encounter its starting point. […] The world could be calculated after a fashion, but that was a very long way from understanding it” (ibid: 185). Measuring the world does not equal understanding it. What is more, and contrary to Euclid, Gauss seems to know that space itself is folded and bent; consequently, parallel lines do not meet and a straight line will eventually re-encounter itself. In other words, when looking at the world, taking it into possession with an imperial gaze, we see only ourselves, not the world. Like the two owls in Theory of Sets, Gauss is an agent of subversion, an alternative to the hegemonic world-view and denaturalizing scalability. In this respect, the first meeting of the two protagonists plays a critical role. In the novel, contrary to historical evidence, not only does Humboldt meet Gauss for the first time in 1828, but also he invites an important witness, a certain Monsieur Daguerre “who was working on a piece of equipment which would fix the moment on a light-sensitive silver iodide plate and snatch it out of the onrush of time” (ibid: 10). Unfortunately, Gauss is too impatient to stay still for a mere fifteen minutes to allow it to happen. Later at night, Humboldt throws the copper plate out the window. Nonetheless, the undocumented presence of Daguerre in Berlin is of much importance. Although Gauss is aware that there some of his contemporary scientists imagined non-Euclidean space, the ‘perspectival eye’ of the photographic apparatus prolonged the hegemony of traditionally conceived space in the nineteenth century. The episode with Daguerre, therefore, illustriously demonstrates that Kehlmann, while reconstructing the moment of the measurement of the world, also wanted to show the historicity of and an alternative to the apparently natural scalability of knowledge production; he hoped to stop the f lood of mathematics.

Introduction

Un-Umwelt In Le contract naturel (2018), published originally in 1990, the same year when Marker’s Theorie des Ensemble premiered, French philosopher Michel Serres postulated that the old social contract should presently be followed by a similar natural contract. He argues that, in order to prevent an ecological catastrophe, we have to start with ensuring that every biotic and abiotic entity has the same rights as humans. He introduces the notion of epistemodicee, upon which all knowledge sanctioned as scientific is premised; it is a contract between researchers as subjects and the world of things. In spite of the contract being an arbitrary convention, it constitutes the foundation upon which every natural phenomenon is based and controlled. While reediting the book, Serres added a short preface in which he argues that we should dispose of the widespread term ‘environment’ in ecology and the Anthropocene. It derives from the Latin vertere (turn around, revolve), and means a circumference wherein we occupy a central place as predators or parasites. He further opines that this central place is the very source of the hegemonic gaze and, consequently, of what Latour called circulating reference and Tsing defined as scalability. It is in this context that the performing arts have proved impressively inventive, arranging situations only vaguely reminiscent of traditional works, because in these arrangements, the viewer can test a novel relationship with the world premised on reciprocity, instead of dominance. One of the best examples of this work is Pierre Huyghe’s UUmwelt that opened in London Serpentine Gallery in October 2018. Significantly, it is neither an installation nor a performance, but a kind of a living organism. It has not been created for looking at, and can exist perfectly well without the public and its controlling gaze, although it clearly problematizes the question of the gaze, alterities and knowledge-making. Five large scale LED walls, placed in the rooms of the Serpentine Gallery, present thousands of f lickering and rapidly changing images. Before entering UUmwelt, a short notice informs visitors that the speed at which the images change depends on several factors, including the humidity and illumination in each room, where daylight is let in and changes every hour. Other factors include the number of visitors in a room, their behavior, and the movement of about fifty thousand bluebottle f lies, widespread in England and Wales; throughout the exhibition, they are fed on a mixture of sugar and water. The f lies have a two-week life cycle, and their number varies significantly, since it depends not only on the right conditions for reproduction, but also on the time of year. Therefore, when I visited the exhibition shortly before it closed in early February 2019, the living f lies could be counted on one hand. The walls of the gallery rooms had been sanded down to remove layers of paint from the previous exhibitions. The dust covered the f loor and was tracked through the rooms as visitors entered and departed. Its micro-

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movements were also said to affect the f low of f lickering images. It is clear the artist intended to create a spatial arrangement that is constantly changing, with each factor inf lecting the others. In this ecological system, the relationships occur between a location and its inhabitants, some of which may be human, some not even organic. Crucially, none of the parts of the system is more important or privileged than the rest. The title of the ecosystem unquestionably refers to the notion of Umwelt (environment space) introduced by Jakob von Uexküll (2010), an Estonian-born biologist. The term refers to a given animal’s perceptual life-world. It played a central role in Martin Heidegger’s celebrated account of human existence in his major work, Being and Time (1927), in which he used it as a premise to differentiate between animals and humans. Whereas the Umwelt which represents the everyday world of human activity is always open to change, the life-world of an animal remains closed, without hope for of alteration. In 2011, Pierre Huyghe presented the Umwelt installation at Esther Schipper’s Gallery in Berlin. It consisted of a room with ten thousands ants, fifty spiders whose movements were captured by CCTV security cameras, and an active f lu virus. To emphasize this environment was awaiting Man as its inevitable center, each visitor, before entering had his or her name loudly announced by a doorman. It is not by chance that Huyghe titled his recent, more porous and contingent ecosystem UUmwelt. Here the double ‘U’ should be read as Un-Umwelt, that is, an environment which is there and not there at once. In London, the ecosystem set abiotic and biotic elements (humans included) on the same footing. In my reading, UUmwelt creates a situation in which the viewer is both engaged and confronted with her own performance of knowledge; this is even more evident than in Huyghe’s previous installations (cf. Barikin 2012). So far, I have intentionally neglected the content of the images f lickering on the LED walls in the Serpentine Gallery. They are mental images of a sort, produced in a rather complicated process at Japan’s Kamitani Lab. The production began with Huyghe choosing different sets of images for volunteers to recreate in their minds. Then, their brain activity was captured by an fMR scanner. The Serpentine Gallery exhibition featured the results of an artificial system of neurons searching for corresponding images in a bank. These are images in the process of forming, never quite resolving into something familiar; always on the brink of being identified. Significantly, what the visitors saw depended on both their individual associations and various sensors, producing a feedback loop with different factors I have already mentioned. In terms of my argument, one could think of the images as being produced by the brain of Marker’s Noah, searching for the similarities and differences of the animals gathered on his ark, or as a result of the process of both identification and invention which Kehlmann’s Gauss ref lects upon. In a sense, it is a situation like one described in the novel: “If one drew a straight

Introduction

line and kept drawing it further and further, eventually one would re-encounter its starting point” (Kehlmann 2006: 185). For in UUmwelt, Huyghe creates an ecosystem in which the visitor can re-encounter herself at the very moment of performing knowledge.

Chapter Overview The authors contributing to this section look at the issue of knowledge production, trying to isolate how knowledge is presently performed at the intersection of science and the humanities, philosophy, ecology, and the arts, and to account for the historicity of these performances within the Western episteme. All three authors posit that if you want to modify the rules, you have to go back to the time when they were produced, and carefully test the possible consequences of modifications or more radical subversions. Each author analyzes the space of structured knowledge performed in each of the projects, considered less as works of art than as no-knowledge zones where things have yet to be named – in other words, as prearranged epistemological fields of experiencing novel modes of being and practices of living. The “Performing Alterities” section opens with a rather ambivalent approach to the currently fashionable idea of collapsing disciplinary boundaries. In “Collapsing Boundaries: Ambivalence and Interface,” Tony D Sampson starts by politically problematizing the idea of the institutional context of the Western neoliberal university, noting the often forgotten fact that capitalism works more effectively with a f luidity of borders. Moreover, focusing on examples from neuroaethetics, he demonstrates that, by allowing disciplinary mixtures, we risk creating methodological confusion, or deprive ourselves of vital critical distance when the protective layers of a field disintegrate. Although Sampson is perfectly capable of understanding the appeal of becoming a disciplinary pirate, instead of rashly taking any radical steps, he offers a Whiteheadian notion of non-localized interferences, which allows for the experimental transversal cutting of lines or making of new patterns. To show how the non-localized interferences can dispense with boundary thinking without falling prey to an evil stratagem of neoliberal mechanisms, Sampson looks at examples of works that produce intrinsic interferences between sensations, concepts, and functions. In so doing, these works demonstrate that the major divisions between different fields of knowledge could be positively abandoned if the artists focused on establishing an inextricable, indivisible, and local relationships of knowledge production. Whereas Sampson’s interest lies predominantly in disciplinary boundaries, Christel Stalpaert demonstrates the changing role of eco-art and activism with regard to contemporary ecological issues in “This Body Is in Danger! On Ecology,

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Protest, and Artistic Activism in Benjamin Verdonck’s Bara/Ke (2000).” She starts by defining the changes in how current ecological thinking conceptualizes nature, pointing at a radical move away from the concept of nature as such, clearly visible in Timothy Morton’s idea of an ecology-without-nature. Similar changes from interactive political theater to interconnective spatial practices involving both human and nonhuman actors in a networked agency could be delineated in the artistic strategies and tactics of the last decades. To show this, the author compares the explicitly anthropocentric agenda of the famous 1987 Greenpeace militant ecology campaign “This Body Is in Danger!” with a more recent urban intervention at Bara Square in Brussels by Belgian artist Benjamin Verdonck. His Bara/Ke (2000), both a remake of and a critical comment on Henry David Thoreau’s famous tree cabin, could be named a un-tree house project, with reference to Huyghe’s ecosystem. It triggered a good deal of response from the local residents, tourists, and immigrants; as such, Stalpaert explicitly calls Verdonck’s Bara/Ke a model production of knowledge, laying the groundwork for new practices of living. The section closes with Małgorzata Sugiera’s “Reel Nature: Speculative Gardens of Eden,” premised on the Whiteheadian notion of propositions; she develops the main argument of the text in two steps. Firstly, she looks closely at representations of the Biblical sixth day of creation to address discourses and epistemic strategies through which ‘the real’ of nature has been culturally constructed. As she posits, we should not only craft new ways of seeing, novel methodologies, and concepts, but also show the ideological roots of naturalized rules and conventions inscribed in the arts and sciences. Therefore, the main aim of this analysis of the sixth day is to reveal ‘the real’ as a sedimentation of the discourses and practices of different disciplines and media, as the arbitrarily conceived, and thus artificial ‘reel.’ The iconic image of the Garden of Eden shows nature in a primordial state, free of any kind of technology. In the second step, Sugiera moves to more recent representations of the Garden of Eden, to representations of nature as an aftermath of singularity which she calls the eighth day, borrowing from one of Eduardo Kac’s bio works of art. Importantly, Gardens of Eden of the sixth and eighth day go back to the very beginning of the era of the Moderns in order to question the basic and virtually naturalized foundations of the world and knowledge-making. In so doing, they engage the visitor in unmooring anthropocentric certainties, and questioning modes of perceiving, constructing, and consuming nature. Hence, all three chapters demonstrate not only that the production of knowledge through art is possible, but also that contemporary art is, more often than not, a privileged site of performing alterities and, therefore, knowledges. If Foucault sought to unearth a network of analogies within an epistemological space specific to a given period of time, other issues currently seem far more pressing. At stake today is a locality of knowledge production which depends on specific networks

Introduction

of humans and nonhumans, on their polyphonic assemblages. Idiosyncratic relationships of contemporary artworks, especially those conceived as unique ecosystems, allow each visitor to experience herself at the moment, when knowledge is locally produced. Thus, within those prearranged conditions, she is invited to take part in a local performance of knowledge and to ref lect on the premises, the alterities, and the epistemological consequences of this performance.

References Barikin, Amelia (2012): The Art of Pierre Huyghe, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Casid, Jill H. (2005): Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel (2005 [1970]): “Preface.” In: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, London: Routledge, pp. xvi–xxvi. Haraway, Donna J. (2005): “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” In: Environmental Humanities 6, pp. 159–165. Kehlmann, Daniel (2006 [2005]): Measuring the World, transl. Carol Brown Janeway, New York: Pantheon. Latour, Bruno (1999): “Circulating Reference. Sampling the Soil in the Amazon forest.” In: Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 24–79. Latour, Bruno (2013 [2012]): Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, transl. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna (2005): Friction. An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna (2012): “On Scalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scale.” In: Common Knowledge 18/3, pp. 505–524. Serres, Michel (2018 [1990]): Le contrat naturel, Paris: Le Pommier. Uexküll, Jakob von (2010 [1934]): A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning, transl. Joseph D. O’Neil, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wulf, Andrea (2015): Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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Collapsing Boundaries Ambivalence and Interference Tony D. Sampson

Introduction Although the collapsing of disciplinary boundaries might appear to be a theoretically promising move, it is not necessarily a goal to aim for without concern for what might eventually emerge. To be sure, the desire for disciplinary mixture might need to be approached more ambivalently. For example, when art mixes with science, the outcome is not always ‘great art.’ Of course the notion of ‘great art’ is contested on many levels. There is, however, always the potential for much methodological confusion to arise in the relation between art and science, in which the aesthetic, as in the sensation experienced, can become tainted by the rationalizing expression of scientific functions. Indeed, as boundary crossings in neuroaesthetics evidence, scientists can often objectify the aesthetic as a brain function: “There it is, the sensation, inside the brain! Beauty itself!” If this function is not located in the neuroimage, then “how can it possibly be good art?” Herein the boundary crossings of art and science become part of a particular version of human rationality, which is given as the only starting point and end goal. The problem with neuroaesthetics becomes apparent, as such, in its claim to be able to discern between an objective aesthetic of beauty and the ‘dubious’ impostors of Conceptual Art (Ramachandran 2011: 192–193). Marcel Duchamp is, as follows, presented as an absurd figure who, as any child in an art gallery can apparently see, parades himself in the emperor’s new clothes. Surprisingly perhaps, it has also been argued that art is not immune to the philosophic concept, as when the aesthetic mixes with the concept, some of its af fective political potency is lost (Deleuze/Guattari 1994: 198). Sure, art and philosophy radicals can always try to subvert the rational brains of science, but if this attempt to disrupt the functions of science by bringing together concepts and sensations is grumbled as a critique of science rather than a productive rapprochement, then critical artists might struggle to secure funding that requires trouble-free disciplinary mixtures.

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We must further consider the ambivalent politics of collapsing boundaries. On one hand, capitalism works more effectively, it would seem, in the f luidity of borders and often encourages disciplinary mixtures if they satisfy the capitalist’s guiding principle of producing quantitative surplus value. In this way, collapsing boundaries can become part of an evil stratagem of neoliberal mechanisms that close the funding door to shut out criticality that gets in the way of profit, in favor of interdisciplinary and industrial impact. Nonetheless, protective boundaries (from broader disciplines to categorized subject genres) are often negligible lines that are inexorably breached by the erosive f low of unrelenting events that cannot be ignored. They come at us like waves, carrying a multitude of novel objects that crash into (and often overwhelm) disciplinary defenses. It is the interferences caused by these waves that are, like Joseph Schumpeter’s (1976) mutational model of capitalism in the 1940s, at once creative and destructive. What should we do when we are all out to sea? Should we build new disciplinary defenses or surrender ourselves to the ambivalence of the waves while trying to desperately hold on to a criticality that might challenge the status quo? Following such an ambivalent line of f light, this chapter begins by problematizing the notion of collapsing boundaries, focusing on the dilemma it poses in the institutional context of the neoliberal university. In short, the desire for interdisciplinary experimentation has to be considered in light of current conditions, in which mixtures are supposed to take place outside of so-called silo mentalities. It is therefore important, before any boundaries collapse, to examine the extent to which disciplines can (or should) productively mix outside of these silos. That is to say, before taking the radical step of replacing boundary thinking with a Whiteheadian inspired notion of nonlocalized interferences set out below, the discussion needs to step back a little to explore the Deleuzian method of interference which offers various experimental traversals between art, science, and philosophy, via the interventional potential of disciplinary giants, conceptual personae, aesthetic figures, and swarming demons.

Collapsing Boundaries

Silo Mentality and Criticality A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns […] The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. (From Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim 1961: 160) Before challenging boundaries and genres, and the disciplinary methodologies and theoretical frames in which they are conceived, we need to provide an institutional context from a Western university perspective. Indeed, there is a new business buzzword that urgently needs our attention, and it is coming soon to a university near you: The silo! We have been told by the managers of an increasingly neoliberalized education sector that we have been working in disciplinary silos for too long, and this is not good for innovation, productivity, and income. The pressure is on. We need to work across silos and get to the nexus that connects everything to everything else (Stirling 2014). But the nexus is full of threats. Our internal disciplinary power structures and ways of doing things will be made visible to all, risking exposure to the peril of alien methodologies and external metrics. In times of budgetary cuts and precarious academic labor, being outside of your silo, and consequently wide-open to these threats, could potentially lead to career death. The collapsing of disciplinary boundaries and the opening up to mixtures of all kinds cannot be seen as a simple elixir. This was a point understood in the university well before the current fashionable idea of escaping silos took hold (Benson 1982: 38–48). In effect, there has always been a well-intentioned, if not somewhat confused concern that we might find ourselves metaphorically emerging from the depths of the silo only to wade about in the shallows of interdisciplinarity. On one hand, in real practical terms, without investment in the time and resources necessary to master the discrete methodologies in which functions, sensations, or concepts become manifest, it is argued that academics risk exposure to pedagogical, and even intellectual limits (ibid). Indeed, divestment, not investment, is the institutional norm in the arts and humanities today, so we need to consider the argument that the production of ‘shallow interdisciplinarity’ is increasingly used by the neoliberal university as a marketing tool to promote low-cost content that lacks intellectual depth, as it is in neither this silo nor that. On the other hand, it is perhaps surprising that Deleuze and Guattari (1994), once the masters of disciplinary mixture, similarly contended, in their final collaboration, that methodological limits are imposed by disciplines on mixtures between art, science, and

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philosophy. That is to say, by allowing mixtures, we risk creating methodological confusion. The neuroaesthetic intervention into art risks, as such, confusing the sensation of artistic practice with a function of science. Inversely, there is a potential methodological limit imposed on art when an artist tries to make a sensation out of a function. In spite of this methodological confusion, we do perhaps need to concede that it is often outside of the silo, in the inevitability of mixture, that we experience novelty. This is a contrasting sense of creativity that renders the notion of shallowness an ineffective metaphor. It is, as follows, outside of the boundary line, in non-locations, where many novel genres, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks are made. If this is indeed the case, then, the problem is how to collapse boundaries without entirely jeopardizing the protection boundaries offer in the current neoliberal state. One way to proceed is to step outside the discipline and advance with relations of suspicion; that is to say a relational critical attitude (Summer 2003). Here I think the mixture of critical theory and interdisciplinarity provides some valuable resources, since it interestingly occurs by way of a creative-destructive interference. In other words, via its alien-like presence, this ambivalent mixture might, at very least, disrupt the political status quo in the university. As Jennifer Summer argues: “There are a number of commonalities that critical theory and interdisciplinarity share. To begin with, both paradigms are academic outcasts, interdisciplinarity for its disciplinary violations and critical theory for its critique of the status quo” (ibid: 6). The notion of allying these two academic ‘outcasts’ promises to imbue the relations established between, for example, art and science, with suspicion. Given the current neoliberal context, such an allegiance of outcasts is clearly of use, but here I would like to move on from a mode of criticality established in the distancing function of a conventional critical theory that remains aloof from other disciplines, to consider relations in terms of non-location. I will elaborate on this strange term below, but for now, the reader needs to imagine disciplinary mixtures outside of the notion of boundaries, which, by default, suggest that mixture follows from a series of locations. Indeed, what is proposed in this chapter is not a collapsing or distancing of disciplinary lines, but an experimental transversal cutting of lines, or making of new patterns, understood here through a theory of wave interferences. Significantly, wave interferences take into account a new materialist-infused approach that does not look to distinguish between science and art in terms of a culture/nature artifice, or indeed, as riven between human ideas and the non-humans that we encounter in certain scientific experiments. On the contrary, what might be referred to as non-art, non-science, or non-philosophy must all welcome a blurring of the lines between non-human interventions into culture, and vice versa, raise concerns about anthropocentric incursions into non-human worlds.

Collapsing Boundaries

To fully grasp the utility of non-location in this non-human context, it is important not to mistake a suspicious relationship for the idealist’s traditional critical confrontation with a kind of science that is only concerned with natural forces. This is because, in many respects, the critical distance established between the arts and humanities defined, on one hand, by a cultural worldview of human ideas, and by the hard sciences and technologists’ experiments into nature on the other, has led us to a wasteful theoretical impasse in the sense that human ideas and natural worlds are kept apart from each other. Any slippage, we are told by the idealists, toward a nonhuman paradigm in the arts and humanities threatens to open the door to rampant science and technological forces, and will, it seems, lead to the ruination of human ideas (Krystal 2014). Yet, as Katherine N. Hayles (2017: 130–131) argues, it is surely the aloof position humanists adopt with regard to scientific and technological projects that ensures important early collaborations and prior discussion of ethical considerations are omitted. What is needed now is an alternative to the impasse of scientific and idealist determinism. As follows, wave interferences are not so much a new critical theory of distance established in disciplinary depths or shallows as they are a new method of doing criticality on the surface, as set out below.

Criticality and Wave Interferences What does it mean to do criticality on the surface? Academics are neither in deep waters nor in the shallows, but, like Conrad’s Lord Jim using his hands and feet to stay af loat, we are on the surface of superpositioning wave patterns that submit us to the boundless potential of creative-destruction. It is on this surface that artistic sensations, scientific functions, and philosophical concepts mix. At the same time, we need to critically probe the political implications of creative destruction at a time when neoliberal agendas are part of these emerging wave patterns. This is a political mode of interference that in many ways situates disciplines in the seemingly conf licting rhythmic interferences of a rampant capitalism; the modus operandi of which is, in itself, creative-destruction. In effect, interferences can play to, or accelerate, the same relational patterns of creative-destruction the neoliberal uses to work the system. In other words, the critical interference may well find itself riding the dangerous waves of interdisciplinarity in the university, already exposed to the politically-constituted rhythmic interferences of capitalism. It is, indeed, at this moment of crisis, difficult to imagine an alternative to a neoliberal regime, for all its creepy resemblances to the instrumentalism of Stalin’s education policy in the 1930s (Brandist 2017: 583–607). For very similar reasons, in the political context of their time, in which capitalism begins to get a grip on the university, it would seem, Deleuze and Guattari

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(1994) expressed caution concerning the extent to which disciplines can and should mix back. As follows, their grasp of science, art, and philosophy as three discrete waves now takes on renewed political significance.1 In effect, each wave pattern in the abstraction of the interference is emitted when the brains of scientists, artists, and philosophers encounter and respond to the chaos of events they encounter. These wave patterns can interfere with each other in various creative and destructive ways, but that does not mean they go on to constitute a new harmonious relation or discursive formation. In other words, a new synthesis, or indeed, a new silo, is not produced by an interference. It is important, as such, not to forget that the outcome of an interference is not a merging of disciplines in a new spatial location. A wave interference does not equate to a static position on a grid, it is a new pattern that gains propensity when two or more waves intersect each other. Although we encounter a certain methodological incompatibility when waves mix, there is the potential for novelty to emerge from three kinds of interference (extrinsic, intrinsic, and non-localized). It will be important, then, to grasp the familiar refrains or new lines of f light that might occur when previously discrete waves interfere at these three levels. In this way, the first- and second-wave interferences (intrinsic and extrinsic) offer “insights into the future of philosophy […] art, and science” (Plotnitsky 2012: 22). But it will be in the potential of an unbounded non-location that a discipline can ultimately say no to its own methods: a non-philosophy, non-art, and non-science. Indeed, it will be impossible for any one person (artist, philosopher or scientist) to claim ownership of an interference once it has become non-localized, since methods become more akin to acts of disciplinary piracy. There are, nonetheless, certain advantages to becoming a disciplinary pirate, given that wave interferences are never fixed. They are full of smooth intensities and events that cannot be possessed; they are the ideal conditions for acts of piracy (Kuhn 2010: 28). For example, when an artist plunders a function of science to create a new aesthetic figure, she does not necessarily become locked into methods, or indeed, discursive formations or existing referents. This is not to say that on the way to non-location we do not experience methodological diktats. The interference is always limited, in intrinsic and extrinsic interferences in art and science, for example, to never becoming more than a sensation of a function. Art grasped as a function becomes a novel referent of the function, but until it becomes completely non-localized, the sensation retains the method from which it was originally conceived. This is the methodological limit a discipline imposes on another discipline, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s abstraction. 1 In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari discuss three discrete planes. The alternative use of “wave” here is an extension of their concept of interference and also marks out a reorientated interpretation of the original text. See a fuller discussion in: Sampson 2016.

Collapsing Boundaries

To produce the kind of novelty promised by non-location, the interference needs to oscillate in all directions. The philosopher plunders the scientist’s methods, as she does the artist’s practice, and likewise, the scientist is free to plunder philosophy and art. To be sure, our example of neuroaesthetics is a case of piracy writ large, carried out on behalf of a scientist whose plundering pays very little respect to the methods of the artist or indeed to what artists might consider great art. The interference is not, as such, interdisciplinary in the sense of achieving unity through a synthetic rapprochement. The interference is not supposed to be a harmonious relationship; it can, and should, be kept ambivalent, complementary, and antagonistic. The interference must remain critically creative and destructive at the same time. The ultimate aim of the critical interference is not to synthesize, but to route around fixed ideas, opinions, and regimes of perception associated with discrete methodologies. This means, eventually, going beyond the limits of extrinsic interferences and intrinsic interferences toward an interference that says no to itself; that is to say “nonlocalizable interferences take us beyond any given field” (Plotnitsky 2012: 21), to a quantum-like superposition. Indeed, unlike the add to/cancel out overlapping, interactions between waves in locationist classical physics, things start to get weird in quantum superposition in the sense that waves (and particles) can be in multiple locations at the same time. For now though, let us begin by using some examples to explore a progression through extrinsic and intrinsic interferences.

Extrinsic Interferences: Giants Although Deleuze (2006: 15–16) identifies a young Paul Klee as an artist whose abstract sensations produce an extrinsic interference when they encounter Leibniz’s mathematics, Klee’s own relationship to science is ambivalent and changed as he grew older (Ball 2003: 357). As a young man, he apparently admired the idea that a science of color could assist an artist in choosing the correct color, however, in later years, he recoiled against the color system of his contemporary, the German chemist, Wilhelm Ostwald. As Klee put it: “That which most artists have in common, an aversion to colour as a science, became understandable to me when, a short time ago, I read Ostwald’s theory of colours” (qtd. ibid: 357). The older Klee thought that scientists looked down on artists, considering them ‘childish.’ Nonetheless, Ostwald’s claim to have produced “harmony using a tone of equal value” according to “a general rule” not only made Klee think that Ostwald, in fact, was the child, but that his system of color also threatened to rob art of its very “soul” (ibid).

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Setting aside the science of color for a moment (for that is another kind of interference), we need to consider Klee’s shifting relation with Ostwald as an extrinsic interference that resonates between disciplines, but within the methodological limits discussed above. This is how disciplines are often enunciated through the names of certain giants whose big splashes in their own fields sometimes have a ripple effect beyond their boundaries as interferences. A. N. Whitehead stands out here as an exceptional giant whose functional mathematics spilled into the world of philosophical concepts, where, for example, vectors become the prehensions of Process and Reality (Whitehead 1985). Most giants are, however, constrained to their own field through their methods. Scientists are compelled, as such, to acknowledge (or refute) the giants who come before them, to justify their own standing. Philosophers make use of giants to ensure a coherent refrain or mark out a junction point wherein one kind of philosophy breaks with another (Deleuze/ Guattari 1994: 125). The giants of science similarly produce paradigmatic cut-off points (Newton, Einstein, Bohr). Art, evidently, has its own giants, dotted along a series of fashionable and meandering paths, some with faded or forgotten names, others revived and brought back from the dead. At various points these paths converge with other disciplines, as was the case with Klee and Ostwald. Similarly, when Abstract and Conceptual Art came together in the latter part of the twentieth century, we see how the sensations of art and the concepts of philosophy begin to overlap. This was not necessarily a harmonious convergence; it risked numbing the affective power of the sensation, turning it into what Deleuze and Guattari surprisingly considered to be the anesthetic quality of the conceptual readymade (ibid: 198). In other words, when sensations and concepts overlap, the latter lose their political capacity to resonate at the level of affect, since the artwork becomes over-imbued with signification, hampering sensation. To consider further the limitations and potential of this overlapping of disciplines and the extent to which the ripples created by giants might interfere with the methodological remit of another field, it is useful to look again at neuroaesthetics. For it is here that science attempts to make the sensation of art into a function. In the neuroaesthetic program developed by neurobiologist Semir Zeki, for example, the study of art and the brain begins with the function of the cortical retina, which is, we are told, the proven location of sight in the brain, and therefore fundamental to an “ineluctable” conclusion that the “overall function of art is an extension of the function of the brain” (1998: 71). Not only is the experience of art exclusively rendered to the “sovereign capacity of seeing” via the cortical retina (ibid: 72), but Zeki is also keen to vaunt the giants of art like Michelangelo, Cézanne, Matisse, and Mondrian, and declare them as fellow seekers of knowledge about this function. This assumed mutuality between art and science is, it seems, part of a harmonious desire to grasp how real objects appear to these great

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artists in the same way that a neurobiologist seeks out the functions of knowledge via the cortical retina. But wait! There are a number of practical issues to confront here. Firstly, most of these artists are, evidently, painters! So Zeki’s initial study of aesthetics is narrowed down to a specific genre of art. We should perhaps, before moving on, apply the above-mentioned relations of suspicion to this expression of neuroaesthetics. Zeki hopes to synthesize the functions of neurobiology and the giants of painting, but in essence, he tries to make the experience of one kind of art into a function of beauty, while denying others a place in the cannon. Indeed, we go on to find out that his brand of neuroaesthetics is even selective within the genre of painting, whereby the giants of cubism, for example, are recognized as heroically attempting to mimic brain function, but not as successfully (neurobiologically speaking) as more representational artists. Thus, Vermeer is celebrated for perhaps getting closer to the Platonic Ideal than Braque could ever hope to (ibid: 80). The second significant practical issue at hand here is how to critique the locationist tendency in the neurosciences to attribute certain art forms to certain regions in the brain (Sampson 2016). That is to say, even when the neuroaesthetic lens moves away from the static canvas to focus on the mobiles of kinetic art, for instance, it is only to make the point that the kind of mobiles Alexander Calder produced are perfect stimuli for other brain cell regions, assumed to be dedicated processors of movement. Likewise, Zeki makes a sharp contrast between the parts of the brain required to process Abstract Art and those used to process Representational Art (1998:  87). What we end up with is what some suspicious critics from within neuroscience itself have called a manifestation of neurophrenology (Shulman 2013: 93), wherein different regions of the brain are rather crudely seen as differently appreciating different genres of art. It would seem that in its search for function in beauty, neuroaesthetics presents a rigidly compartmentalized notion of what constitutes “great art.” This idea not only produces a locationist reading of art as a function of the brain, it also ignores the contested notion (and suspicion) regarding how art becomes great. It is ultimately the methodological limitations imposed on the potential of interferences by the giants themselves that limits the extent to which things can mix at this extrinsic level. As follows, giants are constrained to interferences that can only resonate between planes because it is always the “rule” that the “interfering discipline must proceed with its own methods” (Deleuze/Guattari 1994: 217). Klee’s disinterest in the new science of color is, as such, played out again in the methods of science, wherein the autonomy of the sensation comes into increasingly antagonistic relation to the functions of scientific knowledge. This scientific methodization of the artist’s sensation is, evidently, nothing new, but through neuroaesthetics, sensations, it would seem, become even more functional, scientifically speaking.

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Again, from a relation of suspicion perspective, we need to interrogate the problematic claim that a universal set of principles representing beauty exist, in isolation, inside the brain. To begin with, the neuroaesthetic focus on widely celebrated painterly artworks as the benchmark for beauty ignores the politics of art; a historical pathway of patronizations leading from elite privileges to an art market increasingly composed of capitalist corporations and oligarchs on superyachts. For example, by focusing on the functional movement of kinetic art in the brain, neuroaesthetics jettisons the all-important politics of f luid movement from the sensation of Calder’s performing sculpture (Daniel 2015: 52). Moreover, these oldschool leanings of scientists that exclude certain artworks from the neuro-principle of beauty because they are outside the cannon, or because their child-like properties do not appeal to the conservative vision of what constitutes ‘great art,’ further covers up a bizarre reluctance to register modes of art that extend beyond elite galleries, auction houses, and corporate asset holdings to provide a critique of the art market. Indeed, contrary to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) surprising concern for the potentially anesthetizing outcome of mixing the sensations of Abstract Art and the readymades of Conceptual Art, it is perhaps the absurd critical interference by the readymade itself that allows the concept to slide into the contemporary aesthetic, and, at very least, to confuse the methodological boundaries between art and philosophical concepts. There is a further reversal of the kind of functionalisation of sensation experienced in neuroaesthetics in the field of design, wherein practitioners and theorists like Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2013), as well as Benjamin Bratton (2016), have deployed critical and speculative theory to interfere in the dominant imperatives of capitalist industrial design. The artwork of Garnet Hertz (2017) is of note here, too, since it goes beyond building a critical or speculative narrative into the design concept of an object, moving directly to the processual critical making of the designed object’s functionality. The politics of the sensation of the object are not, therefore, lost to industrial functionality or the anesthetic of conceptualization; they surface in the functionality of a politically disobedient aesthetic figure. In other words, Hertz routes around the concept of the designed object by producing a politics of sensation in the process of making.

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Intrinsic Interferences: Conceptual Personae, Swarming Demons and Aesthetic Figures [The intrinsic interference] takes philosophy outside philosophy, say, into science or art or makes it difficult, even impossible, to decide to which field a given concept belongs. (Plotnitsky 2012: 22) On the intrinsic level, interferences are vital, all-pervasive, and non-human. They can live beyond the limits of a giant’s method; producing slidings from one field to the next. For example, philosophy uses conceptual personae to bring concepts to life, but it is crucial to stress that these personae are not real living persons. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra grasps the world not as humans do, since he is a pure concept. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 63–66) similarly deploy a conceptual persona (the idiot) to illustrate how idiocy tests the fixed methodologies of the public philosopher. The idiot’s questions are the conceptual interferences of the absurd, the lost, the discarded, the anomalous, and the dysfunctional. They cannot destroy methods, but they can slow them down and make them stutter. The intrinsic interferences of science similarly express themselves beyond the scope of human subjectivity. In the past, these swarming demons were mostly imaginary non-humans that interacted with dependent variables, counting and judging speeds, and observing the limits of archaic technology and early data capture. Maxwell’s demon, for example, boldly went where no subjectivity or technology had been before. Yet other non-human inorganic agents have demonic capacities. Ostwald’s color system is founded, as such, on Newton’s observation that a prism could reveal something that the human eye failed to see: the splitting of light into colors. Today, it is new technologies that are increasingly taking on the role of swarming demons. Space probes, artificial intelligence and artificial life forms have the potential to reach beyond human perception to experience the events of previously unknown functions. These demons have their limits, however. The neuroimage, which is supposed to see through the brain to expose neural functions in action, should not to be misconstrued as the All-Seeing Eye. Such demons are compared to an eye at the summit of a cone (ibid: 128–129). They have many blind spots. So, arguably, the neuroimage may well detect the f low of blood to a neuron network, and therefore, the neuroscientist will assume that a brain function correlates in some way to a particular sensation and inferred behavior, but the fMRI will never see the mental concept of beauty in the brain, for instance. The artist’s intrinsic interferences take the shape of aesthetic figures through which artists experiment with sensation. Figures add new varieties of experience to

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the world (ibid: 175). Again, neuroaesthetics, which might look for beauty in Turner’s representation of the sea, misses the point that it is the figure of the seascape itself that takes on the role of an aesthetic. Similarly, it is not Duchamp or von Freytag-Loringhoven, but rather their childlike readymades and Dada-embellished performances that blur the boundary between concepts and sensations. So long as the giants of art and philosophy are constrained to their methods, their concepts and sensations will be kept at a resonating distance, preventing their full mixture. However, in contrast to the swarming demons of science, aesthetic figures have generally established a much closer relationship to the philosopher’s conceptual personae. There are, as such, many similarities between the two in terms of their interventional powers. On the one hand, a conceptual persona, like the idiot, is deployed to route around the fixed concepts and opinions of public philosophy. On the other, aesthetic figures can intervene in regimes of perception like those established in the methodology of neuroaesthetics, which gives sensation to the subject/object relation. It is important nonetheless to note that as many limitations are imposed on the mixtures of intrinsic inferences between art and philosophy as there are on the blind spots of scientific demons. These interferences pass into one another, but only insofar as they produce sensations of concepts and concepts of sensations (ibid: 177). This is not so much an issue of methodology as it is characteristic of a now well-rehearsed Deleuzian concern with two differing consistencies resulting from the encounter with actual and virtual events in which interferences occur. On one hand, then, conceptual personae are like Promethean pirates, bringing concepts to life by stealing from art to make a heterogeneous consistency. The concept is, as such, the actualization of the virtual event. On the other hand, the aesthetic figure is a vampire, looking for another body to virtualize. These vampires live through their affects, providing the virtuality of the event with a figure. However, seeing that these figures are the undead, their sensation of concept can only ever become an otherness caught in a matter of expression (ibid: 177). Like the movie vampire, who virtualizes the body of their last victim, or Duchamp’s cubist nude descending a staircase, or even von Freytag-Loringhoven’s performing cake hats, the otherness of aesthetic figures give the event a body, a life, a universe of possibilities. Yet let us be clear: these figures are not just about capturing events in figurative resemblances, they are the conditions for bringing a composition to life beyond the representations of the living – or indeed, a Vermeer!

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Art Interferences E.E.G. KISS The demons of neuroaesthetics are partial observers in the sense that they can only see the sensation of beauty through function. But what of the sensation’s intrinsic interference with the function and the growing number of aesthetic figures that inhabit the world of the neurosciences? One such ‘art-science’ project is Lancel/ Maat’s E.E.G. KISS, a performance and installation artwork, which “investigate[s] how a kiss can be translated into bio-feedback data” (Lancel/Maat 2014). In short, participants in the installation wear E.E.G. headsets to measure brainwaves activity during “live kissing experiments.” Fig. 1: Lancel/Maat’s E.E.G. KISS (2014 – ongoing).

Although E.E.G. KISS is primarily responding to privacy and trust issues through the concept of public intimacy, there are intrinsic interferences at play in between the aesthetic and neuroscientific functions that cannot be ignored. Indeed, at this level of interference, a neuroscientific methodology that assumes that the experience of art is a mere matter of simple location is disrupted in various ways that conspicuously resist the functionalization of the sensation. As Flora Lysen (2016) points out, the artists’ provocative question of “can we quantify the feeling of a kiss” (4) in the E.E.G. neuroimage turns the scientific study of such feelings on its head. Thus, the performance of the kiss reveals more about the audiences’ feel-

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ings for neuroscience than it does their feelings for each other, as expressed in the brainwaves of the kiss. Indeed, for Lysen, this is not the scientific “staging of the spectacle of the kiss” (ibid), as experienced in earlier media technologies, like film; inversely, “kissing serves as an iconic case study for a spectacle of science” (ibid). Herein, this art-science project breaches the methodological boundaries of the neurosciences and contemporary art. As Lysen puts it: “[T]his art project straddles a difficult and ambiguous line: while it draws upon the authority and popular appeal of neuroscience research and turns us into objects of research, it simultaneously puts the scientific research itself on display and turns us into co-researchers of the scientific situation” (ibid). What the aesthetic figure of E.E.G. KISS achieves in this staging of neuroscientific research is “constantly subverting the boundaries of what counts as a valid scientific measure of brain activity” (ibid). Lysen claims that this staging makes it “impossible” to disentangle “the logics of ‘art’ and ‘science’” (ibid). As follows, the methodological goal of neuroaesthetics – to find beauty in brain functions – is reversed to such an extent that we now find the aesthetic in the participation of what Lysen calls “neuromania” (ibid). It does indeed become difficult to know which field we are in. Is E.E.G. KISS art-science or science-art? In this context, then, the aesthetic figure of the kiss provides an intrinsic interference that slides between disciplinary planes.

Ecologias Virales Another development in Contemporary Art that produces intrinsic interferences between sensations, concepts, and functions is the introduction of non-human performances in art, such as those that appear in Ecuadorian artist Kuai Shen’s experiments with zombie ants. Perhaps building upon a deep artistic fascination with insects, as becomes apparent in surrealist art (Parikka 2016), the aesthetic figure of Ecologias Virales goes beyond the implicit dream-like metamorphoses of Dali’s bugs to an explicit non-human performance in the gallery. These performances help Shen to evade human-centered regimes of perception and offer insights into emerging social systems that are uniquely zombie ant-centered (Shen 2017). To be sure, what is truly fascinating about these South American ‘zombie’ ants is that they are infected by a parasitic fungi (Cordyceps unilateralis) that manipulates the ant’s behavior for its own reproductive needs. These ‘anarchic forms’ of emergent social systems may even prompt new ways of perceiving human and non-human social systems as not just decentralized, but also contagious.

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Fig. 2: Kuai Shen’s Viral Ecologies, 2012.

The infected ants’ unpredictable performances bring to life a viral concept of sociality that is seemingly a ‘stranger’ to the conventional human cognitive model of distributed collective intelligence. There are obvious parallels here between these non-human viral ecologies and the current condition of the sleepwalking virality of the human-digital assemblage (Shen 2017; Sampson 2012). Shen’s experiments are evidently problematic. Aside from ethical concerns about the use of live insects in art, the work is a curator’s nightmare, as the anarchic behavior of the ants means that they will always try to escape the methodological remit of the aesthetic figure and wander the gallery f loor as any other insect would. Perhaps the anarchy of the interference caused by the zombie-ant aesthetic figure marks a point wherein the non-human rejects the methods of the human artist.

Non-localized Interferences There is an extraordinary component of A. N. Whitehead’s (2004) concept of the temporal passage of nature that helps us to begin to grapple with the extraordinary mixtures of non-localized interferences; that is, his seemingly strange notion that experience does not simply begin with subjective human consciousness. Experience is indeed, according to Whitehead, always already out there in the primacy of world. In the context of this discussion, natural beauty is not simply a phenomenon experienced inside a location in the brain. The experience of events of natural beauty did not begin with the arrival of human perception. To put it another way, a human and her perceptive apparatus are not the author of events of natural beauty, nor indeed the concept of nature, since these events preceded

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humanity. It is not human perception that draws attention to a worldly experience of natural beauty, as such. It is, conversely, this experience in the world that draws attention to the limits of human perception, stuck in the here and now, yet erroneously split from the passage of nature from which it emerged. It is not, therefore, human perception alone that sheds light on experience, but experience of the world that draws attention to the anomaly that is human perception. Moreover, in stark contrast to a phenomenal theory of perception that only occurs in localizable points (e. g. in the brain of the subject experiencing the object), and a specific point in time (the here and now), non-location refuses to allow perception, and the passage in nature, to bifurcate. In other words, the non-locational theorist must not, as such, disconnect the complex “temporal thickness” (Whitehead 2004: 56) and intensity of the durational quality of the actual occasions (or events) of primary experience from an embodied experience of located points in time and space that are perceived as secondary qualities (Debaise 2017: 8–15). In short, the experience of the non-locational interference does not begin with the human. It begins with the event. It is significant to acknowledge that any denial of human perception being the dominion of experience is going to be met with a degree of incredulity. Of course, conscious human perception is not an illusion. As Hayles (2017: 65–66) rightly points out, we miss a trick if, in experiencing reading this chapter, for example, we fail to recognize the importance of our perceptive consciousness. Evidently, we do experience consciousness! But as Isabelle Stengers (2014: 147) points out, Whitehead’s notion of conscious perception is not a command post; it only takes into account what occurs in the passage of nature. This is quite unlike the quest of neuroaesthetics; that is say, to find beauty in the visual perceptual functions of the human brain. In contrast, a non-locationist view of perception does not grasp the brain as the producer of reality. That is to say, perception does not decide if things are more or less real! Perception only goes as far as declaring mere instants of percipient, and sometimes specious, events in experience in the here and now. Perception yields an often misplaced abstraction of a far more complex relation to reality experienced through a concrete passage of events. Following Whitehead then, it is not perception, but the process of reality that produces subjective experiences. Again, it is not that mindfulness does not exist; evidently, as you are reading this, you will know that it does; but what is being argued here is that the mind only has a “foothold” in experience rather than this “command post” (Stengers 2014: 67) we misleadingly experience. In terms of grasping how Whiteheadian non-localised interferences can dispense with boundary thinking, it is useful to begin with the following three points:

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1. The non-locational theorist needs to undo the subject-predicated philosophies developed over epochs of human consciousness; that is to say, she needs to completely disengage from the solipsistic sense that humans are the masters of perception when it comes to experiencing primary material substances through secondary qualities only. We know this to be a mere foothold since, in part, we can trace the historical incursions of the swarming demons of science, which, in spite of their many blind spots, see objects as humans would never see them. Demons do indeed inhabit and expose a realm of experience that existed before, as well as beyond, human perception. Similarly, non-locational theory needs to overcome the language games that have become absorbed into the minds of humans and deceptively explain the subjective experience of the real world in such limited ways. This will mean rethinking the experience of objects, not as predicated by the subject-knowers of objects, but by focusing attention on reversible relations in which objects and subjects experience one and other. This might take the form of a non-human art in which humans participate. 2. The non-locational theorist needs to use this challenge to the rigidity of subject-object relations as the basis for rethinking the ontology of spatial relations. Non-location is not realized, as such, through set spatial coordinates in which subjects interact with objects (the here and now of the gallery space). On the contrary, it is interaction in itself that determines Whiteheadian space, and this requires a temporal understanding of how what is over there ends up in the here and now before disappearing into the residue of a memory. Art as event! 3. Related to this second point, the non-locationist must move beyond purely spatial concepts associated with boundary thinking to radically approach the experience of objects in terms of the passage of events or what we might call the waves of experience. In short, non-locational theory needs to bring into play Whitehead’s concept of prehension, which, in crude terms, brings the events of objects (event-objects or wave-objects) together as an experience, and must not be confused with the perception of objects.

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Non-locational Art, or: How Will a Discipline Say No to Itself? Fig. 3: Mikey Georgeson’s Wall Stains.

A non-locational discipline is supposed to say no to its own methods. So, what will a non-art feel like? Perhaps we can look to Mikey Georgeson, an artist whose work falls in the Dada tradition, wherein conceptual personae and aesthetic figures mix; yet he also demonstrates a playful interest in non-bifurcation (2017). Georgeson’s work with wall stains, for example, gives body to an autonomous non-human expression of sensation that does not, we might assume, know the methods by which artists typically produce such expressions. Who knows better the methods of stain-art than the stain itself? Fig. 4: Chris Salter + TeZ: Direction and Sound’s Ilinx, 2014.

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A future development in insect-art might be to actively encourage these creatures to escape their curated place in the gallery or spark a rebellion that says no to the sensation in which they are captured. Similarly, non-art could be found in the aesthetic figures and swarming demons of tech-inspired art. Setting aside popular scientistic notions that a demonic AI could produce art greater than any human’s work, there is the potential for AI-art, using generative competing neural nets, to refuse the methods of art, or at very least, explore new styles (Elgammal 2017). In the field of design technology too, wherein industrial and commercial imperatives have mostly determined disciplinary boundaries, Hertz’s (2017) critical making project is of apparent interest, as it differentiates between the object-orientation of critical design and its own critical process-orientated approach. In other words, unlike critical and speculative design, which challenges the bland industrial and commercial boundary lines with the designed object itself, critical making works through the study and production of technological objects. While the former is arguably stuck in the here and now of the critical moment, the latter is more closely aligned to the events of design as expressed in the process of critical making rather than the concept of design, and possibly the reversibility of subject/object relations.2 There are performative technological environments that further aim to disrupt human perception and potentially expose it to the non-bifuracted passage of events. For example, visitors to Chris Salter, TeZ, and Valerie Lamontagne’s Ilinx (2015) installation were asked to enter a dark space dressed in visors and wearable technologies fitted out with sensors and actuators intended to mess with perception. Ilinx is not, however, about immersive sensory deprivation. Through the overloaded sensory experience of sound, vibration, and distorted vision it is supposed to provoke a more profound series of sensory substitutions, pushing the bodily boundaries of the everyday sensorium into synæsthesia. Drawing on Roger Caillois’s (1958) original concept of Ilinx, the work aims to produce a temporary disruption of perception. Whether or not sensory substitutions are indeed a moment in which the panicked percipient mind realizes its own precarious foothold in the processes of reality or just instants of disorientation in the here and now, and, as Caillois intended, nothing more than a profound destabilization of lucid perception, is of course, open for debate.

2 For example, Hertz (2017) discusses the disobedient functionality of PARTY’s 79 % Work Clock project, which functions as an alarm clock, drawing attention toward the enormity of the gender pay gap in the US where women are paid only 79 percent of what men make annually. The Work Clock chimes once 79 percent of the workday is over. “When a woman hears its chime, she might as well go home” (PARTY 2016).

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Conclusion: The Non-locational University This chapter concludes with the same air of ambivalence as it began. Yes, it may well be the case that the waves of the non-locational interference are where boundaries collapse, and methodologies potentially give way to the novel creativity of disciplinary mixture, but how do we keep criticality alive when the protective layers of a field disintegrate? We might indeed be experiencing the beginning of a (yet-to-come) non-field that says no to fixed methods, rides the waves of creative-destruction, and concedes that our sense of subjective perception in the event is nothing more than a percipient foothold. Of course, radicals have searched for criticality in the nomadic sciences and schizoid philosophies of mixture before. They have already looked to the tangled rhizomes, the lines of f light, and the smooth space of the pirate seas in which disciplinary boundaries become overwhelmed by wave-objects. Yet, in this latest moment of crisis in the university we find disciplines dangerously surfing the waves of an interference produced by neoliberal agendas of creative-destruction that do not say yes to criticality. It is now clear why Deleuze and Guattari ended their collaboration together with a book so concerned with the problem of disciplinary mixture. Indeed, before we can safely say no to our own methodological boundaries, we first need a university that can also say no! Not, that is, to disciplines, fields, or methods, but rather a non-locational university that says no to the status quo!

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Schumpeter, Joseph (1976): Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London: Routledge. Shen, Kuai (2017): “Interview.” In: CLOT Magazine, http://www.clotmag.com/ kuai-shen Shulman, Robert G. (2013): Brain Imaging: What It Can (and Cannot) Tell Us about Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stengers, Isabelle (2014 [2002]): Thinking with Whitehead: a Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stirling, Andy (2014): “Disciplinary Dilemma: Working Across Research Silos Is Harder Than It Looks.” In: The Guardian, June 11th, https://www.theguardian. com/science/political-science/2014/jun/11/science-policy-research-silos-inter​ disciplinarity Summer, Jennifer J. (2003): “Relations of Suspicion: Critical Theory and Interdisciplinary Research.” In: History of Intellectual Culture 3/1, https://www.ucal​ gary.ca/hic/issues/vol3/7 Whitehead, Alfred N. (1985 [1929]): Process and Reality, Free Press. Whitehead, Alfred N. (2004 [1920]): The Concept of Nature. Dover Publications. Zeki, Semir (1998): “Art and the Brain.” In: Daedalus 127/2, pp. 71–103.

“This Body Is in Danger!” On Ecology, Protest, and Artistic Activism in Benjamin Verdonck’s Bara/Ke (2000) Christel Stalpaert Politics and activism are a burning issue in theater and performance studies, including where ecological issues are concerned. However, much has changed since performance scholar Una Chaudhuri chose eco-theater as the theme for an issue of Theater (1994). In this paper, I trace the changing role of art and activism with regard to contemporary ecological issues in the posthuman era. I will first describe the changing definition and constitution of nature itself in current ecological thinking, resulting in the paradoxical call to let go of nature. In this process, an expanding view on ecology connects the environmental with ref lections on the production of subjectivity and social relations, and with posthuman considerations, bringing both living beings and inanimate parts of the world into ecological thinking. I connect these critical and wider views on ecology to new opportunities for activism and (eco-)art. French philosopher Bruno Latour developed his notion of political ecology with consideration for the complexity of current ecological crises, demanding new modes of protest and activism. As I will go on to observe, contemporary artist and activist Benjamin Verdonck takes an unusual stance with regard to political ecology. Letting go of ‘nature’ and moving beyond the logic of crime and punishment, he develops surprising artistic strategies and tactics to meet the demands of current ecological thinking. In his Bara/ke (2000) tree house project, he maintains a special relation with the ‘public’ and with the ‘public’ space of Bara Square in Brussels, connecting environmental thinking with ref lections on the production of subjectivity and social relations in relation to ‘home’ and ‘belonging.’ Moreover, rejecting the claims of monologic knowledge concerning ecological issues, and replacing heroic action with interactive spatial practices in a more-than-human world, Verdonck develops an interactive performance with posthuman qualities.

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The Changing Definition and Constitution of Nature in Current Ecological Thinking In the twenty-first century, ecological conditions are changing, as is ecological thinking. In the Anthropocene, human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems is significant. In order to move beyond a modern humanist anthropocentric perspective, philosophers such as Timothy Morton and Bruno Latour have called upon a critical and wider view on environmental thinking. Whereas eco-critical performance scholars Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May call for an acknowledgment of the “more-than-human world”1 (2012: 2) to rethink the relation between nature and culture, eco-philosopher Morton moves beyond these binaries altogether calling for an ecology-without-nature. In his book Ecology Without Nature, he argues that the ‘Romantic’ image of Nature is the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking. Morton abandons this idea of nature because the Romantic imagery gets “in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art” (2009: 1): “Putting something like Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration” (ibid: 4). Bruno Latour makes a similar claim from a socio-political perspective in his Politics of Nature, saying that, “at least in its theory,” ecology has “to let go of nature” (2004: 9).2 He is convinced that a “thoroughgoing rethinking of ecology” (ibid: 2) is needed if ecology still wants to have a future. Latour observes that the philosophy of ecology is excessively bound by Naturpolitik. Nature is considered a comprehensive unity that is part of reality, lying in a dual relation with culture and politics. This is a binary way of thinking, however, that corresponds to the modern project of the nineteenth century. Latour argues that “Nature” as a unity is but one idea about nature, an idea fabricated by “the Modern Constitution” (2004: 18; 2007: 254). He observes that the careful distinction between nature and culture, and between human and thing, follows the self-evident, but misleading binary structure of a two-house-collective. The powers in this two-house-politics are distributed in a binary manner. In the first house, speaking humans agree by convention on the “truth” concerning the “real” objects of Nature located in a second, distinct and “incommensurable” (2004: 53) house. These “real” objects of Nature have “the property of defining what exists,” but they “lack the gift of speech” (ibid: 14). Only 1 “More-than-human” is a phrase coined by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous. Arons and May operationalized it in their ecodramaturgy. 2 In Reassembling the Social Latour argues that “‘Nature,’ conceived as the gathering of all non-social matters of fact, should be dispensed with as well. […] ‘Society’ and ‘Nature do not describe domains of reality, but are two collectors that were invented together, largely for polemical reasons, in the 17th century” (2007: 109–110).

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a few experts, having accumulated knowledge, have the authority and power to move back and forth between the two houses, and to speak for these ‘real’ objects of Nature. They create a common ground for the claims of monologic knowledge. Latour warns of the “perilous” nature of this distinction (ibid: 19), as it “maintains all human beings in a state of illusion” (ibid: 56). The speaking humans in the first house are, in fact, “ignorant in common” (ibid: 14); devoid of any external reality, they merely have to believe in fictions about “Nature.” Latour observes that the Modern Constitution of Nature coincidences, then, with the introduction of ecology in the late 1860s, at a time when the ideals of the Enlightenment were superseded by deterministic, positivist thinking, and when the science of sociology was firmly established, putting the focus on the rational comprehension of the relation between man and his environment. When the German biologist and social Darwinist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919)3 first used the term ‘ecology’ in 1866 in his Allgemeine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen, he defines the science of ecology as follows: “Unter Oekologie verstehen wir die gesamte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Aussenwelt, wohin wir im weiteren Sinne alle Existenzbedingungen rechnen können.” (1866: 286) Following this naturalist and positivist science, the relations of living organisms to the external world, their habitat, their customs etc., could only be understood through carefully controlled, observational/empirical knowledge. Latour explains that “positivists were not very inspired when they chose ‘facts’ as their elementary building blocks to build their cathedral of certainty. They acted as if it was the most primitive, solid, incontrovertible, indisputable material” (2007: 112). Latour introduces the notion of “mononaturalism” (2004: 204, 228) to emphasize “the political character of the undue unification of the collective in the form of nature in the singular” (ibid: 245). He refers to the “ravages of social Darwinism, which borrowed its metaphors from politics, projected them onto nature itself, and then reimported them into politics in order to add the seal of a irrefragable natural order to the domination of the wealthy” (ibid: 33). Of course, Latour blames neither Darwin nor his evolution theory for the perverse mechanism of this binary politics of nature: “Darwin is obviously innocent of the Darwinisms committed in his name” (ibid: 271). Latour fulminates against this politics of nature as it exhausts “the diversity of opinions, thanks to the unified certainty of the facts of nature” (ibid: 130), to the point of fabricating facts. “How could a solid fact be that solid if it is also fabricated?”, he wonders (2007: 112). 3 Ernst Haeckel was the first biologist (social Darwinist) to use the term ‘ecology’ (German: Ökologie). However, he should not be considered the sole forerunner of late 20th century modern ecology. E. P. Jacobsen, for example, also refers to Alexander von Humboldt’s “totalizing view,” which even more firmly prefigures the modern project to comprehend nature as a consistent unity, in a dual relation with culture (2005: 104).

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In her Ecological Thinking, philosopher Lorraine Code similarly observes that positivist knowledge is built along a “narrow path of linear connections” (2006: 48), and that a confidence in “monologic knowledge claims” (ibid: 104) gives facts a “universal validity” (ibid: 49). She criticizes the obsessive need for control and the “ethos of mastery” (ibid: 48) at work in these positivist-empiricist epistemologies. The “allure of mastery” (ibid: 48) is deceptive, as it relies upon classifying and constructing taxonomies, solidifying nature into one coherent identity, distancing it from culture. Latour urges us to follow facts in their making, rather than blindly accepting matters of fact, rendering their mode of fabrication and the stabilizing mechanism of mononaturalism visible. His call for “matters of concern” (2007: 114) (instead of matters of fact) urges contemporary ecologists “to follow facts in the making and to multiply the sites where they have not yet become cold, routine matters of fact” (ibid: 118): “When agencies are introduced they are never presented simply as matters of fact but always as matters of concern, with their mode of fabrication and their stabilizing mechanisms clearly visible” (ibid: 120). In his Politics of Nature, Latour also combats Romantic conceptualizations of Nature in terms of an organic, holistic system. These suffer from the same deficiency as mononaturalism: they still operate within the two-house politics of the Modern Constitution, clinging to one ideal (fictional) image of a harmonious, ‘green’ Nature as lost paradise: “If we concede too much to values, all of nature tilts unto the uncertainty of myth, into poetry or romanticism, everything becomes soul and spirit” (2004: 4). As such, letting go of Nature means letting go of one ideal order of nature that the world should preserve. Letting go of Nature means letting go of one unattainable ‘ideal’ (Romantic) image of a ‘natural state’ or a ‘lost paradise’ to be regained. Nature has never been ‘harmonious,’ and there is no use in trying to reach an unattainable image that never actually existed. As Latour observes, we are “incapable of rediscovering that lost paradise, that Eden toward which deep ecology would like to redirect our steps” (ibid: 43). Rather than sticking to one, unattainable image of Nature, Latour suggests negotiating “‘the progressive composition’ or ever-ongoing constitution of one common world” (2007: 254). In her notion of “ecological ethos” (2006: 46), Code opts for a similar “interpretative negotiation” instead of deceptive “monologic knowledge claims,” in order to develop an ethics of accountability and responsibility (ibid: 104). Therefore, letting go of Nature in ecological thinking does not refrain from talking about animals, plants and climate change; it also persists in covering “all types and ideas about space and place” (Morton 2009: 2). This expanding view on ecology entails two important consequences. First, to persist in covering all types and ideas means making room in ecological thinking not only for living beings, but also inanimate parts of the world. This is why Latour prefers Tarde’s notion of “acquisition” over Darwin’s “correspondence” and “adaptation” in cataloging the various manners and degrees of being, as it

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better expresses “the formation and growth of any being whatsoever” (2004: 265). In his Politics of Nature, he urges political ecology to start with the idea of a complex collective or community, including humans and non-humans. Code similarly observes that “ecological thinking reconfigures relationships all the way down: epistemological, ethical, scientific, rational, and other relationships between and among living beings and the inanimate parts of the world” (2006: 47). Second, covering all types and ideas about space and place means investigating how the environment can be truly called a home for everyone – a place to dwell and feel safe, a place where one can feel at home and belong. In other words, ecological thinking connects the environmental with a ref lection on the production of subjectivity and social relations. Etymologically, the term ecology combines the Greek words oikos, or ecos, meaning house or dwelling place, and lógos, meaning reason, or study. In recent ecological studies, the first part of the word – ecos – has been reevaluated. Code, for example, proposes “an ecologically derived epistemology” able to “animate feminist, multicultural, and other postcolonial transformative politics and practices” (ibid: 47). In The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari refers to “the ethico-aesthetic aegis of an ecosophy” (2000: 41): a contraction of ecology and philosophy that connects the environmental with ref lection on the production of subjectivity and social relations. These paradigm shifts in current ecological thinking run parallel to the different constellation of current ecological crises, such as climate change, demanding new modes of activism. As I will outline in the next part, Latour’s notion of political ecology considers the complexity of current ecological crises and calls for new modes of activism. In his view, the current militant practices of ecology movements are still burdened by an ideal image of Nature: “Under the pretext of protecting nature, the ecology movements have also retained the conception of nature that makes their political struggle hopeless” (2004: 19, original emphasis). Taking a closer look at the matters of concern in the 1987 Greenpeace militant ecology campaign called This Body Is in Danger!, I will now outline the new challenges for contemporary activists. Considering these ecological paradigm shifts and the new constellation of current ecological crises, I wonder whether the modi operandi of these activists would be as successful in our day as they were in the 1980s. For, in (posthuman) ecological thinking at present, it is not only this human body that is in danger, but the network itself in a more-than-human world. Greenpeace’s slogan, This Body Is in Danger!, in fact speaks of an anthropocentric agenda. What would happen if militant ecologists let go of Nature? Could a wider view of ecology, including all types and ideas about space and place, open up new and unforeseen opportunities for protest and artistic activism?

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Shifting Modes of Protest and Activism In 1987, Greenpeace launched a remarkable campaign. Celebrities posed in T-shirts with the slogan This Body Is in Danger!, alluding to the miserable situation of the environment. The T-shirt was for sale and many were wearing it with pride, displaying their solidarity with the Greenpeace campaign. The T-shirts were a huge success, and for a while they were popping up everywhere. Posters with celebrities wearing the same T-shirt were also distributed in large numbers, calling upon our duty to change our attitude and take action to protect the environment before it was too late. The posters had a clear message: “No Greenpeace – No Bart (or some another celebrity) – No Body.” The campaign stressed the delicate balance of human bodies in the ecological system and pointed out that humans were sure to die if the ecological balance was further damaged by industrial pollution. Fig. 1: A poster of the 1987 Greenpeace campaign This Body is in Danger!, featuring the Flemish rock star Bart Peeters, 1987. Poster design Wim Schamp, copyright Amsab – ISG.

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The T-shirt campaign sided with, among others, an eight-week campaign in the summer of 1987 to fight ocean incineration. This highlighted the large amount of waste that was being burned at sea on specially-designed incinerator ships. To raise awareness of this pollution, activists chained themselves to the chimneys of the furnaces. This militant ecology or radical eco-activism was thus primarily associated with civil disobedience and direct action, and with a clear goal: to obstruct capitalist forces in their environmentally unfriendly activities. Activists displayed a banner on the incinerator ships: “Ban the burn.” This slogan is instructive, clear, and simple. In this eco-activist discourse, an ‘us’ is clearly demarcated against an evil ‘them.’ Slogans supporting eco-actions and protest marches are commands with big exclamation marks, intended to persuade people to join an expanding group of ‘us’ in actually doing something about the situation. Flags with the Greenpeace emblem were also attached to the ships, expressing the social unity of the activists.4 The growing ‘us’ group was supported by the natural sciences. Extensive scientific and technical evidence was used to convince the public that this disposal of waste was the cause of an ecological disaster. The causal relation was presented as “a solid objective reality,” what Latour would call “a matter of fact” (2007: 91, 87). In the end, the activist protest was considered a huge success: the ship could not dispose of its waste because of the human obstruction, and had to take its full cargo of waste back to port. Because of the growing public pressure, the Spanish government revoked the permit allowing the ship to burn its cargo off the northern coast of Spain. While the activities of Greenpeace are still highly important,5 it seems that new, less traceable kinds of ecological disasters threaten society. Tracking down the causes of the ecological crisis along linear connections, defining who is to blame, setting clear goals, and taking direct action, following one path, determined by the logic of cause and effect, action and reaction, crime and punishment, have become less vital. In his Politics of Nature, Latour considers the mad cow disease scandal as symptomatic of this ecological paradigm shift. The ecological crisis caused by mad cow disease, unlike preceding ecological disasters such as pollution resulting from the disposal of waste by incinerator ships, has “no clear 4 Latour, following Durkheim’s reasoning, stresses that “the emblem is not merely a convenient process for clarifying the sentiment the society has of itself: it also serves to create this sentiment; it is one of its constituent elements” (2007: 38). They are actors, and “not simply the bearers of symbolic projection” (2007: 10). 5 As I argued elsewhere, matters of fact still have an important function in tackling certain instances of environmental destruction. As Latour himself indicates, evidence-based research remains indispensable in arguing against climate-sceptics. In the end, as Latour says, science should not be confused with opinion. The operationalization of matters of concern “does not aim to cast doubt on research results; on the contrary, it is what ensures that they are going to become valid, robust, and shared” (Latour 2013: 4). Cf. Stalpaert 2018.

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boundaries, no well-defined essences, no sharp separation between their own hard kernel and their environment”6 (2004: 24). Following Latour, contemporary ecological crises are a rhizome network, with invisible producers, and “numerous connections […] that link them in many different ways to beings” (ibid: 24). Similarly, performance scholar Una Chaudhuri observed in her keynote lecture at the PSi conference in Stanford in 2013 that the logic of climate change is a very complex one, with no clear spatial boundaries. It does not even have a spatial logic. It relies upon numerous choices made simultaneously in different parts of the world. Environmental crises have become so complex, so multi-faceted, that no solution is possible from a single perspective. Considering ecology as a science to understand how the crisis works and to put forward one solid solution is mere fantasy. One cannot trace those who are to blame for the pollution, punish them, prevent them from causing further pollution, and save the earth. Following Latour’s reasoning, one must admit that the militant discourse of activism, defending nature against the effects of industrialization, pollution, and so on can no longer have the same (calculated) effect as it did back in the 1980s, as the target in acting against, for example, climate change, is less definable, and hence, the path less clear. Moreover, according to posthuman thought, it is not the human body, but the network in which the human body is involved that is at stake. Current ecological thinking also incorporates a posthuman turn, and fundamentally challenges notions of subjectivity and human identity. This, of course, also has its consequences when it comes to how (activist) action can be taken, and how critical art can tackle ecological matters. Hence, to have a future, a contemporary eco-activist or eco-artist should at least take these ecological paradigm shifts into consideration. The complex rhizomatic entanglement of current ecological crises might leave us perplexed and rudderless. I am also convinced, however, that the complexity of the matter should not make us cynical or skeptical about the potential for protest, activism and critical art in environmental matters. Critical art does have its af fect (written with an ‘a’); it might be less ef fective (written with an ‘e’) in outlining the path to follow in order to rescue the planet, but it might be all the more affective in the sense of constituting “various af fective forces” (Mouf fe 2005: 24). In this sense, contemporary eco-art can mobilize particular actors in the network instead of channeling energies toward one ideal image of a lost

6 Latour calls the case of asbestos one of the last ‘modern’ ecological crises in The Politics of Nature. Even though it took ages to track down the causes, it became eventually clear that the asbestos, once an ideal construction material, was the cause of lung cancer. This causal deduction is no longer possible in current ecological crises such as mad cow disease or climate change (2004: 23).

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Eden or a better future, and in doing so, it can give people the ongoing desire to change things. Letting go of Nature7 also requires a new concept of action and agency. Latour reproaches both militant ecology – the work of ‘green’ ecology movements – and the philosophy of ecology – the theory behind the militant practice – for dictating “moral conduct in the place of ethics: apolitical, they decide on policy in place of politics” (2004: 19). Latour would say that the militants in the above-mentioned Greenpeace campaign limited the shape, size, heterogeneity, and combinations of associations in the activist actions in advance. Those in charge provide a convenient manual for the action to be taken, but in so doing, they limit the possible movements of actors involved. Moreover, in their defense of nature, and in the political forces they exert, militants still have a modern conception of nature. The ‘warm’ and ‘green’ image of an organic and harmonious Nature is put in a binary, dual relation with the devastating forces of industrialized culture, as in twohouse politics. This Romantic image is considered a strong normative concept, used “to account for the tasks to be accomplished” (ibid: 246). As such, letting go of Nature also means letting go of an activist know-all attitude founded on social and empiricist matters of fact. In the following part of this contribution, I outline how activist and artist Benjamin Verdonck introduces a wider view on ecology in his tree house project Bara/ke (2000). I will consider the artistic strategies in Verdonck’s political ecology, following Latour’s reasoning, through five issues: 1) letting go of Nature and tracing Romantic facts about nature in their making; 2) expanding environmental thinking to notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ in the public space of Bara Square in Brussels; 3) exerting interpretive negotiations as a diplomat of dissensus; 4) moving from interactive political theater to interactive spatial practices; and 5) involving posthuman actors in a networked agency (rejecting heroic human action and protest).

7 Following Morton’s theory of ecological criticism and Latour’s political ecology, the ‘green’ movements and eco-activists cling too desperately to an unattainable Romantic image of Nature. Moreover, Latour explains, by injecting their concern for the environment with a political dimension, the ‘green’ movements touched the heart of the modern two-house-politics (2004: 18–19).

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Letting Go of Nature and Following Facts in Their Making in Benjamin Verdonck’s Bara/Ke (2000) Fig. 2: Benjamin Verdonck’s Bara/Ke (2000): a billboard of ‘lost’ Nature as Paradise, courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 3: Benjamin Verdonck’s Bara/Ke (2000): a tree house on Bara Square in Brussels, courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 4: Benjamin Verdonck’s Bara/Ke (2000): a tree house on Bara Square in Brussels, courtesy of the artist.

For his long-running and site-specific art project Bara/ke (19–28 August 2000), Belgian activist and artist Benjamin Verdonck lived seven meters above ground for ten days in a self-constructed wooden pile dwelling in the middle of the Bara Square in Brussels.8 Verdonck’s tree house is reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin, located a mile outside his native village of Concord. The reference to an icon of the Romantics’ sublimation of reclusive life in unspoiled ‘Nature’ is no coincidence. In re-enacting a contemporary version of this famous hut, Verdonck traces the Romantics’ concerns in their constitution of ‘Nature.’ Living a “reclusive” life in the cabin for two years, self-sufficient, though not without visitors, Thoreau enthusiastically describes “the auroral character” of his modest “home” (1995: 78) in Walden, or Life in the Woods. The isolated primitive living conditions seemed quite beneficial for his spiritual endeavors: “This was an 8 Likewise, in Hirondelle/Dooi vogeltje/The Great Swallow (Brussels 2004; Birmingham 2005; Rotterdam 2006), Verdonck lived in an enormous swallow’s nest, thirty-one metres in the air, for one week. On the ground below, between the passers-by, was a gigantic egg. In Brussels, the bird’s nest was built in front of the administrative centre of Brussels. In Birmingham, it was built in front of the Rotunda building, next to the Bullring shopping mall in the middle of the city.

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airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere” (ibid: 78). Thoreau believed he was leading a more authentic and meaningful life closer to nature. Much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thoreau regretted the ref lective, rational distance that positivist scientists had toward Nature, reducing it to facts and figures. He aimed for a passionate, emotional union with Nature, with the artist-genius deliberately retreating from society and settling down in a natural state of solitude. Thoreau pities his contemporaries in the dark and overcrowded modern cities, where towering buildings and large factories keep them from hearing the wind-music. He advises these poor souls to return to wild, unspoiled nature and to slough off the modern burden of civilization: “We need the tonic of wildness […] we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature” (ibid: 205). The architectural similarities between Verdonck’s tree house and Thoreau’s cabin in the woods, as described in his Walden, are striking. Both dwellings are “merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough, weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night” (ibid: 78). However, Verdonck recasts the hut in an urban environment that is far from unspoiled, quiet, and peaceful. We might even wonder with Thoreau whether Verdonck ever hears the terrestrial music of the winds in his sacred dwelling, considering the number of skyscrapers that surround his little cabin. Verdonck’s self-constructed wooden pile dwelling is positioned in the middle of the Bara Square in Brussels. This was clearly not a retreat into isolation, as Rousseau, Thoreau, and the Romantics proclaimed, Verdonck was engaging with the things and people he encountered in the public space of a busy square in Brussels. During his ten-day residency, he invited local residents, passers-by – among them immigrants and sans-papiers – and tourists to join him for open breakfasts, mini-concerts, billboard announcements, performances, a shared meal during the Sunday market, or a daily press-campaign. A billboard next to the tree house displayed a massive photograph of an exotic ‘natural’ place, with a white beach glittering in the sun, and a palm tree, offering shade and shelter from the warmth. This billboard functioned as an ironic remainder/reminder of the discourse of Romantic sublimation, displaying an idealized but unattainable image of a ‘lost,’ ‘natural,’ ‘original’ state. The idea of a ‘warm’ and ‘green’ nature is reduced to what it is: an image. Verdonck does not display this idealized image of Nature as a normative concept, accounting for an activist task to be accomplished, redirecting the spectator toward a lost Paradise. The colorful

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billboard painstakingly reveals that Nature is not part of reality, but an idea, a construct within a binary two-house politics that befits the modern constitution of the world. Verdonck leaves the dual arena that pits nature versus culture for what it is and rethinks the definition and constitution of nature itself. Facing the dilemmas and paradoxes of the place in which he dwells, Verdonck negotiates the constitution of that space with everyone who dwells there, thus allowing a new political ecology (Latour) and ecological ethos (Code) to emerge.

Expanding Ecology to Notions of ‘Home’ and Belonging at the ‘Public’ Space of Bara Square Bara Square is obviously not an exotic, ‘natural,’ unspoiled place. It is situated on the outskirts of the historical part of Brussels (the Pentagone), where high-speed trains from Paris and London and road traffic from the main Belgian motorways arrive in the city. The government labeled the neighborhood of Bara Square “a dangerous non-place” (Verdonck 2008: 64) and started gentrification processes in 1999 to reconfigure the area. The discourse of gentrification is compelling: it promises to improve the ‘attractiveness’ and ‘f lair’ of the neighborhood. However, gentrifiers conceal their real, economic pursuit: to increase property values. The renovation and revival processes usually primarily benefit the real estate business. Often, lower-income families and their small-scale businesses have to move from the economically expanding area, as they are unable to keep up with the rising living standard. As such, in their pursuit of profit, gentrifiers of Bara Square mainly took into account the traffic function of the area, and failed to give the square a public function. The space is shared, but individuals or communities do not actually meet there. People cross the square quickly, taking the shortest path on their way to work; the area is not a meeting-place. It is too noisy, there is too much traffic, the square is not attractive, with no trees or benches to sit on. In terms of ecological and social connections, it is not an interesting area. Through organizing apparent non-events at Bara Square, such as the shared meal and the open breakfasts, Verdonck put forward some ideas to re-activate the area, not in economic terms of urban development and gentrification, but to forge ecological and social connections. With his artistic interventions, Verdonck inaugurated an alternative gentrification process, injecting the notions of ‘revival’ and ‘development’ with ecological thinking, calling attention to what Lorraine Code called an “ecological ethos” (2006: 48). This ecological thinking does not address “endangered Nature” as such, but multicultural politics and practices, bringing all kinds of “relationships between and among living beings and the inanimate parts of the world” (ibid: 49) to the center of our attention. In his tree house, situated in this “dangerous non-

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space,” Verdonck provided space for a new political ecology to come. This ecology is no longer merely about regaining ‘nature’ from ‘culture,’ redirecting us toward an unattainable image of ‘unspoiled’ nature or a ‘lost paradise.’ This ecological thinking had more to do with the etymological meaning of the first part of the word, i. e. the Greek oikos, or ecos, meaning house or dwelling place. The ecological crisis at stake here is the crisis of a “sense of belonging” (Latour 2007: 7). In fact, Verdonck’s tree house is less the work of art than the complex narrative unfolding from “the conversations he had with people passing by” (Verdonck 2008: 66). Inviting passers-by to his tree house for coffee, tea, and breakfast, Verdonck negotiated the make-up of the space of Bara Square. He registered and hence accounted for diverse feelings of crisis, offering what Latour would describe as “occasions, circumstances and precedents” (2007: 59) for new ecological and social connections to emerge. In doing so, Verdonck traced the hegemonic relations between people and their environment, wondered what kind of relations a dwelling place like Bara Square houses, and whether everyone entering this field – workers, tourists, passers-by, or immigrants – is satisfied, feels at home in the current make-up of the world, the current distribution of hegemonic relations, and the current configuration of power relations. The coffee, tea, and breakfast that Verdonck served was thus also food for thought, an invitation for the passers-by to slow down and to break away from the deceptive self-evidence of economic facts and figures (as provided by gentrification and marketing strategies). As such, Verdonck took a longer view and a closer look, to develop what Code called “an attentive concentration on local particulars” and “specificities” (2006: 50) about the concrete environment. Latour would say that Verdonck relocates the global and redistributes the local (2007: 181, 192). On the one hand, the narrative that unfolds during the long-running process of Bara/ke highlights the practical ways in which Bara Square is produced. The (otherwise invisible) long chain of (economic) actors, linking (fancy) sites to one another, is rendered visible. In this way, ‘invisible’ actors such as gentrifiers are made accountable for how Bara Square is being produced. The deceptive allure of gentrification processes and the shortsightedness of the gentrifiers’ focus on quick, economically predictable results are revealed. On the other hand, Verdonck also detected particular moving entities on Bara Square, such as tourists, passers-by, immigrants, and even the social ‘invisible’ sans-papiers. He traced how the local particulars of their moving bodies articulate the space of Bara Square and how they were placed and localized by structuring templates. By integrating the act of brewing coffee into his art, Verdonck percolated an acute critique of city branding and economically geared acts of gentrification. This critique, however, is not wrapped in a clear, easily digestible message. The artist’s tree house did not become his speaker’s corner for proclaiming his ideas about the environment. This urban intervention triggered a good deal of response

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from the local residents, tourists, and immigrants, and Verdonck connected with their ideas and expectations of home, environment, and belonging. He sought neither to convert people, nor to rationally persuade them to make a better world. The narrative unfolding from the urban intervention gave rise to a debate, connecting some people, dividing others, with some issues hitting the news. Instead of dictating moral conduct through monologic knowledge claims, Verdonck practices what Code calls a mode of “interpretative negotiation” (2006: 104). In place of claiming unequivocal, universal validity from observational knowledge, he collects “the many-faceted, textured character of knowing” (ibid: 49), deriving particular knowledge from the individual relationship between the visitor-spectator and his or her specific, local environment. Verdonck does not derive a totalizing view from this, for, as Code points out, knowledge claims are always “provisional” and “approximate” (ibid: 49). According to Code, this kind of knowledge production is particularly valuable in present-day ecological thinking, as it “has the potential in its micropractices to capture detail and nuance that slip through larger evidence sifting grids and precast templates and thus achieve linkages from location to location” (ibid: 51). As such, Verdonck performs what Code coined as “agential realism” (ibid: 47). This means that he adheres to the “realist commitment to reading observational evidence respectfully, while recognizing that evidence cannot speak for itself, but achieves its status as evidence out of human-nature encounters” (ibid: 47). The narrative unfolding in Bara/ke thus functions as a network, as a constant and contested discursive process of negotiation. Far from creating a new truth about ecology, Verdonck’s urban intervention inserts manifold voices, all with a their own experience of the oikos of Bara Square. After all, ecological knowledge claims about a place are always “provisional and approximate” (ibid: 50). This unfolding narrative-as-network proclaims a new approach to action and activism. In the above-mentioned This Body Is in Danger! campaign, the action was determined by a clearly identifiable group, Greenpeace. Members of this action were recognizable by their T-shirts, banners, and logos. Their documents explain their actions and intentions, describe their skills, measure their calculated effects, and weigh their success on the achieved goals. The collective action they proclaim seems to consist of coordinated human movements. Verdonck’s eco-action cannot be located, despite the central placement of his tree house on Bara Square. ‘His’ action, like any action is, by definition, dislocated; it is, as Latour puts it, “borrowed, distributed, suggested, inf luenced, dominated, betrayed, translated” (2007: 46). Verdonck’s action is sure to be “overtaken,” or rather “other-taken” (ibid: 44–45). A variety of agents are at work, participating in “an entanglement of interactions” (ibid: 65): “Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled” (ibid: 44).

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Exerting Interpretive Negotiations as a Diplomat of Dissensus Elsewhere, I have called Verdonck’s role that of a diplomat of dissensus (Stalpaert 2015). As performance scholar Efrosini Protopapa observes, diplomacy is “an act of negotiation” (Protopapa 2013: 4); it inaugurates “a specific relationship to sharing space and time with others, a specific set of strategies or tactics aimed at negotiation” 9 (ibid). As a diplomat of dissensus, however, Verdonck does not negotiate towards a consensus. The negotiation does not entail “a compromise among competing interests,” nor does it intend to “reach a ‘rational,’ i. e. fully inclusive, consensus, without any exclusion” (Mouffe 2005: 14). As a diplomat of dissensus, Verdonck does not cultivate a rational, ‘know-all’ attitude; he does not try to convince people of an ecological Truth about ‘home’ and ‘belonging.’ He rather provides space to disagree, or, in Jacques Rancière’s words, a space for “dissensus” (Rancière 2010). In his tree house, he listens, poses questions, and provides information, but no clear-cut answers. If the pragmatic interventions of these diplomats of dissensus have any value whatsoever, it lies in their ability to fold the cultivated and rational ‘know-all’ attitude into a never-ending process of negotiating heterogeneity. The discourse of negotiation that Verdonck employs as a diplomat of dissensus is clearly very different from the mononaturalist discourse in militant ecology, which Chantal Mouffe would call an antagonist discourse. His method is not provocative and does not demand direct action. His language is not instructive, clear, and simple. In Verdonck’s urban intervention, no ‘we’ is clearly demarcated against an evil and antagonist ‘them.’ There are no slogans supporting his urban intervention and he does not intend to persuade or convince the public to join a ‘we’ to actually do something about the situation. No symbol or emblem is used to express the social unity of one particular group reacting against another. In Latour’s words, Verdonck does not dictate “moral conduct in the place of ethics” (2004: 19). Instead of reaching a ‘rational’ consensus, Verdonck refuses to establish any particular content for the notion of the good. He values the notion of undecideability in every judgment and starts from the particular or the local: the individuals who pass by, stop, and think through what concerns them in relation to their experience of their concrete environment. Verdonck restores the actors their ability to articulate their own thoughts on how the social is comprised. He does not impose typological labels, nor a convenient manual of the social, which would 9 In her unpublished paper “Diplomatic Bodies. Redirecting, Sidetracking, Deflecting, Bypassing” (presented at the Choreography & Corporeality Working Group of the FIRT/IFTR World Congress, Re-Routing Performance, Barcelona, 22–26 July 2013), Efrosini Protopapa reflects on a choreographic project in which she develops the notion of diplomatic bodies, drawing on The Ignorant Schoolmaster by Jacques Rancière and Richard Sennett’s discussion of “everyday diplomacy” in Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (2012).

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limit the range of acceptable entities. He does not teach participants what or who they are and what they should do. He is not interested in telling the actors how to act. Rather, he retraces “the many different worlds actors are elaborating for one another” (Latour 2007: 49). He follows the actors themselves as they move along the networked space of Bara Square and considers their articulations as valuable. He is eager “to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands” (ibid: 12). As such, he follows “the social f luid through its ever-changing and provisional shapes” (ibid: 86). The actors’ traces that Verdonck follows are very diverse, as they travel at very different speeds and accelerations. This allows for particular dynamics to be traced in the groups at Bara Square. A posthuman perspective does not mean that collective action is no longer possible. On the contrary, what initially seemed to be an empty space, devoid of social activity, appears to be a site full of actors, “simultaneously seized by several possible and contradictory calls for regroupings” (ibid:  28). This notion of the collective is not the same as a homogeneous, stable grouping – it is a heterogeneous constellation. “Groups are ‘constantly’ being performed and […] agencies are ‘ceaselessly’ debated” (ibid: 63). Latour calls this “an association between entities,” “an entanglement of interactions” (ibid: 65): “By collective we don’t mean an action carried over by homogeneous social forces, but, on the contrary, an action that collects different types of forces woven together because they are different” (ibid: 74–75). This, of course, also affects the notion of identity and belonging. Thinking through the nature of groups, Latour insisted that “there exist many contradictory ways for actors to be given an identity” (ibid: 22). Verdonck’s merit, as an activist and artist, seems to be a particular “course of action,” threading “a trajectory through completely foreign modes of existence that have been brought together by such heterogeneity” (ibid: 75). But what can be the ef fect of such a particular course of action? It goes without saying that this mode of interpretative negotiation contests the spatial practice of gentrification at Bara Square. Yet can this mode also be truly transformative, in the sense that it makes “some difference to a state of affairs” (ibid: 50)? “Without transformation in some state of affairs, there is no meaningful argument to be made about a given agency […]. An invisible agency that makes no difference, produces no transformation, leaves no trace, and enters no account is not an agency. Period. Either it does something or it does not” (ibid: 52–53). How long does it take for a ceaseless debate to get bogged down in empty words, hollow phrases, and indifference? To trace the transformative capacities of interpretative negotiation, Latour unfolds a particular notion of agency. It is not “who is doing the action” that is at stake here, but “what is doing the action.” This not only brings non-human agencies into the picture, it also widens the scope of linear action to “complex repertoires of action” (ibid: 55) in an actor network. From this (posthuman) perspective, objects have agency, too “the interesting question at this point is not

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to decide who is acting and how but to shift from a certainty about action to an uncertainty about action – […] to decide what is acting and how. […] Which agencies are involved? Which figurations are they endowed with? Through which mode of action are they engaged? Are we talking about causes and their intermediaries or about a concatenation of mediators?” (ibid: 60, 72). Shifting from ‘who is acting’ to ‘what is acting’ lets us observe a posthuman mode of agency at work in Bara/ke, contesting and transforming the space of Bara Square. In what follows, I outline how Verdonck, following Latour’s reasoning, replaces a more traditional mode of interactive political theater with interactive spatial practices.

Contesting and Transforming Space in Interactive Spatial Practices It is no coincidence that Verdonck chose to erect his tree house on a market square, as this choice articulates a participatory spatial practice that engages with politics. As Latour observes, “places are placed” (2007: 195) and have a particular history, particularly as far as the circulation of human bodies is concerned. The market square not only provides an important function as a public meeting place, it is also closely tied to the history of Western democracy. The democratic ‘rule by people’ in Athens that was developed in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, and the particular public function of the agora or market square therein, served as an example for many democracies to come, in Europe and beyond.10 In current democratic societies, however, market squares seem to have lost their political function. In her The Empty Place: Democracy and Public Space, architectural designer Teresa Hoskyns aptly describes how neoliberal society has withdrawn politics from the public realm. She observes a “shrinking of the public realm” (2014: 10, original emphasis) and blames neoliberalism for appropriating the public space for capitalist consumption. Similarly, gentrification has turned the large open space of Bara Square into little more than a zone for consumption: it is superficially designed as a transportation hub, but fails to serve as a public meeting place. Putting his tree house in the middle of Bara Square, Verdonck reclaims the political potential of this public space. However, as a diplomat of dissensus, he is careful not to turn Bara Square into a “place where deliberation aiming at a rational consensus takes place” (Habermas in Mouffe 2013: 92). Hoskyns convincingly argues that the model of democracy in Classical Athens is articulated through a participatory spatial practice in the agora. The organiza10 The democratic rule in Athens was in sharp contrast to the earlier aristocratic rule, where political power was in the hands of a few aristocratic families, and power derived from material wealth, social prestige, and military success.

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tion of the open space plays an important role in constructing Athens’ democratic identity. As a multifunctional center of public activity in Athens, the agora was not only a center for business and religion, hosting markets and religious celebrations, but also for political activity. The large open space allowed a large number of citizens to assemble (‘agora’ actually means ‘place of assembly’). It was considered “a space for news and public opinion, for philosophy and ref lection” (Hoskyns 2014: 7). The open square was surrounded by public buildings, in which most officials held public office. The impressive façades of these buildings overlooking the great open agora not only guaranteed the democratic system, they also performed the grandeur and seriousness of democratic rule. The powerful architecture of the buildings was supposed to fill the passers-by with awe, and to remind them of their duty to be involved in politics. Under democratic rule, Athenian citizens had the right (but also the duty) to attend and vote in the ekklesia or legislative assembly. As a rule, the ekklesia met in Pnyx, a semicircular level cut from the side of a small hill west of the Acropolis, next to the agora. The Pnyx was not only theater-shaped, it also had a bema or speaker’s platform, where policies were submitted to the Athenian citizens. Serving to enact legislation, hear embassies, and deal with political matters, this location was considered the main decision space (ibid: 7). Yet Hoskyns has also outlined how three places were key to democratic rule: the market space (the agora proper), the mass public meetings of the assembly at the Pnyx, and the theater at Dionysus. The theater in Dionysus should not be underestimated in its mediating function for practicing democracy: “It was there that disagreements in society were acted out. […] Conf lict played a central role in the theater, and therefore in democracy, as sophists and rhetoricians concerned themselves with the theory and practice of argument. Citizens went to the theater to ref lect on conf licts and develop sophisticated arguments for the assembly” (ibid: 7). In other words, it is the physical movement or particular circulation of bodies along the tripartite relationship between these connected places that allowed the public to participate indirectly in politics. “Movement between these spaces allowed the citizenry to move between participation and representation, actor and spectator, practice and theory” (ibid: 27). This tripartite relationship differs from the two-house politics in the Naturpolitik of the Modern Constitution, as not only experts, but all citizens move between well-defined spaces. In a two-house politics, only a few experts possess the knowledge, authority, and power to move back and forth between the two houses. This wider view defines space not as something that is given, but as something that is negotiated. Structuring templates exist, but “movements and displacements come first” (Latour 2007: 204). Therefore, Latour prefers the concept of the construction site to that of space, as the former encompasses an ongoing contestation of space. Moreover, in a construction site, action is distributed among

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human and, importantly, non-human agents and non-human agency: “When you are guided to any construction site you are experiencing the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be dif ferent, or at least that they could still fail – a feeling never so deep when faced with the final product, no matter how beautiful or impressive it may be” (ibid: 89, original emphasis). “For any construction to take place, non-human entities have to play the major role” (ibid: 92). Latour urges us to focus on what circulates, rather than what acts in a construction site, so that we become better in detecting entities whose displacements had been barely visible, or were not supposed to circulate at all. Apprehending the agora as a construction site of democratic rule in ancient times brings forth surprising discoveries. True, in ancient times first-hand political participation was only allowed to freeborn, adult, male citizens. Women, slaves, and metics, or resident aliens, were not allowed to vote in the assembly or to hold public office in the buildings surrounding the agora. Their voice was rarely heard on a political platform. However, movement between the three places facilitated indirect political participation for some of these non-citizens. These could inf luence decision-making through mobilizing public opinion in the agora or by displaying discontent in the theater. For example, it is striking that Aristotle was not an Athenian citizen (Lucardie 2013: 1). Foreign craftsmen, businessmen and even businesswomen also informed decision-making through the formation of public opinion in the agora. They could inf luence public opinion by moving between the agora and the theater and joining the discussions. Circulating in the construction site of democracy was a political act. Contesting space, for that matter, can be considered an important participatory spatial practice.11 Translating the notion of space as a construction site into the realm of site-specific theater also reshuf f les the definition of interactive theater. In Bara/ke, interaction should therefore not be limited to the binary performer-spectator structure. Interaction is understood here as “a complex entanglement of interactions” (Latour 2007: 65): the type of agencies participating in interaction are not always human. Moreover, movement prevails over the structures of spatial templates and allows for a transformative action to be detected. Revaluing various participatory spatial practices, Verdonck reclaims the political potential of circulation in a market square as an open public space. Inviting passers-by to his tree house, he actually invites them to move between the theater space of his tree house and a public market place, between actor and spectator, and thus also hopes to move something on an activist or political level. This move also connects with the ‘time’ and ‘history’ of the constitution of the particular site. The narra11 This participatory practice engages not only spatially with space, but also in a chronological manner. Latour therefore suggests we use not ‘space’ but ‘site,’ referring to the archaeological dimension of time that is connected with any space.

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tive that developed from the Bara/Ke long-running urban intervention engages with politics in that it informed public opinion and, as such, indirectly inf luences decision-making about the place’s constitution. Verdonck does not limit his participatory spatial practice to the ‘legal’ citizens of Brussels. He allows the voices of immigrants and sans-papiers to be heard and recognized as legitimate partners on Bara Square. However, Verdonck’s participatory spatial practice at the market place differs from the classical democratic practice of the agora in two ways; first, as a diplomat of dissensus, Verdonck breaks from the Classical democratic discursive politics of eloquent public speaking; and second, he does not consider the public market place of Bara Square to be a “place where deliberation aiming at a rational consensus takes place” (Habermas in Mouffe 2013: 92). Rather, Bara Square is, in Chantal Mouffe’s words, a space “where conf licting points of view are confronted without any possibility of a final reconciliation” (ibid: 92). We should not forget that democratic rule in classical Athens was based on eloquence in public speaking. Gatherings of the people, political decision-making, and jury trials were all based on rhetoric effectiveness. The agora and the Pynx are primarily discursive public spaces. Agora in fact “comes from the word agoraomai, meaning to speak in the assembly, extending public speaking to the larger site” (Hoskyns 2014: 22). The importance of the bema, or speaker’s platform, in the public meeting place of the legislative assembly or ekklesia also indicates the importance of rhetoric in enacting legislation. Eloquence in public speaking, however, is not just a question of speech; it also involves discursive power relations. A well-educated man was supposed to cultivate his communication skills, as rhetoric was considered an instrument of political success, upward social mobility, and even economic profit. Rhetoric demands a correct, lucid, elegant, and balanced style of speaking in public space, and excludes other languages and styles as ‘inappropriate.’ Eloquence in public speaking hence also constitutes a particular distribution of power: it determines who is entitled to speak and – perhaps more importantly – to express himself in democratic rule. With Bara/Ke, Verdonck distances himself from the rhetoric prestige of the ‘proper’ spoken word of the ‘good’ orator. His tree house is not his speaker’s corner, nor is it a platform for good orators. In Verdonck’s tree house, the narrative unfolding from the artist’s conversations with passers-by is not consistent. The speaking style is not always ‘lucid,’ ‘elegant,’ or ‘appropriate.’ Some passers-by do not even speak one of the official Belgian languages. Rhetoric effectiveness is not Verdonck’s concern. In political terms, rhetoric effectiveness is measured by the consensus it gains; it serves the art of the discussable. The narrative unfolding from Verdonck’s Bara/Ke, on the other hand, exercises the politics of the ineffable and inexpressible. Verdonck’s site-specific performance is in that sense political: on the construction site of Bara/Ke the voice of immigrants and sans-papiers can

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be heard and recognized as the voice of a legitimate partner on Bara Square. This offers a sideways glance on mechanisms of exclusion in democracy in general and gentrification in particular, and of the painstaking determination of the borders of nations, peoples, and bodies. Sans-papiers are excluded from democratic rule, but that does not mean that their bodies do not circulate in the public space. By accounting for these circulations in his art work and making them visible, Verdonck finds cracks in the apparently smooth surface of our democratic eco-system in general, and of gentrification in particular. In these cracks, the voices of those who are excluded from the democratic organizational system become audible. Verdonck does not provide clear-cut answers to this complex ecological problem; he poses pertinent questions. But what about the effects of these interactive spatial practices? Latour is clear on this point: “Even a tiny change in the ways of talking about groups would change the performation of those groups” (2007: 231). Verdonck’s art installation aims to facilitate an ongoing, ever-demanding practice. It points at a permanent state of shared responsibility in a complex network. It is concerned with “the production of knowledge towards new practices of living” (André Gorz, qtd. Mouffe 2013: 90). Actions should therefore be considered as ongoing, demanding practices. Indeed, facilitating movement has to be understood as the disruption of habitual or unidirectional motion, lending new meaning to the concept of ‘action’ and ‘movement.’ This puts the success of artistic activism in a new perspective. Verdonck, for example, also valued the number of people who stopped at his tree house and wished him good morning. For him, changing the habitual trajectory of some people, their pace of habit of rapidly crossing the market without meeting anyone, was already a great step. This and other things happened without Verdonck interfering. People organized picnics on Bara Square, with the intention of getting to know their neighbors better. They connected in a complex ecological network, without Verdonck suggesting it. Action was neither mandatory nor outlined. But change did occur.

Rejecting Heroic Human Action: Posthuman Matter In this interconnected network, body power is no longer seen as generated from individual action; it is always processed. The origin of an action cannot be solely located in one individual. We could say, in Latour’s words, that “action is overtaken” (2007: 43). Moving beyond the notion of the human revolutionary subject, Verdonck inaugurates a form of resistance in which agency is not merely generated by human deeds or corporeal, targeted action; it resides in a “distributed agency of vibrant matter” (Bennett 2009). In his artistic activism, the ethos of mastery is exchanged for an ethics of accountability. Movement, for that matter, has to be

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understood as a shared response-ability; as the ability of any actor or actant to respond in the interconnected mesh. This new paradigm of shared responsibility is actually embodied in the process of response-ability shared by performers, visitor-spectators, and objects co-creating the narrative. What is striking in Verdonck’s Bara/ke is that the unfolding ‘narrative’ incorporates not only human beings, but also mere ‘things’ from the environment. This inaugurates an interesting posthuman perspective on ecology and the notion of the collective. The visitor-spectators are connected in the artwork, but also with and through non-human agents. The narrative is also developed through objets trouvés. If Verdonck found a small iron ring, he would take a card and write down his thoughts at the moment. Verdonck would also collect small, seemingly worthless objects, such as shopping lists, bits of paper, and lost gloves. From a neoliberal perspective, these objects are rubbish, they come from the gutter. However, Verdonck is convinced that, just by being picked up, their status changes. Co-creating the narrative, they become visible agents. IF YOU PICK UP THINGS, THEY CHANGE THEY’RE PICKED UP THINGS NOW AND THAT IS SOMETHING TOTALLY DIFFERENT (Verdonck 2008: 436)

Following Latour’s Actor Network Theory, these objects or things are not considered mere tools, used by an individual with particular intentions or goals. Things are considered “participants in the course of action, waiting to be given a figuration” (Latour 2007: 71). Making12 “objects participants in the course of action” (ibid: 70), does not mean that Verdonck adds multiplicity to the actor network; “it’s the object itself that adds multiplicity” (ibid: 144). He does not turn these objects into agents. Rather, it is by their very connection with humans that these objects shift from being intermediaries to mediators. Verdonck makes “them talk, that is, to offer descriptions of themselves, to produce scripts of what they are making others – humans or non-humans – do” (ibid: 79). By labeling the iron rings with vignettes, holding an account of the thoughts he had the moment he found them, Verdonck traces the connectedness between things and individuals. He treats these objects as agents in his long-running work, and renders them visible by including them in the narrative of the actor network on Bara Square. His account takes the form of small labels, on which he provides the action connected to the thingly agency. The collected items are also included in another account, Werk/ Some Work, a book published in 2008. Verdonck’s account turns invisible actants,

12 “‘Making do’ is not the same thing as ‘causing’ or ‘doing’: there exists at the heart of it a duplication, a dislocation, a translation that modifies at once the whole argument” (Latour 2007: 217).

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who had no figuration, into actors.13 Enhancing the objects’ visibility, he transforms invisible agency into a visible actor by placing it in an account. This is also how Latour’s notion of accountability has to be understood, as “having the agency enter into an account” (ibid: 53).14 As long as an agency is not represented in an account as doing something, it is not an agency: “Without accounts, without trials, without differences, without transformation in some state of affairs, there is no meaningful argument to be made about a given agency, no detectable frame of reference” (ibid: 52–53). This notion of accountability marks a paradigm shift in the notion of the ‘collective’ performing ‘eco-activist labor’ engaged with social ‘change.’ Change is not only derived from concrete action by human beings, gathered in homogeneous communities. Collective action should not be understood as a homogeneous social force; rather, an “action collects different types of forces woven together because they are different” (ibid: 74–75). In this heterogeneity, “action is distributed among agents, very few of whom look like humans” (ibid: 50). Verdonck retraces the formation of groups not only by human actors, but also non-human actors. As such, Verdonck’s eco-activist work for social change has more to do with potentialities of becoming and actualized virtualities than with realized potentials (Latour, following Deleuze 2007: 59); with allowing capacities to emerge, rather than with one ideal of changing the world through heroic action, market-driven business plans or models of gentrification. What can a person do with one glove, anyway?

Conclusion In this contribution, I discussed the political ecology (Latour) and ecological ethos (Code) at work in the Bara/ke (2000) tree house project by contemporary artist and activist Benjamin Verdonck. Letting go of ‘nature’ and moving beyond the logic of crime and punishment, he maintains a particular relation with the ‘public,’ and with the ‘public’ space of Bara Square in Brussels. As a diplomat of dissensus, Verdonck connects environmental thinking with a ref lection on the production of subjectivity and social relations in relation to ‘home’ and ‘belonging.’ As such, he connects ecological thinking with the broader etymological meaning of ecology and with posthuman considerations. Replacing heroic action with inter-active spatial practices in a more-than-human world, Verdonck also develops an inter13 “Any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor – or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant” (Latour 2007: 71). 14 In a footnote accompanying this thought, Latour observes that accountability is a crucial aspect here. He explains this further in the fifth chapter of Reassembling the Social. Accountability should be understood here as having the agency entered into an account (cf. Latour 2007: 53).

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active performance with posthuman qualities. He engages in interactive spatial practices, negotiating interpretation with the public, including posthuman and ethico-aesthetic considerations.

References Abram, Davis (1996): The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-than-Human-World, New York: Pantheon Books. Arons, Wendy/Theresa J. May (2012): “Introduction.” In: Wendy Arons/Theresa J. May (eds.), Readings in Performance and Ecology, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Bennett, Jane (2009): Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Durkham: Duke University Press. Chauduri, Una (1994): “‘There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake’: Toward an Ecological Theater.” In: Theater 25/1, pp. 23–31. Code, Lorraine (2006): Ecological Thinking. The Politics of Epistemic Location, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guattari, Félix (2000): The Three Ecologies, transl. Ian Pindar/Paul Sutton, London: The Athlone Press. Haeckel, Ernst (1866): Allgemeine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen, Georg Reimer. Hoskyns, Teresa (2014): The Empty Place. Democracy and Public Space, London: Routledge. Jacobsen, Eric Paul (2005): From Cosmology to Ecology: The Monist World-view in Germany from 1770–1930, Bern: Peter Lang. Latour, Bruno (2004 [1999]): The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, transl. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (2007): Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno (2013 [2012]): An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, transl. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lucardie, Paul (2013): Democratic Extremism in Theory and Practice: All Power to the People, London: Routledge. Morton, Timothy (2009): Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mouffe, Chantal (2005): On the Political, London: Routledge. Mouffe, Chantal (2013): Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, New York: Verso.

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Protopapa, Efrosini (2013): “Diplomatic Bodies. Redirecting, Sidetracking, Def lecting, Bypassing.” Unpublished paper, presented at the Choreography & Corporeality Working Group of the FIRT/IFTR World Congress, Re-Routing Performance, Barcelona, 22–26 July. Rancière, Jacques (2009 [2008]): The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, New York: Verso. Rancière, Jacques (2010 [1995]): Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, transl. Stephen Corcoran, London: Bloomsberg Academic. Stalpaert, Christel (2010): “The Creative Power in the Failure of Word and Language: On Silence, Stuttering and Other Performative Intensities.” In: Arcadia. International Journal of Literary Studies 45/1, pp. 77–93. Stalpaert, Christel (2015): “The Performer as Philosopher and Diplomat of Dissensus: Thinking and Drinking Tea with Benjamin Verdonck in Bara/Ke (2000).” In: Performance Philosophy 1, pp. 226–238. Stalpaert, Christel (2018): “Cultivating Survival with Maria Lucia Cruz Correia: Towards an Ecology of Agential Realism.” In: Performance Research 23/3, pp. 48–55. Thoreau, Henry David (1995 [1854]). Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Mineola: Dover Publications. Verdonck, Benjamin (2008): Werk/Some Work, MER. Paper Kunsthalle/Campo.

Reel Nature Speculative Gardens of Eden Małgorzata Sugiera Contemporary art has already confirmed that it offers a unique opportunity to unmoor anthropocentric certainties within productive, experimental, and inclusive spaces, able to transcend medial and disciplinary boundaries. Nonetheless, as rightly emphasized by T. J. Demos in Against the Anthropocene (2017), the extended spatial and temporal scales of geology specific to the new era of Man far exceed human comprehension. As such, they present a major challenge to established representational systems, making it necessary to craft new ways of seeing, novel methodologies, and concepts. Most importantly, they require an engagement with media and histories that have been kept apart. Yet Demos’ book confirms that the key question of how the Anthropocene challenges representational conventions, means, and strategies in the visual arts has been often put aside, while issues of how artistic-activist practices not only confirm but also provide compelling alternatives to adopting the Anthropocene rhetoric have been prioritized. I in no way intend to deny that both issues are equally important – raising awareness of human activities that disrupt the earth’s natural systems in our era of climate change and embedding experimental visual arts within collaborative social movements against the Anthropocene. Notwithstanding, in my view it is more important at present to demonstrate that, for instance, even data visualization tools are embedded in a political and economic framework, or to make audiences resist and reconsider fixed cultural meanings and rationalizations of nature by displacing its concepts and images from their naturalized transparency. With its mixed mediality and materiality, contemporary art is thus a privileged site at which discursive networks, complex practices, and links between humans, biotic and abiotic non-humans, and social realities can be mapped, but also unraveled. Therefore, contemporary works of art, even those which are not overtly political or social, cannot be reduced to their internal economies, to matters of artistic discourses, entirely divorced from the outer reality. Departing from that which has already been said and written about the critical role of art in the current eco-political crisis (cf. Davis/Turpin 2015; Demos 2016; White 2018), my article will address selected examples of discourses and

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epistemic strategies through which ‘the real’ of nature has been culturally constructed. I limit myself to looking closely at representations of the sixth day of creation, when, according to the Bible, Adam and Eve were created, and given unquestioned superiority over nature. I analyze various written, visualized, and participatory accounts of the Biblical sixth day, treating each version of the Garden of Eden as an unstable speculative vehicle allowing me to question our modes of perceiving, constructing, and consuming nature; to reveal ‘the real’ as a sedimentation of the discourses and practices of various disciplines and media, as the arbitrarily conceived and thus artificial ‘reel.’

The Sixth Day As Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro point out in The Ends of the World (2017), in the Western canonical expression of the idea of Eden, the world that existed until the sixth day of creation was a kind of stage set for the arrival of the main actor, that is, ‘Man.’ Therefore, the sixth day is often referred to as a unique moment of interface between the Age of Mammals and the Age of Man. As humans are the last to come, Danowski and de Castro argue, “Eden is a world-without-humans that is a world-for-humans” (ibid: 23). The same premise lies at the core of the Western idea of wilderness as something that has managed to survive ‘untouched’ from the dawn of time, as well as the rift between the cosmological and anthropological order, the basic dichotomy between Nature and Culture or, even, between organic life and humankind, seen as an essentially ‘anti-natural’ species, a factor that quantitatively and qualitatively sets life off-balance (cf. Descola 2013: 32–56). The positive concept of wilderness as the “world without us” is fundamental to what Donna Haraway calls “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” in her article (1983–1985), published over three decades ago. Haraway looks closely at the Nature Movement that reached its peak in the United States from 1890 to 1930, and found its best expression in the Akeley African Hall in the New Yorker American Museum of Natural History, opened to the public in 1930. Manifestly, it was Akeley’s aim to make the visitor experience nature at its moment of highest perfection, the moment of origin re-enacted in the form of twenty-eight habitat dioramas, in which all the major geographic areas of the African continent and most of the large mammals were represented. Although Carl Akeley himself called the place a “peephole into the jungle” (qtd. ibid: 24), pointing at a realistic depiction of which man and his technology are no part, Haraway names his African Hall quite rightly “a monumental reproduction of the Garden of Eden” (ibid: 20). Even more important in the context of my argument, since its opening in 1930, the Akeley African Hall made ‘real’ nature visible for millions of North Americans to experience as well. Thus the museum

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educated non-specialist audiences not only in the animals’ ways of life and natural history, but also in basic natural laws, demonstrated through staged habitat groupings. Haraway ironically refers to the animals shown there as “actors in a morality play on the stage of nature” (ibid: 24). Therefore, her article offers insight into the early 20th-century politics of reproduction of the sixth day, a practice that has often been critically addressed to demonstrate and deconstruct the effects of the dual colonization of nature and representation in art of the current phase of the Anthropocene. The official aim of the exhibition in the Akeley African Hall was to bring the wild, unspoiled nature to the city. The visitors, typical urbanites, were to feel reborn in this sanctuary of nature. For Akeley however, this was only one of two reasons for creating the twenty-odd dioramas. Since his first voyage to Africa, he sensed that the purity of wildlife on this continent was exponentially vanishing. He wanted to protect it by all the means available to him. Trying to preserve unspoiled nature by recreating it, Akeley made several trips to Africa to kill and select animals, which he then mounted himself. His experience was supposed to serve as the best epistemological and moral guarantee of the truthfulness of the representation of nature, while eliciting an experience of organic perfection in the viewer. The technique which seemed the most suited to his aims was taxidermy, which allowed him to make an exact image of the wild Africa, “to insure against disappearance, to cannibalize life until it is safely and permanently a specular image, a ghost. It arrested decay” (ibid: 42). In this way, Akeley turned taxidermy into a real art, or rather, into an art as the best servant of the ‘real’ in both the epistemological and the aesthetic sense of the word. Haraway comments on this as follows: “Artistic realism and biological science were twin brothers in the founding of the civic order of nature at the American Museum of Natural History” (ibid: 34); a founding made possible by the death and literal re-presentation of animals, through perfecting the craft of taxidermy. In her account of how Akeley’s habitat dioramas or meaning-machines constructed nature in the African Hall, Haraway makes no attempt to hide that her reconstruction of a social practice connected to the Nature Movement of the early 20th century is far from ideologically innocent and politically neutral. The historical and cultural root of her article in the early 1980s is quite visible, for instance, in her article’s title, which clearly alludes to the Teddy Bear as an emblem of Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the United States, a conservative statesman, Akeley’s friend and hunting companion in Africa, patron saint for the American Museum of Natural History and its inherent agenda of killing as the very basis of reconstructing nature. Haraway’s rootedness in this particular historical moment is demonstrated by an early footnote: “It is a pleasure to compose an essay in feminist theory on the subject of stuffed animals” (ibid: 58). If I understand her correctly, she is not referring to the stuffed bear as a popular toy and a

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protagonist of several anecdotes about Roosevelt’s hunting trips. She is also alluding to the fact that the noble art of taxidermy was a direct successor of a far less noble upholstery business, which put the craft of stuffing birds or animals on a par with stuffing mattresses or chairs and sofas. As Giovanni Aloi mentions in his Speculative Taxidermy (2018), it was French naturalist Louis Dufresne who coined the term ‘taxidermy’ (taxidermie), introducing it in his scientific reference work Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Histoire Naturelle (1802–1804) to substitute for the verb ‘to stuff’ (empailler). Significantly, taxidermy shares the etymological root ‘taxis’ (arrangement) with taxonomy, the chief scientific practice in natural history. In this way, “natural history effectively appropriated the practice of stuffing skins and molded it to fit its taxonomic needs” (ibid: 52), whereas taxidermy became a rational, and therefore scientifically valid epistemic tool. Haraway simply called Akeley’s taxidermal works of art “stuffed animals” (1983–1985: 58), although they were arranged so as to give them the epistemological and moral status of truth-tellers in the African Hall. In this way, as in her other articles on feminist theory from the 1980s, she removed the sedimented strata of apparently objective, patriarchal knowledge to reveal the hidden connections, an interface between the natural world and the institutional bodies that organized it, pursuing their own agenda. Therefore, her article is an exercise in rewriting the account of the sixth day which challenges our thought habits, simultaneously opening horizon for new, untold stories, as the mathematician and philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead urged at around the same time as “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” was constituted. In his Modes of Thought (1938) Whitehead was surely only repeating common knowledge when he stated that the first five days of Creation were overshadowed by the importance of the sixth, the day on which God created mankind in this own image, giving Adam the language to command nature. Nonetheless, Isabelle Stengers rightly underlines the singularity of his approach in her “Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day” (2005). Whitehead was less interested in what was given to us by speech than in what we became when we were given speech. In other words, in his opinion, human subjectivity and culture were conditioned by language, but by no means limited to what language can say at a given historical moment. That is why he differentiated between ‘to be given’ (speech) and ‘to become’ (souls). Stengers elucidates what he might have in mind when speaking of ‘souls.’ However, my interest lies somewhere else. As she argues, one aim of Whitehead’s speculative philosophy was “experimenting in order to find out how to escape the previous accounts of the sixth day” (ibid: 42). He premised the experiment on another important difference, between ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding.’ To quote Stengers once again: “Understanding entails for Whitehead an experience of transformative disclosure, not the possibility of a definition, valid or invalid” (ibid: 42). The very experience of disclosure concerns the possibility of changing the problem, of escaping the oppositions which our modern way of

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thinking induces. With this aim in view he coined the term ‘proposition,’ which should not be confused with a linguistic sentence. Stengers makes it clear that he saw the role of language as to presuppose the feeling of those stories that may be told in the future unlike how they were, and still are told (ibid: 51–52). One of those stories to be urgently retold and rewritten in his times was the account of the sixth day. Stengers’s article is significant in the context of my argument, but so is what she subsequently added in the acknowledgments section (ibid: 55). Here she expressed her deep gratitude to, among others, Haraway, who, having read the first draft of the text, pointed out that on the sixth day God created not only Adam and Eve but also various kinds of animals. Stengers admits in response that Whitehead’s account was incomplete. She also adds an important distinction between man, created as an individual, and animals, defined by their ‘kinds.’ Returning to Whitehead and his proposition, Stengers ends her addendum with an afterthought which reads as a kind of manifesto: “We need propositions that would reconsider the long and many-faceted history of our cohabitation with the other creatures of this busy sixth day, and would activate the importance of new modes of thinking and feeling of the togetherness of our lives” (ibid: 55). In what follows, I present a few propositions of this kind, put forward by contemporary artists.

The Sixth Day Revisited In “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” Haraway demonstrated how the conception of nature and its realistic representations in the early 20th century have been methodically constructed by selecting the ones that express patriarchal ideologies of physical health and moral purity. Many contemporary artists have critically questioned the economies of visibility of natural history through collapsing or unmasking the rhetorical machinery that operates beneath the realist veneer that characterizes such constructions. Alluding to these artworks, especially today’s resurgence of habitat dioramas, Aloi underlines in Speculative Taxidermy that “[t]he diorama no longer ventriloquizes the rhetoric of natural history but becomes a tool through which this very rhetoric can be dismantled and appraised” (2018: 105). As I have mentioned, Akeley’s concept of the ‘peephole’ – “a world-without-humans” (Danowski, de Castro 2017: 23) – was significant for the accounts of Biblical sixth day and representations of wilderness, such as the Garden of Eden in the early 20th century, when a new epistemic modality emerged to prescribe the faithful simulation of the natural realm. From among several examples of artists and works of art pointed out and analyzed in Aioli’s book I have chosen only one, the most telling in this context, the Museum of Nature, or the New Paradise (2000–2001)

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series by renowned Russian artist Oleg Kulik, one contemporary artist who has photographed natural history dioramas in order to critically address issues of “Teddy Bear patriarchy.” In his series, Kulik deconstructs the presumed absence of Adam (and Eve) in this version of the Garden of Eden by showing their presence as a carefully staged ref lection on the glass of a diorama. Fig. 1: Oleg Kulik, Giraf fe, from the Museum of Nature or New Paradise series, 2000–2001. © Oleg Kulik.

We should not forget that around the time when dioramas became the quintessential means for constructing a valid depiction of nature, a new regime of visibility was introduced by photography, and “the photographic image quickly imposed itself as a naturalized, truthful, and mechanical model of human perception” (Aloi 2018: 117). Carl Akeley was keen on both kinds of hunting animals – with a rif le and a camera. Haraway points out: “Taxidermy was not armed against the filmic future, but froze one frame of a far more intense visual communion to be consumed in virtual images” (1983–1985: 38). Thus, the medium and realistic conventions which Kulik employs could be seen as part of a continuum with Akeley’s ‘peephole.’ The translucent ref lections of a naked man and woman, which the artist ref lects on the glass of dioramas as an added screen, clearly allude to Biblical scenes in classical art. This reference, however, is unambiguous only when the naked couple are holding hands, complying with the iconographical decorum of the classical repertoire. In the other photographs in the Museum of Nature series, the couple is engaged in sexually explicit acts, which, conventional morality tells us, reduces humans to the level of animals. In this sense, Kulik demonstratively subverts the spatial concepts of division, exclusion, and surveillance at play in dioramas. Furthermore, because of the spectral presence of Adam and Eva and

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their sexuality, the series not only questions the authorial practices of culturally constructed nature, but also reveals human sexuality as confirming our inherent animality, and thus should remain ob-scene in nature, represented as a morality play. Aioli emphasizes this conclusion, stating: “Kulik collapses religious and pornographic imagery in the production of an aesthetic that critically questions the value of realism in representation” (2018: 133). But the traditional experience of nature as the Garden of Eden could be deconstructed and reconfigured in yet another way, to offer quite a different account of the sixth day, inspiring new modes of thinking. One such account is to be found in the eco-thriller Green Earth (2015), set in the near future and written by bestselling American SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Between 2004 and 2007, Robinson published a climate trilogy – Forty Signs of Rain, Fif ty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting – whose action takes place primarily in Washington, DC. A couple of years later, he condensed his trilogy into a single volume, updated it with new research, and republished it as Green Earth. Particularly significant in the context of my argument are two particularly vivid, connected images of what can go wrong when the ecological balance is upset. The first one involves a massive f lood in the capital; animals f lee from the National Zoo just before it is inundated, and thus are able to survive. Many are not recaptured after the f lood. They stay in Rock Creek Park almost in the middle of the city, thus, in a sense, returning to the wilderness. Then a particularly cold winter comes, marking the beginning of a modern Ice Age, triggered by the disturbances in the ecological balance. The second image which interests me in Green Earth features one of the hot boxes left out in the park for the animals which went feral. Like the habitat dioramas, they are contained, and thus made visible. However, they in no way resemble the representations of wilderness in the Garden of Eden of the early 20th century: “Every box was crowded with a menagerie of miserable animals, like little shipwrecked bits of Noah’s Ark, every creature subdued and huddled into itself” (Robinson 2015: 562). Only a shadow of the rigidity and separateness of taxonomical grids of natural history, which dioramas reproduce in typical habitat groups as incarnations of perfect families, hovers over this image: “Rabbits, racoons, deer, elands, tapirs, even foxes, even a bobcat. Two ibexes. None meeting the eye of any other; all pretending they were each alone, or with only their own kind” (ibid: 579). Interestingly, none of the animals’ eyes meet. They all stare at one of the protagonists, Frank Vanderwall, a sociobiologist and researcher in National Science Foundation, and a keen reader of Emerson and Thoreau, representatives of American Romanticism: “The animals were not happy. They all stared at him, wary, affronted. He was messing up a good situation. The lion had lain down with the lamb, but the man was not welcome. He wanted to reassure them, to explain to them that he meant no harm, that he was one of them. But

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there were no words” (ibid: 579). To better understand the meaning of this scene, I have to return to Haraway’s “Teddy Bear Patriarchy.” As Haraway rightly points out, in Akeley’s African Hall of the National Museum in New York the enchantment of a perfect garden was premised on the fact that this part of natural history was to be read by the naked eye. Although the glass front of the diorama forbade the entry of a human body, the visual arrangement invited the viewer’s gaze. The same gaze was a key ordering principle in the epistemology of natural history. As Haraway writes, “[t]here is no mediation, nothing between the viewer and the animal” (1983–1985: 25), so a unique communion with nature may occur. If this was the case, just the opposite is depicted in the second scene of Green Earth which I have mentioned. Here no barrier exists, not even a transparent one, such as the glass front of a vitrine, but the animals stare – confrontation replaces communion. “[T]he man was not welcome” (Robinson 2015: 579), the protagonist of the novel explains. In other words, he shows human as again expelled from the Garden of Eden, this time by the creatures over which Adam was supposed to govern. While Kulik engages in the repeated deconstruction of a presumed absence of man in wildlife representations in his The Museum of Nature series, at nearly the same time Robinson shows something else in his climate trilogy. He points to an urgent need for a new regime of the visibility of nature. In his eco-thriller, the happy ending is a consequence of geoengineering technologies and not the introduction of renewable sources of energy; as such, I would presume that it can no longer be an image of nature without technology. What is needed after the Biblical account of the sixth day, is an account of the eighth day – the day of a new act of creation located somewhere in the near future.

The Eighth Day As I have demonstrated, the overwhelming majority of modern accounts of the sixth day were premised on the aesthetics of realism and on biological sciences, which, in order to ensure the essential objectivity of the moment of origin, excluded the presence of both man and technology. As Haraway stresses in her “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” the eye is equally important as the critical organ responsible for a first-hand experience of the outer world. Therefore, to demonstrate a new approach to the issue of culturally-constructed nature in the new millennium, I have chosen an example that will serve both as a showcase and a starting point to approach the status of and relationship between two types of experience: a live, or apparently first-hand experience, and a technologically mediated one, traditionally regarded as being unable to provide a true experience of nature. The example I have chosen is a transgenic art project, The Eighth Day, which an American bio-artist Eduardo Kac created with his co-workers and showed in 2001 at Arizona State

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University, Tempe. The project brilliantly expresses and illustrates the artist’s conviction, formulated in his “Introduction” to Signs of Life (2007a), that “bio art should not be seen as limited to present day understanding and techniques, but rather as a general principle of literal life-based creation” (ibid: 19). Thus, it is no accident that the project has particular significance in the context of my chapter. The title of the project clearly refers to the seven days of the creation of life on Earth, as narrated in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. Kac not only added one more day, but also started a new cycle of creation, while drawing critical reference to well-established accounts of the sixth day as a “world-without-humans” (Danowski, de Castro 2017: 23). Whereas the Judeo-Christian God’s creation was based on a gesture of division and separation, Kac’s eponymous eighth day demonstrates the opposite: a vital continuum between animals and machines, with humans occupying the traditional position of observers. In this way, Kac taps into Lynn Margulis’ argument from the 1990s that symbiosis and cooperation are more than key evolutionary factors, they are far more important than Darwinian mutation and selection (cf. Margulis 1998), a thesis which is gaining ground among today’s biologists. A cursory look at his transgenic installation suffices to see this. Fig. 2: Eduardo Kac, The Eighth Day, 2001 (detail). Transgenic artwork with biological robot (biobot), GFP plants, GFP amoebae, GFP fish, GFP mice, audio, video, Internet.

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Fig. 3: Eduardo Kac, The Eighth Day, 2001 (detail). Transgenic artwork with biological robot (biobot), GFP plants, GFP amoebae, GFP fish, GFP mice, audio, video, Internet.

The Eighth Day assembles various living transgenic forms – amoebae, fish, plants, and mice. All are glowing greenish in blue light because they have been genetically manipulated to express a f luorescent protein, commonly used as a biomarker in genetic research. They have been developed separately in laboratories and, then, enclosed together under a clear four-foot Plexiglas dome, mounted on a wooden cylinder, create a new synthetic luminescent ecosystem. The ecosystem alludes, on the one hand, to the natural history dioramas that, similarly, both forbade the observer to enter and allowed the gaze inside. On the other hand, the blue light illuminating the Plexiglas dome recalls an iconic image, the 1972 Blue Marble, a photograph of Earth taken during the Apollo 17 mission. According to Chris Russill, Steward Braun incorporated the photograph – together with another iconic image, the 1968 Earthrise – in the Whole Earth Catalogue to create a collective vision of humanity which could see “itself from the outside” (qtd. Russill 2016: 233). This vision, as Russill argues, should evoke a sense of responsibility for this “delicate jewel in the vast immensities of hard-vacuum space” (ibid: 233). It is particularly

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interesting here that the production of this image involved a great degree of technical manipulation. Even if all the astronauts participating in Apollo  17 subsequently claimed individual authorship of the photograph, most probably, as Russill writes, it had been shot “from the hip” (ibid: 237). Obviously, I am not sure that Kac, in creating his The Eight Day, was thinking about this non-human photography, as Joanna Zielinska calls it in her book of that title (2017). Nonetheless, both Blue Marble and the story behind it create an interesting context for analyzing the interplay of direct and mediated experiences in Kac’s bio-artwork. Actually, the ecosystem of The Eighth Day consisted of one more hybrid form which has yet to be mentioned: a biological robot with a transparent body to make its special ‘brain cells’ visible. Kac gave this name to a colony of f luorescent amoebae, building a network and acting as a bioreactor, responsible for biobot’s unassisted movements. Undoubtedly, showing these new forms of life together as a hitherto unknown ecosystem in vivo, Kac sought to pose important questions about the future life of hybrid forms and environments. However, the biobot plays a key role in what interests me most in the present paper: the interrelations between direct and mediated experiences. As it happens, Kac wanted visitors to watch The Eighth Day both from the outside and within the Plexiglas dome, off line and online through small cameras mounted in the eyes of the biobot and above the dome. The first camera turned the biobot into an avatar of online participants inside the created environment, offering them a first-person perspective on the transgenic ecosystem. Moreover, the first-person perspective was additionally strengthened by the opportunity to control the biobot’s cameras online, through a pan-tilt actuator that allowed the viewer to choose a point of view and zoom in on details. The camera above the dome was equally important. First of all, it showed a bird’s-eye view of the whole room. Visitors become part of the artificial biotope from the point of view of the online participants. Importantly, at the same time, the computer screens in the gallery gave local visitors the chance to see and experience the same images on the Internet. The local visitors could compare those images with those they saw with their own eyes, but first they had to take part in an experiment the artist arranged for them to make them aware of the inalienable fallibility of their senses. When the visitors entered the gallery, they saw a blue glowing hemisphere set against a dark background, reminiscent of the iconic Blue Marble. A video of running water was also projected on the f loor. At the same time, the visitors heard sounds of waves repeatedly hitting a shore, but they could not tell the real from the illusory in the dark room. For this reason, I posit that both the local and the external viewers of The Eighth Day could not only see a new ecosystem of hybrid symbiotic creatures living together, but they were made acutely aware of the fact that they employed their (technologically enhanced) senses to negotiate the real and reel status of what was happening around them. To corroborate this claim, it

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suffices to quote from Kac’s “Life Transformation – Art Mutations”: “Art can, and should, contribute to the development of alternative views of the world that resist dominant ideologies” (Kac 2007b: 163). In other words, if one wants to critically analyze existing ways of viewing the world and introduce alternative ones, one should also ref lect on the way the dominant views are constructed and theoretically underpinned. This was illustrated in The Eighth Day by positioning both the local and external viewers and interrelating their perspectives as well as their emotional and intellectual experiences, by making them see, and see that they see. When trying to unpack the problem of the status and the relationship between direct and mediated experiences, it is important to remember that in both cases we have to do with historically contingent terms, belonging to a much larger and complex working net of definitions and concepts as well as scientific and cultural practices. A case in point is Philip Auslander’s approach to the issue of liveness. In his Liveness (1999), Auslander rightly posited that the idea of what culturally counts as live experience remains a historically variable ef fect of mediatization and mutates alongside technological change. But technological change as such is not enough. A social necessity to renegotiate the existing definition of liveness is needed too. For example, a clear-cut distinction between live and recorded sound was necessary only when it had been undermined by a form of sensory deprivation found in radio broadcasting. Whereas in the gramophone the source of the sound is visible, the same could not be said about music on the radio. At that moment, the paradoxical idea of ‘live broadcasting’ was born, bringing about the naturalization of some recording technology. This naturalization was only possible by deeming another part of the technology ‘artificial’ – the one that only enabled a mediated experience. This scenario repeated itself when, for example, the new medium of television was introduced into social and cultural life shortly after World War II and, as a result, the term ‘live performance’ was coined. Writing in the late 1990s, Auslander marked another moment where a formerly clear-cut distinction was blurred, and demonstrated this change convincingly in his analysis of cultural performances experienced as ‘live,’ although they are to some extent technologically enhanced or created beforehand to facilitate later recording. From today’s perspective, it is, however, manifestly visible that, when trying to explain the historical contingency of liveness, Auslander himself took part in and contributed to establishing a new division between first-hand and mediated experiences. As Claire Bishop argues in Artificial Hells (2012), since the early 1990s, in a variety of global locations, a real surge of interest in participation and collaboration has taken place in art, expressed most forcefully in the live encounter between embodied actors in particular contexts. Auslander’s response to this phenomenon, posited in Liveness, was that our possibility of experiencing

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digital technologies as live is mainly a function of technology’s ability to respond to us in real time, here and now. Obviously, those digital technologies that were not responding to us in real time were deemed inferior, lacking the important factor of immediacy (although it has to be stressed that Auslander did not mention this facet). Perhaps because of the performative and affective turns, Auslander returned to and elaborated upon his initial conclusions. Indeed, in “Digital Liveness” (Auslander 2012), he puts forward a new definition of liveness, still emphasizing its inherent historical contingency. Now he adopted a phenomenological approach, analogous to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s argument that we engage with works of art as phenomena with which we share the same time and space. The article’s conclusion reads: “Liveness is neither a characteristic of the object nor an effect caused by some aspects of the object such as its medium, ability to respond in real time, or anthropomorphism. Rather, liveness is an interaction produced through our engagement with the object and our willingness to accept its claim” (ibid: 9). Then, Auslander takes a step further, and explains: “Digital liveness emerges as a specific relation between self and other, a particular way of ‘being involved with something’” (ibid: 10). Even if now it is our involvement that is decisive in whether an experience in the digital world is live or not, we are still dealing with both a differentiation and a hierarchization of direct and mediated experiences. What should be stressed, however, is that this differentiation and hierarchization are not only present in recording or digital technologies, in new media, even if Auslander’s example might suggest so. Nothing demonstrates this better than the example of Robert Boyle, one of the first natural philosophers and members of Royal Society of London. In his view, the capacity of experiments to provide facts depended not only upon their actual performance, but essentially upon the assurance of the relevant community that they had been performed in such a way. This presupposes that reliability of testimony was premised upon immediate experience of witnesses and their credibility. What is more, Boyle insisted that witnessing should be a collective act, which led to another problem: how to turn a laboratory into a public space, to ensure that not only the iterability of experiments, but also what Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air-pump call “virtual witnessing” (1985: 60). They explain this term in the following way: “The technology of virtual witnessing involves the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication” (ibid: 60, original emphasis). To secure this assent, Boyle designed a specific literary technology, a new genre of detailed experimental reports with pictorial representations, written in a plain and ascetic style, purely functional, and visibly separated on the page from the hypotheses and speculations put forward by the author. Thus, to some extent, writing was rhetorically constituted as a kind of literary liveness. This was done in a way similar to the naturalization of mediated experience as direct when

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based on special premises, even though Boyle possessed none of today’s advanced technologies. Boyle’s technology of virtual witnessing could be quite rightly compared with two types of viewers – online and off line, local and external – in Kac’s The Eighth Day. However, here the external viewers were not supposed to produce anything on the stage of their minds. They looked with their own eyes as local viewers, although they were assisted by technology. Obviously, The Eighth Day was not meant to be an artistic project, not a scientific experiment. However, it critically challenged science and the experiential foundations laid in the times of Hobbes and Boyle. By that time, magnifying lenses had been introduced and, as Lisa Cartwright demonstrates in Screening the Body (1995), the first kind of simulacra had appeared, defined more recently by Jean Baudrillard as copies without originals. Images seen under the lenses of a microscope were simulacra, indeed, as they pertained to a material reality only through detailed optic and micrometric standards, imposed on the entire scientific community. It was clearly visible in the case of Boyle’s virtual witnessing that, increasingly, the academic community was less interested in nature as such than in norms and technological strategies, as well as specialized institutions that regulated, standardized, and disciplined its representations; the norms, methods, and institutions that therefore guaranteed objectivity and universality of the knowledge gathered. This also holds good nowadays, in times of digitally enhanced data visualization and process simulation technologies. It is for this reason that Kac not only intermingled online and off line participation, but in so doing, deconstructed the circulation of reference (cf. Latour 1999) found in experimental sciences and, consequently, undermined the paradigm of scientific objectivity and universality. In The Eighth Day, both local and external participants can see each other, and so the locality and partiality of the two perspectives is made manifest in the situatedness of their knowledge. Each type of knowledge consists of rules for gathering data and recognizing what is true and false, but it is a truth specific for this partial knowledge, because there are several types of truth and falsity, each dependent on sets of practices and experiences. Thus, one might argue that Kac not only shows the first day of a new cycle of hybrid life, based on a continuum of animals and machines. His transgenic art project also points to one of the basic preconditions for the creation of techno-biotic hybrids: crucial changes in our concept of knowledge as a mode of existence inherited from the moderns, and how it is still practiced. The same issue, albeit from another perspective, is addressed by Wonbin Yang’s Species Series (2012), another example of creation on the eight day.

Reel Nature

The Eighth Day Revisited In his bio-artwork The Eighth Day, Eduardo Kac portrayed a new, self-sufficient ecological system, entirely engineered in a laboratory, and probably premised on the concept of the singularity in the near future, triggering unfathomable technological growth and radical changes to human civilization (cf. Shanahan 2015). There are, however, contemporary artists who envisage future humans living on a damaged planet, to use the expression coined by the editors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017). One such artist is an American conceptual artist Mark Dion, working at the crossroads of arts and sciences. In his Landfill (1999–2000), produced about when Kulik made his project, Dion returned to the iconic image of natural history dioramas. It is particularly interesting that he transformed the standard animal dioramas with painted backgrounds into exemplary works of art, critically involved in ecological issues. His diorama featured a wolf and a couple of gulls over a pile of man-made waste, a bewildering showcase of environmental destruction filled with food packages. In so doing, he visibly juxtaposed, on the one hand, the landfill and the traditional aesthetics of the Garden of Eden. On the other, however, he pointed to an existence of mixed ecosystems which we still culturally disavow, but in which we are enmeshed. Even if humans are not present here and the diorama itself seems to offer a ‘peephole’ into the natural world of the Anthropocene, Dion literarily litters the scene with traces of man’s indelible impact on his environment. It is not by accident that I have chosen Dion’s Landfill from among many other artworks visualizing the Anthropocene, as, nearly a decade later, man-made waste occupied a central place in Wonbin Yang’s Species Series, on which I would like to focus here. South Korean Seoul-based artist Wonbin Yang does more than draw the viewer’s attention to urgent environmental issues. He also strongly believes that contemporary mega-cities will soon become a kind of ‘primordial soup,’ perfectly capable of generating new mixed forms of life. In the Species Series (2012), which I had an opportunity to see at the 2016 exhibition New Romance: Art and the Posthuman at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Wonbin Yang illustrated this by creating small, fragile artificial entities made of urban waste – rubbish, old newspapers, disposable cups, and the like – and miniature mechanical parts. With electronic devices giving them the ability to move, and some even equipped with f lashing lights, the autonomous machine-creatures completely overturn our notions of anthropomorphized robots. They are insect-like, each with distinctive behavior and biological characteristics. Wonbin Yang clearly wants his tiny rubbish-robots to strike us as a new species of animal. He gives each a Latinized name, such as Segnisiter continuus (a crumpled old newspaper), Umbra infractus (a discarded umbrella), Parvamotus magnificus (a candy wrap and paper napkin), and Celicem volvens (a disposable cup), and provides each with a species descrip-

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tion, adhering to zoological taxonomy, arranging them in specially prepared specimen display cases. Moreover, mindful of the fact that our understanding of nature has, since World War II, been dominated by the virtual intercession of the camera, the artist makes short videos which document his creatures’ life cycles in their ‘natural habitats’ in the manner of nature documentaries. The oneor two-minute clips show how the rubbish-insects could take hold in man-made surroundings, utilize urban facilities and systems, and form relationships with other human and non-human beings. At this point, a significant dif ference from Kac’s The Eighth Day emerges  – Wonbin Yang’s creatures are artificial, born in the artist’s workshop, yet they present themselves as a part of our everyday urban environments. Fig. 4: Wonbin Yang’s Segnisiter continuus from Species Series, 2012.

Fig. 5: Wonbin Yang’s Umbra infractus from Species Series, 2012.

Reel Nature

Heidegger’s phenomenological distinction between object and thing, mentioned in Aloi’s Speculative Taxidermy, provides a useful framework for understanding Species Series. Undoubtedly, Wonbin Yang’s mechanical creatures have an ambiguous ontological status – they pretend to be alive, and they are endowed with independence and agency. According to Heidegger, an object should fit in a precoded relation between function and purpose in the subject/object relationship. However, it becomes a thing at the very moment it ceases to function as such, and as a result, begins to challenge our expectations, eliciting heightened attention. While objects are absorbed by their anthropocentric functionalities, things are characterized by a specific sensuous presence. Therefore, Aloi concludes: “A thing is that which is yet not fully or even partially codified in representation, and as such, it challenges the subject through a series of nonaffirmative experiences of the world” (2018: 55). The question of codification seems of utmost importance here, because what Wonbin Yang endeavors is a kind of recycling. Yet, contrary to expectations, the products of this recycling do not fall into the category of objects, but become things that “challenge the subject through a series of nonaffirmative experiences of the world” (ibid: 55). That is why, I posit, Species Series, made from the detritus of our everyday life, demonstrates a new ecosystem of the eighth day. What is more, this ecosystem challenges not only our experience of the world, but also the basic ways in which knowledge has been gathered, arranged, and institutionalized in the modern scientific world. While creating the artificial species in his Species Series, Wonbin Yang employed the standard procedures of natural history and its practices of collecting, categorizing and archiving. Quite evidently, the species put on display should serve as reference specimens, following the epistemic modalities of natural history discursive practices worked out in the late 17th century. Yet I would like to emphasize the intrinsic role which language and our notion of equivalency play in constructing a given specimen as a model for the whole species. The role of language is to make living animals disappear through representation, for the purpose of being assimilated in natural history discourse. The word ‘specimen’ etymologically resembles the verb specere (to see). Accordingly, a specimen is an established standard of morphological integrity, representing a given species  – it allows one to see the defining differences between this species and any other, differences expressed in the Latin name and a formal description of the species. Small wonder, therefore, that the act of naming equals the act of taming, and this epistemological procedure clearly refers to the act of dominance that Adam originally performed in the Garden of Eden on the sixth day. As Aloi rightly puts it: “It [a specimen] is an epistemological object par excellence: suspended between the linguistic and the material, it is the animal-object laid bare, the building block of institutional taxonomic discourses” (ibid: 73). Apparently, the same happens in the Species Series, but here we are dealing with artificial entities faking life, and

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thus undermining taxonomy by revealing the basic mechanisms by which order is created through separation, of producing knowledge. By deliberately following the taxonomic practices of natural history, Wobing Yang employs taxonomy in order to question taxonomy itself. Not only do his insect-like artificial entities fake being alive, animated by both electronic devices and well-known conventions of the documentary genre. Each one is also a reference specimen that refers to no other animals of this species; a reference specimen equals a whole species in Species Series. I believe the artist created the series not only to demonstrate how the ‘primordial soup’ of our mega-cities may engender life in the near future, as he has repeated in his interviews. He also wanted to make his viewers aware of the possibility of shifting the modalities by which we consider human/animal relationships. This is why both Kac’s The Eighth Day and Wonbin Yang’s Species Series cannot be reduced to the internal economies of artistic discourses, and thus presuppose the existence of those stories that may be told, as Stengers would have it. They are propositions, in the Whiteheadian sense of the term.

Speculative Gardens of Eden Being perfectly aware that contemporary art critical of various aspects of the Anthropocene is, more often than not, openly political and socially aware, in this article I have focused on contemporary art as a privileged site, in which discursive networks, complex practices and links between humans, biotic and abiotic non-humans, and social realities can be mapped, but also unraveled. In order to critically address discursive and epistemic strategies through which ‘the real’ of nature has been culturally constructed, and to reveal the inherent ‘reelness’ of what we perceive and consume as ‘true nature,’ I have analyzed some representations of the sixth day, when the first humans arrived in the Garden of Eden, and Adam was given unquestioned superiority over nature. These representations are often of mixed mediality, and allow different degrees of participation. However, all belong to the kind of sixth-day stories that Whitehead saw as potentially opening transformative disclosure. Taking into account the fact that the iconic image of the Garden of Eden demonstrates nature in a primordial state, free of technology, I offered a more recent representation of the Garden of Eden, and – borrowing from one of Eduardo Kac’s bio pieces  – called it the eighth day, when nature is reborn out of a laboratory, or the ‘primordial soup’ of our mega-cities, as in Wonbin Yang’s project. Thus, nature as culturally and technologically constructed, nature as an aftermath of singularity. Nonetheless, the visible culturaltechnological characteristics of these representations of the eighth day are of less importance to me than their

Reel Nature

openly deconstructive aims. It is important to stress, in conclusion, that both Kac’s The Eighth Day and Wonbin Yang’s Species Series go back to the very beginning of the era of the Moderns in order to question the basic and virtually naturalized foundations of the world and knowledge-making. It seems insignificant whether the approaches to what happened at the time when Modernist ideas were born are historically sound. Bearing this in mind, I considered these representations as belonging to Whiteheadian propositions. I called them speculative Gardens of Eden. For to unhinge anthropocentric certainties, we need not only to craft new ways of seeing, novel methodologies, and concepts, but also to show the ideological roots of sedimented and naturalized rules and convention in both the arts and the sciences. In other words, we need stories and visualizations of the sixth day which, in the name of a better future, question our modes of perceiving, constructing, and consuming nature.

References Aloi, Giovanni (2018): Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene, New York: Columbia University Press. Auslander, Philip (1999): Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London: Routledge. Auslander, Philip (2012): “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective.” In: PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34/3, pp. 3–11. Bishop, Claire (2012): Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, New York: Verso. Cartwright, Lisa (1995): Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Danowski, Déborah/Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2017 [2015]): The Ends of the World, transl. Rodrigo Nunes, Cambridge: Polity Press. Davis, Heather/Etienne Turpin (eds.) (2015): Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, Open Humanities Press. Demos, T. J. (2016): Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Demos, T. J. (2017): Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Descola, Philippe (2013 [2005]): Beyond Nature and Culture, transl. Janet Lloyd, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Haraway, Donna (1983–1985): “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden. New York City, 1908–1936.” In: Social Text 11, pp. 20–64.

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Kac, Eduardo (2007a): “Introduction. Art that Looks You in the Eye: Hybrids, Clones, Mutants, Synthetics, and Transgenics.” In: Eduardo Kac (ed.), Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 1–27. Kac, Eduardo (2007b): “Life Transformation – Art Mutation.” In: Eduardo Kac (ed.), Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 163–184. Latour, Bruno (1999): “Circulating Reference. Sampling the Soil in the Amazon forest.” In: Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 24–79. Lowenhaupt, Tsing Anna/Heather Anne Swanson/Elaine Gan/Nils Bubandt (eds.), (2017): Arts of Living of a Damage Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2017. Margulis, Lynn (1998): Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, New York: Basic Books. Robinson, Kim Stanley (2015): Green Earth: The Science in the Capital Trilogy, New York: Del Rey Books. Russill, Chris (2016): “Earth Imagining: Photograph, Pixel, Program.” In: Stephen Rust/Sean Cubitt (eds.), Ecomedia: Key Issues, London and New York: Routledge. Shanahan, Murray (2015): The Technological Singularity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Shapin, Steven/Simon Schaffer (1985): Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stengers, Isabelle (2005): “Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day.” In: Configurations 13/1, pp. 35–55. White, Daniel (2018): Film in the Anthropocene: Philosophy, Ecology, and Cybernetics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zylinska, Joanna (2017): Nonhuman Photography, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Notes on Contributors

Mateusz Borowski teaches cultural studies at the Department for Performativity Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. He holds a PhD from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and the Jagiellonian University. His main areas of interest are the history and sociology of science, and counterfactual narratives in historiography and memory studies. He recently published Strategies of Forgetting: Memory and Cyberculture (2015) and, with Małgorzata Sugiera, Artificial Natures. Performances of Technoscience and Arts (2017). He is also active as a translator of literary and scholarly texts. Mateusz Chaberski is a PhD student at the Department for Performativity Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. In 2016, he won a Foundation for Polish Science scholarship for innovative research in Humanities. His academic interests range from performance studies, affect, and assemblage theories to Anthropocene studies. He is also acquisitions editor at the Jagiellonian University Press. In 2015, he published his first book, (Syn)aesthetic Experience: Performative Aspects of Site-Specific Performance. David Howes is Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He has conducted field research on the cultural life of the senses in the Massim and Middle Sepik River regions of Papua New Guinea, Northwestern Argentina, and the Southwestern United States. He has collaborated with Bianca Grohmann and Constance Classen on a project investigating historic and contemporary trends in multisensory marketing, and is currently involved in a research creation project together with Chris Salter (Design Art) entitled “Mediations of Sensation.” He is the editor of, among other works, Empire of the Senses (Berg, 2004), and A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920–2000 (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is the co-author (with Constance Classen and Anthony Synnott) of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994), and (also with Constance Classen) Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (Routledge, 2013). He is the sole author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Michigan, 2003).

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Rosemary Napier Klich is Professor, Director of Research, and Head of Creative Producing at East 15 Acting School, University of Essex. Prior to joining East 15 in 2017, she was Head of Drama and theater at the University of Kent, where she worked since 2007. Her current research investigates media, sound, and spectatorship, and her teaching expertise is in the theory and making of contemporary performance practice. Her co-authored book, Multimedia Performance, was published with Palgrave in 2012; she has since published in journals such as Contemporary theater Review, Performance Research, International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media, and Body Space Technology. She has also undertaken various practice-as-research projects in collaboration with performers, videographers, sound designers and photographers. She holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She has presented keynote talks at conferences and symposia in Korea, Belgium, Poland, and the UK, and is a member of the Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics & Performance at the University of Kent, the New Technologies Working Group of the theater and Performance Research Association, and the Intermediality in theater and Performance Working Group of the International Federation for theater Research. Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture and Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). He is the author of several books on media theory and digital culture, including Digital Contagions (2007, 2nd edition 2016), Insect Media (2010), What is Media Archaeology? (2012) and A Geology of Media (2015). Recently, he co-edited Across and Beyond: Post-Digital Practices, Concepts and Institutions (2016), as well as the first international book on the media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi, Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048 (2015). Izabella Pluta is a PhD reader in literature, theater critic, and translator. From 2008 to 2012 she collaborated regularly with La Manufacture  – Haute école de théâtre de Suisse romande. Recently, she has been granted an advanced research fellowship from Fernand Braudel IFER – Marie Curie Fellowships at Université de Lyon and ENSATT. She is the author of L’Acteur et l’intermédialité (L’Age d’homme, 2011); her articles are also published in academic journals (e. g. Ligeia, Teatr) and group publications (most recently: Pratiques performatives. Body remix, ed. Josette Féral). She also directs artistic and academic projects (in 2012, the Le metteur en scène et ses doubles international conference), and is a member of the following research groups: Théâtre et intermédialité (FIRT), Performativité et effets de présence (UQAM) et Représenter/expérimenter (Université Lyon 2-ENSATT-ENS).

Notes on Contributors

Chris Salter is Concordia University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses, Co-Director of the Hexagram network, Director of the Hexagram Concordia Centre for Research and Creation in Media Art and Technology and Associate Professor, Computation Arts in the Department of Design and Computation Art at Concordia University, Montreal. Living and working in both Montreal and Berlin, Salter’s work explores the borders between the senses, art, design, and new technologies over a range of large-scale installations and performance projects, as well as in books, critical writings, and lectures, all on the international scene. His publications include Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (MIT Press, 2015), The Vibrancy Ef fect: An Antidisciplinary Expert Meeting, coedited with Michel van Dartel and Harry Smoak (V2/NAi Publishers. 2012), and Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, 2010). Tony D. Sampson is PhD reader in digital media cultures and communication at the University of East London. His publications include The Spam Book, coedited with Jussi Parikka (Hampton Press, 2009), Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (University of Minnesota Press, Dec 2016), and Af fect and Social Media, coedited with Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). He is the organizer of the Affect and Social Media conferences, a co-founder of the public engagement initiative Club Critical Theory and co-Director of the Cultural Engine Research Centre (CERC). Christel Stalpaert is Professor of Theater, Performance and Media Studies at Ghent University (Belgium), where she is director of the S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts  & Media) and PEPPER (Philosophy, Ethology, Politics and PERformance) research centers. Her main fields of research are the performing arts, dance, and new media as they intersect with philosophy. She has contributed to many journals, such as Performance Research, Text & Performance Quarterly, Contemporary Theatre Review and Dance Research Journal and edited works such as Deleuze Revisited: Contemporary Performing Arts and the Ruin of Representation (Documenta, 2003), No Beauty for Me There Where Human Life is Rare: On Jan Lauwers’ Theatre Work with Needcompany (Academia Press, 2007), Bastard or Playmate? Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and the Contemporary Performing Arts (Amsterdam University Press, 2012) and Unfolding Spectatorship. Shif ting Political, Ethical and Intermedial Positions (2016, Academia Press). She is editor-in-chief of Documenta and Studies in Performing Arts and Film (Academia Press Ghent). Małgorzata Sugiera is a Full Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and Head of the Department for Performativity Studies. She has lectured and held seminars at German, French, Swiss, and Brazilian universities. She was a

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Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, DAAD, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, Svenska Institutet, the American Andrew Mellon Foundation at the American Academy in Rome and IASH in Edinburgh, as well as of the “Interweaving Performance Cultures” International Research Center at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Her research concentrates on performative arts and memory, gender, and queer studies, as well as performativity and materiality, particularly in the history of sciences. She published twelve monographs, the most recent of which are Non-humans: Reports from Non-natural Natures (2015) and, with Mateusz Borowski, In the Trap of Opposites: Ideologies of Identity (2012) and Artificial Natures: Performances of Technoscience and Arts (2017). She translates scholarly books and theater plays from English, German, and French.