I will be participating in the forthcoming conference, Alliances and Commonalities, hosted by Stockholm University of the Arts (20–22 October, 2022). We - myself, Alex Arteaga and Nicole Wendel - will be activating an "ecology of aesthetic research practices" in relation to our ongoing research collaboration, thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices. More on our project here.
Our Proposal: Through live activation of an ecology of aesthetic research practices, the aim is to provide the conditions for acquiring evidence of a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking. The performed aesthetic research practices are not presented as illustrative examples but rather as ongoing processes of research, as aesthetic thinking in action. To practice and to reflect aesthetic thinking through aesthetic thinking contributes to destabilize the hegemonic epistemic paradigms and, furthermore, epistemology as theoretical framework. We understand these processes as a contribution to disclose new forms of transformative understanding in order to approach the current collective crises in more skillful ways.
Conference profile area: We will be presenting within the frame of the "Art, Technology, Materiality" profile area. This profile area takes as it starting point that humans are connected to the world and to each other through material entanglements and invites an exploration of these relationships.
- Material thinking: The profile area serves as a context for questioning the nature of the materiality of artistic practice and its implications. It enables discussions on what occurs in and through artistic practice, in the interplay between making and thinking where knowledge and meaning is acquired through engaging in the world, with other beings as well as through materials and things. Here, objects are considered active and co-creating rather than discovered or revealed.
- Performativity: Materials and technological devices are interrogated in relation to this interplay between making and thinking, according to what they do, how they form significant interconnections. Ongoing research is in particular interested in how cameras and other devices activate particular kinds of networks. It explores how technical devices enable forms of conversations with both material entities, place, and other agents, and how they enable relevant forms of inquiry. Technological devices are considered as tools for engagement, imaginative tools that connects the known and the unimaginable, activate relationships between here and there, then and now.
- Unstable processes: This profile area addresses the artistic development of technological and material processes, and technological extensions or material challenges to existing artistic practices. It activates a framework of projects, experiments and discourses that explores artistic practice as a way of bringing elements into relationship with each other and that critically engages with the material and technical conditions involved.
- Ecological entanglement: This profile area invites reflection and research from a perspective on the world where the human is not always the privileged position. Considering interconnections with and between material matter enables and requires a reconsideration of how humans are connected in the world as well as of the concept of nature and the impact of technology in society.
See the full programme and register here