VIRTULLAGE AS A PRAXIS – ASSEMBLING UNPREDICTED ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE POSTHUMAN MATERNAL | ANNA MAKRZANOWSKA | Presentation
Virtullage in the simplest possible way can be defined as an artform generated by the process of assembling or becoming together of different entanglements and synergies that occur between the physical and virtual spaces. My presentation will focus on one case study – a 3-minute-long mini video-essay titled: Virtullage: Enyo, Dai-Nu and Glazed Gaze.
This Practice as Research (PaR) based on Robin Nelson’s nexus argue that the processes of assembling within the Virtullage: Enyo, Dai-Nu and Glazed Gaze generate ‘theory imbricated within practice’ in other words praxis about the posthuman maternal and posthuman art. Moreover, my ‘doing-thinking’ process within the virtullage is informed by Rosi Braidotti’s philosophy of posthuman convergence, ‘which assumes that all matter is one (…) intelligent and self-organising’ (Braidotti and Hlavajova, 2018,340).
The presentation will discuss the temporal aspects of virtullage making process and will examine accidental and unpredicted entanglements of spatial-temporal formations, where new – so-called – ‘knowings’ are generated (Nelson, 2013). As my virtullage practice was conducted before and during the Covid-19 pandemic the analysis will present Covid-19 virus as a non-human creative agent entangled within the creative process.
WRITING AND DIFFERENCE: TOWARDS A DIFFRACTIVE STYLISTICS? | AMÉLIE DOCHE | Presentation
Conventions of research in the Western world have tended to privilege a Cartesian atomistic perspective, which marks the knower and the known and the subject and object of research as utterly separate through the adoption of a ‘scientific gaze.’ Theoretically informed by relational ontologies – and particularly by Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action (2007) – this presentation seeks to challenge this long-established research doxa by exploring the entanglement between researcher (observing ‘knower’), readers (observed ‘knowers’), and text (the ‘known’) in Amazon reviews to Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. This study has a twofold aim. Firstly, it seeks to identify, within book reviews, which stylistic elements pertain to and are excluded from the literary response phenomenon (boundary-making practice). Secondly, it endeavours to shed light on the stylistic features, in The Sense of an Ending, which are responsible for reviewers’ responses (meaning-making practice). Those aims are achieved through what I would term a “diffractive” (Haraway, 1996; Barad, 2007) stylistics, i.e. through an in-depth qualitative stylistic analysis paying attention to differences in repetitions (Deleuze, 1994).
References:
Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. London: Vintage, 2012.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994.
Haraway, Donna Joanne. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_MeetsOncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. London; New York: Routledge, 1997.
TUNING IN | NIAMH SEANA MEEHAN | Exposition
As a listener Tuning In presents a voice that does not have the words to describe the process. There are elements of re-reading, voices of others, overlapping, re-visiting past selves, interruptions, repetition. The audio is a collection of recordings, scripts and references from early 2021 to now. My initial research plan was to examine the liveness within Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. However, the pandemic obstructed this line of enquiry. I turned to Beckett’s plays for radio, I began investigating the listening body. A listening body moves through and within waiting spaces, it is a moment of sharing language, allowing openings/gaps/holes. The cut-ins, jump-ins and overlaps are fragmented in-between moments. By creating this audio, I am to reveal the ambiguities of other voices, and the ambiguity of the unsaid/absent.
CONSIDERED, BUT UNPREDICTABLE | JONNIE TURPIE | Exposition
Beginning, with the modern technology of predicable smart phone digital image capture, progressing through haptic drawing on an unpredictable hand-made transparent surface a serigraphic portrait is printed on to paper and on a considered, but unpredictable ink experiment. This paper will present the material challenges, opportunities and responses to a series of surfaces and processes in the pursuit of a single image.
Through exploration of materials, tools, drawing implements and the opportunities and exigencies of the surfaces, the paper will review the mark making toolkit employed to embody a subject’s character and visualisation. The advancement of tacit mark making knowledge through, and over the surfaces will be presented as quiet, conscious and subconscious dialogues, followed in the act of mark-making, as Tim Ingold explains:
We have things to know only because they have arisen. They have somehow come into existence with the forms they momentarily have, and these forms are held in place thanks to the continual flux of materials across their emergent surfaces.
(Ingold, 2019:60)
The single image itself is part of research into material encounters to establish a body of work answering the questions: Can valuable drawn and printed portraits be ethically, technically and creatively made through material drawing and serigraphic processes of interpretation, originating from digital mobile photographs? And if so, do the resultant pensive, portrait images hold within them the journey that has been travelled to make them?
Ingold, T. 2016. A Questionnaire on Materialisms. USA. October No 155. October Magazine, Ltd. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Material Encounters 
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