Necessity and Contingency

Introduction 

Aims

Objective 

Theoretical Postion  

Situated Research  

Literary Review 

Methodologies 

Significance 

Glossary

Research Methods

Concepts, questions and initial ideas

Bibliography

What underpins my practice has become clearer and more specific. From an initial intention to expose or amplify the links between our every day and the durational environmental changes happening around us, my understanding of place has altered and the driver of my practice is better understood as a homeostatic imperative.[1]

Specifically influencing this shift has been a growing understanding that:

- Adjusting to climate transformation, requires a definition of agent, ‘This is as important to the political changes     needed as is our understanding of the terrain on which politics is exerting itself’;[2]

- The global economy is post-anthropocentric in its basic structure;[3]

- The distinction between humans and other species has become blurred;[4]

- The profusion of investment and research across institutions and governments implies that the mutation of our     species is conceivable.[5]

Influenced by this rapidly shifting context and the contingency of our futures, I have fully embraced the destabilising tactic of not knowing in my studio practice. This has led to new explicit and tacit knowledge, produced unforeseen ideas and outcomes, and contributed to shifts in practice and conceptual understanding generating new questions and lines of enquiry.

Current work continues to explore the potential of the liminal to evoke a sense of the developing nature of the creative act and the unseen of emerging crises. Interruptions to familiar space and daily routines have been used to invite a physical and emotional reaction. The expression of vulnerability, interconnectedness and futility to convey something of the uncertainty surrounding our future.

I propose to investigate the notion of preparations for survival in the context of humanity’s uncertain future and the recognition that what it means to be human has irrevocably altered. This will evolve through world-building narratives and encounters with real and imagined solutions to navigating, escaping and adapting to the invisible and unpredictable changes happening around us.

The difficulties we experience in understanding and acting on the complex political, social and environmental issues of our times are exacerbated by information overload.  Problems seem remote and impersonal which contributes to a sense of detachment. This inquiry aims to test the notion that, in a space in which something could happen, our understanding of survival in the post-anthropocene could become palpable and personal.  Meaning emerges from the encounter and not-yet-considered will be experienced and understood in a new and consequential way.

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Initial investigations will develop four poetic encounters with accompanying reflexive and reflective documentation. They will be culturally recognisable as possible traumatic events and will act as a reminder of our creative potential and collective agency and of what it is to be alive today. The interplay between forces, sources and processes that are essential for survival and life will be reflected in the manipulation and coalitions between all elements of the work, viewer and space. A sense of self as interactive in the process and an experience of intersubjectivity to generate ideas of the connectedness, is intended.

My theoretical position emerges from engaging with the ongoing debate about human existence and in weaving ideas from across the humanities, science and art into my own work.

According to the National Institute of Health, around 90% of cells in the human body are non-human: bacterial, fungal or otherwise.[6] It is widely agreed that the symbiotic relationships between these multitudes of organisms and bacteria are essential for our survival and evolution.[7] Tickell describes the individual as a ‘process not a thing’ and puts the ongoing metabolic process of life with its ‘powerful, unsought and unspoken imperative’ at the centre of human flourishing and as its driving force.[8]

​For me, this paradigm shift in contemporary biology helps to connect human culture with life that existed 3.8 billion years ago and to the future of humanity. The notion of the symbiotic identity of the homo sapiens converges with the continuing critical discourse about our species and its agency.

Also, informing my position is the understanding that technologically driven, advanced capitalism invests in the knowledge and control of all life forms for profit.[9] Humans are placed on the same level as other species.‘All matter is raw material.’[10]

Mark Leckey’s installation of 2013, ‘The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things’ epitomises this.  His network of objects rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.  They are displayed as if freed from the mediation of language, concepts or concretes.[11]

I would suggest, however, that Huyghe’s recent exhibition ‘UUmwelt’ reveals a more credible version of today’s society and the human condition.[12] In Huyghe’s installation, human, machine, animal and the gallery itself co-exist without hierarchy and evolve accidentally and unpredictably. A co-evolution of language and technology is implied. It is this, Wolfendale states, that is the condition which leads to our human capacity to create new modes of biological evolution.[13] The intrusive nature of technology can also be seen to have displaced the centrality of human agency from this environment.

​Heidegger’s writings have significantly influenced my thinking and practice too. He tells us that it is only through our handling of materials and tools that we can understand what they can do. Rather than a mastery of materials, this involves a collaborative and responsive approach in which all elements of the work, including the artist, become co-responsible. He termed the praxical knowledge gained in this way as circumspection and stated that through this we ‘gain an original access to the world’ and the new emerges. His non-hierarchical ideas open the way for a post-human understanding of artistic creation.’[14]

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Feelings, emotion and subjectivity will be the cornerstone of my interpretive research approach. They cannot be removed from the inquiry.  Nor do I want them to be.  Feelings and emotions regulate our body’s conditions and provide a direct and explicit experience of the state that our body is in. These processes are essential for our survival and flourishing. Damasio argues that’ Great poetry depends on layered feelings.’[15] I will look for meaning in my and others’ subjective responses and use these to inform continuing research.

I am aware of the privileges and entitlements of my educated, white, European-centric position and the need to critically understand the political discourse around the inequities and injustices performed by human privilege and of traditionally marginalised others.[16]

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Key sources and their influence are referenced throughout this report. In addition, ‘Cut Piece’ by Yoko Ono and Emma Cocker’s texts, ‘Footnotes’, and ‘The Yes of the No’, have specifically shaped my aims. Further texts, as a springboard for ongoing study, are identified.

Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’, first performed in 1964, involves three interlinking gestures: invitation, sacrifice, and souvenir. Ono invites the audience to collude with her in this performance while maintaining her own control of it. By re-enacting the catastrophe of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ono embodies her personal history as a Japanese woman facing starvation and danger and personalises the brutality of war. I find the profound poetry of this work completely dazzling. Particularly influential for this research is the concept of scraps of fabric cut from Ono’s clothing serving as a memory of the past, the artwork itself and a reminder of the future.[17]

​Cocker’s publicly-sited, performance text, ‘Pay attention to the footnotes’, encourages participation and the questioning of conventional patterns of behaviour through resistance and dissidence. Significant to this research, from Cocker's writings, will be investigations into the potential of stillness as a tactic to conjure up a sense of agency or the not-yet-known, and, her use of dissent to break with or defy expectation by willing into existence the unexpected.[18]

Both Ono and Cocker examine the gap between between telling someone to physically act and asking them to conceptually imagine. I am inspired by their work which engineers into form thinking or being differently.

Going beyond my current literature, I have identified texts by Lloyd and Gatens on the philosophy of Spinoza as constructive alternatives to the exclusionary binaries of Cartesian philosophy.[19] These take the focus of philosophical and political thought from individual rights to collective responsibility. Also, specifically identified to explore the use of participation as a tactic to interrupt conventional patterns of behaviour and heighten a sense of sentience and agency, ’Artificial Hells Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship' by Claire Bishop.[20]

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The use and development of ‘self’ in my practice will focus on ongoing reflexivity and autobiographical detail.[21] As part of my apparatus, I will consciously step-back from action in order to theorise what is taking place, and also step-up to be an active part of that contextualised action.[22] Embedded in, and emerging from the work, I will be an element of the research and therefore open to the possibility of shifting insights, emergent goals, and evolving methods.

​Research-led praxis will focus predominantly on action research methods.[23]  Collaborating with materials and processes will lead to a deeper appreciation of their limitations and their potential to generate visceral, kinaesthetic or haptic experiences.

Drawing on philosophical and scientific ideas all elements of the work will co-exist without hierarchy: they will be dependent on each other and the viewer. As co-dependents, they will become an active multitude, temporarily connected and reified so that their potential to evoke some sort of change or response in viewers can be studied. Designed to instil or increase a sense of anticipation and to heighten a sense of sentience and agency, methods of liaison between the assorted elements and human interaction will be explored and tested.

Existing overarching strategies of not-knowing and the liminal will continue as strategies and metaphors. Added to this will be the tactics of silence, stillness, dissent and participation. Quantitative and qualitative research methods will be used to evaluate the dynamics of subjective experiences to inform continuing praxis.[24]

The sharing of the documentation of the process and findings of a practice-led inquiry will contribute to the ongoing debate on the use of creative research methodologies in an academic institution. It will add to the ongoing discussions around contemporary environmental art practice, site-responsive art and participatory art practices.

This enquiry sets out to test the notion that in a space in which something could happen the experience of ‘in-between necessity and contingency’ can become personal and palpable and therefore meaningful. In this way, the significance of the work will be seen in its influence and impact on individual viewers’ deeper awareness of what it is to be human and what the future of our species might look like.

New ways of thinking and behaviours established on the understanding of our subjectivity, ethical posthuman agency and collective intelligence are needed to reimagine and remake our societies norms and their systems.[25] Using an encounter to evoke feelings, meanings and memories about the past, present and future of our species will contribute to the ongoing post-anthropocentric and critical posthuman debates.

In terms of the as-yet-unknown significance of this research, unexpected discoveries and new insights arising       from this report might also develop:

- Can the collaborative creative act as a research method contribute to the understanding of the nature of a post-anthropocentric and posthuman inquiry? 

- How is posthuman research to be conducted without (re)privileging the human? 

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1 The basic set of processes and conditions that regulates physiology within the range that makes it possible to survive life and flourish. It is a powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative for every living organism.

2 HKW Anthropocene, Anthropocene Lecture: Bruno Latour [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtaEJo-jo8Q [accessed 15 November 2018].

3 Fridericianum, 02 Inhuman Symposium - Rosi Braidotti [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNJPR78DptA [accessed 30 December 2018].

4 Serpentine Galleries, Work Marathon 2018: Phoebe Tickell [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbiCOqQk3wc [accessed 17 January 2019].

5  University of Oxford, ‘Research Areas’, Future of Humanity Institute [online] https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk [accessed 30 November 2018].

    University of Cambridge, ‘Our Research’, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk [online] https://www.cser.ac.uk/ [accessed 30 November 2018].

    Environmental Audit Committee, ‘Committees’, www.parliament.uk [online] https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/environmental-audit-committee/ [accessed 28 October 2018].

6  Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo, ’Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body’, Plos Biology A Peer-Reviewed Online Journal, (2016), National Institute of Health Resources.

7 Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018), pp. 53-68 (p. 55).

8  Serpentine Galleries, Pheobe Tickell, Entangled, networked and blurred boundaries [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGtVfddMm4E [accessed 25 January 2019].

9 Centre for the Humanities Utrecht University, Prof. Rosi Braidotti - Keynote Lecture- Posthumanism and Society Conference, New York 9 May 2015 [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S3CulNbQ1M [accessed 16 December 2018].

10 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Modern Connections - Nicolas Bourriaud [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_UOa2MS2Dw [accessed 3 November 2018].

11 Mark Leckey, The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things [online] https://research.gold.ac.uk/9375/6/NC%20Guide%20Leckey.pdf [accessed 3 November 2018].

12 Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt [exhibition] (Serpentine Galleries, London: 3 October 2018 - 10 February 2019).

13  Fridericianum, 05 Inhuman Symposium - Peter Wolfendale [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IpDTUhQA5U [accessed 10 December 2018].

14 Barbara Bolt, Heidegger Reframed (New York: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2011), pp. 93 - 117 (p. 117).

15 Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018), pp.108-116 (p. 116).

16 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013) pp. 2-3.

17 Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964).

18 Emma Cocker, 'Pay attention to the footnotes',  Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2 (2009),139-150. Nottingham Trent University.

19 Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2002).

Genevieve Lloyd, Part of Nature: Self Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics ( United States: Cornell University Press, 1994).

20 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books 2012).

21 I will draw on my personal knowledge and experience of living and working in vulnerable situations and locations and of environmental emergencies and trauma, to inform and influence this research.

22 Miriam Attia and Julian Edge, ‘Be(com)ing a reflexive researcher: a developmental approach to research methodology’, Opem Review of Educational Research, 4. 1 (2017), 33-45. Taylor & Francis Online.

23 See Appendix B.

24 See Appendix B.

25 Centre for the Humanities Utrecht University, Prof. Rosi Braidotti - Keynote Lecture- Posthumanism and Society Conference, New York 9 May 2015 [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S3CulNbQ1M [accessed 16 December 2018].

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Advanced Capitalism - is the term given to the current state of the global economy. Its structure and all sectors, including finance and defence systems, are technologically mediated and driven by algorithms. Advanced capitalism invests in and exploits the scientific and economic understanding of all that lives an insatiable quest for profit. This blurs the distinctions between human and non-human. Its excesses threaten the sustainability of the planet.

Circumspection - Heidegger used this term to describe the particular understanding, or sight, gained through our practical collaboration with things. He believed that our awareness of the world increases through our practical involvement in it.

Collective agency - is the active element of the shared sense of the ‘we’ of a culture. It has the collective potential to change reality through action that could not be accomplished alone.

Homeostatic imperative - is the basic set of processes and conditions that regulates physiology within the range that makes it possible to survive life and flourish. It is a powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative for every living organism.

Information overload - is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue. The term is often associated with an excessive quantity of daily information.

Interpretive Research -  takes the view that each person constructs their own reality and are bound by their context and time. It seeks to understand and interpret the meaning and motives of the world by taking human interpretation and the subjective experiences of individuals as its starting point.

Post-anthropocentrism - defines our contemporary historical moment in terms of advanced capitalism in which all life, matter and relations are constructed and exploited to serve market economies. Typically, it acknowledges the unprecedented human/nonhuman interaction with technology as increasingly intrusive and recognises the inequalities of human privilege on nonhuman and marginalised human others. In a post-anthropocentric landscape, the human has been displaced: human agency, subjectivity and community are no long the exclusive prerogative of humanity.

Posthuman - No attribute of posthuman is uniquely human: it is physically, chemically, and biologically entangled and dependent on a larger process of an evolving symbiotic ecosystem and the environment. Posthuman agency is dependent on forces in which the human participates but does not completely intend or control.

Professor Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism emerges from an anti-humanist tradition. It is visionary and affirmative and in the pursuit of alternative visions and transformative projects. She encourages us to use conceptual creativity to help undertake a leap forward into the complexities and paradoxes of our times.

Praxis - In Heidegger’s writings, art can be seen to emerge from the involvement with materials, methods, tools and ideas of practice.  It is only through their use, he says, that we gain access to the world.

Reflexivity - is the action of self-awareness: reflecting back on oneself systematically at every step of the research process and especially to the effect of the researcher.

World-building - is a term used to describe the process of constructing new imaginary worlds or a components of them, like a plot or a character. It is particularly associated with science fiction or fantasy and its constructed worlds are often created for novels, video games or role-playing games.

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Research methods selected, devised and found will be used to investigate the notion that ‘meaning emerges from the encounter in-between necessity and contingency’.

 - Emerging crises experienced in the liminal space of stillness, silence or dissent;

 - The in-between states of the past and future: the now as stasis, transitions, thresholds;

 - The unknown, overlooked and the invisible;

 - In-between necessity and contingency - a space where something can happen.

The liminal can be brought into existence by the very nature of the emerging - forever bound and repelled by this.

The not-knowing will reveal the unforeseen in a new and unique way creating new ways of seeing, thinking and being.

- Interconnectedness and codependencies of site, space, process, forces, resources and the viewer;

 - Participation and cooperation;

 - Collaborations with materials and processes to generate visceral, kinaesthetic and haptic experiences which       can appeal to the ‘gut’. Gut feelings, emotion and subjectivity are essential for our survival and flourishing.

 - Ongoing critical looking, critical reading and thinking: interpretation and comparative analysis of work by               artists, scientists and writers;

 - Action research methods:

 - Intuitive rolling processes: making use of insights, mistakes and serendipity;

 - Counter-intuitive approaches: using wilfully imprecise, challenging and unfamiliar processes;

 - Inventive storytelling;

 - Collaboration and cooperation.

 - Analysis and evaluation of formal and informal feedback;

 - Ongoing documentation as a space for reflecting on and synthesising the complexity inherent in thinking,             making, questioning and communicating art and the mode of enquiry.

The use and development of ‘self’ to consciously step-back from action in order to theorise what is taking place, and also to step-up to be an active part of that contextualised action will provide the opportunity for me to be an element of the research and therefore open to the possibility of shifting insights, emergent goals, and evolving methods.

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Attia, Miriam and Julian Edge, ‘Be(com)ing a reflexive researcher: a developmental approach to research methodology’, Opem Review of Educational Research, 4. 1 (2017), 33-45. Taylor & Francis Online.

Bolt, Barbara and Estelle Barrett, Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010).

Bolt, Barbara, Heidegger Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinker for the Arts (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2010).

Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics ( France: Les Presses du reel, 2002).

Braidotti, Rosi, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

Centre for the Humanities Utrecht University, Prof. Rosi Braidotti - Keynote Lecture Posthumanism and Society Conference, New York 9 May 2015 [online video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S3CulNbQ1M [accessed 16 December 2018].

Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, Pierre Huyghe (Milan: Skira, 2004).

Cocker, Emma, 'Pay attention to the footnotes',  Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2 (2009), 139-150. Nottingham Trent University.

Cocker, Emma, The Yes of the No (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016).

Damasio, Antonio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018).

Davis, Heather Margaret, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. by Etienne Turpin, (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015).

Environmental Audit Committee, ‘Committees’, www.parliament.uk [online]

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/environmental-audit-committee/ [accessed 28 October 2018].

Fisher, Elizabeth and Rebecca Fortnum, On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (London: Black Dog Publishing c2013).

Fridericianum, 02 Inhuman Symposium - Rosi Braidotti [online video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNJPR78DptA [accessed 30 December 2018].

Fridericianum, 05 Inhuman Symposium - Peter Wolfendale [online video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IpDTUhQA5U [accessed 10 December 2018].

Human Cell Atlas, ‘Mission’, Human Cell Atlas [online]

https://www.humancellatlas.org/ [accessed 4 January 2018].

HKW Anthropocene, Anthropocene Lecture: Bruno Latour [online video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtaEJo-jo8Q [accessed 15 November 2018].

Leckey, Mark, The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things [online] https://research.gold.ac.uk/9375/6/NC%20Guide%20Leckey.pdf [accessed 3 November 2018].

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Modern Connections - Nicolas Bourriaud [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_UOa2MS2Dw [accessed 3 November 2018].

Nasher Sculpture Centre, Nicolas Bourriaud: Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium 2017 Keynote [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FADS5hgB-8 [accessed 21 November 2018].

Ono, Yoko, Cut Piece (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964).

Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt [exhibition] (Serpentine Galleries, London: 3 October 2018 - 10 February 2019).

Ross Institute, Systems, Biology & The Problem of Life [online video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPV3Xl7YSUE [accessed 11 December 2018].

Sender, Ron, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo, ’Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body’, Plos Biology A Peer-Reviewed Online Journal, (2016), National Institute of Health Resources.

Serpentine Galleries, ‘General Ecology’, Serpentine Galleries [online]

https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/general-ecology [accessed 20 December 2018].

Serpentine Galleries, Phoebe Tickell, Entangled, networked and blurred boundaries [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGtVfddMm4E [accessed 25 January 2019].

Serpentine Galleries, Work Marathon 2018: Phoebe Tickell [online video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbiCOqQk3wc [accessed 17 January 2019].

The Matter of Contradiction, Graham Harman - Art and Paradox [online video]

https://vimeo.com/5379312​​​​​​​