Paper short abstract:

The paper maps art-creation from more-than-human perspective. Based on a case study of a painting process I re-define a traditional relational model of creator-artwork and open-up a debate about the nature of artistic, but also scientific outcomes.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores a process of art creation, opening a diverse and ambiguous spaces of new alliance between matter and materiality. My ethnographic gaze follows, how the painting is coming into being. It might seem that, in this case, when examining the traditional medium, it is difficult to fundamentally compromise the dichotomies, like mind/body, fact/value, present/absent, form/content, embedded in the Euro-anthropocentric modernist heritage. I attempt to re-articulate the story of painting from object-oriented ontology. My assumption is, there is no singular creator, material or a tool organized by straightforward causality, but messy processes with multiple "more-than human" co-creators, which, in a specific and significant way take part in the artistic creation. Giving the priority to ontology over epistemology allows me to pay attention to variety of agency across the human-non-human spectrum and to its colors. Moreover, I attempt to contribute to the debate about the relation among the creativity and scientific production. Rejecting the notion of creativity as a capacity of the brilliant mind and considering it as flows of affect among various human and non-human agents (ideas, data, memories, experiences) we might glimpse an artificial nature of art objects similarly as scientific truth, value, painting, performance or text. All of it can be approached as a part of never-ending process of co-creation, where outcomes are always somewhat fragile and not permanently protected.