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Short abstract:

Building on Bread and Puppet's 1984 "Why Cheap Art Manifesto," I offer an essay and facilitate a collective building of a manifesto on the role of artistic labor in today's societies, as part of the effort to articulate the value of creative labor in the imagining of alternative societal systems.

Long abstract:

In 1984, the political puppet theatre company Bread and Puppet published its “Why Cheap Art Manifesto.” The short document uses mixed fonts and varying text sizes that look like something from a scrapbooking crafts project. One of its core expressions is that the role of an artist is to allow others to engage in and create art. In this model, the role of the artist is not one of a producer, but of a facilitator of a public experience.

What is the manifesto for artistic work in the present-day increasingly technological environment? In this panel, I will offer a creative essay that interrogates and builds on the “Why Cheap Art Manifesto” to explore this question. I will ask fellow panel and audience members to write down, in free association, what they think should be included in a “Why Art Work Now Manifesto” and then suggest a collective gathering of a draft of such a “manifesto.”

Although famous for its political claims about the role of art in capitalism, the Bread and Puppet Manifesto offers a point of intervention in developing an understanding of artistic work in the present-day digital environment. I ask how the value of artistic work is relocated to its role in the construction of alternative social infrastructure. I build on my doctoral work and previous artistic practice to explore the ways in which scientific theories about the value of artistic work can be constructed with and through practice (such as this essay and the collective imagining exercise).

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Short abstract:

How would neuronavigation tools be transformed if they addressed both their users' and creators' aspirations? Juggling the demands of speculative clinical prototyping and the energy that can be tapped from “making public” through exhibited artwork, SpecLab holds space for an STS experiment.

Long abstract:

SpecLab started in 2022 with the ambition of enhancing an existing conversation between a neurosurgeon and a design anthropologist by inviting creative coders and designers into the loop. The lab's name reflects a dual focus: on one hand, a neurosurgeon's desire to explore the future of interfaces for surgical planning in the context of spatial computing; on the other, an anthropologist's intent to examine neurosurgery as an ecology of practices. (Stengers 2023)

How would neuronavigation tools be transformed if they addressed both their users' and creators' aspirations? Engaging programmers and artists "on their own terms'' involves offering them the challenges and group dynamics they value. How does one hold such space within academia, while making space for a critical discussion on biomedical visual cultures? Research-as-exhibition ticks many boxes. (Basu & Macdonald 2007) Anthropology is one of the knowledge domains that has devised an open attitude toward its conversation partners, holding reflective yet dynamic spaces for inventive conversations. (Pandian 2019)

The crew of the SpecLab navigates the demands of speculative clinical prototyping and the energy that can be tapped from “making public” through exhibited artworks, featuring into a series of workshops and pop-up exhibitions at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Kulturforum in 2024-2025. This contribution will centre around a discussion between a designer, a creative coder, and an anthropologist, exploring the generation and non-generation of knowledge with their clinical counterparts, the public, and other team members, and will include a demonstration of their current mixed reality neuro-navigation prototype.

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Short abstract:

This paper explores how a series of art works made with participants, plants, and machine learning co-produced knowledge, and whether this paper contributes to how that question can be answered.

Long abstract:

Building a machine learning image model from scratch requires taking hundreds of photographs to inform a model. This paper explores how involving participants in producing that data set can contribute to STS studies of vegetal-socio-technical interactions. This case study of two art works Seeding Things No.3 2020, and Gathering Downstream 2022, explores what was learned when knowledge was created in interactions between plants, machines and human participants. The first worked with participants to plant and care for a grass and clay mountain, and to contribute photographs to a collective model. Emerging characteristics / biases were specific to that group, and enabled new understandings of machine learning. The second used museum archives and environmental images to ask questions about the impact of industrial histories on environmental futures. Influenced by STS and Anthropocene issues of environmental impact, artists are increasingly concerned with the agency of the more-than-human. Ideas of authorship and agency have been challenged through collaborative, participatory, and site-based practices in which ‘context is half the work’ (APG 1965). AI and Machine Learning have led to further investigations of where agency lies in creative production (Zeilinger 2021, Zylinska 2020), and ownership of training images. The case studies I use assembled new visual knowledge within the Machine Learning models and engaged publics and museums in discussion of more-than-human learning, and the impact of creating ML models. Finally, a discussion of writing will problematise exhibition texts and academic papers which ironically, can cement whether the work is recorded as research and/or engagement.

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Short abstract:

I report on three arts-research projects that used more-than-human role-play to explore the governance of urban green spaces. Participants leant into the impossibility of speaking as more-than-humans, to create ironic play that opened up new avenues for shared reflection and critique.

Long abstract:

I report on three interlinked arts and research projects (2019-2023) that used Live Action Role Play (LARP) to enable participants to explore futures from more-than-human standpoints. The Algorithmic Food Justice project invited community growers and tech researchers to speak as/for their ‘companion species’ in a scenario about food security in London, UK. The Treaty of Finsbury Park invited arts audiences to role-play as park creatures, negotiating a treaty for shared governance of this urban park, using a fictional ‘rights of nature’ law. Finally, stakeholders of the River Lea in London were invited to consult on a proposed techno-fix for river pollution as more-than-human characters.

In each case, the groups experimented with more-than-human experiences and ethical positionings. An important quality of the LARPs was their liveliness, creating a shared emotional experience connected to the improvisational qualities of the gameplay. These enabled the shared recognition of irony in playing anthropomorphic relations that were clearly impossible (minting a legal treaty between stag beetles and Haringey Council) yet were clearly reasonable (since stag beetles are globally in decline). Here, irony was used as a device to hold ‘contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes’ and ‘the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true’ (Haraway, 1991). I argue that in pursuing novel workshops of this kind, what matters is trying and failing at more-than-human futures, where playing into the basic impossibilities of becoming more-than-human provides an opening into shared ecological imaginaries.

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Short abstract:

AT-LAB 1 creates an interactive sound and light installation with real-time health data. This case study probes the artist's dynamic role in interdisciplinary collaboration. It navigates the intricate project layers, exploring how diverse knowledge production aligns with outreach goals.

Long abstract:

The AT-LAB 1 of Work Package 2: Social Humans (WP2), of the multidisciplinary consortium project Healthy Living as a Service (HLaS), NWO/KIC (Netherlands Research Council), was an artistic research intervention that took place in the locality of t'Zandt, Province of Groningen, The Netherlands. It consisted of a new media art installation that leveraged the real-time data collected from health sensors to translate them into an immersive and interactive sound and light art experience for the region’s inhabitants. This research project forms the first field intervention of the trajectory of the professional doctorate program Kunst + Creatief, investigating digital literacy and empowerment in rural communities.

This case study shares the experience of embedding artistic practice within a large scientific consortium project. Which roles and positions did the artist have to occupy in interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, engineers, and relevant stakeholders? How were these tensions managed? Furthermore, it will discuss how a specific methodology was chosen for this project that embraces a multi-sited, participant-observant artist as a researcher role. The results and research findings grapple with the multi-layered nature of the project. How can different cases and modes of knowledge production be encompassed within one language that responds to the project’s outreach demands and objectives?

Artistically, it proposes a more-than-human collaborative experience through its immersive qualities, but how does it breach the distance between making and reflecting?

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Short abstract:

This study explores the nonhuman agencies revealed in felting. These agencies unfold the question of how an understanding of felting contributes to the more-than-human frameworks and discourses, and vice-versa, how more-than-human would effect a practice-based study of felting.

Long abstract:

This study explores agencies revealed in feltmaking through more-than-human perspectives. Feltmaking is a traditional and contemporary method of making surfaces, with fibers (usually wool). In the practice-based study, felting is taken as an exploration to have a better understanding of more-than-human influences in craft-design relationships.

While there is a shift in design that includes more-than-human approaches, many examples primarily focus on the technological shifts. I aim to contribute to other relevant and equally crucial frameworks, such as studies focusing on the environment, local knowledges, and post-Anthropocentric studies. This study aims to put in practice how design can shift to a more-than-human era, taking traditional knowledges as relevant intrusions into human-centered design. First I define how posthuman theories can be intrusions in design paradigm to challenge human-centered and Eurocentric frameworks. Drawing from this, I explain a theoretical framework to move to a more-than-human discourse in design, with core theory and intruders concept; acknowledging traditional knowledges as one of the intruders. As an example of how traditional knowledge can be introduced, I introduce a practice-based study that involves craft-design relationship. Through working with fibers and examining the process of wool becoming felt, I explore the relationships between geographies-materials and humans.

Examining the process of wool fibers, I observe their transformation into unrecognizable forms, the artefacts reveal the paradox of extracting materials from nature only to render them as unidentifiable things in design. The exploration highlights the tension and irony inherent in the manipulation of natural elements for creative purposes.

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Short abstract:

How do you play the theremin with your chin? The manifesto “Alternative techniques for the theremin” disrupts existing ways to activate this instrument from a critical disability studies, sound studies, performance studies, and critical AI perspective.

Long abstract:

How to play the theremin: Stand in front of it, left hand over the volume antenna, and right hand alongside the pitch antenna. The shape of your right hand and its distance from the pitch antenna determine the notes played.

For an instrument played through electromagnetic fields and without physical touch, the theremin supports a rigidity of playing at odds with its potential sphere of sound-making. Just as a player’s hand disrupts the theremin’s electromagnetic field to create sound, the manifesto “Alternative techniques for the theremin” disrupts existing manuals and techniques. This reactivates the instrument from a critical disability studies, sound studies, performance studies, and critical AI perspective. More specifically: How do you play the theremin without your left hand? How do you play with your chin? How do you play while sitting? How do you play while laying down?

Developed in conjunction with large language model Mistral AI! 8x7B, “Alternative techniques for the theremin” engages with AI to reimagine relationships between bodies, machines, and sounds, using AI prompting as its own methodology. AI prompting becomes ethnographic in the way I iteratively prompt and gather information by and about Mistral AI. AI prompting is also autoethnographic in the way Mistral AI responds to the prompts as its own self-reflection. It is twice over autoethnographic in how its responses reflect us back to ourselves: our own data compiled in training and remixed in generation. Through these entanglements, playing the theremin becomes a performance and reimagining of human and non-human bodies.

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Short abstract:

Staged as a public experiment this performative presentation between Maurice and his sonic agents mobilizes soundscape ecology as sonic assemblage to equally prompt presenters and audiences to shift perceptions on techno-ecological entanglements.

Long abstract:

The entanglement of technological progress and ecological destruction lies at the core of humanity's existential crisis. Technology destroys the very environment it is constituted of, while techno-solutionism is touted as the remedy for this self-inflicted predicament (Mbembe, 2022). In reaction, Achille Mbembe (2022) advocates for a reconceptualization of human/non-human relationships as an Earthly Community, where humans and non-humans, be it nature or technology, coexist based on the in-common rather than the universal. The research-creation project Soundscapes of an Earthly Community mobilizes the concept of sonic assemblages to critique current techno-ecological trajectories and imagine said cohabitation rooted in in-common soundscape ecologies.

Soundscape ecology recognizes that our sonic environments are constituted of biophonic, geophonic, anthropophonic, and technophonic layers of sound. Transitioning from soundscape ecology to sonic assemblage underscores the relational intersubjectivity and performativity of sonic agents when co-inhabiting their in-common natural and/or artificial sonic environments. The spatial, generative and interactive sound installation deploys a variety of sonic agents, which utilize generative AI audio to craft evolving, artificial soundscape ecologies imagined as sonic assemblages.

As an ongoing public experiment, each iteration of the project explores how the spatial and interactive sonification of techno-ecological situations may prompt audiences to co-produce alternative perceptions of the issues at hand. The project thus grapples with the “unresolved tension between discursive-critique of techno-scientific ‘imbroglios’ and the production of non-discursive aesthetic objects that address these issues”. For the EASST-4S 2024 session, I will do a performative presentation in conversation with the latest generation of prototyped sonic agents.

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Short abstract:

This paper develops a material-semiotics of nonsense as scientific tool, thinking with three “nonsense arrays” as found/founded art-science (Efstathiou 2019). Two are designed for laboratory cognition research, and one is r/whatisthisthing, a forum for submitting and identifying strange objects.

Long abstract:

This story starts with two arrays of nonsense stimuli designed to probe how human brains process meaning. The Novel Objects and Unusual Names (NOUN) database (2016) is part of a lineage of “novel” or “pseudo” stimuli used in research settings in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and psychiatry. The NOUN database was designed to replace Snodgrass and Vanderwart’s 260 pictures (1980), a set of weird digitized line drawings designed to modulate familiarity and novelty. The NOUN database, in contrast, is a collection of actual objects which were deemed by its collectors as novel, non-meaningful, or difficult to identify. (Some of the objects the author of this abstract recognized from NOUN were children’s/pet toys and single function kitchen tools.)

Instead of looking (first, mainly) to the brain by abstracting people and objects from their contexts, I look to the materials and practices of abstraction for clues about what we call thinking. First, I read these nonsense arrays as “found/founded science” (Efstathiou 2019) - also a way of reading across traditions of ‘found objects’ in contemporary art. Next, I turn to an alternate collection of found objects brought to the subreddit r/whatisthisthing. By examining the objects brought to the forum and how members answer “what is this thing?”, I demonstrate that each of these “nonsense arrays” operate as an index of alienation. I contend that beginning in the wild, (in our own wilds) - can be an integral counterweight for modalities of research that may risk mistaking abstraction for universality and alienation for novelty.

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Short abstract:

To explore the values of interactivity to creative research practices, we reflect on participants' counter-play. Herein participants question the set-up of design projects without disengaging from them. Rather than failure, counter-play highlights the creative potential of interactive methodologies.

Long abstract:

This paper explores the contributions of interactive methodologies to creative research practices, drawing on our own experiences as researchers and architects collaborating on community-oriented design interventions in climate debates. Our interactive interventions, which include creative workshops, theatrical performances, and serious games, seek to instigate conversations on different climate futures along the Dutch coast by drawing on environmental sciences and eco-philosophy. The interactive methodologies used in these projects encourage participants to explore various perspectives and values, encompassing human and non-human elements, rendering questions of climate change more tangible and open to politicisation.

However, we argue in this paper that the significance of interactive methodologies extends beyond their intentional objectives. To substantiate this argument, we engage in auto-ethnographic reflection on what we call 'counter-play': instances of friction wherein participants question the set-up of our projects without necessarily disengaging from them. Far from signalling a failure of design interventions, counter-play provides important clues for understanding the different values interactive methodologies bring to creative research projects.

By involving ‘unprogrammed’ ways of thinking and doing, counter-play highlights the creative liberation generated by interactive methodologies, actively engaging audiences in contemplating and crafting alternative climate futures. Furthermore, it provides an anchor for reflections on real-world climate politics, whose features the design reproduces or replaces. Finally, such situations challenge the role of ‘makers’ and thereby harbour creative potential for deepening artistic research practices and initiating new projects.

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Short abstract:

The film BUILDING SPACES is a sensory ethnography that explores how knowledge creation is the outcome of researcher’s material practices shaping their sensory environments. It is an artistic-filmic exploration of the mutual shaping of technologies, spaces, and epistemic practices.

Long abstract:

What does research feel like? How does the place where knowledge is created shape the knowledge itself? And what knowledges remain neglected because we cannot transform them into words?

This work from the field of Science and Technology Studies explores how knowledge creation in social sciences is the outcome of researchers’ material practices of shaping their sensory environments. It is a study of epistemic practices that focuses on the sensory in the form of a visual ethnography. It becomes clear: Research is a sensual affair – a practice, a feeling, a constitution of spaces.

From the perspective of feminist new materialism, the empirical part in the form of the film BUILDING SPACES accompanies four international social scientists through their academic lives and makes practices visible that have so far remained unnoticed. In the increasingly precarious labor system of academia, spaces are built through mundane, material practices that make research possible – so the argument goes. Eventually, it is about the expression of an experience: research, whether artistic or academic, is always a search, an emotional balancing act, a material craft. The knowledges that emerge are situated – they are enacted in the arrangement of sensory contexts.

Combined format: Since the entire film lasts 30 min, I would embed short parts of it in my presentation, which would then last 20 min. Since I have submitted the entire film as a Making & Doing Contribution, there could be the opportunity to see the entire film in a different setting.