Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Storying Relations explores wind as an artistic–scientific method, using kite practices to build shared vocabularies between human and non-human agencies and to open new imaginaries for situated practices.

Paper long abstract

The proposal suggests a radical situating, positioning and locating (sich verorten) with, through, and in-between wind as an artistic and scientific research method and strategy to not only gathering information regarding the human and non-human environments but as a form of sensing, relating, and being-in-the-world. It is about our relation to all scales of wind, from the globally acting trade winds to our personal breathing, which actually resonates with the so called ‹scale effect› of aerodynamics (cf. Reynolds number).

Storying Relations proceeds from the research project Triple Instruments by Florian Dombois, in which a sound kite is flown on a piano wire, that is thread into a sound body on the ground. Triple Instruments are not only musical instruments, but also scientific instruments, and they are a model for a two-directional approach to nature. They have three sonic producers: a human being, a human-made object, and the non-human world. In order to literally explore the ‹metaphorical› qualities, the project invites peers from other disciplines who advance the transferability to and applicability in their fields of research.

In the Storying Relations we, an artist and a scholar in cultural science, propose kite flying as a way of relating to the world. It considers research as a temporal and social practice for extended audiences. It is a proposition of building an artistic, scientific, and social vocabulary in-between human and nonhuman agencies that can be flexibly applied in different space and time constellations and still be radically relatable and local.