Research Catalogue

Hello! Honestly… I wasn’t sure wheater there is anything that makes sense to propose to you from this distance. I don’t know how are you doing? I am ok. I am reading a bit more those days, although something else than I should be reading. Writing a bit more, although something else than I should be writing. I am in a state of illusion that this simplified state of living/working could lead to some clarity in thinking, or that this clarity in thinking would be needed more than ever. The future looks scary. Or it doesn’t look at all. Wouldn’t it be great to be somehow prepared? I wish it would be possible to make sense of this situation collectively. But it is not possible, and it doesn’t seem to work to connect either. I believe it is better to work alone now, acknowledge this impossibility, not try too hard. Perhaps just to remember, there might be someone, besides. On your side. And on the side of you. Para-site in the sense of not being the same and neither them nor you being the one. Ever. Accompanied by someone, something, you don’t know what… is it in your favour or not…? This is an exercise in writing, writing alone, writing at the same time, no one writing and co-writing. This exercise contains invitations to text three monsters, three little helpers: PAN-ic, AMNESIA & CHEAT: the sense of panic, a state of amnesia and guilt of imposter. The entrance is here.

OOPS! DID SOME­THING GO WRONG? Yes, Horribly wrong ... But when? This workshop deals with “monstrous” within cooperation. It is organised as an online “comic book” storyline including bits of co-writing, bits of collective performance and a bit of discussion. The workshop begins with stories of hypocrisies, inadequacies and unease experienced within organizational settings and proceeds through the monstrous altering of those narratives. The characters of Vagina Dentata, Ass-Theth, M/Outhor, Zombie, Cannibal, and Bug are introduced into the plot. These monstrous roles are based on myths, pieces of fiction and academic writing from the field of organizational theory. They either represent the monstrous existing within organizational structures or the monstrous that is/was historically cast away from the social organizations as unsuitable, unproductive or unmanageable. The set of writing sessions opens up into a performative presentation/collective reading and finally into a discussion between monstrous positions and participants.

This paper presents an exchange between four practitioners from distinct disciplines of site dance, philosophy, experimental writing and pedagogy. It presents responses to provocations that position these practices as containers of Situated Knowledge, it interrogates the transmission and reception of practical knowledge, and employs the notion of ‘parasitic endeavor’ as a lens through which to facilitate discussion of of how disciplinary specific practices and emerging knowledges might traverse from one discipline to another and how this knowledge might be articulated and communicated to wider audiences. Informed by Bennett’s notions of ‘vibrant matter’ (2010), Barad’s conception of agency and intra-action (2003), transversality (Guattari, 1964 and Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012) and J.J. Gibson’s theory of affordances (1986) the paper explores how embodied knowledges become activated and mobilised through human-material-world intra-actions and how interdisciplinary engagements facilitate the articulation of such knowledges. The notion of parasitic endeavor employed here alludes to a temporal process in which theoretical paradigms from one discipline are employed within or applied in another for a required period of time to facilitate the articulation of complex intra-active and diffractive human-nonhuman entanglements. This paper seeks to show how distinct practices transmit knowledges beyond disciplinary boundaries. Each respondent will offer a ‘score’ to provoke and support intra-active practice. The score frames a set of instructions, rules or constraints for fellow authors to explore and reflect on their experiences in relation to their own, customary modes of ‘doing’ practice and research. For publication, each contributor will present a response to one or more of these scores, drawing on their own disciplinary methods and working practices to consider how the specificities of their discipline engage creatively with these alternate actions and actors. In this scenario the notion of ‘parasitic endeavor’ is positioned as prodigious and facilitatory; we move through and beyond disciplinary silos, borrow and compare, creating new theoretical and disciplinary entanglements, through which new/augmented modes of thinking/doing might emerge.