INTRODUCTION
A conversation is a mapping of the spaces in between and within subjectivities, geographies, environments, soundscapes, and silences (of voice and thought); in conversing we abide by certain rules of negotiation while breaking others of propriety, manner, logic. In this exposition we aim to explore and enact the liminalities that occur in an artistic dialogue over the course of a series of weeks and reflections. In our capacity as settler scholar feminist artists and researchers, we are interested in understanding and performing scholarship via artistic practice. For this exposition, we negotiated a series of rules for our weekly inquiry. These rules became the map through/by/against which we navigated and re/defined our scholarship, disciplinarity, and research practice. In this work, we create places of overlap and divergence in a fluid “feeling cartography” (Cram 2016), which is “a mode of encounter and trans-ing, entanglement and movement without destination or conclusive points of arrival” (143). This is also a performance of autotheory, which Fournier (2021) describes, as a term “for works that exceed existing genre categories and disciplinary bounds, that flourish in the liminal spaces between categories, that reveal the entanglement of research and creation, and that fuse seemingly disparate modes to fresh effects” (2). Liminality as a theoretical concept emerges out of a diverse body of entangled life work and struggle. We are thinking with those feminist scholars and artists of colour, Anzaldúa and others, without thinking over the specificities of experience. As Barad notes, “Anzaldúa understood the material multiplicity of self, the way it is diffracted across spaces, times, realities, imaginaries” (2014, 175). We take up this material multiplicity in our artistic practice through a lens of posthumunism, which we see as a theoretical pathway into those spaces between agencies and atoms.
The posthumanisms are an invitation to challenge the discrete centrality of human experience and desire, and to instead cultivate attentiveness to the deeply entangled processes of knowing and becoming that constitute the (other-than-)human. Posthumanist methodologies make fluid the binaries and boundaries – the rules – of entities and disciplines, and enable new intra-agential narratives, relationalities, and understandings of research to emerge. In this exposition, we explore a series of artistic methodologies for engaging in qualitative research from a posthumanist ontological perspective. Via artistic practice we aim to reach towards and become-with our own difference, cultivating methodological practices for engaging with the messy, indeterminate, and contradictory features of research. We engage with what Jack Halberstam (2013) describes as “wild theory” that lives in “spaces of potentiality” (para. 17). This paper charts a collaborative experimental artistic research project that was motivated by our mutual interest in arts-based methodologies for engaging in qualitative research and theory. Over the course of several months, in our capacity as arts-based researchers, graduate students, new friends, and settler feminists, we will engage with a series of questions designed to explore arts-based qualitative research and posthuman life in/as artistic research. Each week, we will respond to a single question via our own artistic methodologies. A posthuman ontological perspective will guide our collaborations with each other, our media, algorithmic contingency, as well as digital glitch and transformation towards performative and generative understandings about research and methodology. Taking up Hayle’s (2012) discussion of technogenesis, throughout this work we engage with how “instruments to measure or register any given transformation are themselves part of the dynamic environment which produces that change” (81).
Informed by decolonial theory, this work strives towards new forms of expression and modalities of thinking, theorizing, and working together in difference towards enacting difference. In their study exploring the materiality of indigenous-settler history, Jones and Hoskins (2016) wondered if thinking and writing matter more relationally requires the creation of new terms: “Maybe the provocation is to encounter uncertainly the object-world…. The resulting written accounts will have the (irritating or exhilarating) characteristics of fluidity, contingency, ambiguity — and obscurity” (p. 84). We join them in this territory, taking up artistic media to engage with the object-world of research and theory. Posthumanism in this work is a “stor[y] to tell other stories with” (Haraway, 2016, p. 12); a way of unthinking what we think we know about being human, along with what we think we know about ourselves as thinking subjects. Through digital art-based methods we are able to take imaginative and possibly absurd leaps into the unknown and to ask very serious questions that require no answers but instead proliferate creative possibilities.
Barad, Karen. 2014. "Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart." Parallax (Leeds, England) 20 (3): 168-187.
Cram, E. 2016. "Feeling Cartography." Women's Studies in Communication 39 (2): 141-146.
Halberstam, Jack, “Charming for Revolution: A Gaga Manifesto.” E-flux. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/44/60142/charming-for-the-revolution-a-gaga-manifesto/
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. (Duke University Press, 2016).
Hayles, N. Katherine, How we Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Ishii, Sara. 2021. "Applying Gloria Anzaldúa's Creative Works to Speculative Realism: Bridging Jane Bennett's Vital Materialism and Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Philosophy." Philosophia (Albany, N.Y.) 11: 1-25.
Jones, Alison, & Hoskins, Te Kawehau. “A mark on Paper: The Matter of Indigenous-Settler History.” In Posthuman Research Practices in Education, ed. Taylor, Carol Ann & Hughes, Christina. (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016), 75-92.
