Paintings and other symbolised image systems contribute to the way we see and understand the world, however accurate or flawed they may be. My research contributes to this conversation by ...investigating how to make paintings that allow environments to be creative protagonists rather than passive objects of representation. I do this by drawing from the painting practices of Julie Mehretu and Ingrid Calame to look at how their work registers the experience of place and use these findings to guide my practice-based research, contextualised by 'new materialist' theory. The research shows how unpredictability in the process of painting allows the experience of place to be registered in ways that are responsive to materials and the site; how gesture is used to reveal something about the material and the immaterial world; and how the conversations happening between different levels of experience and modes of representation in the paintings help to yield a dense and complex view of place. Through this study, I have found that paintings can make manifest the relationships between process, gesture, environments and artists and in this way can reveal the experience of place in unexpected and multifarious ways.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In this article, we present ideas about developing innovative methods for the sociology of futures. Our approach brings together the literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and the sociology of ...futures with vital materialism theories and research-creation methods. We draw on our research-creation materials from a series of online workshops. The workshops involved the use of creative writing prompts with participants across a diverse range of age groups and locations. The article ends with some reflections on the implications of our approach for researching the futures of emerging digital technologies and the methodological and theoretical development of the sociology of futures.
Facebook is the most used social media platform globally, despite frequent and highly publicised criticism of some of its practices. In this article, we bring together perspectives from vital ...materialism scholarship - and particularly Jane Bennett's concept of 'thing-power' - with our empirical research on Australian Facebook users to identify what they find important and valuable about the platform. Findings are presented in the form of seven case studies of Facebook use, identifying lively affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities that drive people to continue to use Facebook, moderate their use or take a break. We argue that this theoretical perspective allows for a nuanced understanding of the distributed and relational agencies generated with and through Facebook assemblages that motivate people to stay on this social media platform.
Magical objects are legion in Harry Potter. Among them, wands are the most magical and the most taken for granted. Wands are usually seen as tools, but no tool is only a tool. Speculative Realisms ...provide the means to look past the mere usefulness of wands and explore their nature via a flattened ontology. Recognizing that wands are not passive screens but ontologically equal to all other objects, including humans, bypasses the problems of Kantian epistemology and gives wands room to be what they are qua themselves. Focusing on ontology rather than epistemology enables wands to reveal their power, supplies a framework for studying the natures of nonfictional objects, and – ironically – allows for a more categorical application of Kant’s ethical imperative.
The Prix Pictet is a photography prize focussing on sustainability. Anthropocentric in its world-view, the prize was endorsed and supported by Kofi Annan, who until 2006 was the Secretary-General of ...the United Nations. This article argues three points. Firstly, that the Prix Pictet's model of sustainability is anthropocentric and produces a framework in which myriad inequalities in human relationships become representable. The prize as a symptom of the contradictions created through neoliberalism will be analysed, particularly as the prize celebrates the commodification of art whilst also enabling the articulation of concern about people and environment. This produces the second argument, where the prize is seen as symptomatic of a neoliberal economy that both offers opportunities for artists to express concern about social, economic and environmental inequalities, whilst also 'greenwashing' sustainable investments. Thirdly, I will argue that, photography's ambiguity occasionally escapes the anthropocentric framework, leading to other possible interpretations. The Prix Pictet, then, mainly represents a human-centric view, and this is reproduced at the expense of nature-human-technology frameworks. However, close readings of some of the shortlisted projects see eco-centric and posthuman sensibilities emerging.
In this article, I present findings from my Data Personas study, in which I invited Australian adults to respond to the stimulus of the ‘data persona’ to help them consider personal data profiling ...and related algorithmic processing of personal digitised information. The literature on social imaginaries is brought together with vital materialism theory, with a focus on identifying the affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities in participants’ imaginaries and experiences concerning data profiling and related practices now and into the future. The participants were aware of how their personal data were generated from their online engagements, and that commercial and government agencies used these data. However, most people suggested that data profiling was only ever partial, configuring a superficial and static version of themselves. They noted that as people move through their life-course, their identities and bodies are subject to change: dynamic and emergent. While the digital data that are generated about humans are also lively, these data can never fully capture the full vibrancy, fluidity and spontaneity of human experience and behaviour. In these imaginaries, therefore, data personas are figured as simultaneously less-than-human and more-than-human. The implications for understanding and theorising human-personal data relations are discussed.
Hundreds of thousands of apps are now available that have been designed to monitor, manage or improve users’ health. In this article, I draw on feminist new materialist perspectives, and particularly ...the vital materialism offered by Jane Bennett, to consider the affordances, relational connections, affective forces and agential capacities that contribute to the thing-power of the human-app health assemblage. The discussion is underpinned by the assumption that digital technologies such as health apps are part of a more-than-human world, in which they generate forces and capacities only with and through their associations and relations with the humans who create and use them—or in some cases, relinquish or resist their use. To demonstrate how this approach can be applied to the analysis of empirical material, I discuss the findings of several of my recent projects involving people talking about their use of health apps. Drawing on these materials, I show that the vibrancy of the thing-power of the human-app assemblage is a complex admixture of affective forces, personal biographies and life trajectories, human and nonhuman affordances and cultural imaginaries. All of these elements contribute to a greater or lesser degree to the agential capacities generated by this assemblage.
This article considers the performative aspects of environmental narratives, based on the example of the cultural image of the plastic bag. In contemporary culture, disposable plastic bags have ...become a symbol of the collective guilt related to the role of plastics in the environmental catastrophe. Their perception is affected by various environmental narratives and social campaigns, in which the image of a plastic bag is to evoke fear, aversion, anger, or disgust, reinforcing the view of plastic as an unnatural material that pollutes the planet. The effectiveness of these narratives is limited, as the number of plastic bags in the environment continues to increase. The author explores the possibility of imagining other, less anthropocentric and potentially more effective modes of relating to single-use plastic. She uses performative methods to analyze the short film Plastic Bag (dir. Ramin Bahrani, 2009). Her interpretation draws mainly on Jane Bennett’s concept of vital materialism and Timothy Morton’s dark ecology to focus on the agency of plastic bags in various settings and offer a different perspective on their potential roles in more-than-human relationships.
Building upon a rich body of literature around politics and the Olympics, this article explores the role of objects in political activism and protest at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Inspired by new ...materialist theory, Jane Bennett's vital materialism, and her concept of thing-power (2010), this research thinks about the ways in which objects in the Tokyo 2020 games were lively and agentic players in developing assemblages and discussions around social inequalities at the Games. To accomplish this, the project conducted a thematic analysis of international popular press published during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to explore the thing-power of two objects (unitards and a swimming cap). In so doing, this article explores the ways in which objects were integral actants and helped ignite conversations around gender, the sexualization of female athletes, and the racism and exclusionary practices of elite swimming. The article finishes with a discussion of the thing-power of objects and how a different ontological approach (i.e. one that values nonhuman matter) has implications for athlete protest, policy development, and addressing social inequalities and injustices within sport.
In this paper, we empirically demonstrate emerging material-discursive entanglements of different bodies in Swedish outdoor education, and thereby provoke openings for questioning some aspects of the ...conceptualization of a nature/culture divide. Outdoor and environmental education have been criticized for upholding this divide by not paying attention to the power structures through which bodies become sedimented as either human or nature. By discussing entanglements, and how educators might attend to them as a pedagogical tool, our paper responds to this line of thinking. Vital materialism and agential realism were put to work in a post-qualitative study at a Swedish folk high school. Through engagement with a group of outdoor students, empirical material was created and examples of material-discursive entanglements analyzed. We conclude that outdoor educators can create possibilities for attending to the entanglements of different bodies, thereby making possible a learning with them. This may open alternative ways to conduct outdoor education that challenge the conceptualization of a nature/culture divide.
