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Andrew Lapworth, PhD Candidate, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol (UK)
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EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">Room 2175, Second Floor, Haydon-Allen Building, The Australian National University
Characterised by interdisciplinary practices at the intersections of arts, sciences, and biotechnologies, the emergent artistic genre of "bioart" is increasingly lauded within the social science literature as a crucial arena through which question and unsettle deep-rooted cultural perceptions of life and the individual, the concept of the self, and the position of the human in relation to other (more-than-human) bodies and the environment (Born and Barry, 2010; Dixon, 2009; Hauser, 2006). It is this understanding of the capacity of bioart to effect ontological change that I want to develop further in this paper through a theorisation of art-encounters as "ontogenetic events" that materially produce, rather than merely represent, subjects and worlds. To address this ontogenetic potential of bioart, the paper turns to Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation, and the conceptual terrain he develops to rethink being from the standpoint of its becoming. First, I explore how a philosophy of individuation pushes our contemporary understandings of the subject through an attentiveness to its emergence from material and affective processes that both precede and go beyond it, as well as its susceptibility to immanent disruption through the shock of encounter. Secondly, I argue that Simondon opens up the possibility of theorising this evental potential of bioart by emphasising the preindividual affective forces and processes of the art-encounter, and the disorienting transformations in being these bring about. By rendering sensible and reworking molecular, material, and technological agencies implicated in the constitution of the subject, bioart can be understood to open a space of experimentation with modes of expression and experience in their very coming-into-presence. I unpack these arguments empirically through an engagement with the bioartistic practices of the Tissue Culture and Art Project, whose "semi-living" bioart, I argue, stages a disruption of pernicious contemporary habits in favour of new and creative capacities for thinking, perceiving, and relating to the more-than-human.
Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONEChair: Dr Maria Hynes