Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemAcross the lineaments of figuration: posthuman subjectivities and boundary work with art( 2023-09)Abstract The twenty-first century heralds significant transformations in matters of collective, existential concern for human and nonhuman subjects. These include the processes of accelerating technological mediation, the climate crisis, social and ecological disparity, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Posthumanism, in discourse with these conditions, emerges as a heterogeneous field of transdisciplinary inquiry that includes an intersection with artistic research and practice, with a corresponding diversity in how the confluence is studied, practiced, and ultimately understood. Conducted between 2016 and 2023, this thesis-only PhD project responds to this critical and creative juncture. Its primary aim is to investigate the performative process of how art works across boundaries of knowledge and across multiple modalities of practice. As part of this investigation, I seek to contribute new accounts, concepts, processes, and creations that challenge paradigms of human-centred subjectivity. To achieve this aim, I propose and then apply an overarching methodology of boundary work with art for my transdisciplinary and multimodal research. In Part I, I provide a scholarly and artistic context for this undertaking, establishing key discourses that lead the research through the field of posthumanism, the worlding work of art, posthuman subjectivity, and the thesis’s methodological framework. Two contextual chapters cover my readings of these literatures in order to arrive at the project’s aims. In Chapter 1, I address Rosi Braidotti's call to account for the specificity of art practices at a posthuman interface. I consider this through Barbara Bolt’s framework for a material performativity of art, which proposes to open creative practice to knowledges, processes and worldings beyond representationalism and the art world. I then propose my methodology in Chapter 2. This methodology of boundary work with art contextualises and defines three ethical accountabilities for performing the research and practice: first, the situating of working boundaries within transdisciplinary and partial perspectives; second, attending to posthuman subject-matters; and third, the contribution of affirmative responses. In Part II, I present the outcomes, discussion, and findings generated by applying this methodology in three key studies. Study 1: Boundary work in a posthuman virtuality explores critical concepts of virtuality, and reveals the processes by which contemporary conditions of technological mediation shape boundary work with art, which are reiterated in the following two studies. This discussion includes my analysis of the networked assembly of co-production, the enduring cyborg figure in my contributing paper "The Cyborg Endures: Towards Posthuman Figuration of Virtual Subjectivities", and a rising algorithmic subjectivity as conceptualised in my speculative fiction "Apocope in the Suture Zone.” Study 2: Artwork with avians and a multispecies invitation builds my case for an ethics of multispecies invitation; it is accompanied by the published account of multispecies artwork "Unseeing Elegy of the Tetrachromats" and attendant art-science collaborations. Study 2 reveals how the research methodology may challenge human-centred subjectivity without necessarily seeking consensus between disciplinary perspectives. Study 3: Virtual nature and posthuman wellbeing(s) consolidates my arguments for the significance of virtuality in the work of art’s world, demonstrated by propositions for biophilic design beyond human-centred understandings of both wellbeing and nature, which are mobilised in the speculative fiction "No Longer (..) Not Yet" and my art-health collaboration as documented in the paper "Virtual Nature, Inner Forest: Prospects for Immersive Virtual Nature Art and Well-Being". The figurations (outcomes) that emerge from each study expand, challenge, and enrich both scholarly knowledges and practices at an intersection of posthumanism and art. The thesis thus advances understandings on the performative process of how art works as a worlding practice, with my boundary-led methodology revealing and attending to the present epoch of collective, transformative and imperative significances of ‘the human’ in a planetary ecology of relational becoming.