Media, Practice and Theory: Tracking emergent thresholds of experience

This volume gathers research at the intersection of art and the interdisciplinary humanities to develop an understanding of media assemblages that insist on the generativity of their situatedness within ecologies of practice. These contributions propose media assemblages that enlarge the time and space for co-compositions between media and bodies that reshape subjective, perceptual, and affective registers of experience. Media assemblages include photography, performance, criticism, curation, installation, animation, collage, video and VR, as well as archival and somatic practices. Research as a form of practice is a key orientation in this volume since it offers a means of engaging the world-making proposition offered by Isabelle Stengers that practices are specified through irreducible entanglements that cause one to think, feel, and hesitate. The generative linkages between different disciplinary approaches for engaging research practice across the arts and humanities are favoured over disciplinary and media-based exclusivity. When practice is not posed as an intervention or counterpoint to scholarly research or in opposition to the discursive, differences emerge, not based on convention but through the situatedness of emergent insight. The goal is thus not to forward a reproducible formula for knowledge creation but to weave the conditions for utterances both within and in excess of discipline, convention, and establishment. How can research engender the making of communities between, across, and in excess of institutional frameworks through the emergent affinities, postures, and formats of evolving and inclusive forms of research? This volume is a valuable reference for researchers/practitioners within the arts and humanities as it exemplifies both critical and situated methods for developing interdisciplinary research as a means of transforming the terms of research itself.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Nicole De Brabandere
McGill University

Part One: Theory and Practice

Chapter 1 Seeing and Touching the Shadow: Texturing the Installation
Amélie Brisson-Darveau
UQAM Université du Québec à Montréal

Chapter 2 Virtual ISLANDS: Proposing VR Tidalectics
Olivia McGilchrist
Concordia University

Chapter 3 Con-Tactilisation: Touch as a form of multisensory, reciprocal, and co-constitutive perception
Elke Mark
University Flensburg
Lindsey French
University of Regina

Part Two: Transversal Articulations

Chapter 4 A Matter with(out) Delay: (Dis)appearances of a gift
Petra Köhle and Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin
Institute of Visual Arts, EDHEA – The Valais School of Art, HES-SO Valais-Wallis

Chapter 5 A History of Violence: Photography and Writing as an Experience, Experiment and Insight
Kai Ziegner
University of Applied Sciences Potsdam

Chapter 6 There are no negative forms Or: How I lost my interest in copies
Sarah Burger
ZHdK Zürich

Part three: Speculative Discourse

Chapter 7 Sidelining Photorealism: Speed Racer and the Articulation of Digital Visual Effects Labour
Jonah Jeng
University of Pittsburgh

Chapter 8 Powers of Abjection and Factories of Strong Emotions: On Nadja Kurz’ / Flaccid Knob’s Video Installations
Friederike Sigler
Ruhr-University Bochum

Chapter 9 Latento for Curation as Research-Creation
Treva Michelle Legassie and Matthew-Robin Nye
Concordia University
Karen Wong
Independent curator and designer

Index

Nicole De Brabandere (PhD) is a Visiting Researcher at McGill University, working at the intersection of experimental media practice and theories of corporeality. Her current research develops material practices alongside artifacts of computer vision that lend new insight into the generative animacies of A.I., including its affective and aesthetic effects. De Brabandere has hosted experimental media workshops across Europe and North America and has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles on topics spanning drawing, choreography, habit, research-creation, material culture, critical theory, and artificial intelligence. De Brabandere’s PhD thesis entitled “The Matter of Habit: Experimenting with the Affects of Emergent Media, Material and Movement Practices” (2017) was developed as part of the PhD cooperation between the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and the University of Arts, Linz, and received the ‘Award of Excellence’ by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education. The work was also supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). De Brabandere has also taught and designed courses bridging theoretical and practice-based techniques within the arts and interdisciplinary humanities at the undergraduate and master’s levels in Europe and North America. De Brabandere is a collaborator member of Hexagram, an interdisciplinary network dedicated to research-creation in art, culture and technology, located in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada, and a reviewer for the 'Journal for Artistic Research' and 'NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies'.

Drawing, painting, photography, gesture, corporeality, embodiment, cinema, video, Process Philosophy, critical curation, Somatic Practice, co-creation, co-composition, Virtual Reality, collaboration, Ethico-Aesthetics, animation, Relational Poetics, practice-based research, process-oriented research, research-creation, Artistic Research