Golem geographies

Abstract

In our response, below, we undertake a deeper engagement with one of the authors, Elizabeth Grosz, that a number of the respondents have evoked, implicitly as well as explicitly, in their response to our text and, in particular, Grosz's arguments on art as of the chaotic and of the animal. Whilst our comments on the bowerbird speak to the artistry involved in a sexuated mode of reproduction that increases biological difference, we emphasise an abyssal moment in our initial text wherein we move from a consideration of sexual selection to symbiosis and accretion as productive of diversity, terms that no longer sit quite so comfortably in the lexicon of the ‘animal’. Rather, we implicate aesthetics and an artistry across and down chemical concentration gradients.

Aesthetics, Politics, and Attunement: On Some Questions Brought by Alterity and Ontology

“…The effort is not to wallow in passivity, but the opposite: to impel acting toward possibility through self-criticality. As such, attunement via the aesthetic becomes a means to capture not the impossibility of representation, but the abyssal, non-exhaustiveness of political subjects (Dikeç, 2015: 177), human and nonhuman (Dixon et al 2012b), and their always already excessive capacities to become otherwise through aesthetic experience and practice.…”

“…The other latter engagements (ex. Dixon et al 2012a;2012b;Yusoff, 2014;, while also invoking the importance of aesthetics for differentiating the spaces of ethics and politics, draw out different, indirect purposes regarding the conceptual tradition shared by Rancière. These might be said to emphasise how a tradition that locates itself within what Kant inaugurated as the discourse of modern aesthetics may invoke "abyssal moment[s]" (Dixon, et al 2012b: 292), that is, the implicate capacity of all material gradients, living or non, to be read as aesthetic. For such readings, aesthetics is relevant to questions of politics and ethics in highlighting endless deferrals through the textual and material play of (mis)reading and contingency.…”

“…Spivak, 2012;Jazeel, 2013), or to the promisory potential of relational ontologies in the posthuman or more-than-human mode (ex. Clark, 2012;Dixon et al, 2012a;2012b;Yusoff et al 2012;Yusoff, 2014;Hawkins and Straughan, 2015: 10;Yusoff, 2015), more work may need to be done than simply invoking Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2014). They are situated here in an argument for a much stronger claim for aesthesis than the simple referent "aesthetics" can provide.…”

A touching experiment: Tissue culture, tacit knowledge, and the making of bioart

“…In a conceptual paper, Dixon et al. (2012a, 2012b) argue that art‐science projects of the kind found at SymbioticA offer a challenge to geographers in so much as their emphasis on “the enabling role of matter,” or what they term a “golem geography” (2012b, p. 294), signals the co‐constitutive dynamics of elements and life, and the bringing forth of “new worlds.” In this paper, I add to this body of theoretically and conceptually focused work, through a sustained engagement with an experimental methodology that traced the embodied practice of learning tissue culture as well as the various technologies, protocols and materials at this site.…”

“…Looking at SymbioticA, geographers have to date unpacked the monstrosity of bioart (Dixon, 2008), considered critical bioart as a vehicle to think through the aesthetics of politics (Dixon, 2009) as well as the capacity of SymbioticA's precursor, the Tissue Culture and Art Project and its installations, to reconfigure the subject (Lapworth, 2015). In a conceptual paper, Dixon et al (2012aDixon et al ( , 2012b argue that art-science projects of the kind found at SymbioticA offer a challenge to geographers in so much as their emphasis on "the enabling role of matter," or what they term a "golem geography" (2012b, p. 294), signals the co-constitutive dynamics of elements and life, and the bringing forth of "new worlds." In this paper, I add to this body of theoretically and conceptually focused work, through a sustained engagement with an experimental methodology that traced the embodied practice of learning tissue culture as well as the various technologies, protocols and materials at this site.…”