Reflections on the genre of philosophical art installations

Abstract

We organized our reply to the rich set of commentaries on Erik’s inaugural lecture—The affordance of art for making technologies—around the following five themes. (1) The experience of artworks and whether such experiences can be described in terms of the affordances of artworks. (2) The possibility that engagement with artworks offers for the transformation of ourselves and the sociomaterial practices we take part in. (3) The claim that artworks can serve as what Annemarie Mol describes as “material propositions” that can be used to engage philosophical reflection. (4) The temporality of making practices and how art installations can be thought of as places in which past, present, and future meet. (5) How art could potentially enable a better embedding of technologies in society.

Embodied Making

“…Given this variety of abilities and environmental aspects, it follows from our definition of affordances (see Section 2) that the variety of affordances available in the human ecological niche is staggering, forming an incredibly rich "landscape of affordances" (Rietveld & Kiverstein 2014;Rietveld 2017 and2018;Bruineberg et al 2018). Crucially, artistic makers have the ability to create new affordances by transforming the local sociomaterial environments in which people are situated (Van Dijk & Rietveld 2017;Rietveld & Kiverstein 2014, 2022. Above, the importance of understanding the selectivity in material engagement was mentioned.…”

Editorial – The affordances of art

“…The result is an extraordinarily rich set of responses and reflections that critically engage and highlight future research possibilities inspired by Erik’s lecture. In our reply, Erik and I have used the excellent questions raised in the commentaries to reflect on a variety of aspects of making philosophical art installations (Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2022).…”

Change-Ability for a World in Flux

“…My work is situated in the rapidly evolving field of philosophy of embodied cognition , which understands individuals and their environments as making up an integrated brain–body–environment system (Varela et al 1991; Clark 1997; Thompson 2007; Rietveld 2008b; Chemero 2009; Noë 2009; 2015; Hutchins 2010; Barrett 2011; Hutto & Myin 2017; Myin 2012; 2020; Anderson, 2014; Bruineberg & Rietveld 2014; Froese & Di Paolo 2011; Colombetti 2014; Kirchhoff 2015; Gallagher 2017; Di Paolo, Buhrmann & Barandiaran 2017). It follows that to understand human cognitive behaviour in all its complexity, we need to study the behaviour of people in real-world situations (Barker 1968; Gibson 1979; Costall 1997; Heft 2001; Hutchins 1995; 2013; Sutton 2010; Harris et al 2011; Suchman 2007; Rietveld & Kiverstein 2014, 2022). Over many years, I have, together with my team, employed the philosophical method of conceptual analysis to engineer several of the theoretical building blocks of the philosophy of change-ability: affordances , skilled agency and metastable attunement.…”

“…This experience led the individuals that make up the RAAAF collective as a whole to engage in exploration of different materials, outside of the trodden wood paths, a new but related activity that enabled the collective to become more change-able. The wooden material grooves formed in the landscape of affordances were obstacles to change-ability, and transforming the landscape of affordances by means of the material experiments afforded by the material playground helped to reduce these obstacles and led to the new Breaking Habits art installation (see Rietveld & Kiverstein 2022 for more examples).…”